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Week in review: Week to 28 June
. This week marked the tenth anniversary of my first entry on 750 Words. That sounds more impressive if you don't know how many long gaps there have been along the way: my current streak, which has lasted most of the past year, is the longest time I've stuck at it before giving up for a few years, and in that time I've written more entries than in the other nine years put together.
. At board game club this week, the main game was Russian Railroads, a worker-placement game themed around building railways, with several different tracks, each of which offers different kinds of rewards for building on it. I made the rookie mistake of trying to develop each track more or less evenly instead of picking a couple to focus on, and I also didn't put any effort into hiring engineers (each engineer provides a special ability that only the player who hires them can use), and in the end I came last by an unassailable margin, over 100 points behind the winner.
. I finished A Choice of Catastrophes, a non-fiction book by Isaac Asimov that I've been reading here and there since April. The hook is describing the ways that the world, or at least humanity, might come to an end, but along the way there are lessons in a wide variety of other scientific and historical subjects: to understand how the world might stop working, one first needs to understand how it works.
The big shortcoming of the book is that it's nearly 50 years old now, and there are a lot of scientific discoveries and social developments that have happened in those years. The big-picture astronomical stuff is still pretty solid, as far as I know, but as the focus narrows to our planet the gaps become increasingly obvious: no mention of the dinosaur-killer asteroid, HIV and COVID, Chernobyl, the internet... And then there's the last chapter, which is about trying to predict what challenges the human race might face in the future as culture and technology develop; with the benefit of 45 years of hindsight, some of the predictions have aged better than others.
I'd be interested to read a book like this written with up-to-date information, though I'm not sure there's anyone these days with Asimov's breadth of interests who could do it justice.
. I've had mixed experiences with the works of Tanith Lee: I loved her first novel, thought a couple of others were okay, and bounced off everything else of hers that I tried. Somewhere along the line I got the idea that if there was one of her serious grown-up novels I would be likely to enjoy it would be The Silver Metal Lover, with the consequence that I've spent the last 25 years avoiding reading it so that I could hold on to the fuzzy hope of future enjoyment. Around 15 years ago, I bought a copy in a book sale so that I could more efficiently avoid reading it. The beginning of the end came in February of this year, when it got selected as my book of the month in the Random Book reading challenge - having narrowly avoided being selected for the corresponding prompt last year - but I've been pretty lax about doing the random books in their specified months this year, so it was only this week that I looked at the pile of un-begun challenge books and decided I might as well get on with it.
Part of me was kind of hoping I'd turn out to hate it immediately, because then at least I'd be able to put it aside and be done with it. No such luck: it's pretty well written, and although I don't actually like most of the characters, I have enough sympathy for the protagonist that I'm still interested in how things turn out for her. I suspect the sympathy is going to be a problem, actually, because this looks like it's going to be emotionally stressful.
I've made a good start, but I don't know how long it's going to take to finish, because I have a limited amount of cope for emotionally stressful fiction and when it comes down to it I'd rather be using it on catching up on the shows I've got behind on than dealing with a hapless teenage protagonist who, if I'm being honest, reminds me a bit too much of my own younger self.
. I happened upon an online listing recently for Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 that had a blurb describing it as a "dystopian classic", which would be a surprise to Bellamy. I don't know if the blurb writer was expressing an opinion about Bellamy's vision of utopia, or if it's just that "dystopian" has become such a marketable label lately that the online booksellers are slapping it on anything even remotely related.
. At board game club this week, the main game was Russian Railroads, a worker-placement game themed around building railways, with several different tracks, each of which offers different kinds of rewards for building on it. I made the rookie mistake of trying to develop each track more or less evenly instead of picking a couple to focus on, and I also didn't put any effort into hiring engineers (each engineer provides a special ability that only the player who hires them can use), and in the end I came last by an unassailable margin, over 100 points behind the winner.
. I finished A Choice of Catastrophes, a non-fiction book by Isaac Asimov that I've been reading here and there since April. The hook is describing the ways that the world, or at least humanity, might come to an end, but along the way there are lessons in a wide variety of other scientific and historical subjects: to understand how the world might stop working, one first needs to understand how it works.
The big shortcoming of the book is that it's nearly 50 years old now, and there are a lot of scientific discoveries and social developments that have happened in those years. The big-picture astronomical stuff is still pretty solid, as far as I know, but as the focus narrows to our planet the gaps become increasingly obvious: no mention of the dinosaur-killer asteroid, HIV and COVID, Chernobyl, the internet... And then there's the last chapter, which is about trying to predict what challenges the human race might face in the future as culture and technology develop; with the benefit of 45 years of hindsight, some of the predictions have aged better than others.
I'd be interested to read a book like this written with up-to-date information, though I'm not sure there's anyone these days with Asimov's breadth of interests who could do it justice.
. I've had mixed experiences with the works of Tanith Lee: I loved her first novel, thought a couple of others were okay, and bounced off everything else of hers that I tried. Somewhere along the line I got the idea that if there was one of her serious grown-up novels I would be likely to enjoy it would be The Silver Metal Lover, with the consequence that I've spent the last 25 years avoiding reading it so that I could hold on to the fuzzy hope of future enjoyment. Around 15 years ago, I bought a copy in a book sale so that I could more efficiently avoid reading it. The beginning of the end came in February of this year, when it got selected as my book of the month in the Random Book reading challenge - having narrowly avoided being selected for the corresponding prompt last year - but I've been pretty lax about doing the random books in their specified months this year, so it was only this week that I looked at the pile of un-begun challenge books and decided I might as well get on with it.
Part of me was kind of hoping I'd turn out to hate it immediately, because then at least I'd be able to put it aside and be done with it. No such luck: it's pretty well written, and although I don't actually like most of the characters, I have enough sympathy for the protagonist that I'm still interested in how things turn out for her. I suspect the sympathy is going to be a problem, actually, because this looks like it's going to be emotionally stressful.
I've made a good start, but I don't know how long it's going to take to finish, because I have a limited amount of cope for emotionally stressful fiction and when it comes down to it I'd rather be using it on catching up on the shows I've got behind on than dealing with a hapless teenage protagonist who, if I'm being honest, reminds me a bit too much of my own younger self.
. I happened upon an online listing recently for Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 that had a blurb describing it as a "dystopian classic", which would be a surprise to Bellamy. I don't know if the blurb writer was expressing an opinion about Bellamy's vision of utopia, or if it's just that "dystopian" has become such a marketable label lately that the online booksellers are slapping it on anything even remotely related.