Week in review: Week to 12 September
Sep. 15th, 2026 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. Opening weekend went very well. The show started feeling much more cohesive once all the set painting and sound cues and things were finished. Audience feedback has been entirely positive, and a reassuring reminder that the audience, unlike me, isn't viewing the show through a haze of all the things we didn't manage to do.
. I didn't get to play any board games because I had dress rehearsals at the usual times.
. The first meeting of the new committee went well. Everybody seems to get along, which was not always the case with the immediately previous incarnation of the committee. Whether that translates into working well together to get things done remains to be seen.
. I had an appointment to have my leg examined, with the result that one of my veins has been officially declared incompetent -- not an adjective I'd expected to find applied to a non-sapient component, but I haven't thought of another that would be more suitable. (The job at which the vein is not competent is draining fluid from my leg and preventing it from puffing up.)
. If I had a nickel for every time I've found myself reporting to a librarian that I found a book with a sex scene in it shelved in the children's section, I'd have two nickels, and I don't really know whether twice in thirty-plus years is an unusually high rate for that sort of thing. This time it was a straightforward case of a book in the general fiction catalogue being misshelved; I speculate that whoever shelved it had been misled by the cover art, which was one of those cosy bright-coloured covers that a lot of romance novels seem to have these days regardless of how spicy the contents are.
The other time, twenty-something years ago, was more complicated, because the book had actually been catalogued as a children's book. (It was one of several cases I've encountered of libraries cataloguing Doctor Who spin-off novels as children's books without apparent awareness that several of the spin-off lines were very definitely targeted at adult readers.) The librarian I reported it to said that the classification had been set higher up the library network, so they wouldn't be able to reclassify it without sending a request up the chain of command; I moved away a while later, so I don't know if they ever did sort it out.
. The recommendations from BookSorted have been getting more diverse, and the most recent ones have been for books and authors I hadn't already heard of. There was also an intermediate period where the recommendations were all things I was recommended by Hypatia back in the day and then never got around to trying, which might be a good sign because I remember Hypatia's recommendations as being solidly reliable when I did get around to trying them.
. I didn't get to play any board games because I had dress rehearsals at the usual times.
. The first meeting of the new committee went well. Everybody seems to get along, which was not always the case with the immediately previous incarnation of the committee. Whether that translates into working well together to get things done remains to be seen.
. I had an appointment to have my leg examined, with the result that one of my veins has been officially declared incompetent -- not an adjective I'd expected to find applied to a non-sapient component, but I haven't thought of another that would be more suitable. (The job at which the vein is not competent is draining fluid from my leg and preventing it from puffing up.)
. If I had a nickel for every time I've found myself reporting to a librarian that I found a book with a sex scene in it shelved in the children's section, I'd have two nickels, and I don't really know whether twice in thirty-plus years is an unusually high rate for that sort of thing. This time it was a straightforward case of a book in the general fiction catalogue being misshelved; I speculate that whoever shelved it had been misled by the cover art, which was one of those cosy bright-coloured covers that a lot of romance novels seem to have these days regardless of how spicy the contents are.
The other time, twenty-something years ago, was more complicated, because the book had actually been catalogued as a children's book. (It was one of several cases I've encountered of libraries cataloguing Doctor Who spin-off novels as children's books without apparent awareness that several of the spin-off lines were very definitely targeted at adult readers.) The librarian I reported it to said that the classification had been set higher up the library network, so they wouldn't be able to reclassify it without sending a request up the chain of command; I moved away a while later, so I don't know if they ever did sort it out.
. The recommendations from BookSorted have been getting more diverse, and the most recent ones have been for books and authors I hadn't already heard of. There was also an intermediate period where the recommendations were all things I was recommended by Hypatia back in the day and then never got around to trying, which might be a good sign because I remember Hypatia's recommendations as being solidly reliable when I did get around to trying them.
no subject
Date: 2026-09-17 09:43 pm (UTC)Conversely I've several times found Georgette Heyer detective novels shelved in the romance section, for fairly obvious but definitely erroneous reasons :-p
(Not sure I'd shelve most of Heyer's Regency output under 'romance' either, personally; a good many of them are a long way from the sort of thing that modern 'Regency Romance' writers aim to produce, unsurprising since from her perspective she was simply writing historical comedy set in a fairly obscure period of history, rather than feeding specific tropes set up by subsequent imitators. And anyone who picks up a copy of "Cousin Kate" (or, for that matter, any of her male PoV novels, like "The Unknown Ajax" or "The Quiet Gentleman", which tend to be much more adventure-heavy) expecting fluffy fiction is going to get a shock.
(I had to quit a Heyer discussion group on Goodreads because I got so sick of the constant social critique about how oppressive and unfeminist her books were: hard to understand why people like that were choosing to read them in the first place, if their only reaction was to disapprove of the society depicted....)