pedanther

#20: Read a book whose cover clashes with the cover of the previous book.

Second attempt: I re-read the Very Pink Edition of Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell. (I still have no idea who that cover design was aimed at, but I suppose that as it was a 40th anniversary edition they could count on a ready audience of people who would buy it whatever it looked like. Myself being a case in point.) It's still entertainingly written, but I'm more aware of its flaws than I used to be, and a few chapters before the end I found suddenly that I was looking forward to it being over. There's still, if memory serves, one Modesty Blaise novel that I've never read, and there was a time when the incompleteness would have bothered me. At this point, though, I might read it if I ever happen across a copy but it's increasingly unlikely that I'll exert any effort to seek it out.

#21: Read a book with a different number of viewpoint characters than the previous book.

Made a start on Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover, and then on Julian Rathbone's The Last English King, but then the new Rivers of London book came out so I happily put both aside and read that instead.

The new novel is titled Stone & Sky, so it also counted for the July Buzzword prompt ("Punctuation"). I enjoyed it, but I don't feel that I have much to say about it specifically.

. I think I've found a good balance with the journalling, where I'm keeping a useful amount of notes about things I want to talk about and not spending an off-putting amount of time on it.


. At board game club, we played Power Hungry Pets and Space Base.( Read more... )


. ( Planning for the new financial year )


. I'm continuing to listen to The Hidden Almanac on the anniversaries of each episode's original release date. This week marked a milestone: ( Read more... )


. I had a productive week at work, and learned some new things.


. I went to see the Rep Club's latest production, The Great Emu War. ( Read more... )


. I finished the jigsaw puzzle I was working on in around ten days, and left it sitting around to look at for a few more days before taking it apart and getting started on the other jigsaw puzzle I got for Christmas. This one is based on a Star Wars movie poster, and is proving challenging: ( Read more... )


. At Parkrun, ( Read more... )

The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is an account of a few days in the lives of prisoners in Stalinist Russia, in a "special prison" that houses scientists and engineers who have been set to work on technical projects for the government. (The title is a reference to Dante's Inferno, which divides Hell into circles of increasing severity; the special prisoners, who get better treatment than in the regular prisons and the labour camps, are in the most comfortable outermost circle, but they're still in Hell.)

It's a story about arbitrary cruelty and deprivation, but it's also a story about human connection and friendship and unexpected kindnesses. There are obstacles and also reasons to carry on despite the obstacles.
( Read more... )

#17: Read a book with a title that starts with the same letter as the last name of the previous book's author.

First attempt: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore, a collection of sword & sorcery stories that were first published in Weird Tales in the 1930s alongside the likes of Conan the Barbarian, but have the historical distinction of being written by a woman and having a female protagonist. (The first story has one of those openings where it spends a couple of pages describing a heroic armoured figure before the helmet comes off and everyone, presumably including the original readers, is surprised she's a woman.)( Read more... )

Second attempt: John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant by Raymond Lamont-Brown. ( Read more... )

Third attempt, for the sake of moving things along, was Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji, which is a lot shorter and less complicated than the movie it inspired, but still fun. I appreciated the turn it took at the end.

#18: Read a book in the same genre as the previous book.

Taking the genre as "short, plentifully illustrated children's book featuring animals", I opted for The Animals Noah Forgot by the Australian poet Banjo Paterson, which also counts for the June prompt in the Buzzword challenge (a word in the title related to remembering or forgetting). ( Read more... )

. Had a bit of a stressful week due to events ocurring with a committee I'm on. Did some things, didn't do some other things, spent a bunch of time worrying about whether I was doing enough or should be pushing myself to do more.


. One thing that helped counteract the stress was that this was also the week of the Howl's Moving Castle buddy read on StoryGraph, which lasted most of the week and offered something fun to keep my mind off things. At one point during the week, I found myself pondering a hypothetical cast for a TV adaptation, supposing there'd been one a few years after the book was published. The difficulty of such a hypothetical, of course, is that it wouldn't have had the budget for anyone really famous (the TV version of Archer's Goon didn't have anybody more famous than "played a villain in a middling Doctor Who story", though it had at least three of those). Or, at least, not anybody really famous now: if you timed it just right, you might be able to snag Catherine Zeta-Jones to play Miss Angorian before she got too famous and lit out for Hollywood. I didn't come to any conclusions about who might be good casting for Howell, largely because most of the Welsh actors I could think of would have been either too old or too young - I did notice that Peter Wingfield was in the right place at about the right age, and he's got a good face for it, but I still haven't actually got around to watching him in anything yet so I don't have an opinion on how well he'd do.


. At board game club, we played Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. My opinion remains what it was last time I played it, which is that I find the game mechanically interesting, but I dislike the artwork and the attempts at humour. We also played Flip 7, an abstract push-your-luck game; I did pretty well, but there were too many rounds where I pushed my luck one step too far and lost everything. I'd play it again.


. A few weeks ago, I was in the audience for the recording of an episode of a podcast game show called Inestimable, in which contestants are forced to guess at the answers to questions like "How many basketballs fit in an Olympic swimming pool" and "How many people were stabbed in the entire run of Columbo", and the audience members also put in guesses which are averaged or aggregated to get a collective guess which is put up against the contestants'. That episode has now been released.

The thing I want to make clear first of all about Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 2: The Final Reckoning is that I don't regret taking three hours out of my limited time upon this earth to watch it, and not only because if I hadn't I'd have always wondered what I'd missed. That said, there was quite a lot of it where I was attending politely rather than being properly engaged and excited; there are large chunks that are unusually slow and sombre for a M:I movie, and when it did come to the energetic nonsense the series does so well, I think they finally managed to find a level of nonsense that my suspension of disbelief was unable to rise to. ( Read more... )

#11: Read a book where the author’s name is not the same color on the cover as the previous book’s author’s name.

A Choice of Catastrophes did turn out to be the kind of book that one picks up only occasionally and reads only a bit of, so in the interests of keeping the momentum going, I revisited the bookshelf and came away with The Canterville Ghost, which fit the prompt, was short enough to make up for lost time, and fit in with some of the non-chain-related reading I've been doing lately.

I liked it okay. It suffered a bit from that thing you get sometimes when you spend decades getting around to a classic, where I'd read extracts from it and had heard of most of the good bits already, so it didn't have the same effect as if I'd been coming to it completely fresh. The edition I read has some nice illustrations by Inga Moore.


#12: Read a book with a title that starts with the next letter in the alphabet from the previous book.

Coincidentally, the first book I finished after receiving this prompt was Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers, but that didn't qualify as the Next Book because I started reading it back before I signed up for the Book Chain. I've been working through the collection on and off for the past few months, and mostly enjoying it; a few of the shorter stories felt underbaked, but most of them had something of interest, even the ones I'd read before. One discovery for me was the novella "A Time to Cast Away Stones", which was written and is set between two of Powers' novels and makes clear several things about the second novel that had puzzled me when I read it. (And I note that if I'd read this collection promptly in 2018 when I bought it, I'd have read the novella before the novel - assuming I hadn't also read the novel promptly when I bought it in 2016.)

After making a list of books in the TBR that began with a D, I opted for the shortest one: A Deer in the Family by John Hartmann, translated from the Danish by Edith M. Nielsen. This is a non-fiction account for children about a Danish family that adopted and raised a baby deer, first published in the 1950s; a series of inscriptions on the flyleaf of my copy records that it was originally given to one of my mother's older relatives, then passed down to my mother, who gave it to me when I was seven, whereupon I didn't read it because it was old and the photos were in black and white. The story is quite charming, although the narration (at least in translation) occasionally verges on twee and I wasn't entirely satisfied by the book's answer to the question of whether the baby deer was actually in need of adoption in the first place.


#13: Read a book set in a different country or world than the previous book.

I hadn't looked ahead when I picked A Deer in the Family, but "read a book that isn't set in Denmark" basically gives me free rein to read any book from my TBR that I want to... which is not entirely helpful, since the point of doing these reading challenges is to narrow the options down to something manageable.

. I've been making a few changes to my daily routine, having identified a couple of factors that were messing with my ability to go to bed at a sensible hour. It's been working pretty well so far; I've been in bed within half an hour of my target time most days this week. There were even a strange couple of days where I was all ready to go to bed at least an hour earlier than the time I've been aiming at – only to find my brain insisting that it wasn't time for bed yet and finding things to do until I reached the target time.


. After we finished up our production of Guys and Dolls, I decided to read some of the Damon Runyon short stories that inspired it, to see how much had been changed in the process. "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown", which was the basis of the main plot thread, is recognisably the same story, albeit with a twist that the musical chose not to use (and without a whole bunch of complications the musical added to stretch it out to two acts). After that, things get more distant; "Pick the Winner" has a familiar set-up but a very different ending, while "Blood Pressure" has a familiar scene or two set in a completely unrelated plot, and by the time I got down to "The Hottest Guy in the World" and "The Snatching of Bookie Bob", the only things they really had in common with the musical were some of the character names. (And there are some things in the stories that I'm glad the musical doesn't have in common; it's been a long while since I read a story with as much casual antisemitism and misogyny as "Blood Pressure", and I hope it's a long while before I read another.)


. In other reading, I decided I should make some progress on some of the other reading challenges I've been neglecting since I started doing the book chain, so I read The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne, which was a March pick for the Random challenge and also let me check off the April prompt ("animals") in the themed challenge. I got The Purloined Poodle as part of an ebook bundle that included something else I wanted; it's apparently a spin-off from an urban fantasy series I haven't read. (And, based on this sample, probably won't read; the main characters were fairly entertaining in a small dose but I think I've had enough of them now.) The spin-off sees two of the characters deciding to take it upon themselves to solve a mystery – which got us off to a bad start, because when it comes to stories about complete amateurs playing detective, I prefer the ones where the character has to turn detective because they have a personal stake in the solution of the mystery over the ones where the character is just being a busybody, and this falls too much toward the busybody end of the scale for my liking. I enjoyed it more once they'd located the culprit and the story shifted from amateur mystery-solving to a more straightforward sort of adventure story as they resolve the situation (which I suppose might be a sign that I'd like the main series more than the spin-off, but I'm still not interested enough in the characters to really want to find out). I did laugh out loud at least once, at the bit where Oberon the talking dog reviews The Great Gatsby on the criteria of things interesting to dogs.


. At board game club this week, we played Winter Rabbit again, having determined that we may have misunderstood how an important mechanic of the game worked when we played it the first time. I'm not sure we've got it right yet; on our second game, we won the scenario in half the time the game allowed for the attempt, which seems unlikely to be the intended experience.


. Went to the cinema again this week, to see an observational documentary, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.


. Every now and again, there's an announcement of a big Ingress meet-up somewhere in the world, and I stopped bothering to read the announcements ages ago because it was annoying reading about the fun people were going to have somewhere that's nowhere near me. ...which is how I came to miss the announcement, a few months ago, that the next meetup is going to be in Perth. I only found out this week when another player in my faction messaged me to ask if I was planning to go. I haven't definitely ruled it out, but I'm feeling reluctant; it would mean making travel plans, and getting time off work, and all that sort of thing, in order to go and be sociable with a crowd of people I don't know and might completely fail to get on with. (The prospect of collecting another month-long respiratory infection is also weighing in the scales somewhat.) I thought I might be able to encourage myself by finding something else I wanted to do in Perth around the same time, so I could be guaranteed to get something out of the trip, but everything else I might be tempted to go to Perth for that month is either two weeks earlier or two weeks later.

Strictly speaking, this is an octave in review, covering the period from Saturday, 29 March, to Saturday, 5 April. I seem to have settled fairly solidly on doing the weekly blog post on Sunday, and it was getting annoying having to keep reminding myself "no, that happened yesterday, it goes in next week's blog post", so I'm shifting the window.


Our production of Guys and Dolls finished yesterday. It was successful both in the sense that the audiences had a good time and in the sense that the cast and crew got on with each other and also had a good time. The wrap party after the final performance featured karaoke, which, since it was the cast of a musical doing it, was a lot less painful than some karaoke sessions I can remember. I didn't step up to the microphone - I wouldn't have minded, I just couldn't make up my mind to a song - but I enjoyed singing along to the chorus parts and a few songs that the whole room did en masse.


After having never, to my knowledge, ever heard "Pink Pony Club" by Chappell Roan before, this week I've heard three different versions: the original, Rick Astley's cover, and a karaoke rendition done at the wrap party.


The light bulb in the spare room died during the week, which wouldn't be particularly noteworthy except for an incidental consequence. To get a ladder under the light fitting to swap the bulb, I needed to move the boxes that were piled there, and in the process I regained an accurate sense of just how many boxes I have full of books that I'd shoved in a box with the intention of carting them to a second-hand book shop at some point. I now have all those boxes piled in their own space where I can continue to see how many of them there are, and have added another reminder to my phone; whether that results in any of the boxes actually being disposed of any time soon remains to be seen.


At board game club, we played MLEM Space Agency as the main game, and then several different variants of Uno to round out the evening.


I finished reading Comet in Moominland. I didn't vibe with it. I realised afterward that I'd been in a bad mood on the day I read the last third, due to lack of sleep and some life things that I'd been not thinking about, but I don't think it'd have clicked in any case. I liked the first chapter or so, and then the comet shows up and it turns into a string of arbitrary whimsical events - and, mind you, I like a story that's a string of arbitrary whimsical events when it works, but this didn't work for me.


I did Parkrun both Saturdays of the octave, but if I encountered any charismatic fauna, I didn't make a note of it.


The colour-coded exercise tracker I set up in January seems to have hooked into my brain in a useful way, and my consistency of exercise is gradually increasing. In January, I never went an entire week without exercising at least once; in February, at least twice; and in March, I exercised at least three times in every seven-day period, which was the minimum goal I was working toward. So far this month, if it's not too soon to be saying so, I'm on track to never fall below four exercises in a week.

It took me all of week 3 to finish The Friendship Factor.


#7: Read a book with more pages than the previous book.

There were plenty of options here, as The Friendship Factor is a pretty slim volume, but I opted to count The Martian, which I was re-reading for a book club. This is the third time I've read it (not to mention having seen the movie version), and it's not quite as compelling when I know all the plot twists already, but it was still a fun time.


#8: If the previous book had a person on the cover, read a book without a person on the cover.

This is proving to be something of a problem, as all the books I had lined up to read for other reading challenges have people on the cover, and so do a significant proportion of the books on my TBR in general.

Attempt #1 was Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. The opening chapters introduce a large cast of quirky characters who I didn't care a jot about, and a gruesome murder which I also didn't care about, partly because none of the characters seemed to care about it either: even the detective protagonist was just going through the motions while he looked for an excuse to shove the case off on somebody else, while also having a boring marriage crisis that I suspect was going to lead to him having a fling with a material witness or something. I gave it fifty pages to hook me and then abandoned it without regret. On the bright side, I got two books off the TBR for the price of one, since I got rid of the sequel as well.

While I was taking the sequel off the bookshelf, my eye was caught by the neighbouring book, The Tin Dog by Alexander McCall Smith, which I decided to read as a palate cleanser. It was okay, but I'm well out of the target age range and I kept wanting to ask spoilsport logistical questions like "How sentient is this robot dog supposed to be, actually?" and "Can you really enter a dog in a greyhound race on the morning of the race?" (not to mention "Isn't entering your robot dog in a race with ordinary dogs, you know, cheating?"). I went back and forth on whether to count it as an official attempt for the Book Chain - the cover image doesn't feature a person, but there are people present in the background - and decided against as much as anything else because of how slight it is.

Around the same time, I finished reading The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook, which has a landscape on the cover with no people that I could see, but is disqualified because I've been reading it on and off since before I started the chain.

Official attempt #2 was Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson, which I read fifty pages of and then... not abandoned, exactly, I have a feeling I might get back to it at some point when I'm in the right mood, but I'm certainly not in the right mood for it now. I remember saying when I read Remarkably Bright Creatures that if it weren't for the octopus it would be a kind of book I don't usually read; Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is that kind of book with no octopi in sight, nor the kind of spark that made me continue to be interested in the human characters of Remarkably Bright Creatures even when the octopus wasn't around. The main characters seem like sensible people, and I don't appear to be in any suspense about whether they're going to sort their problems out in the end, and in the mean time I'm not really in the frame of mind to enjoy watching people being smothered by social convention and being forced to confront their mortality.

After going through my TBR shelves and not finding anything that called out to me (at least, not that didn't have a person on the cover), I resorted to going to the local public library and wandering the stacks until I settled on Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in an edition which has the eponymous manor house on the cover with no people. From past experience with Christie, I'm reasonably confident I'll find it at least readable enough to get through it without giving up and that even if there's a few deaths there will be a minimum of people confronting their own mortality.