pedanther

My second attempt at a random book for February, Perfume by Patrick Süskind, came to the same end as the first: fifty pages in I didn't care about any of the characters (apart from maybe a couple who had appeared in one scene each and I was confident would not be appearing again) and I had no curiosity about where the plot, such as it was, was going, so I abandoned the book and moved on. Perfume struck me as a book that might appeal to the kind of reader who enjoys bathing in written language: parts of it are beautifully crafted, and there was some interest in the way the narrative was centred on the sense of smell instead of something more usual like sight or sound, but I'm not that kind of reader and I didn't feel like I was getting anything out of it that rewarded the time I was spending on it.

My third attempt, The Visitors by Clifford D. Simak, was more successful, in that I read nearly fifty pages in just the first sitting and went on to read the whole thing before consigning it to the box of books I intend to get rid of. It's a story about the arrival on Earth of a group of very alien aliens, and how the people of the United States (where the first one happens to land) react to the situation. In the first part of the story, when everyone's just trying to figure out what the first arrival is, I found myself less interested in the aliens than in the detailed account of a group of reporters and photographers covering the landing (I wasn't surprised when the opening sentence of the author's bio at the back of the book turned out to be "Clifford D. Simak is a newspaperman"). Later, we get more detail about the aliens, but I felt a lack of drama, partly because the presentation is very dry (lots of scenes of people in conference rooms telling each other things the author wants the reader to know) and partly because both the aliens and the key humans are so darn reasonable about the whole business. In the last third of the novel, the author starts developing the idea that the aliens might cause a lot of trouble with the best of intentions, just by not understanding the economic and political consequences of their attempts to be helpful, but the novel ends without the author committing to the idea, and trails off into more scenes of people in conference rooms talking about what might happen next. Even the obligatory last-second sting in the tail happens thirty pages before the end and gets talked to death before the novel's finally over. There's a kind of half-baked attempt to compare the aliens to the European colonialists in the New World, both early on when people are afraid the Visitors plan to move in and take over Earth without regard for its existing population and again later when they start handing out advanced technology, but it doesn't go anywhere deep or insightful and in the meantime it means we get stuck with a bunch of scenes of white people talking about Native Americans with varying degrees of knowledge and sympathy, including a character going on a four-page rant about, among other related topics, how the Europeans were doing the Native Americans (he doesn't say "Native Americans") a favour by stealing their land off them. (That guy isn't meant to be sympathetic, and he's only in that one chapter, but it left a bad taste).


At the board game group this week, I played Chomp (arrange tiles with dinosaurs and landscape on them so that the dinosaurs that will score you points don't get eaten, starve, or fall into tar pits), Ticket to Ride: Europe (lay out the best train routes on a map of Europe), and Santorini (build towers and be the first to have a worker at the top of a tower while preventing your opponents from completing their own towers or stealing yours).


During the periods when I've been using 750 Words regularly, I've mostly been using it as a place to keep a journal, but one day this week I used it for the original intended purpose of furthering creative writing. I'd been reminiscing about a story idea I had years ago, as a spin-off from another story I also never completed, and decided to dig out my old story notes and see if I could add to them. I looked in the folder on my computer and found the story notes for the original story idea, but there weren't any notes about the sequel story. So I decided that my 750 Words session for the day would be a brain dump of everything I could remember about the story idea, including the bits and pieces I could remember having made up for WIP memes and things over the years. When I was done, I tried a word search on my computer to try and find a scene fragment I knew I'd written out at some point; I didn't find that, but I did find that I had, after all, written an extensive set of notes on the story idea - I'd stashed them in a separate folder, because I was trying to make it work as a standalone story instead of a sequel, under a code name that I'd subsequently forgotten referred to that story. I don't think the brain dump was a wasted exercise, though, because it's useful to have a record of which parts of the idea have stuck with me over the fifteen years since I wrote the original story notes; in the unlikely event that I do ever write the story, that'll give me an indication of which parts of the story are the ones that really resonate with me.

I'm still mostly doing my 750 Words sessions in the mornings. I'm not happy about how it cuts into the time I could be using for morning exercise or other useful things, but one day this week I did the session at night because I hadn't found time earlier in the day, and was reminded how much of a struggle it was to do when I was tired.

My random book for February was Devil May Care, a James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks - or, as the cover had it, "Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming". That would usually mean that the book was originally published under Fleming's name before Faulks's authorship was acknowledged, but I gather that in this case the author credit has been in exactly those words right from the first edition, and indicates that Faulks made a conscious effort to mimic Fleming's manner of writing instead of employing his own. I found the result felt slightly exaggerated, not to the level of parody or caricature but enough to be a bit offputting, especially since it highlighted some of the aspects of Fleming's novels that I never much liked in the first place. It also had a few new faults of its own, including that thing you often get when a setting is pastiched by a writer decades later who can't resist throwing in a bunch of references to historical events and people that the original author wouldn't have considered relevant or appropriate to include. All of which I could probably have forgiven if it had succeeded in endearing me to the characters or engaging my interest in the plot; as it was, I hit page 50 and still didn't give a fig for the fate of the world or any of the characters, so I ditched it and went to read something more fun.

My new random book for February is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, which I haven't started reading yet.


The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic: Legacy with managed to get together on the weekend and play a few more rounds for the first time in a few months. I'm still finding the unfolding legacy plot familiar and predictable, though I appreciated that a document that was revealed this session provided context for an earlier plot development I'd been unhappy about and established it as something that we're intended to not be happy about. I was also amused when the same cache of documents contained an in-story explanation for a game mechanic that's necessary for game balance but hadn't, until now, made a great deal of sense within the fiction of the game.

At the same session, we also played Western Legends, Raptor, and Schotten Totten. In Western Legends, the board is a map of a territory in the Wild West and each player takes on the role of an outlaw or lawman (or stays neutral, but you earn victory points for being a notorious outlaw or a successful lawman and there's no reward for doing neither) and moves around completing activities like prospecting for gold, fighting bandits, robbing banks, or driving cattle, according to personal preference and the character's secret goal cards. Raptor is an asymmetrical game where one player controls a family of dinosaurs and the other controls a group of hunters trying to capture them. In Schotten Totten, two families are fighting over a property line and players win skirmishes by putting together the best three-card combinations.

At the usual Monday evening session, we played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong and Forgotten Waters. In Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, I was the clue-giver once, and succeeded in leading the investigators to the murderer; and the witness once, and succeeded in getting the murderer caught without being identified and nobbled; and a regular investigator once, and achieved nothing of distinction. Forgotten Waters is a pirate game with narrative elements that's intended to be played over several sessions; we started a game about a year ago which fell apart quickly for a number of reasons, so this time we were starting again from scratch with a partly different group of players. That meant that a lot of the story bits we got to were familiar, but the game went well and we remembered to record the game state at the end of the evening so we could pick it up again another time.


Rehearsals have fully started for Guys and Dolls. I'm enjoying the singing, and mostly managing to remember the dance steps.


Still bike riding regularly. Somewhat complicated by the fact that there's an ongoing project to resurface the city's bike trails, and on a couple of my regular routes this has got as far as digging up the old cracked tarmac but not yet progressed to laying down the new smooth tarmac. A couple of days ago, when I was out riding in the morning, I saw a kangaroo, which stood a few metres from the bike trail and watched me go past.

Finished reading Here Lies Arthur. It's one of those books that takes King Arthur back to his hypothetical roots in post-Roman Britain, though the author's note makes a point of saying that it's meant as an entertaining might-have-been and not as a serious attempt at 'what really happened'. The might-have-been is that Arthur was just one of many warlords trying to become the top dog, and not the most noble or the most powerful, but had the significant asset of being supported by Myrddin, a skilled storyteller who made Arthur a legend in his own lifetime. It's an interesting premise, and produces some reflections on the nature of truth and the power of belief (it's narrated by Myrddin's apprentice, known to posterity as the Lady in the Lake, who has mixed feelings about the wisdom of the entire enterprise). I did find it a bit distracting that many of the stories that are posited as having their origins in actual events of Arthur's life are ones that I'm pretty sure only became attached to the Arthurian legend centuries later, but I suppose when you're writing an entertaining might-have-been you have to use the stories your audience will recognise. I was entertained, and got invested in the characters, and was satisfied by the way it wrapped up.

This week I also re-read The Man Who Made Gold by Barbara Ninde Byfield, a short fantasy novel that was a favourite of mine in younger days. According to the reading log, it's been nearly twenty years since I last read it, but I still remember every story beat and a lot of the dialogue. (I found myself noticing a few turns of phrase that have shown up in my own writing.) Whatever you do, don't feed Frederick!


I've already been to the cinema more times this year than in all of 2024. I went to see two movies this week, Wicked: Part I and Conclave.

Wicked: Part I is the movie adaptation of the first act of the long-running musical inspired by the novel inspired by The Wizard of Oz, telling the story of the young woman who becomes known as the Wicked Witch of the West. It was very good; there were a few places where I thought things that worked on stage hadn't quite translated gracefully to the screen, but nothing I had real trouble with. There were also some elements they'd taken the opportunity to tweak for the better, particularly the characterisation of Nessarose, who gets pushed around (both figuratively and, given the wheelchair, literally) significantly less than in the stage version. I was damp-eyed at times, including at the finale - and, somewhat to my surprise, during the opening scene, where nothing has even happened yet. (Or rather, since the opening scene is setting up a flashback that tells the whole story, everything has happened but you don't know it unless you've already seen Wicked. This is the first time I've seen the opening scene since I saw Wicked on stage, so it was my first time watching it with full knowledge of what's just happened and what's not being said. The added realism of film also means that if you know to look you can see what's just happened in Glinda's face, in a way you wouldn't from twenty rows back in a theatre.) The decision to split the musical over two movies attracted some debate, but it seems to be working so far. I actually wasn't that worried about Part I, because the first act has its own character arc and triumphant finale; I'm interested to see how well Part II works, as the second act not only has to deal with the fallout from Part I but gets lumbered with all the fiddly details of making the story of Wicked dovetail with the story of The Wizard of Oz.

Conclave is a political thriller, based on a Robert Harris novel, about the shenanigans surrounding the election of a new Pope. Political maneuvring, dramatic revelations of candidates' secrets, all that kind of thing, wrapped up with some excellent acting and even a few thoughts about justice and faith and the role of the Church in the modern world. In terms of dramatic appropriateness, it's not really a surprise who ends up getting elected, but it's a fun journey seeing how things get to that point.


I've finished my playthrough of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, so I started playing XCOM 2. And then I started Not Playing XCOM 2.

XCOM 2 is a substantially tougher game than its predecessor, both in general difficulty and in things like the way it gives each soldier enough individual personality that you care when one of them gets killed. I was doing pretty well at first, and fairly sure I was enjoying it, but then I hit a difficulty spike and kept repeatedly failing missions. I kept playing, but it was getting less and less about the joy of overcoming high odds and more and more about stubbornly throwing myself against the same obstacles over and over. Part of it was that, even when it was going badly, playing the game was a distraction from stressful things happening in real life, but it got to the point that I spent a day playing XCOM 2 in every spare moment and quite a few moments I strictly speaking couldn't spare, not only procrastinating things I didn't want to do but failing to get around to things I did want to do and would have enjoyed. I wasn't enjoying XCOM 2, I realised; I was engaged, but it was more like a weird kind of doomscrolling (and possibly, given how often the success or failure of a mission seemed to come down to the initial random conditions, something unpleasantly like a gambler going back to the table declaring that this time was going to be the winner). So I decided the next day that I would not play XCOM 2 at all, and find other things to do if I needed to procrastinate. I stuck with it, though at first it required some stalling tactics ("At least do the washing up first, then we'll see"), and at the end of the day I felt so much better and had got so much done that I've spent the rest of the week Not Playing XCOM 2. (It didn't all go as well as the first day; there was a day where I was feeling out of sorts and spent most of the day mindlessly faffing about on the internet, but I still think that left me in a better mental state than an equivalent amount of beating my head against XCOM 2 would have done.)

I don't think this is really XCOM 2's fault - I think it just happened to be in the right/wrong place when my mental health wasn't the best. I've enjoyed - properly enjoyed - playing it before, and I probably will again. Just... not right now.


I had the unusual experience this week of going to an unstructured social event and enjoying myself. I usually prefer to get my socialising done in situations where there's some kind of event providing structure - such as band rehearsal, or board game club - because when there's nothing to do but interact with humans, I'm never sure what I should do or whether I'm doing it right. This event was actually a gathering of people from the board game club, and was originally described in the invitation I got as "socialising/boardgames", but by the time I got there it had been decided to hold the event out in the host's back yard, where it was cooler but not very well lit, and to stick to socialising and leave board games for another time. It turned out pretty well; there were enough people to keep the conversation going without any one person being under pressure, and I knew everyone well enough to be comfortable in their company.

Saturday was my last full day in town. I went to Parkrun in the morning, taking the opportunity to visit a course I haven't done before; I picked one near the seashore since I hadn't been properly near the sea yet during my visit, though as it turned out the track was on the landward side of a string of high dunes so I didn't actually see the sea except in glimpses. Later in the day I went to WABA and to Astrofest, and caught up with people I knew.

On Sunday morning, I went to the beach with relatives, and we looked in tide pools and found interesting shells and generally had a nice time. In the afternoon, it was time for the train home. On the train, I read The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, one of a bundle of ebooks I got a while back which had originally been published in a serial format with different authors writing each chapter. I got on better with it than the last one I tried, in that I didn't give up before I reached the end, but I found it disappointing; the plotting was uneven, with elements being introduced without proper set-up or dropped without proper pay-off, and the characters were all Types without enough personal history or individuality for me to really care about what happened to them.

When I got home, I did read Remarkably Bright Creatures. If it weren't for the octopus, it would be a kind of book I don't usually read, but on the whole I enjoyed it, though one of the subplots set off one of my narrative allergies so badly that I started skimming chapters whenever it cropped up. It might have been a good thing that I didn't have it with me on the train; I think I might have been less happy with it if I hadn't been able to put it down and walk away for a bit when it was getting too much.

After the better part of two years, I've finally finished listening to all of Re: Dracula, the audio drama podcast adaptation of Dracula Daily. I started listening last year on its original release, but stopped partway through, then restarted at the same point when it came around again this year. To be fair to the podcast, a major reason I struggled with it was external; last year was the year I started logging daily reading progress and not just when I completed a book, and I made the possibly unwise decision to log Re: Dracula as an audio book and keep track of the cumulative run time. That would always have been a challenge and a distraction from simply listening and enjoying, though now I'm done being fair I want to also note that having to calculate and subtract the run time of all the ad breaks certainly didn't help.

With that out of the way, Letters From Watson is now the only serialised fiction thing I'm still participating in, and when that finishes next month I think I'm going to want a significant break before I let myself consider getting caught up in any more.

I put my 750 Words account into scheduled vacation mode before my trip, since I wouldn't have access to an internet with a keyboard and I don't write anything of significant length on my phone, and I didn't reactivate it immediately after I got home. Partly that was because I'd found that it was actually quite nice to be able to go "I'm tired, I'm going to bed" and not "I'm tired, but I have to write 750 words before I can think about going to bed", and partly it was because I couldn't decide what to do about the days I'd skipped: try to summarise them, or just write them off and resume journalling from where I was. Anyway, I didn't do any journal entries all week, and one of the consequences was that I didn't have a handy supply of pre-digested things to say. That's one of the reasons this is a week late, though perhaps not the main one – but that is a topic for next time.

. The season recently closed for the club's latest production, The Regina Monologues, a set of six interconnected stories inspired by the six wives of Henry VIII but set in the present day. I wasn't involved (it's an all-female cast, with only the six women appearing on stage), but I went to see a performance and was very impressed. It's the most challenging (for both the cast and the audience) bit of drama the club has done in the last few years.

The club's next production is Seussical, the musical inspired by the works of Dr Seuss, which I'm also not in; I decided not to audition for several reasons, including still being a bit musicalled out after Mamma Mia. My sister was disappointed when I told her; she says I have the right kind of face to be a Dr Seuss character.


. Am still listening to Re: Dracula. One problem I've been occasionally having is that because it's intended to be listened to on a specific schedule, I sometimes find that the schedule expects me to listen to an episode when I'm still busy digesting something else. That was an issue the day I read the last of the Penelope trilogy, and I couldn't easily put the episode off because there was another one due the next day; it cropped up again the night I went to see The Regina Monologues, but on that occasion there was a break of several days before the next episode, so that time I postponed the episode until I felt ready for it.


. A while ago, I started using the Calibre ebook management software to organise my ebooks. Part of the motivation is that I've replaced my physical ebook reader a couple of times now, and each time I did, the books that I bought through the official store had their read status and tags automatically re-applied from the cloud, but not the several hundred books I'd obtained by other means. The second time I was faced with the prospect of going through all those books, individually re-marking the ones I'd already read (if I could remember) and re-adding all the tags (if I could remember, with part of the problem being that the tags largely existed to remind me of things), I added Calibre to the mix, in the hope that once this round of re-marking and re-tagging was complete Calibre would remember the details for me and handle the whole task should it ever again be required.

I've achieved a full success with the tags; if I add a tag to a book on the reader, it automatically gets copied to Calibre's records next time they share information, and if I add a tag to a book in Calibre, it's automatically copied to the reader. The read status has proven to be trickier. With the help of a plugin, I've got it set up so that the ebook reader tells Calibre whenever I change the status of a book on the reader (how far I'm up to, or if I've marked it as finished); what I haven't been able to find is a way to arbitrarily mark a book as finished in Calibre and have that recognised by the ebook reader. I suppose if all else fails I can go through everything on the ebook reader and mark the ones I've read there, and that information will be transferred to Calibre, and then hopefully since it's information provided by the ebook reader it will, when the time comes, be transferred back.


. At the boardgame club this week, I had a chance to get a couple of games on the table that I haven't had out for a while. I got Jabberwocky and The Lady and the Tiger in a Kickstarter; neither is a single game, but instead each has a set of components (cards and coloured tokens) and a rulebook containing rules for several different games that can be played with the components, depending on how many players you have. They seemed like a useful and flexible thing to be able to take along to a boardgame gathering, but in practice I've only ever played a couple of games out of each and still don't really know most of the games well enough to be confident suggesting them.

My favourite game from either set is "Labyrinth", a two-player game in The Lady and the Tiger where the cards are laid out to create a playing board that changes configuration each turn and the players race to get all their pieces from one corner of the board to the other across the shifting terrain; I got to play a game of it this week while we were waiting for more people to show up so we could start a larger game.

When one other person showed up, we also played a three-player game from Jabberwocky; in "Gyre", which I don't think I've played before, the cards are laid out to create a playing board which the players move around the edge of while performing actions to gain control of specific areas on the board. It took us a round or two to come to grips with how the game worked, but it ended up being a very close match and we all enjoyed it.

(I promise the games don't all start with the cards being laid out to create a playing board; last time I had Jabberwocky on the table, for instance, we played "Slithy", which involves using the tokens to bid for points based on the predicted value of another player's hand of cards.)


. One of my so-far-unrealised plans for long service leave was to take up knitting or crocheting or something of the sort, partly for the potential practical value and partly to have something to do with my hands while I'm watching TV or listening to a podcast. Since I have so far consistently forgotten to go and obtain the necessary equipment and materials, I decided this week to shift my sights to something a bit less ambitious, and for which I already have the necessary equipment to hand: namely, learning to shuffle a deck of cards properly. My current shuffling technique is not the worst I've observed among the people I've played with, but it's awkward and clumsy enough that I'd like to improve it, and I've always been impressed by anyone who could do a clean riffle shuffle. I haven't made much progress on that specific goal so far, as none of the "How to do a riffle shuffle" tutorials I've looked at bother to explain how the actual riffling part works, having apparently been written by people who have been handling cards long enough to have forgotten which of the things that are now second nature to them might be opaque to a beginner. So for now I'm sticking with a tutorial that covers the very basics of card handling, like what a "dealer's grip" is (another thing that came up in a shuffling tutorial without further elaboration), and hoping to work my way up. I can do a pretty consistent one-handed swing cut now, at least, so that's something.

. On my second week of leave, I did more weeding, focussing on the plants growing up along the front of the house (and making it possible to walk from the front door to the car without having to dodge or step over any tall weeds). I also fixed a pantry door that had come off one of its hinges, and found a remedy for the sagging seat of the sofa.

. Some while back, I signed up to a literary serial Substack called Wildfell Weekly, which presented Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. (It wasn't a fully chronological presentation like Dracula Daily; the first few posts were co-ordinated with the dates in the narrative, but then the narrative starts skipping weeks and months at a time - the full story takes place over the course of about a decade - so after that the posts settled down to one a week.) I kept up with it pretty well at first, but I got stuck around halfway through, when the Tenant's backstory starts being revealed (having gone in with just enough knowledge of the premise to dread where the story would go from there), and remained stuck while the serial continued on all the way to the end. Faced with the need to keep up my reading streak without resorting to actually starting The Female Man, I began reading individual chapters, and gradually built up steam and got all the way to the end. I'm glad I've read it now - it's secured Anne the position of my favourite Brontë - but I think perhaps the weekly serial wasn't the best way for me to have read it. (On the other hand, perhaps it was, seeing as the only other option appears to have been me never getting around to reading it at all.)

. During August, I got into a situation on Duolingo where I needed to complete all the daily challenges every day for the rest of the month in order to keep my streak of monthly medals. I've been gradually going off Duolingo anyway (which is partly how the situation arose), with a rising feeling that I'm not getting enough out of it to be worth all the ways it annoys me, so I decided that if I failed to get the August medal I would take it as a sign to walk away. At the end of the month, I irretrievably lost one of the daily challenges that I could easily have won, due to Duolingo not being clear about the requirements for completing the challenge; I decided that was definitely enough for me, and uninstalled the app forthwith. And I have not missed it one bit.

. Saw some people online talking about a new game called Tactical Breach Wizards, and thought it sounded interesting enough to try downloading the demo. It's a turn-based tactical combat thing, and one of the wrinkles is that one of the main characters can see a minute or so into the future, which mechanically translates to you being able to preview the effects of your turn before committing to it, and you're encouraged to try out elaborate or showy moves to see if they'll work. Each of the player-controlled characters is a different kind of wizard, with different abilities and weaknesses; one of the starting characters, for instance, is a weather witch, who begins the game with several kinds of wind spell but nothing that does direct damage, so she has to knock opponents out by slamming them against walls or else remove them from the field of battle by pitching them out of windows. (I haven't played any of the developer's earlier games, but I'm given to understand that defenestration is something of a trademark.) By the time I hit the end of the demo I was sufficiently immersed to forget it was just the demo and be surprised to hit the end, and wanted to know what happened next, so I bought the full game. I've been playing it on and off since; if I'm honest, the gameplay isn't quite my jam, but I'm really enjoying the characters and the dialogue is great.

. There is a tournament currently being held on Tumblr where people were invited to submit their favourite character that they didn't think anybody else had heard of, and the characters face off in one-on-one contests where the winner is the one that more of the audience really hasn't heard of. (It's intended as an antidote to all the other character tournaments on Tumblr where the winner is usually the character most people have heard of, regardless of what the nominal criterion of the tournament was.) One of the competitors is a character from the Liaden Universe, and obscure even for that series: it's Jen Sin yos'Phelium, the keeper of Tinsori Light, who until quite recently had only appeared in one short story and none of the novels. He won his first match-up (against a sapient eyeball from a Youtube video I've never heard of) by a comfortable margin, and is through to the second round.

. "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.

. A good number of years ago, I backed the original set of Magic Puzzles 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles on Kickstarter, and then they sat around unopened because I never got around to setting up a space where I could work on them. A week ago, I finally hauled one out to have something to do with my hands while watching a Youtube stream (which was celebrating the third anniversary of its Youtube channel, and therefore nearly the third anniversary of the first time I said to myself, "You know, I could probably do one of those Magic Puzzles to have something to do with my hands while watching these"), and I've been working on it in spare moments. I finished it this morning, and am now trying to decide how long to leave it out and admire the artwork before I clear it away so I can get started on the next one. (I was a bit worried that the puzzle's gimmick, advertised as a "mind blowing magical ending", would end up being a fizzle; in the event, I think that description is overselling it a bit, but it is pretty neat.)


. The thing about the XCOM games is that, while I enjoy them, I'm not terribly good at them, or at least I wasn't at first, and I've never got all the way through one without saving before every mission and shamelessly reloading if everything goes pear-shaped. When I first started, this was necessary to avoid complete mission failure and my entire team getting wiped out on the regular, but as I've improved I've also been increasingly tempted to stretch the definition of mission failure, a tendency that was shown up when I found myself taking a mulligan on a mission which had gone entirely according to plan right up until the last-moment death of a single soldier who just happened to be one of the ones I was sentimentally attached to. After that, I promised myself that on my latest runthrough I would only replay missions that were complete disasters and specifically would keep the result of any mission where the objectives were successfully achieved no matter how many soldiers got killed doing it. I have kept to that resolve, even for the mission that ended with only two soldiers still standing; it's been challenging, and included long stretches where I was struggling to field a team for missions (and at least two points where I had to automatically fail missions because I literally didn't have enough active soldiers to do them), but it was very satisfying when I overcame that and started building up the team again. There's some kind of life lesson in that, probably. The funny thing is that, although there were those stretches where it felt like we were limping along, in the end the campaign has taken about the same amount of time as all my earlier ones; I reached the end game in roughly the same number of missions and within a month, in-game time, of my previous longest campaign. Presumably that had something to with the fact that I still took do-overs on the missions that I completely failed; doing a run where I kept the result of every single mission, no matter how disastrous, would be an even more interesting challenge, but one that I don't think I'm a good enough player yet to survive.


. After I completed the latest runthrough of XCOM 2, I decided it was time for a change of pace, so I've been playing a platformer called SteamWorld Dig 2, which I assume I got in a bundle at some point because I don't remember ever specifically deciding to buy it. I've been playing it often enough to start seeing it behind my eyelids, and enjoying it a lot, and it's reminding me how much I also enjoyed playing the last platformer of this kind that I played (the excellent Yoku's Island Express), so I'm thinking maybe I should play this genre more often.


. Another thing I've been really enjoying lately is a new D&D Actual Play series called Natural Six, which put out some preview/prequel episodes a while back and released its official Episode 1 last week. The players are all charming and invested in their characters, and they and the DM all bounce off each other really well. New episodes are being released fortnightly, on Youtube or as a podcast, alternating with episodes of an after-action series where the players talk about the previous week's session.


. The random book selection for April was based around picking one of the oldest books on the to-be-read list – which in my case didn't actually result in one of the books that's been waiting to be read the longest, because I already had a large stack of unread books when I joined StoryGraph and I didn't make any effort to list them chronologically. Actually, it looks like I started by adding the unread books on my ereader, which necessarily are all more recent than when I got the ereader about a decade ago. I definitely have paper books that have been waiting longer than that.

The book that was randomly selected for me was The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke, a young adult time travel story that I think I picked up as part of a special offer and had no idea what it was about until I started reading. There were some parts that I felt lacked the subtlety that I would have expected if it were a book for not-young adults, but on the whole I enjoyed it well enough and found it satisfying in the end. (Speaking of the end, it makes some interesting choices about which questions it leaves unanswered – although I've noticed that, because of the time travel, at least one of those questions is actually answered in the first chapter before the reader knows what the question is yet...)

The theme challenge for April is "a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming", and I haven't picked a book for it yet.