Book Chain 2026: Weeks 1 & 2

On reflection, I decided that, since the point of doing this challenge is to get reading done, I would treat the first prompt as a free space and proceed from there. If it should happen that I encounter a book I'm properly excited about the prospect of reading, I'll start a new chain from there.


#1: A book that you're excited to read!

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.

Ella Minnow Pea is an ordinary young woman living on the island nation of Nollop, where life takes a turn when the ruling council starts progressively banning letters of the alphabet (first Z, then Q, and so on) and imposing draconian punishments on anybody caught using, or possessing in written form, any word containing the forbidden letters. The story is told in letters and documents, which become increasingly constrained as the proscriptions continue. ( Read more... )

#2: A book where the first letter of the title matches the last letter of the previous title

The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll with annotations by Martin Gardner.

The complete text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with extensive annotations providing historical context, Oxfordian in-jokes, the original texts of poems being parodied, and other useful details. ( Read more... )

#3: A book in a different genre than the previous book

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.

I decided to mark the occasion of The Maltese Falcon hitting the US public domain by finally getting around to reading some Hammett, but to start with the Hammett I already had on my shelf. A private investigator is hired to travel to a town in the grip of gangsters, and arrives to find that his client has been murdered, after which he takes matters into his own hands. ( Read more... )

Week in review: Week to 10 January

. 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.)