Book Chain, etc, Week 11

#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book

Devil in the Mountain: done. The pace picked up toward the end, which is perhaps less a statement about the book itself than about how I had enough grasp of the concepts by then that I wasn't having to keep pausing to process.


StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed

Having completed Bleak House, I have to admit that a section in the last quarter fully justifies its inclusion as a detective story, complete with murder, the suspect the police consider obvious but the audience knows didn't do it, the suspect the audience is given every reason to think did it short of actually showing the murder being done, and so on, all the way to the summation in the drawing-room. There's some impressive setting-up of things that will turn out to be important later. There's even a bit where the detective finishes a conversation and pauses on the way out the door to ask one last thing.

I enjoyed the rest of the novel, too, although some of the directions the "heroine is epically clueless about being in love" plot went were, to put it politely, a bit odd.


Miscellaneous

For no other reason than because I reached the front of the hold queue,

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.

A collection of essays with the conceit that Green is writing reviews of, and giving ratings out of five to, random things that it would be foolish to give ratings out of five to, such as "Viral Meningitis" and "The Lifespan of the Human Race". Most of the essays end up being about more than just the thing being reviewed and rated: The first essay, for instance, is nominally about the song "You'll Never Walk Alone", but also covers the history of the musical it originated in and also looks at the phenomenon of sports fans adopting club songs and Green's history with football club whose fans adopted this song in particular. Many of them, as the title suggests, end up having something to say about humanity's place in, and effect on, the world.

I'm enjoying the essays, and finding it a useful book on days when I want to keep my reading streak going but don't want to get involved in anything long and complicated.


Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor.

A university history department staffed by Loveable Eccentrics has access to time machines which they use for conducting first-hand historical research. In due course, there is Plot involving people who wish to use the time machines for more selfish purposes.

( Read more... )

I admit that I did get into it in the run-up to the dramatic climax, which I was suitably engaged by, and the same for the second dramatic climax that, due to an oddity of the plot structure, followed several chapters later. However, the blatant sequel hook in the epilogue failed to find purchase, and I don't anticipate continuing with the series.

Week in review: Week to 14 March

. At the weekly boardgame meet, we played Cockroach Soup (which is like Cockroach Salad but with more slurping, although one player refused to slurp and just said "slurp" instead), Flip 7 With A Vengeance (which is like Flip 7 only more so), Lovecraft Letter (which is like Love Letter with the option to unlock forbidden techniques that are more powerful but increase the chance that you'll go mad and get disqualified), The Mind, and Cheating Moth.


. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice cube tray has established that if I leave it out of the freezer for about fifteen minutes, the ice blocks will melt enough to relent their grip while otherwise retaining their shape. I will probably continue to use the dog tray more often, as I'm not the kind of person to know fifteen minutes in advance that I'll be wanting a cold drink. I have made a mental note to try with fruit juice and see if that affects the grippiness.


. I've played through all the prequel missions in the XCOM 2 "Tactical Legacy" DLC. There's a state I get into sometimes when I'm reading a book that I'm not really enjoying, where I'm still interested in seeing what happens next but what I'm really looking forward to is getting to the point where I've seen what happens next and can move on to something else; that's how I felt when I was doing the last few missions. One thing I can say for them is that they've given me a new appreciation of how the main game works as an ongoing story with a cast of familiar characters who grow and develop over time, with the player getting involved in guiding their development, and isn't just a bunch of arbitrary missions featuring an arbitrary bunch of people with random skill sets.


. Auditions have begun for our next production, which will be the Peanuts-inspired musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I remember auditioning for something years ago (it seems likely it was Putnam County, though it might not have been) with Charlie Brown's kite song from this musical, but I haven't been able to find where I stored the music for it. (I was undecided about whether I would actually audition with it this time, since usually I make a point of not auditioning with a piece from the musical I'm auditioning for, but it would have been nice to find it again regardless.)


. The BBC has announced the recovery of two more missing episodes from early Doctor Who, both from near the beginning of "The Daleks' Master Plan". This means we now have substantially more than we previously had of Adrienne Hill's run as a Doctor Who companion, and of Nicholas Courtney's first appearance on the series.

Coincidentally, the day after the announcement, I was poking around in my digital archive looking for the kite song, when I found a mysterious folder containing a single file with the informative name of "scan0003.jpg", which turned out to be a newspaper clipping from the last time an episode of "The Daleks' Master Plan" was recovered.


. The family walk continues.