pedanther

Fiction books
Zen Cho. The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo (e)
Agatha Christie. N or M? (re-read)
Graham Greene. Brighton Rock
Robert Harris. Imperium
Joan Lindsay. Picnic at Hanging Rock
Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle. The Mote in God's Eye
Naoki Urasawa, tr. John Werry. Asadora! volume 3
Gene Luen Yang, Gurihiru. Superman Smashes the Klan (e)

In progress
Douglas Adams, John Lloyd. The Deeper Meaning of Liff
Robert Harris. Lustrum (e)
Jules Verne, tr. George Towle. Around the World in Eighty Days (e)

Non-fiction books
Kelly Bishop. The Third Gilmore Girl (e)
Ben Macintyre. Operation Mincemeat (e)
Ewen Montagu. The Man Who Never Was (e)

Abandoned
Eric Thompson. Tales of True Adventure volume 1

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

Top of the to-read pile
Robert Harris. Dictator

Fiction books
Steven Carroll. Death of a Foreign Gentleman
Uri Orlev, tr. Hillel Halkin. The Island on Bird Street
Mordecai Richler. Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
Tom Scioli. Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre (e)
Arthur Upfield. The New Shoe (e)
Naoki Urasawa, tr. John Werry. Asadora! volume 1
Naoki Urasawa, tr. John Werry. Asadora! volume 2
Jules Verne, tr. FP Walter. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (e)

In progress
Charles Dickens. Little Dorrit (e)

In hiatus
Cory Doctorow. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (e)
William Morris. The Well at the World's End (e)
Julian Rathbone. The Last English King
Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (e)

Picture books
Juliette MacIver, Sarah Davis. The Grizzled Grist Does Not Exist! (e)
Juliette MacIver, Sarah Davis. That's Not a Hippopotamus! (e)
Eve Sutton, Lynley Dodd. My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (e)
Richard Fidler. Ghost Empire

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

Top of the to-read pile
Jules Verne, tr. George Towle. Around the World in Eighty Days (e)

. At board game club, we played Cosmic Encounter, which would have gone quite differently if anybody had read the rule book first; most of us were relying on the player who'd proposed the game to remind us how it went, and it turned out his memory of the rules wasn't quite as solid as he'd thought.


. I fell behind on Natural Six back in November, when my long service leave ended and my week was suddenly much less well supplied with opportunities to watch three-hour-long episodes, and what with one thing and another the backlog got significantly larger before I started actively trying to catch up, so I've been trailing behind ever since. ( Read more... )


. Another thing I'm all caught up with is Sesska's Doctor Who reactions - just in time for her to go on a break and not be posting any more for a while.


. I read A Room with a View by E.M. Forster for the Buzzword reading challenge (this month's prompt was "with"). It took me a while to get into it, but by the halfway mark I really wanted to see how things turned out. (I've repeated often enough the saying that no novel can survive the words "I don't care what happens to these people"; the thing that kept me going through this novel is that, once I got to know her, I did care what happened to Lucy.) ( Read more... )


. I had brunch in a cafe on Saturday morning, and was hit by not one but two surcharges. One was the usual surcharge when a business chooses to pass on the fee for paying electronically, but the other - which is new since last time I ate at that cafe - was a surcharge for It's Saturday. ( Read more... )


. One of the saints' days mentioned in The Hidden Almanac this week was the feast of Saint Caliper, the patron of those who travel the dreadful roads between ebook formats.


. Several times in the past few weeks, when I've popped into the local shop to get bread or whatever, my eye has been caught by a display of large varicolored marshmallows, imported from the US. This week I succumbed to temptation and bought a bag. They tasted terrible.

. I've finished the Star Wars jigsaw puzzle, with the last several days spent filling in the black and speckled-black spaces in the image by trying pieces one at a time until I found the one that fit. I've enjoyed having a jigsaw puzzle on the go and filling bits in at odd moments, but now I've done all the puzzles I own. I'm thinking about going back to the oldest one and doing it again, since buying a new thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle every fortnight seems like a bad habit to get into when I'm trying to keep expenditure down.


. At board game club, we played Mysterium. I got both the suspect and the location first try, and then spent most of the rest of the game completely failing to interpret the clues I was given about the murder weapon: by the time I got it, there were only two potential weapons left to guess, and I still would have gone for the wrong one if the other investigators hadn't talked me out of it. All of the investigators made it to the finish line in time, some by the skin of their teeth, but when it came to the final deduction there was near-complete disagreement about the solution; only two investigators agreed on a solution, and unfortunately it turned out not to be the correct one.

Over the weekend, we also had one of our occasional sessions where a few of us get together outside the usual weekly meeting. Usually it's to play a big game that there isn't time for at the weekly meeting, but not enough people could make it on this occasion, so we just played a string of smaller games instead: Ticket to Ride: London, Sequoia, Shake that City, Star Fluxx, and Hero Realms.


. At one point this week, I found myself somewhat overwhelmed on the new media front: within a couple of days, a new season of a TV show started, two podcasts that have been quiet for a while released several hours of new content, and the new Rivers of London novel came out, in addition to my usual podcasts, the regular episodes of Jet Lag and Taskmaster and the backlog of Natural Six that I'm still trying to work through. In one area, at least, it came out to a net decrease in the number of things I was actively trying to keep up with, since the new Rivers of London novel immediately muscled aside the other two novels I'd been making some attempt to read; apart from that, though, I found myself with a lot of things to watch or listen to and not so many hours in the day in which to do it.

#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.)

Fiction books
Andrei Baltakmens. A Hangman for Ghosts (e)
Eugene Byrne. Things Unborn
Diana Wynne Jones. House of Many Ways (re-read)
Diana Wynne Jones. Howl's Moving Castle (re-read)

In progress
Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (e)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, tr. Michael Guybon. The First Circle

Abandoned
CL Moore. Jirel of Joiry (e)

Non-fiction books
Xavier Duff. Noose: True Stories of Australians Who Died at the Gallows

In progress
Isaac Asimov. A Choice of Catastrophes

Abandoned
Raymond Lamont-Brown. John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant

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

Top of the to-read pile
Ursula K Le Guin. Always Coming Home (e)

Fiction books
Tove Jansson, tr. David McDuff. The Moomins and the Great Flood
WE Johns. Biggles Forms a Syndicate
Sharon Lee. Sea Wrack and Changewind (e)
KG Lethbridge. The Rout of the Ollafubs (re-read)
Alexander McCall Smith. The Tin Dog
Andy Weir. The Martian (e) (re-read)
Oscar Wilde. Lady Windermere's Fan
Jane Yolen. Sister Light, Sister Dark (e)

In progress
Tove Jansson, tr. Elizabeth Portch. Comet in Moominland
Tim Powers. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (e)
Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (e)

Abandoned
Martin Cruz Smith. Gorky Park

Non-fiction books
Colin Duriez. The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook
Alan Loy McGinnis. The Friendship Factor

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

Top of the to-read pile
Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Fiction books
Barbara Ninde Byfield. The Man Who Made Gold (re-read)
Philip Reeve. Here Lies Arthur
Arthur Upfield. The Bachelors of Broken Hill (e)
Connie Willis. Inside Job (e)

In progress
Tim Powers. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Colin Duriez. The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook

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

Top of the to-read pile
Sebastian Faulks. Devil May Care

Long service leave is over, and I'm back at work. The first few days were busy as I caught up with what had been done in my absence, but then things settled back into the old rhythm. I briefly considered blagging some extra time off on account of respiratory interestingness, and would have if I still shared a working space with other people, but since I work from home there's not a risk of sharing infection, and I was awake and alert enough to do the work, so I decided that it would be better to be back on duty when people were expecting me to be back.

The lingering cough has continued to linger, but is mostly gone now.

I've caught up with the random monthly reading challenge, finishing off my October book (This Is Improbable) and November book (The Sword of Islam). The challenge for December is to read one of the five longest (by page count) books on the to-read list, which seems just a bit rude for the challenge that starts only one month before the final deadline. (To be fair, the rules of the challenge actually allow doing the prompts in any order, so there's nothing stopping someone choosing a book for this prompt in January and spending the entire year on it. Still.) The five books on my to-read shelf with the largest page counts are mostly omnibus editions - a complete works of Shakespeare, a complete novels of Austen, and Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume - plus one novel, The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton, and a 1981 edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

I've also started catching up with Natural Six, which I'd been keeping up with easily during long service leave but then fell a couple of episodes behind when I had the lurgy and lacked the concentration to watch three-hour-long episodes. I expect to be caught up before the next episode comes out, but then I'll be dealing with the issue of being back at work and having significantly fewer three-hour blocks of free time in a week, so I might fall behind again.

I haven't resumed doing 750 Words yet; my current plan is to write off November and start again fresh on the first day of December.

Fiction books
Rachael Allen. Harley Quinn: Ravenous (e)
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Lost World (re-read)
Colin Forbes. The Leader and the Damned
Jack London. The Scarlet Plague
Dan Moren. The Caledonian Gambit (e)
Evangeline Walton. The Children of Llyr
Evangeline Walton. Prince of Annwn
Evangeline Walton. The Song of Rhiannon

In progress
Hanan al-Shayk. Women of Sand and Myrrh
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Valley of Fear (e) (re-read)
Evangeline Walton. The Island of the Mighty

Non-fiction books in progress
Marc Abrahams. This Is Improbable
Andrew Ford. Try Whistling This: Writings on Music (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
(anthology). Tremontaine: Season One (e)