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. 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.
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. 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.
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. I have long been a fan of Bride of the Rat God, Barbara Hambly's historical fantasy novel set in 1920s Hollywood, so I was intrigued to discover that she's recently started putting out a series of historical murder mysteries set in 1920s Hollywood in which the main characters described by the blurb are unmistakeably the protagonists of Rat God with slightly different names. Scandal in Babylon, the first book of the series, does an interesting balancing act where its characters don't appear to have actually experienced the events of Rat God (they're all acting as if this is the first time they've been caught up in a murder, and there's no mention of any supernatural elements), but they're picking up from where the characters of Rat God left off – the film star's sister-in-law already has the job and the boyfriend she acquired over the course of that novel, for instance – so that if you want to read it as a sequel you just have to squint a bit. The story itself leans a bit much toward the cosy mystery vein for my taste, so I'm not sure if I'm going to continue on with the series, though I am curious about where it might go now that it's got past having to set everything up again for the benefit of new readers.


. For the April theme 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. Being an anthology, it's arguable whether the book as a whole is about the required subjects, but enough of the individual stories fit the criteria that I feel good about it as a pick. I haven't finished it yet, so I haven't looked at the May theme challenge yet.


. I got new spectacles in April, and for some time afterward kept stopping to stare around and marvel at how crisp the world is when my prescription is up to date and my lenses aren't all scratched up. I think part of why I was so surprised is that my brain had tricked itself into thinking that the way I see the world when I'm wearing my contact lenses was the best it ever got. To some extent that's reasonable, because the contact lenses get replaced more often so they have the most recent prescription and aren't at all scratched up; however, my eyeballs have at least two separate things wrong with them, and the contact lenses only correct for the more common and less complicated problem, so with the contact lenses in the world is always a bit blurry.


. I've finished playing SteamWorld Dig 2, and moved on to SteamWorld Heist, set in the same milieu a few centuries later. The art style and so on are very similar, but the gameplay mechanics are different, and so far I don't think I'm enjoying it as much. There might be something about the story, too: Dig 2 featured a single protagonist with a clearly defined ultimate goal, which helped hold what plot it had together even when it was effectively a case of solving whatever the immediate problem happened to be and then whatever new problem that caused, but Heist is about a group of characters, who are not very deeply characterised and don't appear so far to have a goal beyond the immediate problem.


. The rehearsals for the musical are coming along. There was a nice moment at a rehearsal recently. We were working on the choreography for a song which has an instrumental break in the middle, during which some of the characters do a bit of dumbshow which is briefly described in the script but the score (at least the vocal score, which is all we had to work with) doesn't give any details about how long each part of it was supposed to last. As an additional complication, there's also a scene change in the course of the song, and the score doesn't indicate exactly where that happens either (I have a suspicion that in the original staging there was a revolve or some other bit of machinery that rendered it trivial) but we'd figured out that it should probably happen during the instrumental break as well, to avoid undermining the singers. So we spent some time working out who needed to be doing what, and when, and walked it through a few times without music. And then we tried it with the music to see where the timing needed to be adjusted - and it fit into the instrumental break perfectly, first try.
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Fiction books
Alan Bennett. The Uncommon Reader
Gail Carriger. Soulless
Catherine Johnson. Mamma Mia!

In progress
Anne Brontë. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (e)
Arthur Conan Doyle. A Study in Scarlet (e) (re-read)
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. Catriona (e)

Picture books
Margaret Wild, Jane Tanner. There's a Sea in My Bedroom (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book
Gerard Jones. Men of Tomorrow

short, screen, and stage )
books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Thomas Babington Macaulay. Lays of Ancient Rome
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. I didn't agree with everything in the three Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials, but I enjoyed all three, and I'm excited to see what comes next in a way I haven't been for years, so as far as I'm concerned they're a success.


. We did not, in the end, achieve the feat of doing a full run-through more than a week before the show opened, but the show was a success anyway. We even got a reasonable write-up in the local paper, complete with front page photo. Next year, the big focus is going to be on doing a musical, which will be Mamma Mia.


. The reading challenge for December was "a book about somebody who is gifted"; I started reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, got bogged down, read the much shorter Rhianna and the Wild Magic by Dave Luckett instead, and then, having removed the pressure to finish, was able to also finish reading The Calculating Stars.


. I first read Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart's novel about the adventures of Number Ten Ox and his friend Li Kao, the scholar with a slight flaw in his character, when I was in university. I re-read it recently, and then finally got around to reading the two sequels, The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen - and I'm not sure whether I wish I hadn't. It's one of those situations where turning a one-off story into a series involves tweaking the premise to open it out, and in this case I felt like some of the things I'd loved about the original were lost in the process. One of the changes is that there's a subtle but significant shift in genre: Bridge of Birds is a series of whimsical adventures in which Master Li and Ox solve a number of apparently unrelated puzzles and problems which turn out in the end to be interconnected; the sequels are detective stories, in which Master Li is presented at the start with a mystery that takes the whole book to solve. There are still whimsical incidents along the way, but they don't land the same because one feels obliged to interrogate them about how they fit into the main plot instead of just enjoying them and letting it be a bonus if they fit into the plot at all. There's also a change in Ox's personality: in the first book, he's a naive young man going on the adventure of a lifetime to save people he cares deeply about; in the sequel, he's become a seasoned adventurer, a development which happened entirely off the page between books and left me feeling for a while like I wasn't sure I recognised him (and for even longer like, if he doesn't care so much about how the adventure turns out, why should I?).


. I decided about a month ago that it was about time I tried a long-form computer game again, and picked XCOM: Enemy Unknown out of my large pile of unplayed games on Steam. It's already cracked my top 10 most hours played. (Which is, I have to admit, partly due to there having been some stressful days in the past month where it was helpful to be able to submerge myself for a few hours in solving problems with no real-world consequences, but that's not the whole reason.)

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