Skip to main content

What I read: July 2024

I'm not a whiner; that's a lot of bruise
"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 forever and then I found the audio was going to be "soon" when the eBook still had 10 weeks wait, and I needed something to listen to while I worked on that interminable Fair Isle sweater. The wait was like 3 hours maybe. It was a little depressing but definitely good. 

LHC #259: "The Four Profound Weaves" by R.B. Lemberg. eBook. It was as good as the reviews said and exactly what I wanted it to be. 

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.
Read more

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...
Read more

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...
Read more