Other reading in Week 6

No progress on finding a colour match for the book chain, but I've got other reading done:


January: Title containing "Before" or "After"

Before Dorothy, Hazel Gaynor. A historical novel telling a version of the life of Dorothy Gale's Auntie Em.

It's a straight historical, with no fantasy elements; one of the things it takes from the 1939 movie is the idea that Dorothy's trip to Oz was a dream inspired by things and people encountered in the waking world. Consequently, the cast of characters includes real-world analogues for the Wicked Witch (very similar to the movie's version), the Wizard (signficantly different), Glinda, and so on. Another thing it takes from the movie is that Tornado Day happens in the 1930s, allowing the author to make use of the Dust Bowl and the Depression; I was mostly able to roll with it but did occasionally blink at the inclusion of things that my head considers definitely post-Oz. (There's just something weird about the idea of Dorothy Gale sitting in Kansas reading Anne of Green Gables.)

I'm not sure how it would read as a straight historical for someone who wasn't familiar with The Wizard of Oz and didn't notice the references; I was initially rather distracted going "that's from that bit in the movie" and "that's from the book", and more interested in collecting clues about how the author was planning to deal with Tornado Day than in the characters for their own sake, but I did start getting involved in it once I'd settled to my satisfaction what kind of story to expect. My initial reaction when I realised what the driving question of the climax was going to be was "oh, this again?", but in the event I was sincerely invested in how it would play out.

I do think it could have done with another editing pass specifically to assess which of the references were actually contributing something worth keeping in; not every mention of circus animals need to include "lions and tigers and bears" (four separate times, I counted), and it felt like every red thing was ruby and just about every green thing was "emerald" -- though, having said that, I was struck by a moment near the end when one of the things I would have expected to be emerald was merely "green", which effectively undercut the moment in a way that I would like to think was deliberate.


Miscellaneous

Fiasco by Jason Morningstar. The source-book for a narrative role-playing game/long-form improvisational exercise for creating stories of "powerful ambition and poor impulse control", inspired by films like Fargo and Blood Simple. This was a re-read; I've owned the book for years, since I saw a demonstration game, but have never had any success at rounding up some people to play it with (nor the requisite impressively-large number of dice required).


You Say Potato: The Story of English Accents by Ben & David Crystal. Ben is an actor, David is a linguist, both have a professional interest in accents and how they develop and what they signify. The book includes a section about their work in the Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation project, which is where I first encountered them. I'm about halfway through, and have not yet reached the section promised on the back cover which addresses the vital question: "Has anybody ever actually said 'po-TAH-to'?"

The style is very conversational, and I have a feeling the audio book version would be a lot of fun to listen to.

Week in review: Week to 7 February

. At board game club, we played Cockroach Salad, 27th Passenger, and Dixit.

27th Passenger is a deduction game in which the aim is to identify which of the other passengers on a train are the other players in disguise and eliminate them before they do the same to you. I did well; I achieved the first successful elimination, and arguably the second, although it would be difficult to say definitely who was second since that round was a bloodbath that saw three more players eliminated, leaving only me and one other player standing. The other player turned out to be a step ahead, and got me one round before I would have got him.


. After a bit of a break, I'm making reasonable progress on another jigsaw puzzle, though I'm not getting as big into it as with some others I've tried. This is the first puzzle I've attempted from this manufacturer, and I'm not impressed by the engineering quality of the pieces (they're a fair bit better than the one I had to give up on partway through, but that's a very low bar to clear). I'm also not finding myself engaged by the picture; it's one of the kind with lots of famous fictional characters hidden in it, but I don't recognise all of them and I'm not feeling very enthused about the ones that I do recognise.


. Continuing to make progress with Natural Six; this week I watched the episode "The Last Ride of Calypso Moonrise", which was a lot of fun and in no way like what I had expected from the title.


. I finished my run-through of XCOM 2 on the easier difficulty, and, as generally happens when a run goes well, immediately wanted to start another run.

There's a big sale on Steam for the XCOM games this weekend, because it's the tenth anniversary of the launch of XCOM 2, so I took another look at the "Shen's Last Gift" DLC, which I've wanted to try for ages but put off because it can only be bought as part of a pricey bundle with a bunch of other DLCs that don't interest me. The bundle was down to around ten dollars, which I decided was a reasonable price I'd be willing to pay for just "Shen's Last Gift", so I bought it.

What I hadn't anticipated was that Steam would immediately start downloading and installing all the DLC in the bundle without asking me first, which would have been mildly irritating without the fact that the bundle includes the big update that changes things throughout the game and adds several new fully-voiced characters and weighs nearly as much as the base game itself. It was still downloading when I went to bed.