Book Chain, weeks 3 & 4

It took me all of week 3 to finish The Friendship Factor.


#7: Read a book with more pages than the previous book.

There were plenty of options here, as The Friendship Factor is a pretty slim volume, but I opted to count The Martian, which I was re-reading for a book club. This is the third time I've read it (not to mention having seen the movie version), and it's not quite as compelling when I know all the plot twists already, but it was still a fun time.


#8: If the previous book had a person on the cover, read a book without a person on the cover.

This is proving to be something of a problem, as all the books I had lined up to read for other reading challenges have people on the cover, and so do a significant proportion of the books on my TBR in general.

Attempt #1 was Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. The opening chapters introduce a large cast of quirky characters who I didn't care a jot about, and a gruesome murder which I also didn't care about, partly because none of the characters seemed to care about it either: even the detective protagonist was just going through the motions while he looked for an excuse to shove the case off on somebody else, while also having a boring marriage crisis that I suspect was going to lead to him having a fling with a material witness or something. I gave it fifty pages to hook me and then abandoned it without regret. On the bright side, I got two books off the TBR for the price of one, since I got rid of the sequel as well.

While I was taking the sequel off the bookshelf, my eye was caught by the neighbouring book, The Tin Dog by Alexander McCall Smith, which I decided to read as a palate cleanser. It was okay, but I'm well out of the target age range and I kept wanting to ask spoilsport logistical questions like "How sentient is this robot dog supposed to be, actually?" and "Can you really enter a dog in a greyhound race on the morning of the race?" (not to mention "Isn't entering your robot dog in a race with ordinary dogs, you know, cheating?"). I went back and forth on whether to count it as an official attempt for the Book Chain - the cover image doesn't feature a person, but there are people present in the background - and decided against as much as anything else because of how slight it is.

Around the same time, I finished reading The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook, which has a landscape on the cover with no people that I could see, but is disqualified because I've been reading it on and off since before I started the chain.

Official attempt #2 was Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson, which I read fifty pages of and then... not abandoned, exactly, I have a feeling I might get back to it at some point when I'm in the right mood, but I'm certainly not in the right mood for it now. I remember saying when I read Remarkably Bright Creatures that if it weren't for the octopus it would be a kind of book I don't usually read; Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is that kind of book with no octopi in sight, nor the kind of spark that made me continue to be interested in the human characters of Remarkably Bright Creatures even when the octopus wasn't around. The main characters seem like sensible people, and I don't appear to be in any suspense about whether they're going to sort their problems out in the end, and in the mean time I'm not really in the frame of mind to enjoy watching people being smothered by social convention and being forced to confront their mortality.

After going through my TBR shelves and not finding anything that called out to me (at least, not that didn't have a person on the cover), I resorted to going to the local public library and wandering the stacks until I settled on Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in an edition which has the eponymous manor house on the cover with no people. From past experience with Christie, I'm reasonably confident I'll find it at least readable enough to get through it without giving up and that even if there's a few deaths there will be a minimum of people confronting their own mortality.

Week in review: Week to 28 March

The new fitness tracker is going well. The "time to get up and stretch" notifications are better targeted at my use case than the Fitbit's method was, and are still working effectively.

It took several attempts to get the new fitness tracker to track my bicycle rides. On the first attempt, it didn't track anything; apparently there was some permission or other that hadn't been set correctly. On the second attempt (after I'd confirmed that all the permissions were now set properly), I decided not to hit the "starting cycling" button and see if the automatic exercise detection figured out what I was doing; not only did it not detect that I was cycling, at the end of the hour-long ride I got a notification that I'd been sitting in one place for an hour and should get up and do some exercise...

Since then, I've been hitting the "starting cycling" button every time, to be on the safe side.

It's been a bit tricky lately finding places to ride the bike that are off the road: we have a fairly good network of bike trails around the town, but in January a lot of the trails in my vicinity were torn up as the first stage of laying down fresh tarmac, and it was only recently that the actual laying down began. Looking forward to having that finished; the new tracks, in the areas they've been completed, are smooth and very nice to ride on.


At Parkrun this week (where the fitness tracker had no trouble automatically detecting that I was doing walking exercise), I saw a small brown lizard sunning itself by the side of the track.


It's been a rough week at work, featuring one of Those Clients.


At board game club, we played Last Light, a game involving exploring the galaxy and gathering resources. In general outline, it's somewhat similar to Eclipse, which we played a while back, but with some significant differences in gameplay (including a less complicated scoring system) that result in it being less of a marathon. One of the interesting gameplay differences that's not directly related to the playing time is that the board representing the galaxy rotates at intervals, with different parts of it rotating at different speeds, altering the strategic situation each time it happens.


Went to the cinema to see The Return, a demythified retelling of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after decades away, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. It's getting good notices for the central performances, which I agree are spectacular, but I think the story as a whole has some shortcomings and I'm not sure the ending would have worked if the performances weren't so good. (It probably doesn't help that it's not that long since I read The Last Song of Penelope, another demythified retelling of Odysseus' return which I found more effective.) I did enjoy some of the nods to other parts of the Odyssey that are woven into the story.


This week was the release of The Beekeeper's Picnic, a new point-and-click adventure game featuring an elderly beekeeper named Sherlock Holmes who used to be a famous detective but is now very definitely retired but keeps tripping over mysteries needing to be solved anyway. I'm enjoying it so far.


On the library trip where I picked up The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I also discovered that the library had a copy of Tove Jansson's first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, so I've now read that and am partway through the sequel, Comet in Moominland. (Neither of them count for the book chain "no people" challenge because I take it as read that Moomins count as people.) I'm not disliking them, but I suspect I've left it too long to start the series and have missed the age where they would have clicked with me.


I need to have a proper think about how I'm using 750 Words as a journaling tool. The journaling itself feels helpful, and I want to continue doing it, but I'm not sure 750 Words is actually the right place for it; I'm not really using it the way it's supposed to be used. For one thing, you're supposed to pick a consistent time of day to do it, and to start and finish in a single sitting, but I've been all over the shop lately (the best time of day is clearly first thing in the morning, but that's also the best time of day for several other things so it often gets bumped) and have frequently written a journal entry in two or more sittings when I've been able to find the time. (None of those has resulted in me failing the challenge of writing 750 words without interruption, because each journal entry is easily over a thousand words - which in itself is another reason why this might not be the appropriate application.)