Robynettely

Wind/Water/Salt   Chapters 39-51:   Nothing. Persephone  (probably not its real name): Nothing. Vinterlys:  Worked on giving Chapter 4 a shape.  Critted  4  Got back  1 Submissions  0  Out there   0   Rejects   0 Knitting Aberlady  (AS Celtic Collection). did an inch or so while listening to an audio book.  Ankylosaur  (Knitty). Started the month with one sock done to the gusset and the other done to the toe. These are done.  Bongo Basketweave   (knitty): Started the month with the back done and four inches of front. Finished the front and started the sleeves top down at the same time because I was afraid I was going to run out of yarn. Indeed, I knitted the sleeves until there was none of one of my colors left and stopped. Just the finishing to do now. I hope my half-length sleeves don't look too stupid when I'm done, but that's something to find out next month.  Plain ordinary socks. Started...

LHC #204: "The once and future witches" by Alix E Harrow.  Hard copy because the eBook had like a 7-week wait. Takes place in about the same timeframe as "The Jungle", interesting juxtaposition. Good book, start to end.  LHC #205: "They can't kill us until they kill us" by Hanif Abdurraqib. Hard copy, because the e-book had like a 14-week wait. This one must get stolen a lot, they got brand-new copies in and I got one of those. I did what I do when I read something about music, which is I listen to the artist or work as much as I can as I read. This totally exposes me to things I know nothing about. It was also amusing when people would ask what I was reading, to explain to them.  "Harrow the Ninth" by Tamsyn Muir.  I want to read sequels a little closer to the book they're near, where available, rather than putting them on the list and reading them two years after I read the previous. So here we are.  Ebook. I spent a lot of time wonderi...

LHC#119: "How to listen to Jazz" by Ted Gioia. I guess this came from my self-improvement phase of requests. It was published in 2016, so not that old, but its pre-pandemic publication shows. There's a whole long section where he discusses the concept of virality as if the medical sense would be new to people. Interesting, though.  I might have gone a little too hard on this one. I listened to a ton of jazz while reading it, and discovered a couple of tracks I loved, and some whole subgenres I apparently loathe. Eeew, cool jazz is so not for me.  LHC#120: "The Country Girls Trilogy" by Edna O'Brien. Not sure if this should be one or three, but it's one volume so for here I'll count it as one. In my annual tally of books read (maintained elsewhere) I'll count it as three. Very much worth reading. It's pretty clear why it would have been banned a lot though. Wow.  LHC #121: "The Memento" by Christy Ann Conlin. The voice in this is gr...

LHC #115: "Confederates in the Attic" by Tony Horowitz. Written in 1998, but still very relevant. I didn't realize until I was 20% in that I was reading this during Confederate Heritage month. What a fluke.  This book gave me an odd moment of rooting for Disney. If, in the early 90's, they had succeeded in building a theme park near Manassas, then maybe they would have made the Disney version of the civil war that could unite America.  LHC #116: "How Music Works" by David Byrne. So much of this book could just as easily be about writing.  LHC #117: "Someone who will Love you in all your Damaged Glory" by Raphael Bob-Waksberg. I'm sure it was recommended by someone. I dream of someday catching up to the books on this list, so I can remember when I asked for them, but I feel like it's never going to happen. Some of these were awesome (the one about going to see your brother's play) and some were meh. It's a short story collection, t...

"The Kingdom of Copper" by S.A. Chakraborty.  I meant toto ordered it when I finished the first one? But the spoilers at the end were somehow for book 3, so I ordered that one instead, and then it was coming in four weeks, so I had to read this one in a rush.  I felt like the author saw much more in Nahri than I did. I found it too stressful to be able to properly enjoy.   "The Empire of Gold" by S.A. Chakraborty.  And here we are.  One time this woman was making all sorts of accusations against me and one of them was that I had called her a crocodile. I thought it was the most... bizarre thing at the time. Maybe this book explained that?  I found it much more relaxing to read than the previous volumes, because the characters (some of them) were in a position to be kind to one another occasionally. Though Chapter 42 wasn't my favorite. It felt like she ran out of time. I  LHC #113: "Ruined by Design" by Mike Monteiro. Hard copy. The library has 4...

  "Daisy Jones and the Six" by Taylor Jenkins Reid.  audio book. Recommended by someone in Toronto Life magazine. The weird thing is that it has nothing to do with Drake.  The audio book was probably a mistake, I found it too slow.  LHC #110: "Babel: around the world in 20 languages" by Gaston Doren.  This book was totally my jam.  LHC #111: "The City of Brass" by S.A. Chakraborty. Recommended in so many places, including by Ali A. Olomi, who tweets about Islamic astrology and Jinns and stuff. He'd probably also mentioned that book about the Arabian Nights that I read last month, which in turn mentioned a story about The City of Brass. So. Marie Brennan said in her capsule review of book 2 (this is book 1 of a trilogy) that it lacks a sense of humor. I'm not so sure. I found the first 10% a little tiresome, but when all the characters lie to each other so much, it got tremendously fun.  LHC # 112: "The path between the Seas: The creation of th...

LHC #107: "Certain Dark Things" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Audio book. I finished a sweater while listening to it. It's about Mexican vampires. I found Domingo pretty annoying.  LHC #108: "Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights" by Marina Warner. Hard copy. Worth the effort.  LHC #109: "Wild Milk" by Sabrina Orah Mark. eBook. I had no recollection of requesting this back in 2019, but when it bubbled to the top of the list and I read the description, I was like "yeah, that's my jam." I wish the library's website had a notes field in the Holds interface! Also that it listed the length of the book, because this one is unintimidating, even if the cover is kind of weird. Oh, and it's published by the Dorothy Project, which I'm a fan of.  If I wrote stories like this people would get mad at me.  "The Tower and the Fox" by Tim Susman.  Free eBook because book 4 just came out. This is book 1. Kinda Hogwarts in...

  LHC #104: "Gingerbread" by Helen Oyoyemi.  I actually remember wanting to read this when I put it on the list. I made gingerbread in its honor, and the boy asked if he could take some for his girlfriend, but it contained eggs and she's allergic, so I had to make another one... This book was worth every minute.  LHC #105: "To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis. I got it out because it was the highest item on the list that didn't have a wait. Apparently it's book 2 of a series. I wish that had been clear on the synopsis on the library website? It's part of the description on Overdrive, but not on the main TPL site. And it was on my list because it was the only thing they had in hard copy by Connie Willis, which seems wrong somehow. I just looked, and the situation is better now.  Anyway, I think my dad would have loved Connie Willis. The science fictional time travel blended with the Wodehouse-style humor and energy would totally have been his...

"Crooked Kingdom" by Leigh Bardugo.   I read book 1 in September, and it took this long for Book 2 to arrive. It was a race between hard and e-copies, and they kind of tied. I guess that means the system is working correctly?  There were tons of flashbacks, and they were awesome. So whatever people say about "don't do flashbacks" is BS. Also, tons of past perfect tense because of the flashbacks. On OWW I'm constantly suggesting PP tense to people.  The other lesson here is characters are their relationships. The six are all such flawed people, but such interesting relationships. If I had to kill anyone, I... oh.    LHC #101: "The Song of All" by Tina LeCount Myers. I probably requested this one because of something about Finland. Not available on Overdrive, so I read it in hard copy. I... found it a little slow. I wanted more detail especially in the worldbuilding, and sometimes I was confused about which character was which.  LHC #102: "Borde...

LHC #98: "Jade City" by Fonda Lee.  I loved this book, but I worry I'm never going to know what was in that letter from Enyi that Lan put in his desk for later.  "Exit Strategy" by Martha Wells.   In the library race between eBook and hard copy, this time hard copy won.  "Akira Book 6" by Katsuhiro Otomo. Finished the series! Worth the effort even if I didn't completely understand it.  LHC #99: "Alice Payne Arrives" by Kate Heartfield. Long ago when I put this on my list I sent a note to the library letting them know the title had a typo.  "Alice Payne Rides" by Kate Heartfield. I might have gotten this one out because I didn't quite understand the ending of the previous. And the first one was such a quick read, so the time cost is low. I feel like these two could have been one book and it would have made more sense.  "Wear, Repair, Repurpose" by Lily Fulop. A little more basic than I wanted and not nearly long e...

  "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" by Cory Doctorow.  This is very relevant to a lot of the jobs I apply for these days. Basically, interoperability! Anti-trust!  "Rogue Protocol" by Martha Wells.  I wasn't done with book 2 (last month) when I requested this one on Overdrive. The wait purported to be 16 weeks. So I requested the hard copy too, and made it a race. The hard copy won.  LHC #95: "Things we lost in the fire: Stories" by Mariana Enriquez. Probably another in the "girls behaving badly" genre I seem to have been mad about in Jan of 2019. Except it's from Argentina and translated into English, so not the same at all. Really good. I need to read more lit in translation, and also maybe I would love to know a language well enough to translate out of it.  LHC #96: "An Ocean of Minutes" by Thea Lim. It's a pandemic story that I requested back in Jan of 2019, when I didn't know how much fun pandemics were. I ...

"Artificial Condition" by Martha Wells.  The first Murderbot book was so awesome I immediately requested book 2, but it was a month's wait? The next one says 16 weeks, and I've ordered it already. I read a review of one of these that called Murderbot "He" throughout, and I found this shocking.  LHC #89: "The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing" by Melissa Bank. I had a phase where I requested a bunch of short story collections about young women behaving badly. This is one of those. Somehow I hadn't realized it was linked stories until after the third one, and then the fourth one was only barely connected, which was weird.  LHC #90: "Half-Witch" by John Schoffstall.  I would have requested this one because of its awesome name. It was also only available in paper. Weird? I guess that's because it's a middle-grade novel (somehow I didn't realize this until I was a few chapters in) and middle graders don't have eReader...

"Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness" by Susannah Cahalan. Recommended by my sister. I accidentally got the audio book out of the library.  "Mozart's Starling" by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Terry Windling recommended this one on her blog. I really appreciated the end notes being properly linked for a change. My favorite starling fact I learned is that the reason my dad (who owned a small plane) passionately hated starlings was because a flock of them had taken down an aircraft at Logan in 1960.  LHC #85: "Your duck is my duck" by Deborah Eisenberg. Short stories, much more about character than plot. Really rich. I should read more of her.  LHC #86: "Music, sense and nonsense: collected essays and lectures" by Alfred Brendel. Physical library book! I know nothing about piano and a lot of this was over my head so I had to make a schedule in order to finish it.  I used Spotify to play him while I listened, which maybe helped? I don't know.  Canad...

LHC #80: "All Systems Red" by Martha Wells. Such voice! I devoured it and requested the next one in the series. LHC #81: "On Immunity: An Innoculation" by Eula Biss. Recommended by someone in my karate class, possibly when I mentioned my obsession with pandemics and vaccine resistance etc. like a year and a half ago. One thing that drives me a little bit mad when reading eBooks is they make so little effort to link the endnotes to the relevant block of text. Hyperlinks are so easy! And I know it's possible. That Jared Diamond eBook I read last month had hyperlinks in the intro, if not in the rest of the book. Though that one could have had links to and from the photos too. "The Red Threads of Fortune" by JY Neon Yang. A sequel! Wow these characters are wonderfully lacking in jealousy. I appreciated the portrayal of Mokoya's emotional mindset.  LHC # 82: "The Language of the Third Reich: LTI Lingua Tertii Imperii: a philologist's no...

LHC #76: "Midnight in Peking" by Paul French. Interesting to read this right after "The Poppy War", but that's how the library gave me them. It's the kind of history I love, full of details I have to look up. It's about the investigation into the murder of a white British (well, British enough) teenager in Peking in 1937, and what really (most likely) happened. LHC #77: "Witchmark" by CL Polk. This is the book I've waited longest for on Overdrive, so my expectations were high. This book was an absolute delight. It moved fast, it was funny and charming, and I loved it so much. "Upheaval" by Jared Diamond. The boy really wanted me to read this, so I did. The author has this odd tendency to say things like "100,000 Finns died, which is the equivalent of 9 Million present-day Americans" or "Meiji Japanese farmers had to pay 3% tax. My marginal tax rate in California is 44%" which I found repulsive. Having not...

LHC #72: "The Hare With Amber Eyes" by Edmund de Waal.  Recommended by a coworker. This is the first thing I've read where I was actively glad I was reading on a computer, because Google was so available. I looked up a lot of paintings and words. The sections about suffering through world wars 1 and 2 certainly put my own not-very-difficult situation in perspective.  "What if this were enough?" by Heather Havrilsky.  I think I like her better when she's trying to help other people solve their problems, rather than going on (and on) about her own. LHC #73: "Silver on the Road" by Laura Anne Gilman.  Two-week wait on Overdrive. I loved the worldbuilding and the dynamic between Izzy and Gabriel. Highly recommended. LHC #74: "The Wrong Stars" by Tim Pratt.  Another book I read on overdrive. This was a fun read, and it helped me understand what one of my peers on OWW was going for last year. Sorry I misunderstood the style before, dude! ...

LHC #67: "The Falconer" by Elizabeth May. I might have put this on my list because the author shares a name with the current leader of Canada's Green Party. I wasn't fond of the main character. It's written in first person present, and my lack of connection with Aileana made that rough. It was a quick read. LHC #68: "We Will All Go Down Together" by Gemma Files. This must be the fifth or sixth book I've read by her? It really helped me focus my main witch character in WWS, and also I learned from the pronunciation guide that I've been saying one of the characters' names wrong for about 10 years. Oh well. LHC #69: "The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories" by Joan Aiken. Strange is so true. I'd just received this book when the library closed for the foreseeable future due to COVID-19. On the day I started reading it, I took it with me to visit my mechanic, because the check engine light was on, then walked over to...

"Danagerous Ages" by Rose Macaulay. Marissa Lingen read this last month, and made me want to read it. LHC #65: "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge.   The tines (wolfpacks) were fantastic, and so was the galaxy, with the slow zones, etc. I'm not sure I truly understood it, but it was really cool. LHC#66: "Permutation City" by Greg Egan.  The last from the  Jo Walton SF list  that I've been reading for months and months! For some reason I put this on my book list that I make while reading Locus (a very different list than the LHC list let me tell you -- I will never read all those) on about the same day I was setting new books to "active". Anyway, this book really drove home how I don't want to go live in the singularity. It seemed awful.  "The Raven Tower" by Ann Leckie. Got it for Christmas. Really awesome. This is one I will try to force on others. The POV character was great, I loved how it was sort of omniscie...

LHC #62: "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner. I was intimidated by the length, and got confused by the vast cast of characters, but it was still really good. "The Book of Dust" by Philip Pullman. The boy gave it to me for Christmas, and I devoured it. Now I need to watch the HBO His Dark Materials series, and also read some other books in the series. LHC #63: "Cyteen" by CJ Cherryh. The first 30 pages were a slog, but then this one was no problem at all to read. Apparently it was originally published as a trilogy. I cannot see how that could have possibly worked. There didn't seem to be wasted scenes anywhere, either. I don't feel like it answered the question it asked at the beginning, really, and I felt like it was going to. Apparently that's in the sequel. LHC #64: "Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson. Weirdly, I have a different book by RCW in my TBR pile. But I own that book, so the necessity to read it is so much lower! Thi...

“Getting Off Right Safety Manual” by Harm Reduction.org. Research for Persephone. This document had a great tone, even if Ed disagreed with some of the content.  LHC #59: “Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand” by Samuel R. Delany. This one must be meant to improve me. I feel like too many of the books on my list lately have been someone else’s taste, which is not quite the same as my own. It also seems so skew very male, which seems odd. This book went way better for me when I sat down and just punched through. There’s a fantastic scene towards the end where they’re having a dinner party and the guests of honor have a conversation amongst themselves about what barbarians their hosts are that the hosts just do not understand even a little bit even though the POV character is an expert in etiquette. Worth the read though I’m a little tired of stories about gender identities. “Asymmetry” by Lisa Halliday. My sister asked for it for Christmas. A light palette cleanser, I tho...