Book Chain, weeks 12 & 13

#17: Read a book with a title that starts with the same letter as the last name of the previous book's author.

First attempt: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore, a collection of sword & sorcery stories that were first published in Weird Tales in the 1930s alongside the likes of Conan the Barbarian, but have the historical distinction of being written by a woman and having a female protagonist. (The first story has one of those openings where it spends a couple of pages describing a heroic armoured figure before the helmet comes off and everyone, presumably including the original readers, is surprised she's a woman.)( Read more... )

Second attempt: John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant by Raymond Lamont-Brown. ( Read more... )

Third attempt, for the sake of moving things along, was Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji, which is a lot shorter and less complicated than the movie it inspired, but still fun. I appreciated the turn it took at the end.

#18: Read a book in the same genre as the previous book.

Taking the genre as "short, plentifully illustrated children's book featuring animals", I opted for The Animals Noah Forgot by the Australian poet Banjo Paterson, which also counts for the June prompt in the Buzzword challenge (a word in the title related to remembering or forgetting). ( Read more... )

Week in review: Week to 7 June

I've been experimenting with my journal entries in the last week or two, ( Read more... )

We had a family get-together for the public holiday, ( Read more... )

The board game club had another of their long public holiday sessions ( Read more... )

I had a doctor's appointment this week: a routine thing, not because anything was wrong with me. ( The next bit involves injections )

I don't think I've mentioned in one of these posts that I've started reading Solzhenitsyn: ( Read more... )

( Movies current - Ocean - and upcoming - including )

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The latter had the tagline "Only monsters play god", which is staking out a position in the "'Frankenstein' is not the name of the monster" discourse that I respect.


I finished playing through The Beekeeper's Picnic. ( Read more... )

I got to Parkrun only slightly late this week: ( Read more... )

I've had several experiences this week where I was reading someone's description of their experiences with ADHD and thinking that it sounded worryingly familiar. ( Read more... )

I was yesterday years old when I learned that "Womble" is an actual real surname that actual people really have. (Apparently, it's derived from the Yorkshire town of Wombwell.) The context was somebody mentioning a law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson; the relevant founding partner was apparently called B. S. Womble, which is one of the most made-up-sounding real names I've encountered in recent memory. (His full name was "Bunyan Snipes Womble", which sounds like a law firm all by itself.)