What I read: May 2022

Apparently I've given up on trying to read in these pictures, let's see if I can do better next month.

LHC #167: "Missing Soluch" by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, translated by Kamran Rastegar. I ought to acknowledge the translators more often here; they're integral to the experience. Anyway, I read book 1 of this (it's divided into 4 books, about 100 pages each) and found it unrelentingly depressing. Then partway through book 2, I started to wonder if I was misunderstanding completely and it was actually supposed to be funny?

LHC #168: "Legends of the Fire Spirits" by Robert Lebling. Hard copy! I read most of this on vacation.

LHC #169: "Moon of the Crusted Snow" by Waubgeshig Rice. eBook. Pretty fun.

LHC #170: "Automatic Reload" by Ferrett Steinmetz. eBook. I quite enjoyed it. Not something I could write, I think, which makes me sort of jealous. The characters and their issues were so embedded in the story!

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...

What I read: March 2024

LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence. "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read. LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes. I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...

Robynettely

Search This Blog