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Five Things Make a Post
Jul. 1st, 2024 09:10 am. Our season of Mamma Mia has come to a successful conclusion, and I have been, with some relief, to get a hair cut. (I'd grown my hair out a bit to suit the character I was playing, and I didn't mind the look, but it was getting long enough to be annoying to deal with.) The club's next production will be The Regina Monologues, a retelling of the stories of the wives of King Henry VIII; it's an all-female cast, so I get to have a bit of a break without worrying about whether there's a part I should have gone for.
. The random book selection for June was taken from the subset of the to-read pile consisting of books which had been tagged "adventurous" and "challenging" by StoryGraph users. My randomly-selected book was The Workers' Paradise, a small-press science fiction anthology which I'd bought to support the publisher and then left languishing because I suspected it wasn't really my kind of thing. This turned out to be an accurate suspicion; I struggled through about half of it before deciding that I just couldn't take any more, and that I'd seen enough of the editor's choices to be confident there wouldn't be a story in the back half that made the whole thing worthwhile. I went back to the random selection, and (after vetoing a couple more short story anthologies) got a replacement pick of Spinneret, an adventure novel by Timothy Zahn. I had a much better time with that, although I was dubious about some of the politics and I thought the characters were rather flat; each character started out with a clear role in the plot (the Leader, the Scientist, and so on) and never really developed beyond it.
. For the June theme reading challenge, the theme was "a book about the ocean, maritime life, coasts, or something sea-related". I thought this might be my cue to finally read Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures, which I keep being recommended and have had a rolling hold on for a while – but then the ebook reader broke and I missed the deadline for rolling over my hold, so I've been bumped back to the bottom of the hold queue, which means that even if the replacement ebook reader does show up soon it's going to be a while (the library website is currently estimating a couple of months) before a copy becomes available. So I'm going to have to come up with something closer to hand that fits the theme.
. Separately from either of the monthly challenges, this month I also read Killing Floor, the first of Lee Child's long-running series of thrillers featuring Jack Reacher, and confirmed that it's not the kind of thing I'm likely to want to read more of. Having the kind of mind I have, I was struck by the boilerplate in the front of the edition I read, which has a little summary of Reacher's backstory that presumably is repeated verbatim in every book in the series. What struck me is that it places the events of Killing Floor in 1997, which is a reasonable assumption on the face of it, given that that's when Killing Floor was published... except that it's a plot point in the actual novel that it's taking place in a presidential election year, which 1997 wasn't.
. I have mixed feelings about the latest season of Doctor Who, but I found enough to like that I'm glad I watched the whole thing and didn't give up when I was feeling disappointed with it partway through.
. The random book selection for June was taken from the subset of the to-read pile consisting of books which had been tagged "adventurous" and "challenging" by StoryGraph users. My randomly-selected book was The Workers' Paradise, a small-press science fiction anthology which I'd bought to support the publisher and then left languishing because I suspected it wasn't really my kind of thing. This turned out to be an accurate suspicion; I struggled through about half of it before deciding that I just couldn't take any more, and that I'd seen enough of the editor's choices to be confident there wouldn't be a story in the back half that made the whole thing worthwhile. I went back to the random selection, and (after vetoing a couple more short story anthologies) got a replacement pick of Spinneret, an adventure novel by Timothy Zahn. I had a much better time with that, although I was dubious about some of the politics and I thought the characters were rather flat; each character started out with a clear role in the plot (the Leader, the Scientist, and so on) and never really developed beyond it.
. For the June theme reading challenge, the theme was "a book about the ocean, maritime life, coasts, or something sea-related". I thought this might be my cue to finally read Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures, which I keep being recommended and have had a rolling hold on for a while – but then the ebook reader broke and I missed the deadline for rolling over my hold, so I've been bumped back to the bottom of the hold queue, which means that even if the replacement ebook reader does show up soon it's going to be a while (the library website is currently estimating a couple of months) before a copy becomes available. So I'm going to have to come up with something closer to hand that fits the theme.
. Separately from either of the monthly challenges, this month I also read Killing Floor, the first of Lee Child's long-running series of thrillers featuring Jack Reacher, and confirmed that it's not the kind of thing I'm likely to want to read more of. Having the kind of mind I have, I was struck by the boilerplate in the front of the edition I read, which has a little summary of Reacher's backstory that presumably is repeated verbatim in every book in the series. What struck me is that it places the events of Killing Floor in 1997, which is a reasonable assumption on the face of it, given that that's when Killing Floor was published... except that it's a plot point in the actual novel that it's taking place in a presidential election year, which 1997 wasn't.
. I have mixed feelings about the latest season of Doctor Who, but I found enough to like that I'm glad I watched the whole thing and didn't give up when I was feeling disappointed with it partway through.
