pedanther

. The wait time for the library system's copy of the second Murderbot Diaries book turned out to be three weeks instead of the estimated two-three months, which I suppose makes sense since the estimate is probably based on assuming people will have the book for the full loan period but it's quite a short book and I, for instance, had it back to the library within a few days.

Reading these is an interesting experience: normally I really don't enjoy stories where a likeable character is stuck in socially awkward situations, and Murderbot is getting stuck in socially awkward situations all the time, but -- it's like, you know how in a series where the protagonist is being put in physical peril all the time, no matter how bad it gets in a given moment you can take comfort from knowing that the author's not going to go too far? In this series, arguably Murderbot's emotional stress has at least as much dramatic weight as the physical peril, and to me it feels like it comes with the same kind of implicit promise that no matter how bad it is in the moment, it's never going to be too much.


. I don't usually start reading long fanfics until they're complete, because I don't like worrying about the possibility of being left hanging if the story is never finished (note scribbled in margin: also why never watch TV now? hmmm), but after I devoured Like Fire in Our Bones, I wanted to see what happened next so much that I started reading the sequel immediately even though it's still in progress. So far, that's paid off; new chapters are being published often, and the story is still great. It does, however, mean that the story and its characters are continuing to take up space in the part of my brain that holds information about my ongoing reading, which may be why I haven't attempted anything else this month that couldn't be read in a single sitting.


. Another thing taking up space in the mental filing cabinet of ongoing reading is Batman: The Adventures Continue, the latest comic book series spun off from Batman: The Animated Series. It's okay.


. On the plus side, possibly because the mental filing cabinet is currently optimised for serial fiction, this is the first year in ages when I've felt up to doing Lonesome October again. I always think about it, but most years lately I've felt like I was too busy or didn't have the spare mental or emotional capacity or whatever.

It works like this: Roger Zelazny's novel A Night in the Lonesome October has been described as an advent calendar for Halloween: apart from the prologue, it has 31 chapters, each set on the corresponding day in October, and readers are encouraged to space it out and read each chapter on the appropriate day. The story itself is a cheerfully macabre tale involving vampires, werewolves, indescribable Things, and other such seasonal delights. (As well as a guest appearance by an unnamed famous detective who might well be Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes, because if you're already including every other famous character from the black-and-white Universal Studios movies of the 1930s and 1940s, why not?)

1. There've been some upheavals in the United States since I last posted, what with the hurricane and then the election. I hope all of you who were in the path of either or both got through unscathed.


2. I had something timely to say about procrastination, and then I didn't get around to saying it. But recently I finally girded myself up and did a job I've spent hours actively avoiding over the course of several months. It presented no great difficulties, and was done and dusted in half an hour. (Rita Emmett has something very pithy to say in The Procrastinator's Handbook about putting more effort into putting a job off than it eventually takes to do the job; it's a common experience, apparently. It may be about time I read the Handbook again.) One thing I note is that after the first few weeks, I suspect I was largely putting it off because I'd been putting it off: every time my mind came near the thought of the unfinished job, and thus the thought of how late it was, it hurried off to think about something else instead.


3. At a recent brass band rehearsal, as a break between the big job we'd just finished and the one we're about to throw ourselves into, we spent the time pulling out old pieces we haven't played in years and trying them out again. Most of them had mysteriously become much easier to play since last time I played them.


4. For Halloween, the Toastmasters club did a themed demonstration meeting, with members of the public invited to attend, and a costume competition, and several talks about famous local haunted buildings. It was a successful night, well-attended and fun, and we even got a few new members out of it.

On Halloween night itself, I didn't do much except reading the big finale of A Night in the Lonesome October. It was a lot more dramatic than I remembered, possibly even more dramatic than it was the first time I read the book. That might have something to do with reading it late at night, if not with what night it was. (Note to self: If you start at 11.50 next time, midnight in the book will coincide with real midnight. That might be interesting.)


5. In other reading news, I seem to have neglected to mention that Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese is awesome.

1. I have four books simultaneously in progress. This is unusual for me; my normal process is to pick a book, read it until it's done, then move onto the next one. The main reason for the current fragmentation that I'm involved in two separate paced re-reads; of the other two books, one has established itself as a carry-in-pocket-and-read-at-odd-moments book, and the last is a short story anthology.

The read-at-odd-moments book is The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by Padraic Colum, the first (and so far only) book to get full marks at Read All the Newberys. It's the read-at-odd-moments book partly because it's an ebook, so I'm going to have it with me anyway when I get trapped in a doctor's waiting room or whatever, and partly because, although I'm enjoying reading it, I'm not in a particular hurry to get back to it when I'm not. It has to be admitted that, although I've not read this version before, I do have a pretty good idea how it's going to end.

I'm re-reading Tamora Pierce's Alanna series in synch with Mark Reads Tortall. Early Tamora Pierce has a somewhat clunkier prose style than I remember her later work having, and the pacing is oddly episodic. So far I'm finding them pleasant enough, but not so gripping that waiting between chapters is a trial.

I'm re-reading A Night in the Lonesome October according to internal chronology (the prologue is set at some point in September, then there are 31 chapters headed "October 1" to "October 31"). There's not a formal re-read community for this, but I know people who have done it (and even people who do it every year), and I decided to give it a try. Doing two re-reads at once may turn out to be pushing it, but if I'd waited for Mark to finish the Tortall books, he would probably have been reading something else interesting instead. Too early yet to tell if I'm going to regret having to stop at the end of each chapter.


2. Speaking of Mark, he recently started a new blog called Mark Plays, which is the same thing as Mark Reads but with video games. He started with Portal, right now he's nearing the end of Portal 2, and he's just announced that next week he's going to start on Dragon Age: Origins.

This has nothing to do with why I finished Portal 2 this month, which I'd already done before I read Mark's announcement, but the timing was good. I'm so used to the idea that everybody knows all the big plot twists in Portal (or at least their associated quoted-to-death catchphrases) that I was surprised and entertained that he was surprised and entertained by all of them. He is continuing to be caught off-guard by every plot twist in Portal 2, including the one that gives "Chapter Four: The Surprise" its title, which I would have sworn nobody would have actually been surprised by. But then Mark never sees any plot twist coming. It's a big part of his blogs' appeal.


3. I have finished my first-pass read-through of I Could Do Anything, If I Only Knew What It Was; it's only taken me nine months. (Finishing it at all is a victory; if I didn't have procrastination issues, I probably wouldn't have been reading it in the first place.) The book is now full of bookmarks marking the bits I could benefit from going back over in more detail, and actually doing the exercises instead of just skimming past them. (Reading Chapter Nine made me sad; it was exactly what I needed ten years ago. Though whether I'd have heeded it if I'd had it is another question...)


4. Did we really just blow through the entire year's complement of Doctor Who episodes in a single month? Apparently we did. Huh.


5. If you are interested in one or more of the following: Muppets, Doctor Who, The Avengers (the movie with Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. and some other dudes in it, not any of the other things with that title), The Hunger Games, and/or Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom, this video has something for you.

Fiction books
David Gemmell. Legend
Barbara Hambly. Stranger at the Wedding (re-read)
Josephine Tey. The Franchise Affair (re-read)

In progress
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace

Non-fiction books
Linda Gale. Discover What You're Best At

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

Top of the to-read pile
Agatha Christie. The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite

Earlier this month I read a novel by S. M. Stirling in which the heroes get around on dinosaur-back, controlling the dinosaurs by means of electrodes planted in their brains to make them happy when they go where the controller wants them to go and unhappy when they try to go somewhere the controller doesn't want them to go. I admit it's kind of a cool concept, but I felt a bit uncomfortable that none of the characters seemed at all worried about the ethical considerations.

Today, I read a novel by Roger Zelazny, twenty-some years older, in which there is incidentally a character who rides a dinosaur around in a similar fashion - and he gets called on it, by somebody who isn't impressed by the justifications he offers (which are much the same as those tendered in Stirling's novel).

It wasn't the only reason I enjoyed the Zelazny much more than the Stirling, but it was definitely appreciated.

Fiction books
(anthology). Batman Black and White volume 2
Jane Austen. Mansfield Park
Chris Boucher. Doctor Who: Match of the Day
Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio. Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones (reread)
Neil Gaiman, various collaborators. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? (and other stories)
Rudyard Kipling. Soldiers Three
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Double Vision
Alan Moore, Zander Cannon, Gene Ha. Top 10 volume 1
Peter O'Donnell. The Silver Mistress
Lance Parkin. Doctor Who: The Eyeless
Michael Salmon. The Pirate Who Wouldn't Wash (reread)

Non-fiction books
(none)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Stephen Dando-Collins. Caesar's Legion