pedanther

Long service leave is over, and I'm back at work. The first few days were busy as I caught up with what had been done in my absence, but then things settled back into the old rhythm. I briefly considered blagging some extra time off on account of respiratory interestingness, and would have if I still shared a working space with other people, but since I work from home there's not a risk of sharing infection, and I was awake and alert enough to do the work, so I decided that it would be better to be back on duty when people were expecting me to be back.

The lingering cough has continued to linger, but is mostly gone now.

I've caught up with the random monthly reading challenge, finishing off my October book (This Is Improbable) and November book (The Sword of Islam). The challenge for December is to read one of the five longest (by page count) books on the to-read list, which seems just a bit rude for the challenge that starts only one month before the final deadline. (To be fair, the rules of the challenge actually allow doing the prompts in any order, so there's nothing stopping someone choosing a book for this prompt in January and spending the entire year on it. Still.) The five books on my to-read shelf with the largest page counts are mostly omnibus editions - a complete works of Shakespeare, a complete novels of Austen, and Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume - plus one novel, The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton, and a 1981 edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

I've also started catching up with Natural Six, which I'd been keeping up with easily during long service leave but then fell a couple of episodes behind when I had the lurgy and lacked the concentration to watch three-hour-long episodes. I expect to be caught up before the next episode comes out, but then I'll be dealing with the issue of being back at work and having significantly fewer three-hour blocks of free time in a week, so I might fall behind again.

I haven't resumed doing 750 Words yet; my current plan is to write off November and start again fresh on the first day of December.

Stuff happened, but a lot of it isn't relevant to people who aren't me or my immediate family. I watched a lot of internet videos (and went to the cinema to see Catvideofest, a 75-minute compilation of cat videos from the internet with ticket proceeds going to charity), made some substantial progress through the omnibus of "Classic Tales of Science Fiction" (which I'll get to in a separate post at some point), and took part in an Ingress event which was a good excuse to go bike riding regularly. I am keeping on top of the washing up, and I succeeded in putting away all of the backlog of clean laundry. I continue to be thankful for the new air conditioner, which is making life in the hot weather much more pleasant.

. I went to the cinema for the first time in months, to see a new Australian film called Kid Snow, which was filmed on location in Western Australia and has a few people I know in the crowd scenes. (I also know some of the locations, and I'm pretty sure I spotted a sequence where the characters leave a small country town, drive all day, and arrive in a new small country town, in which both small country towns are played by the same somewhat larger country town, a few blocks apart.) The plot is the kind of thing that sounds very familiar if you try to explain it in a single sentence, and some of the dialogue is a bit on the nose, but the main performances are strong (including the tagalong kid character, who is genuinely charming and not irritating except when the story means him to be). Some of the supporting performances, too; at least two of the supporting characters are played by actors who have separately starred in other Australian productions that I've been meaning to get around to (one of which, Mystery Road: Origins, was filmed on location in the same part of Western Australia and has more familiar faces in it).


. Last weekend was a long weekend in WA, which as far as the local boardgaming club was concerned meant an opportunity to break out some of the longer board games that we don't get to play in our weekly evening sessions. Over the weekend, we played several rounds of Pandemic Legacy (which started well and then got out of hand repeatedly as additional constraints began appearing), Fury of Dracula (with unintentionally appropriate timing; in the chronology of Dracula this week in September is when the heroes stop playing catch-up and start actively hunting vampires), and a six-player game of Agricola, among other shorter games.


. I was right, I did end up picking Cobra for the September random book challenge. This involved shamelessly bending the instructions for selecting the book, but I've done that a few times already with this challenge. I feel like it's the kind of challenge where the aim is ultimately to break decision paralysis and read a book, and as long as that goal is achieved it doesn't really matter if you follow the instructions to the letter. I wouldn't be so cavalier with a reading challenge where the book selection mattered in itself, like the challenge I've seen going around where the aim is to read one book originating from each nation.


. Apart from the two monthly reading challenges I'm doing, I'm also doing another less structured one that's just a long list of varied prompts like "a book with a hotel on the cover" or "a book with a title that sounds like exercise". I haven't been mentioning it because the range of prompts is so broad that I can usually find something to check off for every book I read, so I've been tending to treat it as an afterthought and not an aid to book selection. However, since I was caught up on both the monthly challenges with some time left in September, I decided to look at the list of unfinished prompts and see if it would suggest something to read next. My eye was caught by "a book with the word 'secret' in the title", since that seemed like an easy one to match against my to-read list on StoryGraph -- and it was even easier than anticipated, because when I went to the to-read page the very first book listed, in the section at the top of the page for high-priority books, was The Mountains Have a Secret, the next novel in the Bony series. So I borrowed that from the library and read it. Then I immediately went on to read the following book, The Widows of Broome, because the ebook edition has a really ugly cover that I hate looking at and didn't want lurking at the top of my to-read page for however long it would otherwise have taken me to get around to it.


. Somebody in a book-related online group posted a picture of their recent book acquisitions, which included Prez: Setting a Dangerous President. This briefly gave me hope that Prez had somehow been revived without me hearing about it, but when I looked it up it turned out it was just a new edition of the first six issues with a different subtitle and a new bonus story.

The modern incarnation of Prez, written by Mark Russell with art by Ben Caldwell, ran for 6 issues around nine years ago, and then was cancelled just as it was really getting going. I wasn't a huge fan, but it had its moments, and Russell was clearly going somewhere with it and I would have liked to have seen where that was. Of the various questions left unanswered when the series was cancelled, the one that increasingly haunts me as time goes on is the place in the story of comic relief and occasional deus ex machina Fred Wayne, a quirky reclusive multi-billionaire who drops into the story from time to time to give events a nudge, and somehow avoids being one of the series' villains despite being a multi-billionaire with enough money and influence to bend democracy to his whim, whose reputation canonically rests on taking credit for the unrecognised work of more creatively gifted employees. (The bit about him making his first fortune from generative AI that's started crowding human writers out of the market hasn't aged well, either.) It might not bother me so much if there weren't occasional moments that might have been hints that Russell knew what he was doing and that what he was doing was setting Fred up to be an antagonist later on -- I even have a left-field theory, based partly on things that happened in the original 1970s incarnation of Prez that aren't in evidence in the six published issue of the reboot, that he might have been intended as the ultimate villain of the series. Or I could be reading too much into it, and Russell just wanted a convenient deus ex machina and didn't think too hard about the implications. We don't know, and what bothers me is that there is, now, no way we can ever know for certain.

. My login to borrow ebooks from the library had stopped working for no apparent reason, which happens several times a year and almost always just means that it's been a while since I borrowed a book in person and the library computer wants me to go in and confirm that I'm still a local resident and active library user. (I had to figure that out from first principles the first time it happened; I don't know why they can't display a message explaining what's going on. Well, probably because the ebook library is a third-party system and it would be some flavour of Too Hard.) Accordingly, I went in to the library to see if anything caught my eye that I could borrow and prove my continued existence. One of the first things that caught my eye, on the display of New and Popular Books near the front desk, was the third volume of Claire North's recent trilogy about what Odysseus' wife Penelope had to deal with while he was off having the Odyssey, which I'd heard about somewhere a while ago and thought might be interesting. While I was browsing through the shelves I found that the library had the first two volumes as well, so I decided to borrow the first one, Ithaca, and see how it went.

. Last year, I started listening to Re: Dracula, the audio drama version of Dracula Daily, but gave up on it a little way into September for a number of reasons, including general Having Too Much to Keep Up With and a more specific Fed Up With All the Ads. I decided that this year, having a bit more mental and emotional bandwidth to spare, I'd pick up where I left off (or actually, a few episodes before, to start at a suitable inflection point in the narrative), and so far it's going pretty well. There are still All the Ads, but I'm coping with them better (and being more ruthless about just skipping through them, since at this point even if there was an ad for something I was actually interested in I would probably avoid it out of spite).

. I've been doing a project for a while now, posting on Tumblr, where I go through The Count of Monte Cristo chapter by chapter and note everything the text says about when the events take place. The hope was at the end of it I would have a set of information I could assemble into a proper timeline that would be useful for future reference, but I am confounded at every turn. And, mark you, it's not that Dumas doesn't give dates, it's that he seems incapable of giving a date without contradicting himself: the most important event in the novel is given no fewer than three different dates in different chapters (and, on one occasion, two different dates within the same scene); the only character who has a birth date explicitly stated has two different explictly-stated birth dates; the date that a week-long event begins is two days after the date that it ends. I still want to present my findings in some kind of useful reference document, but at this point I don't have any idea what form such a thing would take.

. My current standby book, for when I need a couple of pages to keep my reading streak going but don't feel up to anything too involving, is Try Whistling This, a collection of essays about music by the composer and music critic (and host of Radio National's The Music Show) Andrew Ford. One of the essays I've read so far was about the role of nostalgia in popular music, and how musicians who were considered rebellious and dangerous in their heyday, like Elvis and Beethoven, wind up being sold as nice and comforting. (Which reminded me of the time I heard a choir sing "Imagine" at a memorial service, in between a hymn and the Lord's Prayer, and found myself reflecting that it's become so familiar that it's now possible for the words to pass through people without slowing down.)

. Too tired to elaborate, but Natural Six is really very good.

. "The Diamond Lens" by Fitz James O'Brien (1858): A novella about a guy whose obsession with developing the Perfect Microscope Lens leads him to do terrible things to achieve his goal, and then what he sees through the lens drives him mad. ( Read more... )

. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864): A scientific expedition has a series of subterranean adventures after climbing down an extinct volcano. ( Read more... )

. Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888): A man from the late 19th century is transported (via suspended animation) to the 21st century, where everything is now part of a socialist utopia which his new friends helpfully explain at great length. ( Read more... )

. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898): Martian invaders tromp around the south of England for a few weeks oppressing the populace before being defeated in an unexpected way. ( Read more... ) This is so far the only book in the omnibus that I think there's any chance of me re-reading.

. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912): The classic tale of planetary romance and adventure that popularised so many tropes that it can seem like a collection of clichés. ( Read more... )

My replacement ebook reader has arrived, huzzah! ...which then left me with the prospect of loading several hundred ebooks back onto it, and reconstructing the complicated system of tags I'd built to remind myself which series or fandom they were all in, and regretting that I kept putting off making the record of which ones I will never read again and was only keeping because I hate throwing things away.

I decided that in the circumstances it might be time to finally try out this Calibre ebook library management software I keep hearing about. I've spent several happy hours cleaning up metadata, and discovering that with Calibre as an intermediary I can once again read all the old ebooks I bought decades ago from now-defunct websites in formats that my current ebook reader doesn't know about, and reconstructing the complicated series of fandom tags for what will hopefully be the last time. I haven't quite got as far as actually putting everything back onto the ebook reader, though I have loaded a few test books to make sure that the tags work and so forth.

Part of the reason I'm not especially in a hurry with that is that it's likely going to be a while before I get to read any ebooks anyway. While I was reader-less I got roped into a community read of a chunky omnibus of old science fiction novels, which I'm currently running behind on because right after I signed up for that an interlibrary loan finally came in and I had to read it and the rest of the trilogy it's part of before it was due back.

The trilogy in question is the Tenabran trilogy by Dave Luckett, which I started reading when I was at university years ago, but by the time I got up to book 3 it was out of print and almost impossible to find. (In one of those moments that become significant with hindsight, I actually attended the event where book 3 was officially launched, but at the time it didn't seem to make sense to buy book 3 of a trilogy I hadn't yet read any of the earlier parts of.) More recently I managed to get hold of a secondhand copy of book 3, but by then I'd forgotten most of what happened in book 2, which I didn't have a copy of and which hadn't become any easier to get hold of with the passing of the years. I eventually discovered that the state library had a copy hidden away somewhere, requested it through interlibrary loan, and heard nothing for long enough that I'd begun to suspect nothing was going to happen, until suddenly I got a notification that it was waiting to be picked up at the local library branch. So now I've re-read the first two books (both just as good as I remembered) and finally found out how it all ends.

Another thing that happened while I was forced back on paper books is that I finished reading A.C. Grayling's The Good Book, which I've been working through bit by bit for the past couple of years. It's an anthology of non-religious writings on what it means to live a good life, covering a range from Classical times through to the 19th century, and bills itself in a subtitle as "A Secular Bible", which I have mixed opinions about. As a way of drawing a potential reader's attention, it certainly works; I might never have heard of it if it had been called something different, and I certainly wouldn't have been given this copy by the person who gave it in the circumstances in which it was given. But I don't feel like the conceit -- which extends to dividing the book up into sections with names like "Genesis" and "Acts" and splitting the texts into arbitrary chapters and verses -- achieves anything except to distance the reader, and to give the impression that Grayling is trying to hitch his solo effort onto the coattails of a major cultural artifact created by many hands over the course of centuries. Of course, while the compilation is the work of one man, the text isn't -- but another problem with aping the style of The Bible is that there's a distinct lack of attribution. Some of the larger chunks are fairly easy to identify -- "Histories" is mostly Herodotus, and "Consolations" is mostly Seneca, and "Acts" is mostly Plutarch, and "Epistles" is mostly Chesterfield -- and some of the smaller pieces manage to be distinctive, like Bai Juyi's poem about the parrot, but there are a lot of places where there's a particularly nice idea or turn of phrase that I would like to know who it belongs to, whether Grayling or someone else, and there's no way to tell.

. Our production of Mamma Mia opened this week. It's been our best-selling show in memory, with every single performance sold out before it even opened - hurrah for name recognition! The rehearsals went pretty well (as the director remarked, it helped that most of the cast already knew most of the songs), and at the traditional milestone three weeks before opening it was actually in good shape for a show with three weeks of rehearsal left. Then we lost a week of rehearsal due to half the cast being struck down by various respiratory illnesses, and one week before opening we were in good shape for a show with two weeks of rehearsal left. We managed to pull it together in the last week, though, and although the performances have had some rough edges they've been nothing to be ashamed of.


. For the April theme reading challenge ("a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming"), I chose an anthology called Mists and Magic, edited by Dorothy Edwards. It's a collection of short stories and poems about witches, ghosts and other magical creatures, aimed at a young audience, so I'm coming to it rather late. (It hasn't been sitting in my to-read pile quite that long, mind you; it's only been fifteen years or so since I picked it up at an ex-library sale for reasons I don't now recall.) I probably would have enjoyed it a lot at the target age, but coming to it now I found the stories mostly short and slight, and in many cases was already familiar with the element the story was relying on for novelty. There were a few that I thought stood out, in particular "Christmas Crackers" by Marjorie Darke and the editor's own contributions, "Night Walk", "Witch at Home", and "The Girl Who Boxed an Angel". Looking back on them, those are stories where the author put some extra effort into characterisation and didn't settle for writing about A Generic English Child; I concede the possibility that there may have been readers in the target audience who would have preferred the generic protagonists as easier to identify with, but they didn't do it for me. "Night Walk" is apparently an extract from a novel, which I'm now interested in reading the rest of.


. For May, there was a choice between "something old, or a book about something or someone old" and "a book that you think you might bail out on, or a book about emergencies, panics or escapes"; I chose Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, a book about someone very old, and a lot of emergencies and panics, that I wasn't entirely sure I wasn't going to bail out on. After finishing it, I immediately went and got the sequel from the library, and now have book 3 of the series on hold.


. The random book selection for May was taken from the non-fiction section, and my randomly-selected book was Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do About It by Thom Hartmann. The general principles are interesting, though for the most part already familiar to me. It has a couple of things holding me back from engaging with it in depth. One is that it's very much a book by an American, for Americans, about America. The other is that it was already a decade old when I acquired this copy (it came as part of an ebook bundle on the theme of "Hacking Capitalism") and it's been sitting around unread for a good while since then, so the America that it's about is the America of George W. Bush's second term and there's nearly two decades of developments (and lack of developments) that it has nothing to say about. Trump is mentioned once, in a list of American tycoons; Obama is not mentioned at all. (Bernie Sanders gets quoted a couple of times, but the author finds it necessary to explain to the reader of 2006 who he is.)


. The new Liaden novel, Ribbon Dance, is just out, but I haven't had a chance to start reading it yet because my ebook reader went into a coma a couple of weeks ago; it was only about a year and a half old, but fortunately that meant I qualify for a free replacement, but the replacement hasn't arrived yet.

1. Shortly after I moved into this house, I noticed that one of the washing lines (there's a set of five, strung in parallel) was looking significantly frayed at the end and was probably going to give way sooner or later. Then I had a look at the other end and realised that each line is on a reel, so that if it breaks you just have to release the tensioner widget and pull some more line out, so I decided to not worry about it until it happened. Well, last week it happened (while I was in the middle of hanging out laundry -- who would have guessed that the time it snapped would be when it was having weight put on it?), so after the laundry had dried and been put away I set about figuring out how to operate the tensioner widget. It took some figuring out (by my count, I unscrewed at least three things that didn't need to be unscrewed at all), but in the end I had restrung the broken line, as well as a couple of others that were beginning to look frayed, and as a bonus had adjusted the tension on all the lines, and it felt like enough of an achievement that I wanted to record it somewhere.


2. At the Rep Club, our big musical for this year is 9 to 5, the musical of the film of the Dolly Parton song. (If you know the song, I'm playing the man from the line "I swear sometimes that man is out to get me".) It's going to be a lot of fun if it comes together; we're currently at the "four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse; three weeks, and it couldn't be worse" stage.


3. Speaking of musicals, the local high school that does a musical every year or two is currently doing The Wizard of Oz (the version that's adapted from the 1939 film). I'm not sure if it's the first musical production they've done since the lockdown, or if I've ignored some in the intervening time because I felt it was too soon to be sitting in a crowded auditorium for several hours, but anyway it's the first one of theirs I've been to since last time I mentioned I'd been to one. There was the usual range of talents on show for a student production, with Dorothy and Scarecrow being the strongest performers, and the kid who played both the Munchkin Coroner ("not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead") and the Winkie Captain standing out among the smaller roles. The guy playing the Wizard did pretty good characterisation, but wasn't so good on the vocal projection (and for some reason, even though all the main players were miked, nothing was done to make his voice more impressive when he was doing the Great and Powerful routine). Their version of the disappearing-reappearing ruby slippers wasn't as slick as the version in the last production I saw of this show, about a decade ago, but it was pretty good. I had a good time.

3a. One thing I used to enjoy doing at these shows, that I didn't get to do this time, was spot the cast members I knew from performances at the annual performing arts festival. The performing arts festival hasn't been held since the lockdown, and I suspect there isn't going to be another one any time soon, because the two most load-bearing members of the organising committee have separately become too occupied with other commitments.


4. I was on the fringes of the solar eclipse last month. Around the time when Exmouth was experiencing totality, I went out into the garden with a pinhole viewer and got a good look at the moon covering about half the sun -- but if you didn't know there was an eclipse on, and were just going about your day, you probably wouldn't have noticed anything. It was a bit less bright than you might expect for a cloudless midday, but that was all.


5. I mentioned back when Dracula Daily was finishing up that I was trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to re-read Anno Dracula, Kim Newman's Dracula-meets-Jack-the-Ripper novel, while the details were still fresh, or if that would just lead to me spending a lot of time complaining about things Newman changed or got wrong. In the end, I decided instead to read The Five, Hallie Rubenhold's non-fiction book about what the standard Jack the Ripper myth doesn't tell you about his victims. I have a feeling that this means there are even more parts of Anno Dracula that would make me complain about things Newman changed or got wrong, but I think it was the right choice.

5a. Rapid-fire reading challenge update: November (a book with "ING" in the title) - Ingathering: The Complete People Stories by Zenna Henderson; December (a book with a number in the title) - The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett; January (a book you wanted to read last year and didn't get to) - Deathless Gods by PC Hodgell; February (a book by an author you love) - The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman; March (a historical or epic book) - The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; April (a book about rain or weather) - Winds of Evil by Arthur Upfield; May (a book about emergencies, panics, or escapes) - the first couple of volumes of Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo.

Our next production is Ladies in Black, an Australian musical that debuted a few years ago (just before covid came along and limited its prospects for becoming more widely known). I wasn't planning to do two musicals back-to-back, but as usual there was a shortage of men willing and able to sing, so I got roped in. I'm playing the male half of the main romantic subplot, which is a change from my usual (character roles and, in Alan Rickman's phrase, "very interesting people"), and has been taking me into new territory. The rehearsal period has been a bit crunched because of the way the Rock of Ages season was extended, but we had our final dress rehearsal/preview last night and were pleased and relieved to discover that, while there are still some rough patches, we do indeed have a show.

At work, I haven't maintained my focus to the same remarkable level, but it's still pretty good. As I got back into things after the covid isolation, what I've been noticing is the way it's affected by how much else I have on my mind (for instance, it's taken a dip just lately because a lot of my spare time and brainpower has been focussed on preparing for the opening of Ladies in Black). That seems kind of obvious, now that I say it, but it's not something I was really consciously aware of before in the same way.

My complaint about not having anyone to share my The Sandman experience with has had a happy epilogue: I was catching up with my brother on the weekend, and he mentioned that he's also watching The Sandman and, as it turned out, was up to exactly the point I'd been up to when I was most miffed about not having anybody to talk to about what it was like to be up to that point. So we got to have a long conversation about what we thought of it so far.

I was all set to say that I think I might be done with this set of monthly reading challenges, having whiffed June, July and August, but then I checked my reading log and discovered that in fact I've completed the August challenge entirely by accident: the challenge was "a book with an object in the title", and I happened across The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and other stories at the library and decided to give it a go without remembering about the challenge. The challenge for September is "a book with LIGHT or DARK in the title", so we'll see how this goes.

The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and other stories is one of a series of collections reprinting the short stories Terry Pratchett wrote very early in his career for the children's section of his local newspaper. They're trifles, but they're amusing and they have their clever moments. It was also fun spotting the first appearance of ideas that he revisited later on: there's a story in this collection that uses a version of the premise of Johnny and the Dead, and another which is unmistakeably a complete miniature version of the plot of Truckers (and even has some of the same jokes).

Rock of Ages has opened, and ran for two very successful weekends -- it was going to be three, but then several key cast members tested positive for covid. So there's been a hiatus, and the final weekend will be next week instead, if nothing else befalls us. Covid aside, it's been a lot of fun, with a cast and crew who have got on really well together.

Speaking of the covid, I have had a run-in. I got off fairly lightly; apart from one really rough day and night (for a value of "really rough" that didn't extend to needing to leave the house or seek medical assistance), it was mostly just achiness and fatigue and annoying coughing and sniffling. I didn't even end up taking any days off work (which is a desk job that I do from home), although I probably would have taken the worst day off if I'd known in the morning how bad it was going to get, and in the event I spent much of that afternoon unofficially zonked out on the couch.

In fact, I was weirdly productive at work for the entire rest of the week I was in isolation... and have continued to be weirdly productive since. Something about it, perhaps the combination of being well enough to get a reasonable amount done but ill enough to have no guilt about not getting more done, seems to have reset the way my brain handles work-related stress. I've had an ongoing problem with procrastination, where if I wasn't sure how to start tackling a big or unusual job I'd avoid doing it, and then I'd feel guilty about putting it off and that made me avoid it even harder, and then it would be weeks later and it still wasn't done. But that set of brain weasels seems to have gone away, or at least quietened down a lot, and in the past few weeks I've successfully tackled several big tasks; not always immediately, sometimes I've decided that I'm not up to that today, but then instead of going into a guilt spiral I've been able to look at it again the next day and think, yes, today I am up to it. I don't know if this is going to last, but I'm glad of it while it does.

In other news, I have now read all of Raymond Chandler's novels, including the last one, Playback, which I had not read before. I found it disappointing, which may have been due to bringing inappropriate expectations of what it meant to be The Last One. And to be fair it was always going to have a tough act to follow coming after The Long Goodbye. But The Long Goodbye has one of the best endings in the series, and would have been a strong ending for the series, and Playback failed to convince me that it had anything to offer that made it worth giving that up.

I didn't manage to complete the reading challenge for June, which was a book with "All" in the title. I started reading a couple of different books that would have qualified, but didn't get very far into any of them. The challenge for July is a book with "Book" (or some other related word such as "Page" or "Library") in the title.