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Week in review: Week to 3 January
Jan. 5th, 2025 09:24 amI had a victory against clutter this week. There's been a big pile of boxes in the middle of one room of the house since I moved in, waiting to be sorted out Some Day, and I finally decided that I'd had enough and Some Day had arrived. Some of the boxes got unpacked and some had more appropriate places found for them, and now I can walk straight across the room without circling around a big pile of boxes, which still feels a bit weird.
I read the last of my stack of library books, Stan Grant's Talking to My Country, and the Rivers of London box set I got for Christmas, and a few shorter things, finishing up the year by finally getting around to reading Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows". I hadn't been sure it would live up to its reputation, but it is atmospheric and effectively creepy, and I appreciated the final sentence, which caps it off effectively without trying to carry the whole weight of the story, the way some stories in this subgenre do.
Part of the reason I've been reading so many short things in the past few weeks is that I'd set myself a reading goal for 2024 with a moving target that went up every time I bought a new book, to encourage me to read more of the books I already own, and after keeping ahead of it most of the year I'd sent the target skyrocketing by succumbing to the lure of a Humble Bundle of 30 Ursula K. Le Guin books. At a certain point, I recognised that I wasn't going to catch up to the target without spending the last day of the year grimly slogging through books, and let it go. So I finished the year a few books behind the target, but I still read a respectable number of books for the year and, more importantly, I achieved the real goal of reducing my to-read pile by a significant amount.
The first book of the new year is Here Lies Arthur, an Arthurian legend retelling by Philip Reeve. I'm giving the monthly Buzzwords reading challenge another shot, so this is my book for the January challenge, "'Truth' and 'Lies'". I'm also doing the Random TBR challenge again; the prompt for January is to filter the TBR to fast-paced books under 300 pages long and then pick one of those at random; I ended up on Inside Job by Connie Willis.
On New Year's Day I spent a chunk of the day playing boardgames with my brother and some people we know from the boardgame club. We played Hey, That's My Fish!, Mysterium, Thornwatch, and Ingenious. I didn't win any of the competitive games (Mysterium and Thornwatch are both collaborative, and we collectively won those), but I had a good time. One of the guys offered to buy us all lunch, and got it from Macca's because that was one of the few places that was open; it's the first time in literally years that I've eaten anything from Macca's, and I haven't been missing anything.
Casting has been set for the Rep Club's next big production. Rehearsals haven't started yet, because some people are still away on holiday, but I've collected my copy of the script and vocal score. I should probably be spending more time practicing the songs than I have been.
I read the last of my stack of library books, Stan Grant's Talking to My Country, and the Rivers of London box set I got for Christmas, and a few shorter things, finishing up the year by finally getting around to reading Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows". I hadn't been sure it would live up to its reputation, but it is atmospheric and effectively creepy, and I appreciated the final sentence, which caps it off effectively without trying to carry the whole weight of the story, the way some stories in this subgenre do.
Part of the reason I've been reading so many short things in the past few weeks is that I'd set myself a reading goal for 2024 with a moving target that went up every time I bought a new book, to encourage me to read more of the books I already own, and after keeping ahead of it most of the year I'd sent the target skyrocketing by succumbing to the lure of a Humble Bundle of 30 Ursula K. Le Guin books. At a certain point, I recognised that I wasn't going to catch up to the target without spending the last day of the year grimly slogging through books, and let it go. So I finished the year a few books behind the target, but I still read a respectable number of books for the year and, more importantly, I achieved the real goal of reducing my to-read pile by a significant amount.
The first book of the new year is Here Lies Arthur, an Arthurian legend retelling by Philip Reeve. I'm giving the monthly Buzzwords reading challenge another shot, so this is my book for the January challenge, "'Truth' and 'Lies'". I'm also doing the Random TBR challenge again; the prompt for January is to filter the TBR to fast-paced books under 300 pages long and then pick one of those at random; I ended up on Inside Job by Connie Willis.
On New Year's Day I spent a chunk of the day playing boardgames with my brother and some people we know from the boardgame club. We played Hey, That's My Fish!, Mysterium, Thornwatch, and Ingenious. I didn't win any of the competitive games (Mysterium and Thornwatch are both collaborative, and we collectively won those), but I had a good time. One of the guys offered to buy us all lunch, and got it from Macca's because that was one of the few places that was open; it's the first time in literally years that I've eaten anything from Macca's, and I haven't been missing anything.
Casting has been set for the Rep Club's next big production. Rehearsals haven't started yet, because some people are still away on holiday, but I've collected my copy of the script and vocal score. I should probably be spending more time practicing the songs than I have been.
