Skip to main content

What I read: November 2024

I have some work to do

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 more hard copy books rather than reading everything online. So I'm going to try to have 2 books per month be hard copy to get back in the habit of that. They're better to read on the bus anyway. 

The last nonfiction I read was "The last supper" and this book was really at odds with that in terms of its understanding of what it is to work. 

Also, we used to have a Nest product (he goes on and on about his time at Nest and the product life cycle etc.) and my experience of the product life cycle of Nest is pretty horrific because as far as I'm concerned, Google murdered our Nest. I won't forget that. Now we have a shoddy Amazon product to replace it that keeps getting de-featured. 

LHC #277: "No gods for Drowning" by Hailey Piper. eBook. The formatting was kind of annoying. There weren't proper chapter breaks, it seemed double-spaced. Nevertheless, I loved her dialog, especially. I went to her website to find out what else she'd written, only to discover that this book is somehow out of print? It was published in September 2022, how does that happen? I don't understand publishing. 

LHC #278: "Ducks" by Kate Beaton. Hard copy. I prefer reading graphic novels on paper. It was amazing, heartbreaking, so well-done. I think I will buy a copy tomorrow to give away for Christmas.

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