pedanther

According to my music player, my digital collection consists of 2,542 tracks, with a total running time of 143 hours and 39 minutes.

The phrase "a song I don't particularly care for from an album I got for one of the other tracks" is going to show up often enough that I should probably come up with a snappy abbreviation.

( Read more... )

No progress on finding a colour match for the book chain, but I've got other reading done:


January: Title containing "Before" or "After"

Before Dorothy, Hazel Gaynor. A historical novel telling a version of the life of Dorothy Gale's Auntie Em.

It's a straight historical, with no fantasy elements; one of the things it takes from the 1939 movie is the idea that Dorothy's trip to Oz was a dream inspired by things and people encountered in the waking world. Consequently, the cast of characters includes real-world analogues for the Wicked Witch (very similar to the movie's version), the Wizard (signficantly different), Glinda, and so on. Another thing it takes from the movie is that Tornado Day happens in the 1930s, allowing the author to make use of the Dust Bowl and the Depression; I was mostly able to roll with it but did occasionally blink at the inclusion of things that my head considers definitely post-Oz. (There's just something weird about the idea of Dorothy Gale sitting in Kansas reading Anne of Green Gables.)

I'm not sure how it would read as a straight historical for someone who wasn't familiar with The Wizard of Oz and didn't notice the references; I was initially rather distracted going "that's from that bit in the movie" and "that's from the book", and more interested in collecting clues about how the author was planning to deal with Tornado Day than in the characters for their own sake, but I did start getting involved in it once I'd settled to my satisfaction what kind of story to expect. My initial reaction when I realised what the driving question of the climax was going to be was "oh, this again?", but in the event I was sincerely invested in how it would play out.

I do think it could have done with another editing pass specifically to assess which of the references were actually contributing something worth keeping in; not every mention of circus animals need to include "lions and tigers and bears" (four separate times, I counted), and it felt like every red thing was ruby and just about every green thing was "emerald" -- though, having said that, I was struck by a moment near the end when one of the things I would have expected to be emerald was merely "green", which effectively undercut the moment in a way that I would like to think was deliberate.


Miscellaneous

Fiasco by Jason Morningstar. The source-book for a narrative role-playing game/long-form improvisational exercise for creating stories of "powerful ambition and poor impulse control", inspired by films like Fargo and Blood Simple. This was a re-read; I've owned the book for years, since I saw a demonstration game, but have never had any success at rounding up some people to play it with (nor the requisite impressively-large number of dice required).


You Say Potato: The Story of English Accents by Ben & David Crystal. Ben is an actor, David is a linguist, both have a professional interest in accents and how they develop and what they signify. The book includes a section about their work in the Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation project, which is where I first encountered them. I'm about halfway through, and have not yet reached the section promised on the back cover which addresses the vital question: "Has anybody ever actually said 'po-TAH-to'?"

The style is very conversational, and I have a feeling the audio book version would be a lot of fun to listen to.

#6: A book whose title has the same first letter as the name of the previous book's author

James Randi: Psychic Investigator, the companion volume to the 1991 TV series of the same name.

An introductory overview of a topic and a person I was already interested in, so there wasn't much in it that was new to me except in the details, but it was an entertaining overview and an enjoyable refresher, and now there's one less unread-for-over-a-decade book on my shelves.


#7: A book with the same number of words in the title as the previous book

It took me over a week to pick a book for this prompt, because I kept trying to match the previous book to the extent of having four proper words with no articles or prepositions, which leaves a lot of candidates out (anything titled "The X of Y", for a start). In the end, I settled on:

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche in which Psyche's sister decides it's time to tell her side of the story.

Another unread-for-over-a-decade book; as an adult, I've developed a tendency to distrust Lewis. In this case, I'm glad I finally read it.

Orual makes an interesting protagonist and narrator: she's not a nice person, proud and selfish, but it's always clear why the things she does made sense to her at the time. And, balancing the fact that she's ready with a justification for her bad actions, she's also capable of doing signficant good and doesn't always recognise how good she's been. (I was reminded of the saying about how life is like working backstage at a theatre or doing an embroidery from the wrong side, where you're always aware of the messy scaffolding that nobody else can see and only have an indistinct idea of what it looks like to everyone else.)


#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book

The cover of Till We Have Faces has a full-cover illustration with a very similar colour scheme to the previous book I had for this prompt last year, which would have been a useful thing to notice then but now means that, unless there's another such book lurking unnoticed on my shelves, I'm facing a similar struggle to find something to match it.

I was pondering a possible rule set for a chess variant inspired by Doctor Who, when I had one of those revelations that make you wonder if you've overlooked something obvious that everybody else spotted immediately.

It's this: In "The Curse of Fenric", the winning move in the chess puzzle is the same as the winning move in the Doctor's real conflict with Fenric.

In my defence, the story presents a much more conspicuous explanation for the symbolic significance of the chess puzzle, which makes it harder to consider that the chess puzzle might represent more than one thing.

( spoilers under the cut )

Archive of Our Own recently did a feature update that now makes it possible to sort one's collection of bookmarks (links to fics one is interested in revisiting) by the length of the fic in question.

The shortest fics I've bookmarked that consist entirely of normal text are several drabbles; the sorting gives priority, apparently on the basis of age, to rabidsamfan's Calvin and Hobbes drabble Introduction.

(Works that don't consist entirely of normal text, and thereby confuse the word counter, include embedded videos, comic strips and other works told entirely in images, and ysobel's I am Groot (Groot's Story), where the bulk of the story is in the footnotes.)

My two largest bookmarks are both series: Motion Practice (by an author who has chosen to remain anonymous) and Don't Look Back by this-acuteneurosis.

Motion Practice is a series that reimagines the Avengers (the American superheroes, not the English crimefighters) as a team of lawyers, with various other characters in associated roles including Loki as that one slimy defence lawyer you always get in legal dramas who will do anything to get his client off as long as his client has money; there are over forty works in the series, including seven entire novels.

Don't Look Back is a Star Wars story in which Princess Leia is sent back in time to before the Empire, and sets out to prevent the Empire being created -- which, unlike in many works with similar premises, doesn't just meaning assassinating the would-be Emperor but also dealing with the social and cultural forces that enabled his rise to power. I've seen the author say somewhere that when they started writing it, they expected it to be a single work under a hundred thousand words long; it's currently over 750,000 words and counting, and with luck may be finally completed some time next year.

The longest individual fic I have bookmarked is Sansûkh by determamfidd, in which the events of The Lord of the Rings are retold from the point of view of a group of dwarves (the late Thorin Oakenshield and his companions) watching from the afterlife and commentating on the action. I've been re-reading this one over the past few days, since I first did the experiment of seeing what the longest fic I had bookmarked was, and am about a quarter of the way through. I have mixed feelings about it, because some of the worldbuilding is interesting, but the fic uses the characterisations from the Peter Jackson movies, which means that sometimes the author's priorities and decisions have significant areas of non-overlap with mine, including when it comes to what the author has chosen to make one of the main emotional threads of the narrative. (If you know what the word "bagginshield" means, you likely have an idea of whether this is a story you're likely to be willing to spend 570,000 words with.)

#4: A book published at least five years before the previous book

Attempt 1: Twenty-Two Goblins by Arthur W. Ryder, a translation/retelling of "Vetala Panchavimshati", a Sanskrit cycle of folk tales.

In the frame story, a king encounters a goblin (properly a vetāla) who tells him a series of stories involving magic and supernatural creatures. ( Read more... )

Attempt 2: Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster.

I decided that what I needed was a book in which nobody was getting horribly murdered. ( Read more... )


#5: A book with the same spine colour as the previous book

Here's a conundrum: What colour is the spine of an ebook?

Well, in this case there's an answer: PG's edition-with-images of Daddy-Long-Legs includes not only the internal illustrations and a picture of the front cover but also a picture of the spine, which has a nice floral decorative element on it. The spine is green.

The Project Gutenberg edition-with-images of the sequel only has the front cover and not the spine (insufficiently decorative, one presumes), but if the spine is the same colour as the front cover then it is also green. Therefore:

Dear Enemy by Jean Webster.

A young woman is charged with running an orphanage in need of reform, with the assistance of, among others, a taciturn doctor with whom she immediately fails to get on (and we all know what that means). ( Read more... )

. There was a heatwave lasting several days, during which the temperature got as high as 45 degrees Celcius and never got below 20 degrees. During the hottest few days, it was too hot to be sitting at the computer and I didn't have much oomph for reading, so I listened to a lot of podcasts and finished my current jigsaw puzzle (and, when it got really hot, took a long nap).


. The board game club meetups have started up again for the year. This week, the main game I played was Leviathan Wilds, in which the board represents an enormous creature that you're climbing over, trying to achieve goals while avoiding hazards and trying not to slip and fall. Beforehand, we played Let's Dig For Treasure, and afterward we played Ingenious.


. I'm keeping up the regular walking, weather permitting, and I remembered that I have a bicycle and went for a bike ride. I've also resumed the set of muscle exercises that I stopped doing a couple of years ago during a health scare and hadn't got around to starting up again.


. The current season of Jet Lag involves playing hide and seek across England (theoretically the entire UK, but the travel time limits mean they're unlikely to hit the outlying regions, in the same way that the Australian season barely went further west than Adelaide). There have been some fun interactions with the locals, and this week Ben and Adam got sent to Coventry and Sam went to hide in Milton Keynes, on the grounds that it would never occur to the seekers that anybody would voluntarily go to Milton Keynes.


. A couple of list videos showed up in my Youtube recommendations about video games that were set in the year 2026. One such game was Observation, a game which I was initially very enthusiastic about but haven't opened in about five years after I got stuck in one of rather too many frustrating pixel-hunty puzzle sections. Seeing it on the list prompted me to wonder if I should give it another shot, but on reflection I'm happy to let it be.


. I was at a loose end and decided to give XCOM 2 another go, but I'm not in the right frame of mind to enjoy it and avoid getting into another grim spiral, so I've stopped again.


. Our state started a container deposit scheme a few years ago, in which used drink cans and bottles can be dropped off at collection points in return for a small amount of money per can or bottle, thus hopefully reducing the amount of cans and bottles that become litter. I've been accumulating cans and bottles due to uncertainty on my part about where the local collection points are and what the appropriate method is to bag them up before dropping them off, but I managed to get that sorted out and yesterday I dropped off two full bags, with a good start made on filling the next bag.


. Rehearsals have begun for the first Rep Club production of the year. The first read-through was fun.


. I see the End of Year Writing Meme is going around again. My complete output for 2025 was two pieces of flash fic ("Being" and "Flesh and Blood") amounting to a total of seven sentences, so I don't think there's enough material to answer all the questions about "What was your best opening sentence" and so on -- but it's a quantum leap above the last few years when I finished nothing at all.

(I started writing a few other longer pieces, but I think most of them were more about working out how I felt about the plot point in question than about producing a finished story. The exception is the one I started a couple of weeks ago, which might yet amount to something.)

We got to do several fun things with the out-of-town family members while they were back in town for the holidays, including Parkrun, a game night, and horse-and-buggy rides provided by a friend of one of my siblings. At the game night, we played Uno No Mercy, Dixit, Saboteur, and the imaginatively-titled That Sound Game, a variant on charades where non-verbal sound clues are allowed and hand gestures are forbidden. While the buggy was being set up, we were all encouraged to take a turn at hand-feeding treats to the horses; I haven't done that since I was a boy, and it turns out to be much more fun when you know you've got the technique down and have stopped worrying about losing a finger. I got a case of sunburn that I still haven't entirely recovered from, but it was worth it.


Books:

The first part of the week was devoted to finding books that would tick off multiple reading challenge prompts at once before the end-of-year deadline.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows was a great success: three challenge prompts in one blow ("Food and Drink", "Hopeful", and "Alliteration") -- and, more importantly, I enjoyed it a lot and never felt uncertain about whether I wanted to continue reading. (I feel like I've been writing or contemplating the sentence 'This book was a pleasant reminder that reading can actually be fun' a slightly worrying amount this year, but anyway this book was a pleasant reminder that reading can actually be fun.)

I didn't get on so well with Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree, although I enjoyed it well enough to get through it. Something about it didn't quite click, and I think part of the trouble was a mismatch of expectations. When that first occurred to me, I thought it was because it's a subgenre I don't read so often, but when I got to the epilogue I decided that it was (also) that it's a prequel to a book I haven't read. I'd assumed that being chronologically first would mean I didn't need to know anything going in, but research suggests that the characters whose arcs I was having the most trouble getting a bead on are the ones who also appear in the original novel, and who therefore the author had grounds to assume the reader would already know where they were going to end up. (It may also have suffered by comparison to The Guernsey Literary; they're both books about the transformative power of reading but their approaches and styles differ significantly, and I know which one I prefer.)


In the end, I completed nearly all of my 2025 reading challenges -- I was only one prompt short on one challenge, and halfway through the book that would have filled that prompt, but I decided I'd be happier if I finished the book at its own pace than if I tried to cram 350 pages in one evening for the sake of an arbitrary goal. The reading goals that mattered were "Read books" and "Have fewer unread books at the end of the year", both of which I passed with flying colours.

For 2026, I've cut back a bit, and am only doing two main reading challenges: a monthly themed challenge and a new iteration of the book chain.

The first reading prompt for the book chain is "a book you're excited to read", which is a bit of a stumper: if I had a book handy that I was excited to read, I'd have read it already. Worst case, the book chain's not getting started until Platform Decay comes out in May. Anyway, I decided to start laying groundwork by clearing out some books I'm definitely not excited to read: I officially DNFed some of the books I'd paused on StoryGraph, and returned three unread library books that I'd got out as potential candidates for the old year's last few reading challenge prompts.

The first prompt of the monthly themed challenge is also proving unhelpful; I've placed holds on a few possibilities at the library, but none have come in yet.

In the mean time, I've finally got around to starting Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, a story about a country where free speech is being restricted one letter at a time (first they ban the use of all words containing the letter Z, and so on). The story is told in letters and documents, so the restrictions are reflected in the storytelling itself.


The timed readalong of The Dark Is Rising is technically still going on, but I couldn't restrain myself and finished reading already. It's still a very good novel, and the BBC radio adaptation a few years ago did not do it justice. I'm undecided about whether I'll go on and re-read the rest of the series; there is more good writing to come, but the direction the series ended up taking never sat right with me.


Movies:

I watched Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson's new murder mystery, with friends, and we had fun discussing our theories as we went along. We've all seen enough other locked room mysteries that we each immediately suspected the key points of who did the deed and how, but it was still interesting to follow the uncovering of the details and the revelations about who else was involved and why. And, like Knives Out before it, the story isn't just about solving the murder; the protagonist, and at least some of the supporting characters, have their own personal journeys to go on, and in the end a kind heart is just as important as a clever brain. (That was something I felt was missing in Glass Onion, and I was glad to see it back.)


TV:

I've made it to the end of Bille August's TV adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. It eventually becomes apparent that this version of the story is mainly interested in Edmond and Mercedes. The scenes where one is pining for the other are among the few scenes that actually work, and the scene in the park where they're standing within arm's reach, looking each other in the eyes, and still yearning for each other over a seemingly unbridgeable emotional chasm, is probably the best scene in the whole thing -- and shows that the writer does in fact know what subtext is and has a grasp of the concept of conveying information without having a character baldly state it, which I had been beginning to seriously doubt. I mentioned that there was a moment in the first episode that moved me to audibly-expressed derision; this scene includes the moment paying off that bit of set-up, in an action whose import is clear to both characters and the audience without a word spoken, and I have to admit that the pay-off is actually pretty good. The set-up remains solid gold bullshit, and typical of the writer's tendency throughout to have characters do what's convenient to him without regard for whether it makes any sense for someone of that time and social status. There are in fact, I grudgingly admit, several nice moments in the last few episodes which deliver interesting payoffs to set-ups that I disapprove of (the scene where the portrait of Mercedes sits in the background of every shot while Albert and his father have a conversation that conspicuously avoids mentioning her is another one). The construction of the revenge plot continues to be slapdash right up to the end, and a lot of scenes that ought to be dramatic fail to be because there's been no build-up to them or because the air was let out early.


Having got that out of the way, I rewarded myself by watching the first episode of the new season of The Traitors, a series reliably made by people who know how to tell a story about intrigue and betrayal properly.

I've been playing around with the reading list/challenge feature on The StoryGraph, and I've just published my first: The Haycraft List of Detective Story Cornerstones

In his 1941 book Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, Howard Haycraft included a list offering "a suggestive selection of the 'high spots'" of the first century of modern detective fiction, from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" to The Patience of Maigret, by way of Holmes, Wimsey, and many others.

For the most part, he limited himself to one book per author, except in a few cases where he felt that the author's range or impact justified the making of an exception. Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr, to name two, were awarded a second spot on the list. Arthur Conan Doyle is the sole author to be awarded a third (in fact he gets nine, because Haycraft refused to play favourites and included the entire Canon).


(My first thought for a reading list was actually the book club from Jo Walton's Among Others, but I put it off long enough that someone else got there first.)

#40: Read a book with the same coloured cover as the previous book.

First attempt: The Pearl Harbor Murders by Max Allan Collins. One of a set of murder mysteries with the hook [famous author] solves murder mystery during [historical event with large body count]; most of the others feature mystery writers, but this one stars Edgar Rice Burroughs, presumably on the basis that he was, obligingly, actually there at the time. The more I got into it, the less keen I was on the premise, and I didn't find the narrative style or any of the characters particularly engaging. Also, it turned out to be an uncover-the-fifth-columnists plot, and I've had enough of those lately already.


Second attempt: Long Way Home by Eva Dolan. Another murder mystery -- not the kind where the murderer is caught and normal order is restored, but the kind where the murder is a symptom of a broken world and ends up not being the worst thing uncovered by the investigation. Grim, but at least I didn't get the feeling the author was taking the situation too lightly.

Not the kind of thing I'd normally read for fun, but it was on display at the library and the cover fit the prompt so I decided to give it a go. I don't regret spending the time on it, but I'm not tempted by the sequels. (There are apparently five sequels and counting, which surprised me a bit, as the detective protagonists didn't feel to me like the type to headline a series. Knowing that this was book one of The DI Zigic and DS Ferreira Series did give me a bit of amusement when I got to the part where DI Zigic gets shot in the line of duty and the author spends a couple of chapters trying to pretend he might actually be dead.)


That concludes the Book Chain reading challenge. I'm looking forward to seeing if there's going to be another one next year.