pedanther

. After I graduated from university, I took a job in a field that vaguely interested me in order to put some money away while I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life. It's a bit worrying that I'm now going on long service leave from the same job and I still haven't figured out what I really want to do.

On the bright side, long service leave is long service leave.


. For June, the themed reading challenge offered a choice of "a book about the ocean, maritime life, coasts, or something sea-related; bonus if it’s also fishy in some way" or "a book about things/people/places/galaxies being fixed and/or broken". For my official selection, I ultimately settled on Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee (a book about people and galaxies being fixed and broken, not necessarily in that order), but before that I'd also considered trying to satisfy the first theme with several books that kinda-sorta fit, like Jules Verne's A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (a significant chunk features the ocean, maritime life, coasts, etc., and the justifying science is definitely fishy).


. For July, the theme was much broader: a book obtained second-hand, bought from an independent bookshop, or borrowed from the library. I had plenty of choices, I just needed to decide whether I wanted to hold myself to the July book being one that I read after the June book. While I was thinking about it, I spotted Arthur Upfield's An Author Bites the Dust on the to-read shelf and spontaneously decided to read it, and since it's a book I obtained second-hand from a library sale it's eminently suitable for the theme.


. The random book selection for July came from "books in the genres of Feminism and Science Fiction". It turns out I have no books in my TBR that have both genre labels, which isn't a reflection of its contents (if nothing else, I know there's Humble Bundle of Nebula winners in there that includes several classics of feminist SF), but rather a reflection of the fact that StoryGraph treats "Feminism" as a non-fiction subject label and doesn't apply it to fiction works. I tried again with the subset of my TBR that was labelled "Feminism" or "Science Fiction", and came up with short story collection I didn't like the look of, but the book next to it was The Female Man, from the aforementioned Humble Bundle, so I'm going to go with that instead.


. Part of the reason I'm running a month behind on the monthly reading challenges is that I've been buddy-reading a chunky omnibus of "Classic Tales of Science Fiction", which meant I had to read that at a pace which matched my reading buddy and fit any other reading in around it. That's "have been" and "had to", past tense, because my reading buddy has hit their limit on old-timey sexism and racism and decided that if this is the best the past can do, the past can keep it, and has gone off to read something else more recent and more enjoyable instead. I'm going to keep plugging away at the omnibus, because I don't like leaving a book unfinished and in my unwise youth I acquired a tolerance for old-timey bullshit and there are a few things in there that I do genuinely want to read at least once, but since it's just me now I'm going to be doing it at my own pace and reading other things in between.

. 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.