pedanther

November: Title That Contains Instructions

Saucer Country: Run by Paul Cornell, et al. On the night before she announces her candidacy for President, New Mexico governor Arcadia Alvarado has an experience which gives her an urgent and personal reason to find out what's really going on behind decades of stories about unidentified flying objects and alien abductions. Sifting the truth out of the myths and deceptions and preconceptions is complicated by the attentions of several different conspiracies with their own UFO-related agendas.

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October: Parts of a House

I continue to chip away at Three Stones Make a Wall while I wait for my library hold to come in. This may have been a tactical error, as most days I'm not motivated to read it without consciously reminding myself, and yesterday I got distracted and forgot I hadn't read it yet, bringing an end to my coming-up-on-three-years daily reading streak.


Miscellaneous

This week's Cadfael novel is Dead Man's Ransom, but I haven't read it yet because my hold hasn't come in yet. Several times during the week, I found myself wondering if there's somebody else in the state who's also re-reading the series and we're fighting over the one copy of each book in the state library system. If so, next week will be their turn to wait, because I've already borrowed next week's book.

I wasn't sure after I finished Terrier if I was going to continue with the series, but after a couple of days I found I was curious about what happened next, and after all the second book of the series was the one that had been specifically recommended to me, so I carried on. I enjoyed Bloodhound more, though I still find that the mix of different things it's trying to achieve don't quite come together for me. Bloodhound comes to a pretty tidy conclusion, so I wouldn't necessarily feel like I was missing anything if I stopped there, but I'd already put in a hold request for the final book at the library, so I'll see how I feel when it comes in.

The Cadfael book for this week was The Devil's Novice. I remembered the plot of the murder mystery, pretty much, but I enjoyed all the character bits that I'd forgotten.

I haven't touched Three Stones Make a Wall in a while; I'm considering letting it go back to the library and picking something else for the reading challenge. I have a few options, including Under the Whispering Door, The Secret of Chimneys, Anne of Green Gables, and Soldier at the Door (although I don't know if it's a good idea to try reading an Edith Pargeter historical and an Ellis Peters historical at the same time).

. I had the week off work because I had things to do that took me out of town and largely away from the internet, so I only heard about the PHP security flap in passing after it was mostly over. I expect I'll have some interesting emails waiting for me when I get back on Monday.


. On my days off, when I wasn't doing the things I had to do, I got some weeding done (though not as much as I'd grandly imagined at the start of the week) and generally spent a fair amount of time being outside and enjoying the fact that it was a nice day that I didn't have to spend in the office.


. At the weekend gaming session, we played Tainted Grail, with the outcome I'd been secretly hoping for when I agreed to it, which was that after playing it for a while we came to a collective decision that we weren't actually having much fun playing it and that we wouldn't try to play it again.

So instead we started playing Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, which I'm enjoying a lot more.


. I missed the regular weekly board game meet because I had to be elsewhere.


. I've been on the waiting list for a couple of years to get an appointment with a specialist about an ongoing health problem, and the appointment happened this week. My doctor has been worried about how things are going, and referred me to the specialist at least partly because she thinks it might require an advanced treatment that would require the specialist to sign off on. The specialist, in contrast, was pretty clear that I'm not anywhere near the state where the advanced treatment would be indicated, and seems to think the things we've been trying while waiting for the appointment to come around are working pretty well. Some tests have been ordered, and I've been given some more things to try (which led to me announcing the outcome to my family as "I've been prescribed 'eat more Weetbix'"), and there'll be a follow-up appointment next year.


. I went to the end-of-year concert put on by the music students at the school attended by one of my younger relatives. It had some of the problems common to school music concerts, including several group performances where the musicians, whatever their individual skill, felt like they were not playing together so much as playing at the same time, but it ended on a run of good performances (including a jazz ensemble my relative was in) and I was able to honestly say at the end that I'd had a good time.

This week's Brother Cadfael book was The Virgin in the Ice. This is one of my favourites of the series, and one of the ones I've re-read most often, but I was still finding new things in it.

Apart from that, still plugging away at Three Stones Make a Wall and reading each day's chapter of A Night in the Lonesome October.

October: Parts of a House

Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaelogy by Eric H Cline. This is proving to be one of those non-fiction books where I don't mind reading it, but when I'm not reading it I'm not in a hurry to get back to it. It was written fairly recently, so I'm learning new things even about the areas I already knew a fair bit about.


Miscellaneous

The Leper of Saint Giles for the Cadfael readalong. One of the things I'm noticing about the series on this re-read is that while Cadfael himself doesn't change all that much — having started the series already at the point in his life where, as the saying goes, he's found out who he is and is doing it on purpose — we get character development within each book and between books for his assistants, who are younger and still have some finding out to do.


I wasn't planning to re-read A Night in the Lonesome October this year, but someone I know is reading it for the first time and enthusiastic about the way it's designed to be read one chapter per day, so I've joined their buddy read. We established when Larry Talbot turned up that the name doesn't ring any bells for them, so I'm looking forward to seeing how many of the hints they pick up about what his deal is.

. It was another blah sort of week, but at least this time it could be definitely attributed to me not feeling well. I did a lot of reading and watched a bunch of old episodes of Taskmaster, and felt better in the second half of the week. The weather's improving, and I'm getting back on track with my exercise routine.


. I also watched the new episodes of The Celebrity Traitors, which has got off to a cracking start.


. The remaining in-town members of the family went together to see Coyote vs ACME at the cinema. It was really good. We're thinking about trying to do more family cinema excursions, but that's going to depend on there being something else everyone's interested in seeing.


. At the weekend gaming session, we played a scenario from Mansions of Madness. On arriving at a remote house whose owner had mysteriously disappeared, the first clue we found was a warning scratched in the wall in backwards letters, and we all looked at each other and went, "aha, it's going to be Things coming out of the Mirrors". It was, too. We survived to the end without anyone dying or going mad, but we were either too slow or didn't find all the clues we need, and the main antagonist got away to cause trouble again later. Toward the end, there was a mysterious door that several of us wanted to open but we eventually came to a consensus that we shouldn't risk it until we'd dealt with the monster currently attacking us, in case whatever was behind the door made things worse, and then defeating the monster turned out to mark the end of the game so we never got to find out what was behind there. I regret that, partly because there's a possibility that we could have found something helpful, and partly because I reckon that if it wasn't helpful it would at least have been interesting.


. The weekly board game meet was a long afternoon session because of the public holiday. We played Last Light, No Thanks, Dandelions, Coup, and Gravwell. I made some poor strategic choices at the start of Last Light and wound up trapped in one corner of the board for the entire game, though I did find a number of things to do that got me a middling final score. In Gravwell, I had a much better grip of how the game worked than the previous times I've played, and at one point was within a single space of winning the game, but didn't manage to bring it home before being dragged away again and then overtaken by another player.


. I've been trying out a computer game called Glass Masquerade, which is a casual game where you assemble jigsaw puzzles styled as stained glass windows. I got it in a Steam sale for a couple of bucks, and it was worth it for the price, but I'm undecided about whether I want to spend any money on the expansions with more puzzles in. The UI is a bit fiddly sometimes, and the jigsaw pieces all have thick borders around them which sometimes makes it hard to tell that a piece will actually fit into the space where it's meant to go.


. I'm continuing to get reading suggestions from BookSorted. One that amused me this week was a recommendation for one of Tanith Lee's dark fantasy novels, with one of the supporting points being that I have a Tanith Lee novel in my all-time top 5, "so Tanith Lee's voice clearly works for you" — the thing being that my favourite Tanith Lee novel is The Dragon Hoard, which has a very different narrative voice from pretty much everything else she's written.

Fiction books
Margery Allingham. The Tiger in the Smoke
Agatha Christie. By the Pricking of My Thumbs (re-read)
Brian Daley. Han Solo's Revenge
Sangu Mandanna. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
Ellis Peters. A Morbid Taste for Bones (e) (re-read)
Ellis Peters. One Corpse Too Many (e) (re-read)
Terry Pratchett. Reaper Man (re-read)
William Shakespeare. Richard III
Martha Wells. Witch King (e)
Timothy Zahn. The Icarus Hunt (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
(anthology). Failure to Launch: A Tour of Ill-Fated Futures

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Ellis Peters. Monk's Hood (e)

September: Me/My/Mine

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie.

I've read it before — years ago, when I was too young to understand some of it. It might have been the first Agatha Christie I ever read, and certainly the first with Tommy and Tuppence. I read the Tommy and Tuppence novels as I came across them, which meant that I read this one first, and the first one last; I've been re-reading them in the proper order lately, and here we are.

I'd forgotten most of it, although I did remember Mr. Eccles, because it was the first time I'd encountered the name outside the Goon Show. And parts of it came back to me as I got to them (including the rose, which was on the front cover of the edition I first read). I had a good time, and I'm glad I re-read it.

By coincidence, I learned the same morning I finished reading it that there's a new TV adaptation of the novel on Britbox, set in the present day with Tommy and Tuppence in their thirties. I can't picture how that would work.


Miscellaneous

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters.
One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters.

oldshrewsburyian is leading a readalong of the Brother Cadfael novels on Tumblr. I read the whole series through many years ago, but it's been at least a decade since I re-read any of them, so I figured this was as good an excuse as any. The readalong is doing one book a week, but I only heard about it after it started and then I had to wait for the first book to become available at the library, so I have some catching up to do.

Re-reading them was like hanging out with an old friend, and a comfort in a week where comfort was appreciated. I wasn't in any suspense about the murder mystery in either — I remembered pretty much all of the denouement of the first one, and enough about the second that I recognised the murderer pretty quickly once he appeared — but that just meant I could sit back and appreciate everything else the novels are doing.