Skip to main content

What I read: July 2022

"Lent" by Jo Walton. I love her so much. An interesting thing to read right after The Dragon Waiting that's for sure. I knew even less about Savonarola than Richard III but that didn't matter. 

LHC #175: "On Translation: Translators on their work and what it means" edited by Esther Allen. Even the essays I really didn't care about, like the one about translating songs from old French, were fascinating. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that French would have zany old spellings the way English does. 

LHC #176: "Wanderers" by Chuck Wendig. I was intimidated by the fatness of this, but it was a very quick read (for something so fat). I guess long doesn't equal difficult? I did find the lack of past perfect tense sort of annoying sometimes. It meant I had to pick through manually and decide what order things happened. also an unnatural number of characters with red hair for no reason. And America seems to be populated only by white supremacist gun nuts and sheeple, I find that hard to believe. 

LHC #177: "The Wee Free Men" by Terry Pratchett. I have found him tedious and annoying in the past. There's a certain frantic humor that I find a slog. This was another race between the eBook and hard copy, and the hard copy won. Maybe because it's got a middle grade intended audience, I found the pace, voice, etc., much less annoying than his normal fare. 

LHC #178: "Nomadland" by Jessica Bruder. eBook. Frances McDormand started in a movie loosely based on this book a couple of years ago. This is true stories, profiles of various borderline homeless old people. What stood out to me in this book was the lack of physical violence, and also substance abuse was relatively low. Not sure how realistic that is. I spend far too much time worrying that I'm going to wind up old and homeless, so this was great. 

LHC #179: "You look like a thing and I love you" by Jannelle Shane. eBook. 

Popular posts from this blog

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.

In progress: August 2024

Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:   Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Continued to think thoughts.  Short Stories:   After posting that short story from last month onto the workshop, I picked one of those short stories I'd started and forced a plot onto it.  Critted  5  Got back  4 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Started month with two inches done above the armholes. Listening to audiobooks, I finished the fair isle portion, cut the steeks, and set up and knit the neckline. Just the endless finishing now.   Blushing Cloud  (Knitty S/S24). Started the month with (still) three inches of back done. Socks take priority.  Elbrus socks (Knitty first fall 2024). Finished.  Elbrus socks II . Started the first.  Pole shorts  (Joan McGowan-Michael). I knitted these several years ago, but the...

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...