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[personal profile] penaltywaltz posting in [community profile] wipbigbang
Dates for most participants run from September 8th to November 30th. Emergency dates run from December 1st to December 31st and are not listed on this form. Please list your date preferences in order of most wanted to least wanted. If you have been given permission by a mod to claim an emergency date, list the emergency date you want and a second and third emergency date, just in case, then leave a note you have mod permission in the notes.

This round we'll be using a new form so that everyone can sign up despite the dates being here on Dreamwidth. If you are planning on posting in December you still must fill out the form, as there's an agreement all participants must agree to that they will post their project by December 31st or drop before that date, or else they will be banned from participation for a round. I will update on a daily basis. If all three or your date choices are taken a mod will email you with other potential dates. Please check this page to verify you got one of your date choices!

Posting Claims Sign-Up Form Is Up At https://forms.gle/8bK7B4WHRiB1CTb28


Dates )

Stone & Sky

Aug. 22nd, 2025 10:22 pm
hebethen: (books)
[personal profile] hebethen posting in [community profile] fffriday
Just popping in to mention that the latest Rivers of London entry, Stone & Sky, features our talented young apprentice Abigail as a co-narrator, and she meets a very intriguing huntress while she's tagged along on a Scottish investigation. It's a very "ah, youth" kind of summer romance for sure, but I enjoyed Abigail's POV on it a great deal, not to mention the particular ways that it was tinged by their involvements in the demimonde!
penaltywaltz: (I'm A Mod)
[personal profile] penaltywaltz posting in [community profile] wipbigbang
As we still have a number of unclaimed WIPs, we'll be leaving our pinch-hitter signups open until August 31st (the Dreamwidth pages have been updated but the summary pages and form links will remain the same). After that, if there are WIPs still left unclaimed, we're afraid we cannot provide art or fics for those WIPs.

We understand that this may be a disappointment for these authors and artists. Unfortunately, the unexpected growth of the event this year in conjunction with the lack of available pinch hitters has made it impossible for us to guarantee art/fic for all the participants who signed up for claims. We hope this event nonetheless continues to help you finish your WIPs.

Me-and-media update

Aug. 23rd, 2025 10:15 am
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
Previous poll review
In the Obsessions poll, 9.8% of respondents have one current active fandom, 31.4% have a couple, 25.5% have a handful, and 15.7% have none at the moment. The most common response was "it's complicated" with 37.3%. Seven point eight percent have blorbos but no fandom.

In ticky-boxes, goth butterflies and punk moths came second to hugs, 56.9% to 76.5%. Dream parkour came third with 47.1%. Thank you for your votes! <3

Reading
Audio: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, read by Candida Gubbins -- I'm a third of the way through this delightful thirty-hour tour of the Renaissance. No idea how much is lodging in my brain (versus in-one-ear-and-out-the-other-ing), but I'm getting bits here and there. Like, for example, the Renaissance framing of "grace" as heavenly political capital. And theology as it relates to Hamlet. The general tone is very fun. In progress.

Audio: Stone and Sky (Rivers of London) by Ben Aaronovich, read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Shvorne Marks. Having settled Peter into married life, Aaronovich is porting all the relationship stuff over to Abigail. I guess that makes sense. (The case isn't coming together for me, but that might be because I keep falling asleep while we're listening.) In progress.

Library book: A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall. Just a few chapters. Historical romance, and I'm pretty sure all the characters are speaking/behaving anachronistically, but I'm looking forward to the reveal.
Spoiler. The lady in the title is trans and was best friends with the duke before she went MIA at war and transitioned; he thinks she died, and he's now grieving his friend.
In progress.

Guardian by priest. We've finished the main story, just one short story extra to go. Wow, this has been a ride!

Kdramas/Cdramas
Still rewatching Nothing But Love (AKA Nothing But You), ahhh, I love them so much.

I've also started My Girlfriend is the Man, a Kdrama about a woman with a genetic predisposition to sudden-onset sex swap, who does indeed wake up in a male body. I only just finished episode 1, so I don't know yet how well they're going to handle it, but I'm fairly sure the narrative pressure on the boyfriend is to accept that his girlfriend is still his girlfriend, whatever body she's currently wearing. No idea where they'll take it after that.

Pru and I finished Sell Your Haunted House this week. We're planning to start Love Scout next (rewatch for me), unless I can think of something good (and Korean) with murders/ghosts/cases of the week. Hmm, maybe I should give Mystic Pop-Up Bar one more try... I bounced off it before, but I know several people who loved it.

Other TV
Cut for length. )

Guardian/Fandom
It's the last weekend of the Guardian novel scheduled readalong, and then we're heading into a slo-mo rewatch of the drama (half an episode per week). If you've been Guardian-curious or thinking of revisiting the show, now's your chance. *lures*

[community profile] fan_writers is going so well. Love to see so much conversation and interaction over there! If you have thoughts on writing, please feel free to post to the comm, either directly or with a link!

Audio entertainment
Letters from an American (lots, including a great half-hour interview with Gavin Newsom). Half an episode of Sinica, Writing Excuses, a couple of episodes of You Can Learn Chinese, some Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, and a couple of episodes of A Life Indigenous.

Plugged-in life
The last few days, I've been experimenting with not spending every waking non-keyboard moment listening to audiobooks and podcasts. I was kind of hoping some silence and/or music would wake up my creative brain, and then ideas would come spilling out my fingertips. So far, it's just created an opening for brain weasels. Pbthpbthpbhtpbhpth!

Writing/making things
I spent Monday morning writing a political submission and then finished my meta post about story middles. I spent Tuesday's writers' hour writing most of this. I am working on a fic, but it's slow going. It's veered into one of my DNWs (D/s). I mean, you know how sometimes you can write your own DNWs, because you instinctively avoid the aspects that actively squick you? That part is working. It's just that neither the Shen Wei in my head nor I have any idea what we're doing, lol. Playin' it by ear. *rattles keyboard*

I threw something verrrry last minute together for the [community profile] fan_flashworks Twinkle challenge. No idea if that worked.

Life/health/mental state things
I'm okay, just a bit disconnected. The weather's been so cold I want to stay home all the time. I really hate everything our government is doing (not on the same scale as the US, but terrible in its own libertarian way), so by day I'm a mild manner fangirl, but at night I wake up periodically to scrawl angry letters to politicians and/or newspaper editors in my notebook. I should send more of these; I'm always held back by feeling like I don't know enough and need to fact check.

Food
I made two small batches of vegetable dumplings -- Moosewood's sweet potato recipe, and mushroom & coriander adapted from the Omnivore's Cookbook's chicken recipe. I had to use my dumpling press because of my arms, but that worked okay.

Recently made: enchiladas, crispy orange beef (consistency would have been better if I hadn't shoehorned a ton of vege in there too), plus experimenting with crispy tofu in various dishes. A lot of the sauces make the tofu go slimy, but it's so good when they don't.

Goals
My goal for this year is to make goals for next year.

Good things
Guardian stuff -- the readalong, Wishlist!!, the upcoming rewatch, yay! I'm hoping the latter two will combine to get me writing again. Playing with paint pens (drawing butterflies like a six year-old). Sunshine. Cat. Boy. Assimilating my little-worn 'tidy' clothes into my everyday wardrobe so I don't have to shop.

Poll #33518 Plaguefic
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26


Covid in fiction

View Answers

I'm okay reading fiction about Covid and related subjects
13 (50.0%)

I'm okay reading fiction that includes mentions of Covid
15 (57.7%)

There are aspects of the pandemic I avoid
7 (26.9%)

I like it when characters mask sometimes
10 (38.5%)

I prefer my reading matter to avoid the subject entirely
6 (23.1%)

It's better in profic / a novel
2 (7.7%)

It's better in fanfic
1 (3.8%)

other
0 (0.0%)

I don't read much atm
5 (19.2%)

ticky-box of gossimer and thistledown
9 (34.6%)

ticky-box of steel girders
8 (30.8%)

ticky-box of half a bottle of flat champagne
3 (11.5%)

ticky-box of battery acid and protest signs
11 (42.3%)

ticky-box of three wallabies at a 1970s disco
14 (53.8%)

ticky-box full of hugs
17 (65.4%)

Well, you can't tell much from faces

Aug. 22nd, 2025 03:10 pm
sovay: (Jeff Hartnett)
[personal profile] sovay
It is no discredit to a warhorse of crime fiction like The Gaunt Stranger (1938) that its ending surprised me the most Doylistically. From my twenty-first-century vantage, it may be even more delightful than it would have played at the time.

My chances of coming to it unspoiled then, of course, would have been basically nil. It was the third screen and second sound version of its popular source material, the 1925 Edgar Wallace novel of the same name which had been definitively rewritten following its smash stage run as The Ringer (1926), so called after the alias of its central figure, the elusive master of disguise whose legal identity of Henry Arthur Milton has never helped Scotland Yard get a fix on his movements, his intentions, or his face. "Don't they call him the Ringer because he rings the changes on himself? Why, in Deptford they say he can even change the color of his eyes." What they've said for two years at the Yard is that he died trying to outswim a bullet in Sydney Harbour, but recently his reputation has disconcertingly resurfaced in the Karswell-like card accompanying the delivery of a wreath of lilies to a caddish crook of a London lawyer: "R.I.P. To the Memory of Maurice Meister, who will depart this life on the seventeenth of November. —'The Ringer.'" Copycat or resurrection, the threat has to be taken seriously. The smooth solicitor who doubles as an informer and a notoriously uncaught fence has on his hands, too, the suicide of the previous in his string of pretty secretaries, the Ringer's own sister. The forty-eight-hour deadline runs out on the anniversary of her death. Even if it's just some local villain trading on the scandal to raise a scare, the authorities can't take the chance of not scrambling round-the-clock protection for the victim-elect, devoting their slim margin for error to trying to outthink an adversary they have only the sketchiest, most contradictory clues toward, pointing as much to a runaround as to the unenviable prospect of the real, shape-shifting Ringer, who like all the best phantoms could be standing quietly at the elbow of the law all the while. "King Street! He'd walk on Regent Street. If he felt that way, he'd come right here to Scotland Yard and never turn a hair."

Properly a thriller rather than a fair-play detective story, The Gaunt Stranger has less of a plot than a mixed assortment of red herrings to be strewn liberally whenever the audience is in danger of guessing right; the tight cast renders it sort of the cop-shop equivalent of a country house mystery while the convolutions build to the point of comedy even as the clock ticks down to a dead serious stop. Christie-like, it has an excuse for its slip-sliding tone. Decent, dedicated, even a bit of an underdog with this case landed in his lap by divisional inconvenience, Detective Inspector Alan Wembury (Patrick Barr) sums up the problem with it: "If the Ringer does bump Meister off, he'll be doing a public service." The most extra-diegetically law-abiding viewer may see his point. With his silken sadist's voice and his smile folded like a knife, Meister (Wilfred Lawson) is the kind of bounder of the first water who even in nerve-racked protective custody, distracting himself from the pendulum slice of the hours with stiff drinks and gramophone records of Wagner, still finds time to toy with the well-bred, hard-up siblings of Mary and Johnny Lenley (Patricia Roc and Peter Croft), cultivating the one as his grateful secretary in brazen reprise of his old tricks and maneuvering the other into blowing his ticket of leave before he can talk his sister out of the trap. "Have you ever seen a weasel being kind to a rabbit?" Offered a year's remission on his sentence if he helps the police out, sarkily skittish second-story man Sam Hackett (Sonnie Hale) wants no part of this farrago of arch-criminals and threats from beyond the grave just because he once happened to share digs with the Ringer and drew the short straw of catching a more or less unobstructed view of the man; it accords him the dubious honor of the best lead on the case and he makes sure to state for the record as he resigns himself to the role, "Give my kindest regards to the Ringer and tell him I highly recommend rat poison." The audience might as well sit back and genre-savvily enjoy the ride. Should we trust the credentials of the glowering DI Bliss (John Longden), freshly returned from Australia on the supposed track of the Ringer's widow and grown such a mustache in his five years abroad that even his former collar doesn't recognize him until he's flashed his badge? Since the order for the funereal flowers was cabled from her stateroom aboard the liner Baronia, should we presume that Cora Ann Milton (Louise Henry) smuggled her living husband into the country or that she's the real mastermind of the plot against Meister, effectively impersonating her dead man to avenge his sister? The entrance she makes at the Flanders Lane station is as striking as her dark, insouciant looks or her American accent, too shrewd to be written off as a mere moll; stepping out of the mirror-door that leads so conveniently for a receiver of stolen goods down to the brick-arched river, she gives the locked-in lawyer the shock of a revenger's ghost herself. "Don't worry. I'm alone." Not only because one of his cherished classical records has played instead an ominous bulletin from the Ringer—a cold theatrical voice, as impossible to trace as greasepaint—the proceedings begin to take on a haunted-house quality, not unbefitting a film whose most important character heading into the home stretch is still Schrödinger's dead. At 71 minutes and fluttering out fast, rest assured it will not sober up too much for break-ins, fake-outs, or the dry commentary of Dr. Anthony Lomond (Alexander Knox), the division's irreplaceably cantankerous amateur criminologist who was introduced waving off a request for his medical opinion with the time-honored "Och, Wembury, I'm not a doctor, I'm a police surgeon. Call me in when he's been murdered." Grey-spry, he has a catlike habit of tucking his feet up on unexpected furniture, briar-smoking like a fumarole. Tragedy tomorrow, eccentricity tonight.

You're the only doctor I've met who puts his faith in patent medicines. )

Despite its programmer values, The Gaunt Stranger has a quirkily important pedigree: in the clever titles of theatrical posters caught in a passing constable's torch-flash, I spotted Sidney Gilliat as the author of the fleetly tangled screenplay and Ronald Neame as the DP who made more out of low light than the studio sets, but did not realize until after the fact that it was the very first film produced at Ealing under the auspices of Michael Balcon. I had known it was the first screen credit of Alex Knox. I don't know what about his face made casting directors want to stick a mustache and at least ten years' worth of stage grey on it, but he was playing middle-aged again when he reappeared for Ealing in a small, astringent, bookkeeperly role in the next year's Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), now regarded thanks to its plot of a small traditional brewery wilily outwitting its heavier-weight corporate competitor as the forerunner of the classic post-war Ealing comedies. By 1940 he had been collected by Hollywood from Broadway and I don't see how not to wonder if under less transatlantic circumstances he might have continued with Ealing into the '40's and their splendidly weird array of wartime films. Or pulled a John Clements and stuck for most of his life to the stage: I have been calling him a shape-changer because it was obviously one of his gifts and his inclination—and in hindsight, something of a joke on this movie—but it makes it very difficult to guess seriously where he could have ended up. In any case, the existence in this timeline of The Gaunt Stranger on out-of-print Region 2 DVD makes me all the more grateful that someone just stuck it up on Dailymotion. It's a modest B-film, not a mislaid gem, but any number of movies of that class have infinitely improved my life. The title pertains in no way to the action. "And don't be so darned sure there's nothing to be afraid of at Scotland Yard." This shadow brought to you by my pretty backers at Patreon.

Book Review: The Golden Compass

Aug. 22nd, 2025 01:12 pm
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
[personal profile] littlerhymes and I have for years tossed around the possibility of a buddy reread of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which I have resisted because I hated The Amber Spyglass so much. However, I finally cracked and we reread The Golden Compass, and it turns out that it’s just as flawless as I remembered it. How? How is it so good? Nothing should be ALLOWED to be this good, particularly not something that is going to go on to have disappointing sequels.

First of all, the worldbuilding is just so good. The daemons are a stroke of genius: what child DOESN’T want to have an adorable companion animal who is with you at all times and adores you and also changes shape until you reach puberty, at which point it will assume a shape that reveals your True Nature? And of course we all imagine having cool daemons who are cats or foxes or hawks or whatnot, not boring dog daemons like servants have.

(Pullman: not a dog person.)

But the daemons are only one part of Pullman’s deliciously crafted world. Over the course of the story Lyra moves through a variety of different environments, the stately masculine luxury of Jordan College in Oxford and the homey gyptians boats and the wildness of the North, and they all feel real and well-developed and lived in, with little hints thrown in about life in other parts of the world (like Lee Scoresby’s Texas) that make you feel that here indeed there is a whole world that extends in all directions, and Lyra is just moving through a small part of it.

Also, the plot moves along at a good clip. Pullman accomplishes all this rich, lush worldbuilding so economically, because we’re only ever spending a few chapters in one place before we rush on. I remember the Jordan College section going on forever! But it’s just the first four chapters or so, and then Mrs. Coulter whisks Lyra off into high society, another section that I remember lasting forever (in a good way, I should add; I remember these sections lasting forever because I never wanted them to end), but it’s only a couple of chapters before Lyra’s on the run, having realized that Mrs. Coulter is the head of the dreaded Gobblers who have been kidnapping children for who knows what nefarious end?

And from that point on, the action never lets up. She’s on the gyptian boats, she’s going north with the gyptians to save the kidnapped children, she becomes lifelong friends with an armored bear by telling him where to find his stolen armor, and and and one event after another, yet the pace is not breathless, each event gets just enough time to develop its full impact (the scene where Lyra learns what the Gobblers are doing!) and then we move on.

Excellent worldbuilding, excellent plotting, and amazing characterization, too. Lyra is such a fantastic heroine: lively, cunning, a natural leader, rough around the edges and yet with a great compassion underneath. Her daemon Pantalaimon is a perfect foil, cautious if Lyra is taking needless risks, but indomitably brave in the face of struggles that daunt even the usually fearless Lyra.

But it’s not just Lyra. The secondary characters are so well-drawn too, and as with Jordan College and Mrs. Coulter’s flat, I was often surprised how swiftly their sections passed. For instance, Serafina Pekkala only shows up in one chapter! (Of course, she’s talked about far earlier than that.) She’s so vivid in my memory that I was sure it was more than that. Farder Coram, Mrs. Coulter, Lord Asriel: the book is packed with startlingly vivid characters who have stuck with me for years.

I was, I must confess, hoping just a little to see signs of the flaws that would become so apparent in the later books in the trilogy. But no, whatever went wrong went wrong later on. The Golden Compass is pretty close to flawless. Perhaps its only error lies in ending on a sentence that any sequel would be hard-pressed to live up to. What book could possibly capture the possibility inherent in “she walked into the sky”?

Help understanding American recipe?

Aug. 21st, 2025 09:43 pm
luzula: a Luzula pilosa, or hairy wood-rush (Default)
[personal profile] luzula
I would like to make this cake recipe. What does it mean when it says "1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour, divided" in the ingredient list? First I read it as "one to one half a cup", but that doesn't make sense. Is this in fact an American way of writing "one and a half"? And why does it say "divided"? Also it's a mystery to me why it says in the instructions that you should use "1-1/4 cups flour" instead of "1-1/2 cups flour". I can't see anywhere else in the recipe that uses flour. It does say "test kitchen approved", so I assume it's tested and proofread...

Project Farcry by Pauline Ashwell

Aug. 21st, 2025 09:28 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Dr. Jordan's weird kid Richard is the key to unlocking first contact... and much more.


Project Farcry by Pauline Ashwell

Book Review: The Fairy Circus

Aug. 21st, 2025 07:54 am
osprey_archer: (cheers)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
I saved Dorothy P. Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus for the final book in the Newbery project because I had a suspicion that it would be a high note to go out on, and I was 100% correct.

At the beginning of the book, the fairies witness a human circus when it sets up on their field. Enchanted, the fairies decide that they simply MUST have a circus of their own, and the rest of the book is about how the fairies through a circus with the help of the woodland creatures.

The spiders spin a trapeze and a tightrope! The chipmunks are the tigers, but they keep forgetting to be properly fierce! The squirrels are the lions (carefully bunching their squirrels around their heads for manes) and they are SO fierce that they spring on the lion tamer, who flies away just in time! Thrillingly terrified, the fairies “went flitting over the arena looking for anything a little less exciting than lions. They even sat down at the farther end of the arena and let themselves be amused by the clowns! They had been as scared as all that!”

The fairy queen shows up, and the fairies have a grand parade in her honor, with tortoises as elephants and mice as horses. And the whole circus is illuminated by fireflies. And… and… and…

An enchanting book. Perfect for fans of Borrowers-type stories about tiny people (in this case tiny people with wings!) making use of the materials at hand to make their own tiny world.

wednesday reads and things

Aug. 20th, 2025 04:11 pm
isis: (waterfall)
[personal profile] isis
What I've recently finished reading:

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett, which, it's the third book in the series, so if you like this series you will probably like this book. I particularly enjoyed the trope (which is not uncommon - it's also an element of the Invisible Library series, for example) that the Fae are governed by tales and stories, so the things that happen in their kingdoms generally follow the well-known structures of fairy tales. I also appreciated that the story wrapped around to include elements of the first book.

What I'm reading now:

My hold on Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio came in, and - I can't remember why I put a hold on this book? Did one of you recommend it? I've started it but I am not finding the style particularly engaging. I'll stick with it for a while, though.

What I've recently finished watching:

Untamed, about which I must agree with [personal profile] treewishes's assessment: "Excellent scenery and interesting characters, the plot, um." The drone shots of Yosemite are spectacular! The action taking place in meadows with cliffs in the background is beautiful! The very beginning has some really fingernail-biting rock climbing (both B and I, who used to climb, muttered at the total sketchiness of one of the placements...) and overall the scenery is just gorgeous. The characters and the way they interact, their backstories and their drama and trauma, are definitely interesting. The plot, um. I have a lot of niggling criticisms, like, there is no way an LA cop would be able to easily transfer to a park ranger job! There is no way an experienced law enforcement officer would go confront a dangerous person without backup! I am side-eyeing the idea of a hippie encampment being on park land and not cleared the hell out of there immediately they found it! I can't imagine a park far from major cities being a hub for [spoilers redacted]! But mostly it's just a ridiculously convoluted plot for the sake of ridiculous convolutions.

Apparently there will be a second season, but I have no idea what they are going to keep constant from the first - the people, the setting, ???

What I'm still playing:

I'm still playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and it's still entertaining.

spinning on a spinning wheel

Aug. 20th, 2025 04:19 pm
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee


Spinning at a spinning wheel - not a tutorial or demonstration of good spinning, and most of the wheel is out of frame so you can see the main ~action. I am still a beginner, and I think I foxed up some of the terminology. But my advisor was curious so I recorded this.

Bundle of Holding: TinyZine

Aug. 20th, 2025 04:22 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The complete four-year run of TinyZine, the tabletop roleplaying magazine from Gallant Knight Games that supports the streamlined minimalist TinyD6 rules system.

Bundle of Holding: TinyZine

Wednesday Reading Meme

Aug. 20th, 2025 09:29 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My second-to-last Newbery book, Jeanette Eaton’s Leader by Destiny: George Washington, Man and Patriot, which is also my second Newbery George Washington biography, which should tell you everything you need to know about the importance of American history in the Newberys. (Maybe that should be a Newbery post in itself.) I don’t actually remember the other one that well, but I’m fairly sure that it didn’t feature George Washington’s tragic doomed lifelove for the already-married Sally Fairfax nearly as prominently, or possibly indeed at all, as I was quite surprised to hear about it in this book.

(Eaton’s Daughter of the Seine also dwelt on Madame Roland’s tragic doomed love for a man not her husband, so this may just have been an Eaton thing. Admittedly, there was no tragic doomed love in her Gandhi biography, except perhaps Gandhi’s unrequited yearning for a united India?)

I also finished Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. I really enjoyed the ancient Roman Britain stories in the middle of the book: truly they are so Sutcliff! Or rather, Sutcliff is so Kipling!

But then the last story is Kipling’s attempt to create an inclusive vision of England by making the Jewish people an integral part of the story of the Magna Carta, by having a Jewish moneylender force the king to terms by refusing to lend him any more money, and “by refusing to lend him any more money” I mean our hero actually tosses an entire gold treasure into the sea.

I believe that Kipling is trying to be anti-anti-Semitic here, but he also has the moneylender character describe sitting under a table as a child listening to Jewish moneylenders decide which king shall rise and which shall fall, so, like, maybe he needed to workshop this one a bit.

What I’m Reading Now

Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I listened to an audiobook version of this a few years ago and really didn’t like it, but had a suspicion that it might be due to the narrator’s gravelly monotone, so I bought a copy and am reading it with my two eyes and now I’m loving it! An important reminder that an audiobook reader can make or break a book.

I just finished the Almanac portion of the book, which are just monthly musings on plants and animals in the environs of the sandy farm Leopold owned in Wisconsin. It makes me want to write a Hummingbird Cottage almanac. Maybe I’ll do monthly posts next year starting in January.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been intending to read Ben MacIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat ever since I read Max in the House of Spies, but despite the fact that I’ve loved the other two MacIntyre books I read, I keep putting it off and off and off. Why is it sometimes so hard to read a book that you really do want to read?

Get on the Books

Aug. 20th, 2025 07:18 pm
contrary_cal: (Default)
[personal profile] contrary_cal
(With apologies to Daniel Andrews for nicking and adjusting his line.)

I have been hauling my brain back towards reading mode over the last few weeks; I don't think I'm there yet, but I'm getting better. I should say that I've also been watching some TV series that I initially didn't intend to watch over the last couple of months! The first series was Andor, which I wasn't interested in until I heard about the Kleya backstory episode and then watched in reverse order, mostly skipping the tedious bits (aka anything to do with non-Rebellion Cassian and Bix and Ferrix). The second, surprising me since I've previously only liked DS9, is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is a pleasant way to spend time so long as I skip anything with too much focus on Spock (no offence to the actor, I'm just not interested in Spock or Vulcans). I really like the show's sure touch with comedy, the fairy story episode and the crossover with the animated characters were fun (the musical one less so, unfortunately), and I am very much in favour of #Moretegas and was also in favour of more La'an except then they went and stuck her with Spock.

I kind of want to write something about Kleya but I am still stuck on the final bits of A Common Language and don't feel my brain unsludging for a change of topic yet.

Anyway. Books!

What I've read

The Serpent, The Thief and The Master by Claire North: I liked the first of these novellas very much, found the second mostly okay and was bored by the third. Sorry, don't care about Silver, give me more Thene.

The Iron Princess by Barbara Hambly: ....meh? I finished it. The story was enough to keep me going, but the characters were barely there, so it was hard to care about them. Also, pointless tacked-on last-second reassuringly het romance for our heroine ahoy! I expect better of Hambly than that.

Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn: I saw this recced somewhere around DW and thought it sounded okay, but unfortunately the rec failed to state that it's basically wish-fulfilment romantasy from before the term romantasy was invented. Some nice worldbuilding and magic systems, which kept me reading, plus some nice and some thunderingly dull characters, screamingly obvious He Was A Boy She Was A Girl throughout and a conclusion that lost all tension offscreen and didn't make a lick of sense either. Fortunately it was an e-book and cheap.

The Lotus Empire by Tasha Suri: A solid, mostly effective end to the trilogy.

What I'm reading

Nothing right now, my brain has re-sludged.

What's up next

I have a Claire North in transit at the library and may pick up the new Melissa Caruso when I'm in town at the weekend. Plus there's another SNW episode to watch tomorrow, which should be nice.

moar yarn

Aug. 19th, 2025 09:15 pm
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
What I do when sick: more spinning.





Now that I can spin wool blends at all, next up: working on consistency.

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cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (Default)
cyphomandra

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