pedanther

#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.

Fiction books
Clifford D Simak. The Visitors

In progress
Sharon Lee. Sea Wrack and Changewind (e)
Tim Powers. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (e)

Abandoned
Sebastian Faulks. Devil May Care
Patrick Süskind. Perfume

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
Jane Yolen. Sister Light, Sister Dark (e)

The weather was very hot, and the effects could be felt even indoors with the air conditioner cranked up.

I'm working my way through Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers, and, on the days where the heat got to me and I didn't have the mental presence for Powers, reading a few entries from The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook.

At board game club, I played Psycho Killer, Mayan Curse, and Waking Shards.

I came up with a new motivational tool for my cardio exercise this week. I've been keeping track on a paper calendar of which days I did some kind of cardio exercise, and ticking off weeks where I reached a target number of days, but it occurred to me that if I kept track in a computer spreadsheet instead, I could get it to automatically calculate not just each calendar week but a running total for any given seven-day period, and generate a coloured strip that changed from red to orange to green to show how well I was doing at hitting the target. One of the unexpected effects was that, because of the way I set up the coloured strip, it doesn't just show the past but also a vision of the future, with the seven-day period following today lit up in the colour it would remain if I didn't do any further exercise in that period. Marking off a day makes the entire following week shift up in colour in a way that's very satisfying. It's too soon to tell if it's leading to me exercising more consistently, but it feels like it is.

I did start playing XCOM 2 again, beginning a fresh game from the beginning. It's been going a lot better; I'm still failing missions occasionally, but it's been pretty apparent each time what went wrong and usually it's only taken a second attempt to get back on track. (The big recurring problem, which has been one of my faults ever since I first started playing XCOM and the source of a lot of strife that I've been prone to blame on the RNG, is a tendency to be impatient even in untimed missions and push on with unnecessary haste - which is a particular problem when, as it often does, it results in being faced with a fresh wave of enemies just when one has used one's last action point for the turn.) I've also been getting more resilient in the face of failure: there have been missions that have gone so badly that the me of a month ago would have given up entirely, but I've pushed on and turned them into successes; and there have been times when a mission did end up going badly, or even failing, and I've kept the result and things have nevertheless turned out well on the larger strategic level.

. The reading challenge for April was a book with "Little" or "Big" in the title. I had intended to combine it with my Chandler reading and use The Little Sister, but that's the one Chandler novel I don't own a copy of and I put off going to the library too long, so when I did I found that the library's one copy was out and there wasn't enough month left to wait for it.

So instead I grabbed the first available thing with a suitable title out of my bookmarks on Overdrive, which turned out to be A Little More, a collection of poems and essays by the Tasmanian writer Margaret Scott. I remember her recurring guest appearances on Good News Week (translation for British readers: more or less the Australian version of Have I Got News For You), where she showed a wicked sense of humour hiding within a demure little old lady, but didn't know much about her actual writing. I'm enjoying getting acquainted with it.

The challenge for May is a book with a direction in the title.


. While I was putting off looking for The Little Sister, I read Stolen Skies, the new third novel of Tim Powers's current contemporary fantasy series. I have mixed feelings about it. The premise is intriguing, but three books is the longest he's ever stuck with one setting and set of protagonists, and I'm not convinced it's working; some of the situations are starting to get repetitive, and having generic government agencies as the antagonists is damping down his flair for memorable villains. Part of me wishes that he'd stopped at book two, which ended in a way that would have worked as a satisfying conclusion, and done this premise with a new set of characters. At the same time, since book three does exist, I find myself hoping that he has a fourth book planned; that's partly because the end of book three doesn't work as a satisfying end to the series, and partly because I remember that I wasn't so keen on book one until book two came out and showed where things were going, and I'm hoping he'll repeat the trick with books three and four.


. I also read Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White this month, because I saw it when I was in the library and remembered that I'd been meaning to read it some time. I now understand completely why everyone I know who's read it is so impressed with Marian Halcombe.


. I've been getting back into playing Invisible, Inc lately, and trying to get the hang of the Expert Plus difficulty setting, which is required for three of the four achievements I still hadn't ticked off. Expert Plus difficulty, apart from various incremental tweaks like having more guards in each level, requires some mental rewiring because it takes away one of the key tools available in the lower difficulties. In the lower difficulties, if you can see a part of the room you can see if it's visible to a guard or security camera, but in Expert Plus difficulty you have to be able to see the guard or camera to be able to determine which parts of the room they can see; which is more realistic, but makes entering a new room a much dicier proposition requiring much peering around of corners.


. I mentioned a while back that I've been watching the reaction channel Marie-Clare's World as Marie-Clare works her way through Doctor Who. Back when I last mentioned it, I believe, she was still mostly relying on physical video media, but since then she's switched to streaming it on Britbox. One of the ways this makes a difference is that she's made a habit of avoiding learning the story titles in advance, since now she can just hit the "next episode" button without needing to know what the next episode is called, and also covers her eyes when the title comes up at the beginning of the first episode of each story. That way she gets to watch each story even more spoiler-free than even most of the people who watched it when it first aired. Occasionally this has dramatic results, such as when she recently watched "The Five Doctors" with absolutely no idea of what she was getting into and got increasingly emotional as it became apparent what was happening.

Fiction books
Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep (re-read)
Neil Gaiman, Chris Riddell. The Sleeper and the Spindle
Kim Newman. Something More Than Night (e)
Catherynne M Valente. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

In progress
Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist (e)
Peter Høeg, tr. F David. Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
Jason Pitre. Sig: City of Blades

Non-fiction books in progress
David Attenborough. Zoo Quest for a Dragon

Abandoned
Matt Parker. Humble Pi (due back at the library)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Tim Powers. Stolen Skies (e)

Fiction books
(anthology). Batman Black and White, volume 1 (re-read)
Lois McMaster Bujold. Barrayar (e) (re-read)
Lois McMaster Bujold. Penric's Progress (e)
Lois McMaster Bujold. Shards of Honor (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Accepting the Lance (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Alliance of Equals (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Dragon in Exile (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. The Gathering Edge (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Neogenesis (e) (re-read)
RA MacAvoy. Tea with the Black Dragon (re-read)
Tim Powers. Medusa's Web (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Christopher Lascelles. Pontifex Maximus (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
(anthology). Batman Black and White, volume 2

Fiction books
Tina Jones. The Thing About Weddings
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Conflict of Honors (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Local Custom (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Mouse and Dragon (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Scout's Progress (e) (re-read)
Tim Powers. Hide Me Among the Graves (e)
David Whitaker. Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (audio book) (re-read)

In progress
Grant Allen. An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay (e)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Fledgling (e) (re-read)
Terry Pratchett. Snuff (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Christopher Lascelles. Pontifex Maximus (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Agent of Change

Fiction books
(none completed)

In progress
Terry Pratchett. Unseen Academicals (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
(anthology). Playboys of the Western World

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

Top of the to-read pile
PC Hodgell. By Demons Possessed

Fiction books
James Goss. Now We Are Six Hundred

In progress
Terry Pratchett. Night Watch (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Grant Morrison. Supergods
Jack Plotnick. New Thoughts for Actors (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Tim Powers. The Stress of Her Regard

1. Monument Valley 2 has just come out for Android devices (I think it's been out on iDevices for a while). Where the first game had a girl named Ida exploring the mysterious valley where geometry is more of a guideline than an actual rule, the second game has a woman named Ro and her daughter. The player only has direct control of Ro, with her daughter automatically moving to follow her; when the valley's whimsical geography separates them (which of course it repeatedly does), the player must not only figure out what path Ro needs to take to get to the exit but also what actions Ro must take to non-verbally nudge her child in the right direction.

In the Monument Valley tradition of never outright saying what's going on, the game doesn't (in my experience so far) say what connection there is between Ro and Ida, or whether this is a sequel or a prequel. It has not escaped my attention that the ghostly figure who occasionally appears to give Ro cryptic advice looks a bit like Ida -- but then again, when Ro puts her official hat on, she looks a bit like the ghostly figure who would occasionally appear to give Ida cryptic advice...


2. Another game I've been playing a fair bit lately is Crypt of the NecroDancer, in which you move around a procedurally-generated dungeon collecting treasures and whacking monsters -- and get a bonus if you do it all in time with the beat of the background music. I'd heard a lot about it, so I picked it up recently when it was going cheap in Steam's Halloween sale. I wasn't sure about it at first, but I think I'm getting the hang of it now.


3. Also out this month, Baen Books is publishing Down and Out in Purgatory, a collection of short fiction by Tim Powers, some of which has previously only been available in pricey limited edition chapbooks (or, if you happened to be paying attention at the right time, as somewhat less pricey limited availability ebooks). Of the stories in the collection that I have had a chance to read previously, I have particularly liked the title story, which is like a more compact version of one of his contemporary fantasy novels (the plot involves a man on a quest for revenge who decides he won't be put off when his target inconveniently dies before he can be killed); "Nobody's Home", a prequel to The Anubis Gates featuring that novel's main female character; and "The Way Down the Hill", a disconcerting story that might be a sequel to The Anubis Gates if you squint.


4. With summer coming in, I've started going to the pool of a morning to swim laps. It's going pretty well so far, and I might make it my main form of regular exercise in place of going to the gym. The gym, I've found, tends to set off my insecurities -- am I doing the right exercises? am I doing the exercises right? -- but swimming from one end of the pool to the other repeatedly is a lot more straightforward and I find it tends rather to calm me down.


5. Things I am not doing this month include Nanowrimo (doesn't really work with the way I write, to the extent that I have one), Yuletide (I don't mind offering to write for people, but I can never think of anything to ask for), and the ficlets I offered to write for that AU meme over a month ago (plain and simple procrastination, no excuse).