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. This week marked the tenth anniversary of my first entry on 750 Words. That sounds more impressive if you don't know how many long gaps there have been along the way: my current streak, which has lasted most of the past year, is the longest time I've stuck at it before giving up for a few years, and in that time I've written more entries than in the other nine years put together.


. At board game club this week, the main game was Russian Railroads, a worker-placement game themed around building railways, with several different tracks, each of which offers different kinds of rewards for building on it. Read more... )


. I finished A Choice of Catastrophes, a non-fiction book by Isaac Asimov that I've been reading here and there since April. The hook is describing the ways that the world, or at least humanity, might come to an end, but along the way there are lessons in a wide variety of other scientific and historical subjects: to understand how the world might stop working, one first needs to understand how it works.
It's good, but shows its age )


. I've had mixed experiences with the works of Tanith Lee: I loved her first novel, thought a couple of others were okay, and bounced off everything else of hers that I tried. And I've spent the last 25 years actively not reading The Silver Metal Lover ) I've made a good start, but I don't know how long it's going to take to finish, because I have a limited amount of cope for emotionally stressful fiction and when it comes down to it I'd rather be using it on catching up on the shows I've got behind on than dealing with a hapless teenage protagonist who, if I'm being honest, reminds me a bit too much of my own younger self.


. I happened upon an online listing recently for Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 that had a blurb describing it as a "dystopian classic", which would be a surprise to Bellamy. I don't know if the blurb writer was expressing an opinion about Bellamy's vision of utopia, or if it's just that "dystopian" has become such a marketable label lately that the online booksellers are slapping it on anything even remotely related.
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. 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... )
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#19: Read a book where the title is a different color than the previous book's.

First attempt: Takeoff Too!, a collection of works by Randall Garrett. I was introduced to Garrett through his Lord Darcy stories, which I really enjoyed (the elevator pitch is "Sherlock Holmes in a world of magic, with the occasional delightfully awful pun"), and then pretty much everything else of his that I've read has left me cold. The contents of Takeoff Too! proved no exception )

Second attempt: How to Draw Stupid, and other essentials of cartooning by Kyle Baker, which also counts for the May prompt in the Buzzword challenge (title contains "to" or "too"). Since I was reading out of idle curiosity I don't have a strong opinion about whether it would actually be useful to someone seeking to become a cartoonist, but I was entertained.


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

First attempt: K-PAX by Gene Brewer; the edition I had on hand has a vibrant purple cover that clashes with just about everything. My quickest DNF of the year to date: I lasted 20 pages. It was shaping up as one of those books where two sock-puppets talk at each other in a way that's supposed to end up imparting important life lessons; neither of the two participants in the dialogue felt like real people, and to the extent that they approached real personhood neither of them was a person I liked or wanted to spend more time with or expected to have any insights into life that were worth sticking around for.

(And then I took the rest of the week off fiction reading and binge-watched Natural Six instead.)
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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... )
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To echo a review I gave recently to another three-hour movie, I mostly don't regret spending the time watching the Delaporte-de La Patellière film version of The Count of Monte Cristo, but it's mainly because if I hadn't I'd have always wondered what I'd missed.

The movie is like the mansion that this version of the Count inhabits: large and elaborately decorated, but hollow and echoing and surprisingly empty of real people. Despite the running time, and the jettisoning of large portions of the novel, parts of the plot feel rushed and missing out on connective tissue that would give it emotional heft. Read more... )
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#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... )
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I haven't been watching the just-finished season of Doctor Who, and I was rather put out this morning to be told, by someone who assumed I'd already seen it, how the season finale ends )

In more cheerful TV news, the current season of Taskmaster is very, very good.


At board game club, we played Risk Legacy and Century: Golem Edition )

Computer games: Battletech, The Beekeeper's Picnic, Mark of the Ninja )

Reading challenges )

Podcast: The Hidden Almanac )

I overslept and missed Parkrun )

I've discovered a new word for the list of Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down And Was Pronouncing Wrong All This Time. This one is a character name: Methos, a recurring character from the 1990s TV series Highlander. I've been reading about him sporadically for decades, but I've never actually seen an episode with him in, and when I went looking for Youtube clips of Peter Wingfield performances a few days ago I discovered that I've been mentally pronouncing the E wrong: I always figured the first syllable of his name rhymed with "death", but it turns out it rhymes with "teeth".
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. 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.
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#14: Read a book with something on the cover that was also on the previous book’s cover.

Noose: True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows by Xavier Duff. The subtitle is kind of inaccurate: many of the chapters are stories of crimes that led to someone dying at the gallows, but while the crimes can be recounted in detail, for most of them the historical record lacks the details that would allow the story of the person to be told. I didn't enjoy it, and I didn't feel like I was learning much that was new. (At least in the sense that everything it talked about was something I was aware of in general terms as a kind of thing that happened, though I admit that many of the details were new.) (And unpleasant.) I don't know if it's really the book's fault; it may largely be just that true crime isn't really my idea of fun reading.

#15: Read a book that has a spine that's a different colour from the previous book.

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It was long overdue for a re-read, and I got a nudge from somebody I know organising a buddy read on StoryGraph. It's just as good as I remember, and a nice relief from all the darker books that I've been reading lately.

#16: Read a book that was published in a different decade than the previous book.

I decided to keep the Diana Wynne Jones train rolling and read House of Many Ways, a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle that was published a couple of decades later, and which I'd only read once, back when it first came out. (There's another sequel in between, but I have re-read that one before, and there were bits of it that I wasn't in the mood to revisit.) I don't love House of Many Ways as much as Howl's Moving Castle - it's less... I think maybe "ambitious" is the word I'm after? - but it's a fun read.
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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... )
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#13: Read a book set in a different country or world than the previous book.

I had a couple of false starts, including The Third Policeman, a work of dark absurdist comedy that I found too dark and not detectably comedic, and lost patience with before it even got to the first policeman. (Afterward, I was moved to re-read An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest to confirm that my sense of humour wasn't broken.)

The book I ended up finishing was also my book for May in the Random Book Challenge; the instruction was to sort my TBR by 'Earliest Added' and pick one of the first five books listed. In my case, that didn't actually mean the books that have been waiting longest for me to read them, because when I started keeping a TBR on StoryGraph I first added the books that were on my ebook reader at the time before I went to the physical bookshelves.

Anyhow, the book I selected was A Hangman for Ghosts by Andrei Baltakmens, a murder mystery set in Australia during the convict period. It's an interesting one; the detective character is a convict with a hidden past, so the story's unfolding the mystery of him alongside the mystery of the murder, which he investigates for a variety of reasons - none of which are precisely to see law and order preserved, so neither he nor the audience is sure what he'll do when he does track the murderer down.


#14: Read a book with something on the cover that was also on the previous book’s cover.

The flip side of the "didn't look at the next prompt" coin: the cover of A Hangman for Ghosts featured a noose and not really anything else. I don't think I have anything else in the TBR with a noose on the cover.

I went to the local library to see what they had, and after confirming that their copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None isn't one of the editions with a noose on it, and failing to locate their copy of Meg Caddy's Slipping the Noose (it turns out the library has shelved it in the Junior Fiction section, despite the subject matter and the publisher putting it solidly in Young Adult), I borrowed a non-fiction book of True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows.
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#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.
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. At board game club, we played Lanterns, Exploding Kittens, Drop It, and Carcassonne. I haven't played Carcassonne in ages, but it turns out I'm still good at it (and, just as importantly, enjoy playing it). I also enjoyed playing Lanterns, which I'm not as good at, and Drop It was okay. I don't remember what the gameplay of Exploding Kittens was like because everything else about it was crowded out by how repulsive the artwork was.

The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic Legacy: Season One with got together on Friday and we played through to the end of the season. I'm kind of glad we're done with it; it was an interesting experience seeing how the game changed over the course of the season, but the story parts continued to be familiar and predictable right to the end. We'd also started to lose track of some of the rule changes, which contributed to us finishing the season on a more successful note than if we'd remembered all the new rules that were added to make the climax of the season more challenging, but I think that even if we had kept perfect track of all the rules we still would have achieved a respectable outcome.

We also played a game called The Isle of Cats.


. Years ago, when we were studying Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in high school, the official text we had to use was an omnibus edition that also included An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan, and A Woman of No Importance. I read An Ideal Husband at some point in the intervening decades, but I never got around to reading Lady Windermere's Fan until last month and it was only this week that I read A Woman of No Importance. Wikipedia says it's generally considered the least successful of the four, and that makes sense to me; unlike, say, Earnest, which is clearly and coherently a comedy, A Woman of No Importance is a bunch of witty dialogue crammed into a drama revolving around a subject that is not in the least funny, and I don't think it all fits together quite satisfactorily.


. There's a new podcast called DC High Volume, which is doing official audio adaptations of classic comic book storylines. They've just finished Batman: Year One (which was not bad, although there were a few scenes, including the climactic action moment, that I don't think quite worked without the visuals), and are following it up with The Long Halloween.


. I've either been having more vivid dreams lately, or just remembering them more clearly when I wake up. It might be something to do with catching up on my sleep debt, or possibly because the weather's turned cold and I've started sleeping with the winter covers on.
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. 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.
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#8: If the previous book had a person on the cover, read a book without a person on the cover.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the first Poirot novel, but I haven’t been reading them in any kind of systematic order, so I’ve read around half a dozen of the later novels already. It’s the second I’ve read that’s narrated by Arthur Hastings, and once again I found him an impediment to my enjoyment. People always unjustly think of Holmes and Watson as the prime example of the great detective and his slightly dim sidekick, but really it’s Poirot and Hastings; Hastings can be relied on to go after every red herring and bark up every wrong tree and ignore every hint from Poirot that he might be on the wrong track. Poirot keeps making little jokes about how slow on the uptake Hastings is, which Hastings is too slow on the uptake to notice. I get the feeling it’s supposed to be funny, but I don’t find it so, and anyway that just makes me annoyed at the author for setting him up to be laughed at. It’s certainly not the case that we’re being invited to laugh with him, because that would require that he be in on the joke.

Also, somebody gets murdered, I guess? The mystery is actually quite clever, I think; I’d almost be tempted to read it again to see how all the pieces fit together, except that would mean spending more time with Hastings.


#9: If the previous book’s title started with a consonant, read a book whose title starts with a vowel.

I picked up The African Queen in a library-discard sale years ago, with a vague idea about seeing how different it was from the movie. It’s broadly similar, though the movie has a significantly different ending (and doesn’t let the characters do any more than exchange suggestive banter and occasionally kiss, while the novel is less restrained). I didn’t quite warm to the main characters, partly because I got the impression that the author didn’t entirely like them; some of his explanations for their behaviour had a feeling of coming from a superior and somewhat cynical remove.

Interesting experience, probably won’t read it again.


#10: Read a book in a different format from the previous book.

I wasn’t entirely sure whether my copy of The African Queen was a native hardback or one of those cases where the library added a protective shell to a paperback, so I figured to be on the safe side I should go with an ebook - which provided a convenient opening to read Diviner’s Bow, the new Liaden Universe novel that came out this month.

I devoured Diviner’s Bow in a single day; after spending the past few months chipping away at the depths of my to-read pile, it was nice to have a reminder of what it can be like to read a book I really enjoy populated with characters I like spending time with.


#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.

I’ve started reading A Choice of Catastrophes by Isaac Asimov, but I’m not sure yet if I’m going to make it my official pick for the prompt; it’s shaping up to be a read-a-chapter-every-now-and-again sort of book, and I might swap in something that will be done quicker.
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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.
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The new fitness tracker is going well. The "time to get up and stretch" notifications are better targeted at my use case than the Fitbit's method was, and are still working effectively.

It took several attempts to get the new fitness tracker to track my bicycle rides. On the first attempt, it didn't track anything; apparently there was some permission or other that hadn't been set correctly. On the second attempt (after I'd confirmed that all the permissions were now set properly), I decided not to hit the "starting cycling" button and see if the automatic exercise detection figured out what I was doing; not only did it not detect that I was cycling, at the end of the hour-long ride I got a notification that I'd been sitting in one place for an hour and should get up and do some exercise...

Since then, I've been hitting the "starting cycling" button every time, to be on the safe side.

It's been a bit tricky lately finding places to ride the bike that are off the road: we have a fairly good network of bike trails around the town, but in January a lot of the trails in my vicinity were torn up as the first stage of laying down fresh tarmac, and it was only recently that the actual laying down began. Looking forward to having that finished; the new tracks, in the areas they've been completed, are smooth and very nice to ride on.


At Parkrun this week (where the fitness tracker had no trouble automatically detecting that I was doing walking exercise), I saw a small brown lizard sunning itself by the side of the track.


It's been a rough week at work, featuring one of Those Clients.


At board game club, we played Last Light, a game involving exploring the galaxy and gathering resources. In general outline, it's somewhat similar to Eclipse, which we played a while back, but with some significant differences in gameplay (including a less complicated scoring system) that result in it being less of a marathon. One of the interesting gameplay differences that's not directly related to the playing time is that the board representing the galaxy rotates at intervals, with different parts of it rotating at different speeds, altering the strategic situation each time it happens.


Went to the cinema to see The Return, a demythified retelling of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after decades away, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. It's getting good notices for the central performances, which I agree are spectacular, but I think the story as a whole has some shortcomings and I'm not sure the ending would have worked if the performances weren't so good. (It probably doesn't help that it's not that long since I read The Last Song of Penelope, another demythified retelling of Odysseus' return which I found more effective.) I did enjoy some of the nods to other parts of the Odyssey that are woven into the story.


This week was the release of The Beekeeper's Picnic, a new point-and-click adventure game featuring an elderly beekeeper named Sherlock Holmes who used to be a famous detective but is now very definitely retired but keeps tripping over mysteries needing to be solved anyway. I'm enjoying it so far.


On the library trip where I picked up The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I also discovered that the library had a copy of Tove Jansson's first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, so I've now read that and am partway through the sequel, Comet in Moominland. (Neither of them count for the book chain "no people" challenge because I take it as read that Moomins count as people.) I'm not disliking them, but I suspect I've left it too long to start the series and have missed the age where they would have clicked with me.


I need to have a proper think about how I'm using 750 Words as a journaling tool. The journaling itself feels helpful, and I want to continue doing it, but I'm not sure 750 Words is actually the right place for it; I'm not really using it the way it's supposed to be used. For one thing, you're supposed to pick a consistent time of day to do it, and to start and finish in a single sitting, but I've been all over the shop lately (the best time of day is clearly first thing in the morning, but that's also the best time of day for several other things so it often gets bumped) and have frequently written a journal entry in two or more sittings when I've been able to find the time. (None of those has resulted in me failing the challenge of writing 750 words without interruption, because each journal entry is easily over a thousand words - which in itself is another reason why this might not be the appropriate application.)
pedanther: (Default)
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.
pedanther: (Default)
#5: Read a book where the author’s name is the same color on the cover as the previous book’s author’s name.

The Rout of the Ollafubs is a collection of linked short stories, with a shared setting and a cast of recurring characters, but focussing on a different character for each story (apart from the first and last, which bring all the characters together). I read it once when I was much younger, and some of the ideas and moments have stuck with me, along with a recollection that there were other parts I found dull and skipped over. Re-reading it as an adult, there are some imaginative ideas and fun characters, but the stories are rambling and lack clear stakes and in the end I feel that the whole is somewhat less than the sum of the parts. Some of the humour hasn't aged well, either, with parts of it depending on derogatory stereotypes of foreigners and the lower classes.

One of the things that made my experience of reading it now different from reading it back then is that now I'm able to recognise the influence of some of the other authors that preceded it; in particular, there were several points that reminded me strongly of George MacDonald's work in the genre, a comparison that tended to come out to Rout's detriment. With MacDonald, you can always tell that there's some underlying pattern or purpose even when the story's apparently being arbitrary; with this book, there were occasional moments where I got the sense that the author might have some idea of what the stories were driving at, but that idea never communicated itself to me (and the book ends with an explicit refusal to offer any explanations).

Of the individual stories, my favourites were the ones featuring the family of talking bears. There's something about making a bear cub with a Cornish accent the hero of a fantasy story that ensures it won't be as straightforward as a story revolving around a generic human protagonist, and these stories include most of the bits that had remained with me from my first read.


#6: Read a book that has the same colour spine as the previous book.

I'm currently working my way through The Friendship Factor by Alan Loy McGinnis, which is full of sensible advice about how to build better relationships with people that I'm probably never going to follow.

Book Chain

Mar. 9th, 2025 06:54 pm
pedanther: (Default)
The Book Chain reading challenge is turning out to be quite motivating; I've already read two more books in the chain and started a third. I suppose it's because the set-up requires to one to start thinking about the next book one is going to read as soon as one has finished the previous book.


The third prompt in the challenge is to read a book where the title contains a noun or adjective that appears on page 50 of the previous book. The first adjective I found on that page was "light", so I read Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen.

Sister Light, Sister Dark is the first half of a duology about a young woman with a long-prophesied world-shaking Destiny, although at the beginning of the book it's unclear what that destiny actually entails, because the ancient prophecy follows the traditional strategy of being impossible to understand until it's too late to dodge. At the end of the book, it's still pretty unclear, partly because things are only just beginning to really kick off but also partly because, in my view, the book does a less-than-stellar job of explaining what's going on in the world that might be shaken by a world-shaking Destiny. We get a very clear portrait of the isolated community the protagonist grows up in, and a few slightly-less-isolated neighbouring communities she visits over the course of the story, but the wider world remains foggy: somewhere away in the distance there's a king, and some guy trying to usurp the throne, but it's never really explained what the political situation is or what difference it makes to most of the people the story is actually about.

There's some interesting worldbuilding, including the titular light and dark sisters, who give an effectively otherworldly tone to the parts of the story where they feature. I was disappointed, though, by how much they felt like set dressing and didn't affect the (fundamentally rather familiar-feeling) plot. My reservations are probably addressed in the second half of the duology, but I find that I'm not in any hurry to find out.

One of the features of the book is that it's interspersed with legends and scholarly articles from later centuries, showing how the key events of the protagonist's life left their mark on posterity. The first few piqued my interest, but in the aggregate I felt that they rather weighed the story down, and although I got some wry humour from the scholars' biased misrepresentations of the past (including the repeated insistence on interpreting what the reader knows to be genuine supernatural events as metaphors or later inventions), I found that the accumulation of them had the effect of making me less invested in how things turn out: how important can the details of the protagonist's life really be, when posterity will forget most of it, misunderstand the rest, and believe none of it?


The fourth prompt is to read a book at least five years older than the third book. I read a Biggles novel I happened to have lying around, Biggles Forms a Syndicate. It's pretty slight, even compared to other Biggles books I've read; in particular, the nominal villain barely achieves anything in a plot where the environmental hazards are the real driver of the drama. But it passed a couple of hours and was an effective palate cleanser.


The fifth prompt is to read a book where the author's name on the cover is the same colour as on the fourth book. I've made a start on The Rout of the Ollafubs by K.G. Lethbridge, a collection of interlinked fantasy stories which share a setting and a recurring cast but each story has a different central character and a different style. I know I read through it once when I was much younger, but I seem to recall that I skimmed over the bits I was bored or confused by, and I'm interested to see how different it hits me at my current age.

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