pedanther

. I went to the cinema for the first time in months, to see a new Australian film called Kid Snow, which was filmed on location in Western Australia and has a few people I know in the crowd scenes. (I also know some of the locations, and I'm pretty sure I spotted a sequence where the characters leave a small country town, drive all day, and arrive in a new small country town, in which both small country towns are played by the same somewhat larger country town, a few blocks apart.) The plot is the kind of thing that sounds very familiar if you try to explain it in a single sentence, and some of the dialogue is a bit on the nose, but the main performances are strong (including the tagalong kid character, who is genuinely charming and not irritating except when the story means him to be). Some of the supporting performances, too; at least two of the supporting characters are played by actors who have separately starred in other Australian productions that I've been meaning to get around to (one of which, Mystery Road: Origins, was filmed on location in the same part of Western Australia and has more familiar faces in it).


. Last weekend was a long weekend in WA, which as far as the local boardgaming club was concerned meant an opportunity to break out some of the longer board games that we don't get to play in our weekly evening sessions. Over the weekend, we played several rounds of Pandemic Legacy (which started well and then got out of hand repeatedly as additional constraints began appearing), Fury of Dracula (with unintentionally appropriate timing; in the chronology of Dracula this week in September is when the heroes stop playing catch-up and start actively hunting vampires), and a six-player game of Agricola, among other shorter games.


. I was right, I did end up picking Cobra for the September random book challenge. This involved shamelessly bending the instructions for selecting the book, but I've done that a few times already with this challenge. I feel like it's the kind of challenge where the aim is ultimately to break decision paralysis and read a book, and as long as that goal is achieved it doesn't really matter if you follow the instructions to the letter. I wouldn't be so cavalier with a reading challenge where the book selection mattered in itself, like the challenge I've seen going around where the aim is to read one book originating from each nation.


. Apart from the two monthly reading challenges I'm doing, I'm also doing another less structured one that's just a long list of varied prompts like "a book with a hotel on the cover" or "a book with a title that sounds like exercise". I haven't been mentioning it because the range of prompts is so broad that I can usually find something to check off for every book I read, so I've been tending to treat it as an afterthought and not an aid to book selection. However, since I was caught up on both the monthly challenges with some time left in September, I decided to look at the list of unfinished prompts and see if it would suggest something to read next. My eye was caught by "a book with the word 'secret' in the title", since that seemed like an easy one to match against my to-read list on StoryGraph -- and it was even easier than anticipated, because when I went to the to-read page the very first book listed, in the section at the top of the page for high-priority books, was The Mountains Have a Secret, the next novel in the Bony series. So I borrowed that from the library and read it. Then I immediately went on to read the following book, The Widows of Broome, because the ebook edition has a really ugly cover that I hate looking at and didn't want lurking at the top of my to-read page for however long it would otherwise have taken me to get around to it.


. Somebody in a book-related online group posted a picture of their recent book acquisitions, which included Prez: Setting a Dangerous President. This briefly gave me hope that Prez had somehow been revived without me hearing about it, but when I looked it up it turned out it was just a new edition of the first six issues with a different subtitle and a new bonus story.

The modern incarnation of Prez, written by Mark Russell with art by Ben Caldwell, ran for 6 issues around nine years ago, and then was cancelled just as it was really getting going. I wasn't a huge fan, but it had its moments, and Russell was clearly going somewhere with it and I would have liked to have seen where that was. Of the various questions left unanswered when the series was cancelled, the one that increasingly haunts me as time goes on is the place in the story of comic relief and occasional deus ex machina Fred Wayne, a quirky reclusive multi-billionaire who drops into the story from time to time to give events a nudge, and somehow avoids being one of the series' villains despite being a multi-billionaire with enough money and influence to bend democracy to his whim, whose reputation canonically rests on taking credit for the unrecognised work of more creatively gifted employees. (The bit about him making his first fortune from generative AI that's started crowding human writers out of the market hasn't aged well, either.) It might not bother me so much if there weren't occasional moments that might have been hints that Russell knew what he was doing and that what he was doing was setting Fred up to be an antagonist later on -- I even have a left-field theory, based partly on things that happened in the original 1970s incarnation of Prez that aren't in evidence in the six published issue of the reboot, that he might have been intended as the ultimate villain of the series. Or I could be reading too much into it, and Russell just wanted a convenient deus ex machina and didn't think too hard about the implications. We don't know, and what bothers me is that there is, now, no way we can ever know for certain.

. 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.

. Last month at gaming group I played Citadels and Codenames: Pictures.


. We have had two more sessions of the roleplaying campaign, and are well launched on an adventure exploring mysterious tunnels.


. Rehearsals have begun for Hello Dolly!. I'm playing the role that was played by Walter Matthau in the movie, which doesn't surprise me. I was either going to be Walter Matthau or Michael Crawford, and I'm more of a Walter Matthau (and our other main male lead who does musicals is more of a Michael Crawford).


. I wanted a mental palate cleanser after the disappointing end of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, so I went back to the novels that were the Star Wars sequels before Lucasfilm decided to make more movies. I read Aaron Allston's X-Wing novels for the first time, and then re-read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy that launched the novel series, for the first time since... come to think of it, since before the prequel trilogy movies came out (more on that in a moment). The X-Wing novels were interesting because I could feel them getting more self-assured and better written as they went along; I wasn't entirely sure about them after the first one, but by the end of the second one I was solidly hooked. The Thrawn trilogy stands up very well after nearly thirty years, although there's a major plot point involving the Clone Wars that conspicuously suffers from ol' George having changed his mind later about Star Wars prehistory. After I finished re-reading the Thrawn trilogy, I thought about going on and reading the duology Zahn wrote later as a sequel to it, but it occurred to me that if I was disappointed by it I was going to be back where I started, and the trilogy ended in a satisfying place, so I decided to leave it at that.


. I don't have an opinion on how the latest season of Doctor Who ended. I lost enthusiasm somewhere around the third episode, so I haven't seen anything past that. I've heard bits here and there, and none of it has reacquired my interest; there's a limit to how much pull even an intriguing story hook can exert if you don't trust the writer to take you somewhere worth the journey.

Fiction books
Charlie Jane Anders. The City in the Middle of the Night (e)
Alan Garner. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
Randall Garrett. Too Many Magicians (e) (re-read)
Terry Pratchett. Making Money (e) (re-read)

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

In hiatus
V Anton Spraul. Think Like a Programmer (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Rebecca Roanhorse. Trail of Lightning

Fiction books
Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Mr Quin
Agatha Christie. Three-Act Tragedy
James Clavell. The Children's Story
Stephen Jeffreys. The Convict's Opera

In progress
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace

Non-fiction books
(none)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Agatha Christie. "The Love Detectives"