What I read: December 2022

"The Calculating Stars" by Mary Robinette Kowal. Got it for Christmas last year. Very readable. As much as I don't want to like MRK (sometimes seems kind of sanctimonious?), I kind of have to. This book is a delight, though there should have been a trigger warning for all the puking. I forced it on Ed when I was done, and he liked it too.

LHC #196: "Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s" by Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein. eBook. I made great use of Spotify while reading this, it's really fun. Though there are almost no references to drugs and alcohol. I guess it's about the music?

"Elatsoe" by Darcie Little Badger. Hard copy, last of the books I got for Christmas last year. I need to let go of my whole past-perfect thing I guess. This was a great, fast read.

"Terciel and Elinor" by Garth Nix. I will read anything set in the Abhorsen universe. The boy gave it to me for Christmas. Awesome gift. If I had all the time in the world I would cosplay Abhorsen. This is a good example of what you can do with a story where everyone knows which players are going to live, and which will die, and yet it's engaging and interesting. Rings of Power should take note!

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

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