Robynettely

LHC #275: "The Only Good Indians" by Steven Graham Jones. eBook. Loved it. There's another book by him on my list, and I'm not sad about it. The character development was beautiful. I think horror might be good at that! Highly recommended.  LHC #276: "The collected novellas of Stefan Zweig". eBook. Another one that I have no idea how it ended up on my list; clearly recommended by someone. The library Holds tool really needs a notes field, where I'm sure I would faithfully note "recommended by: " or some such thing. Anyway. I'm almost tempted to describe this as horror. At least for me. The character development was very rich. Not my thing maybe. So patriarchal.  "Build : an unorthodox guide to making things worth making" by Tony Fadell. This was my office book club's Autumn selection. I got it from the library in hard copy because it would be faster than waiting. Also, I feel like I might be serving the library better getting...

  Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:   So that funeral scene, I looked for where to cram it in (fortunately I have a calendar of the events).  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I think I figured out the ending.  Short Stories:   Finished one, for some definition of finished.   Critted  4  Got back  2 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Blushing Cloud  (Knitty S/S24). Started the month with 10.5 inches of back done. I might have 14 now, depending on how much I'm allowed to stretch it.  Hamilton  (Self). Started the month maybe 2" from armhole on the body. I had to do algebra to figure out the sleeve decreases! 3x+4y=133; x+y=37. x=15; y=22! But then I realized I didn't need algebra, I could have just done 37/133=3 R=22, so I would do 15x dec every 3 rows and 22x dec every 4 rows. I finished the body to the armholes, and started the first sleeve.  Seamless s...

LHC #270: "The Ruin of all Witches" by Malcolm Gaskill.  eBook. It's a history of a witch hunt in 1646 in Springfield, MA. There are a lot of characters and sometimes I had a hard time keeping track of who was who. And is the case with trials, the same ground was sometimes covered over and over, hard to keep track of. Still, it was a good read and reminded me of something important I forgot in WWS.  LHC #271: "Blood and guts in High School" by Kathy Acker. eBook with poorly reproduced graphics. Very strange and short. I wonder if this is what Gemma Files' notebooks are like? It was nice to get to practice my Farsi.  LHC #272: "The Next Supper" by Corey Mintz. Hard copy because that's what was available. Published in 2021, it's very much a still in the pandemic book. 3+ years later, that sometimes felt a bit weird, but there was a lot of interesting information in here, and food has always been a volatile industry so I suppose whenever he w...

Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:   While reading about puritans, I discovered a scene that I'd missed that might be a wedge into finishing this.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I think I figured out the ending.  Short Stories:   Last month I was writing one from scratch. It's pretty close to done now.  Critted  5  Got back  2 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Blushing Cloud  (Knitty S/S24). Started the month with 7.5 inches of back done. Did 3".  Elbrus socks II . Last month I had finished the first and run out of yarn, which was a whole mess of coming up with an elegant solution. They're finished now. Hamilton  (Self). Started the month with 2" of bottom edge, finished that and started main colorway.   Seamless seam socks (Knitpicks Pop Socks). Love this pattern. Finished one sock, nearing the toe on the second.  Sashiko project:  Nothing....

Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:   Still n eed to take up comments and revise. I actually opened the file this month, because I discovered a missing scene! Need to find a way to work that in.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Continued to think thoughts.  Short Stories: I have two open on my late night desktop now, and I pick away at one of them most every night.  Critted  4  Got back  2 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Finished the endless finishing.   Blushing Cloud  (Knitty S/S24). Started the month with five inches of back done (up from three). Now I have 7.5, so half done.  Elbrus socks II . Last month I had started the first. Ran out of yarn, finished first, almost done second.  Hamilton  (Self). Started. will get to second colorway and decide if I hate it or not. I think I don't. I'm still on the waistband though, which looks ugly. ...

An interesting stat (to me anyway): Nine (1/8) of the books on my library holds list are sequels to things I've already read. I think only six are non-series books by an author I've read before.  LHC #265: "Silver in the wood" by Emily Tesh. eBook, nice and short and delightful. The follow-up is on the list.   LHC #266: "How we learn to move" by Rob Gray PhD. Hard copy because that's what the library had. There are a lot of pics in this book and they are low-quality. While the concepts are interesting, I had to make an effort to relate them to the activities I participate in.  Most interesting perhaps was the brief discussion of habit and automatic portions of a movement, and whether automation is something we should even strive for. For me, if there's a portion of a movement I can automate, that's a win, because then I can focus on something else, e.g., automating the embusen of a kata. But is that even automated? At the same time, the idea th...

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...

LHC #260: "Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels" by Katherine Anne Porter.  I put this on my list because of my ongoing writing project about a pandemic, but that was two years ago and I've barely worked on that project in the last year to be honest. Question for myelf: Why am I so afraid of reading old things? I had trepidation about this, but in fact it was a delight. Not sure these would count as novels these days, as I read each one basically on a bus ride to/from dance class.  LHC #261: "Run, Hide, Repeat: A memoir of a fugitive childhood" by Pauline Dakin.  eBook. I wanted something less stressful because Klara and the Sun was getting me down, and a whole lot of things had a waitlist, so I chose this. I spent most of the book wondering which character was going to wind up with what mental disorder, very satisfying. Good read.  LHC #262: "The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Nayler. eBook. I wanted this one because it was the next longest on the ...

  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:   Rewrote the ending of the story I pulled out last month. Started a couple of other short stories, but they're more percolating.  Critted  3  Got back  1 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Started the month in the color work of sleeve 2. Due to a 10-hour round trip in the car to Cleveland one weekend, I finished the sleeve and attached it to the body. Then due to listening to an audio book, I did two inches. Every row is shorter than the last! Hope to finish the fair isle portion in August.  Blushing Cloud  (Knitty S/S24). Started the month with (still) three inches of back done. Socks take priority.  Rainbow II.  Finished both.  Sashiko project:  Nothing.  Ruffle...

"Don't sleep, there are snakes" by Daniel Everett.  Recommended to me by a translator I work with, someone gave it to me for Christmas. I found I didn't have a whole lot of sympathy for some of Daniel's situations, pretty much for the reason he expected.  LHC #256: "The Princess Will Save You" by Sarah Henning. eBook. I bet I put it on my list because it's a gender-swapped princess bride complete with pirates. What's to go wrong with that? I found the unrelenting awesome-genius-righteousness of the good guys and the endless stupid-shallow idiocy of the bad guys tedious after a while but it wasn't terrible. The plot was good, just sometimes the writing was not very subtle.  LHC #257: "The Man who was Thursday: A Nightmare" by G.K. Chesterton. eBook. It was on my list because of Neil Gaiman. Quick read, very fun. Not many women!  LHC #258: "Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro. Audio book because I had the eBook on hold f...

LHC #251: "Foundryside" by Robert Jackson Bennett.  ebook. I started off thinking this was way too simplistic, but it was good clean fun.  LHC #252: "City of Broken Magic" by Mirah Bolender. Audiobook to get me to and from food bank farm day and then another drive to Ottawa. Way too much unimportant detail, or maybe it was misplaced characterization and worldbuilding, for my taste.  LHC #253: "Four Lost Cities" by Annalee Newitz. Audiobook. Nonfiction might work better for me for long car rides. I finished a sweater working on this!  LHC #254: "The sin in the steel" by Ryan Van Loan. Hard copy because it was the only format available. This was really fun, even if a huge portion of it was zombie battles and I got really tired of hearing about ichor, and sometimes nothing would happen for chapters on end because characters (okay, the main character) would rail on and on, not letting others get a word in edgewise.  LHC #255: "Half-Blood Blues...

  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:   Worked on the one I pulled out. I started the month thinking it was great and I didn't need to do anything, but now at the end of the month I need to fix the ending. Last night I wrote "You're the superhero we need, SuperWasp." The end. And that is not good, that's giving up.  Critted  3  Got back  0 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Started the month with about an inch of the second sleeve (the first sleeve and body are done). Now I'm into the color work.  Morning Brew  (Coffeehouse Knits). Started the month with just the neck and finishing to go. Did that.  Blushing Cloud  (Knitty S/S24). I had maybe three inches of back done. I did about one row, since I'm probably going to...

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:   Finished the one I pulled from the backlog in March, posted it on OWW, pulled out something else.  Critted  4  Got back  3 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Started the month with the body done to the armholes and maybe half an inch of sleeve. My goal was to finish that first sleeve, so I can do the next one in June and the upper chest/shoulders in July, then the finishing and neck in August, but this may not be realistic. I did finish that first sleeve and started the second.  Morning Brew  (Coffeehouse Knits). Started the month with several inches of the first sleeve done.My goal was to finish this sleeve, then do the second sleeve in June, then finish it in July so I can (blessedly) start s...

"Educated" by Tara Westover. Office book club selection for June, and one of my other colleagues who isn't in book club read it and found it good but harrowing. And my sister read it and said I'd like it. She made me cry, when her mother said "You were my child. I should have protected you." And then of course I was angry for the rest of the book. I hadn't realized when I started that her PhD is in history, that made so much of what I liked make sense (where she's presenting differing views in the footnotes, etc.)  LHC #246: "For the Wolf" by Hannah Whitten. Hard copy because the TPL Overdrive site had 2 copies and 72 holds, so a wait of "at least six months". I found it sort of hard to read, something about the sentences and paragraphs didn't sit right. The characters' communication styles drove me crazy, maybe it was condoning toxic masculinity? Not the book for me I guess. LHC #247: "The Women could Fly" by Me...

I re-ordered all this so it appears in the order I actually finished them, rather than the order I started.  LHC #246: "Tristimania" by Jay Griffiths.  Intense. I might have added this to my list because she does the Camino de Santiago. I think I expected something more personal. With more of a thread of action. For huge sections, it was nothing but picking who in mythology represents hypomania the best. Though it might have given me a title for Vinterlys so I guess it's worth it. I might have preferred it if the poetry had been at the start rather than the end; it felt already explained by the time I got to it.  LHC #244: "Ant Architecture" by Walter Tschinkel.  Very funny book! Full of bad ideas! I totally enjoyed the descriptions of experiments done on/with the ants. What a brilliant mind. I care relatively little about ants but this book was fascinating.  LHC #243: "Sex workers, psychics and numbers runners" by Lashawn Harris. A little more academ...

Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:   Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Thought thoughts mostly.  Short Stories:   Almost finished the one I pulled from the backlog last month.  Critted  4  Got back  1 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Started the month with maybe 15 rows to the armholes. But I've been thinking that for a long time. I listened to the Reith Lectures with Stuart Russell and mapped out the sleeves, then pushed to the armholes just to get it over with.   Morning Brew  (Coffeehouse Knits). Started the month at the armholes. There was a mistake in the pattern that was fortunately easy to fix (once I realized the numbers error wasn't because I'd accidentally added two stitches during the 16" of uninterrupted stockinette) because I hadn't divided for armholes yet, only for neck. I'm now finished ...

  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...

  Same place as last month's burnt-out car. Those are patched bullet holes.  Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:   Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Thought thoughts mostly. They were good thoughts though, probably useful.  Short Stories:  Finished that one I meant to finish in February, posted it to OWW. It was pretty nice to pull something else out of the backlog. April's goal will be to finish that one. I think it's doable.  Critted  4  Got back  2 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Started the month with 25 rows until the armholes. Maybe six now?  Morning Brew  (Coffeehouse Knits). Started the month with 4 more inches to the armholes. Got there! error in pattern.  Tiny Twists Socks (the second pair). Started the month halfway down the leg of the second. Turned the heel.  Blushing Cloud (Kni...

LHC #236: "The animals in that country" by Laura Jean McKay.  I thought I knew what I was getting into with this, but I did not. Wow. It's like a pandemic addiction memoir but with talking Australian animals who are not as insightful as we'd like.  "The Power" by Naomi Alderman. I watched the TV show (season 1? will there be another?) last fall. The TV show was amazing, except the end didn't quite work for me. Alex went to a signing with the author, and I got this. I quite enjoyed it, the ending was much more satisfying.    LHC #236: "Armistice" by Lara Elena Donnelly.  Audiobook. I found MRK's reading sort of a downer, wondering if that was on purpose. Or too wistful maybe. Also, Makricosta sounds really old as read, I went looking for fan art to get a better sense. I found surprisingly little, maybe I don't know how to search anymore.  LHC #237: "The Marigold" by Andrew Sullivan. Near future horror set in Toronto. Needed m...

 Not my car! But left at a place I frequent for several days. Very dirty.  Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:   Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Thought thoughts mostly.  Short Stories:  Finished that third draft. My goal was to finish this in Feb and get it on the 'shop. I'm so close.  Critted  6  Got back  1    Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Started the month halfway to the armholes. Wanted to get there by the end of the month, but I have 25 rows to go.  Morning Brew  (Coffeehouse Knits). Started the month with 7" of body. God, stocking stitch in the round is dull. I need milestones! I also wanted to get to the armholes on this by the end of the month, I think I have 4 more inches.  Tiny Twists Socks . Started the month with a half inch done. Finished the first sock, halfway down the...

"Morgan is my name" by Sophie Keech. Office book club selection. It gets exhausting to read about plucky young heroines who are terrible at needlework all the time. I should probably read some Jo Walton. I mean, you can be good at needlework and other things too! I didn't find this book very surprising. The first half was kind of boring, but it got better towards the end.  LHC #233: "The Shifter" by Janice Hardy. I read her writing advice website regularly, so I thought I should maybe read an actual book to find out if she was worth it. Oh my, the voice of this book grabbed me immediately. The worldbuilding seemed shady but the voice was solid. It wasn't very subtle, but I might not be the target audience.  LHC #234: "Ragnarok: The End of the Gods" by A. S. Byatt. At this point with my library account, I'm just guessing. I know there was something by Byatt there? I suspect there was. I did not know what to make of this book. Strange, but it w...

What a bad selfie! What an awesome sweater!  Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:   Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Thought thoughts mostly.  Short Stories: Started a third draft where I took out all the things that didn't belong.  Critted  6  Got back  1    Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Started the month with the fair isle portion barely started. Since I was now down to 2 projects, I had no choice but to work on this, which is good. I planned to the armholes and did about half of that.  Braids   (self). Started  the month with just the hem to go and then a small amount of finishing. It went great and now it's done.  Morning Brew  (Coffeehouse Knits). Started the month with a tiny bit of the body done. As it's mindless, and I'd run out of other mindless projects, I did a bit.  Tin...

"Fourth Wing" by Rebecca Yarros. Two of my sisters asked for this for Christmas, and the boy started reading it and had to stop because he was having too many sarcastic thoughts, so I bought it so he wouldn't have to. And the tradition is, if you can read it, you should before you give it away.  Alternate title: Sexytimes at illogical dragon school.  LHC #231: "Into the Riverlands" by Nghi Vo. Book 3. I was going through old entries looking for hints as to what might be on my library holds list, and I found book 2 of this series, and I knew book 3 must be there.  "Lady Tan's Circle of Women" by Lisa See. One of my sisters asked for it for Christmas. It was a bit gory, and I found the last section sort of tacked on, but it was quite fun.  LHC #232: "The Midnight Bargain" by C.L.Polk. Just guessing this was on my holds list. I found it stressful to start, then kind of silly. Maybe I was going too fast. Good read.  "Fifth Business...

Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:   Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Thought thoughts mostly.  Short Stories:  More editing strategies. I think another day or two of words and I'll call it a second draft, and start a third.  Critted  3  Got back  0    Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Cathar  (self). Started the month with the fair isle portion barely started. Did not progress. Braids   (self). Started  the month with just the hood and hem to go. Started the hood a few times, did not make great progress for a few weeks, then I realized what to do in conversation with Alex, and finished the hood for New Year's Eve after only four days of work.  Tiny Twists socks  (Pop socks: Colorful patterns by Knit Picks). Started the month on the heel of the first. Finished. Beady-eyed owls. Last of the Christmas socks, fo...