teej | Reading

Reread.

Fourth book in McKenna's Tales of Einarinn series. It takes place simultaneous to book #3, With Ryshad as primary viewpoint character (and two or maybe three other characters as secondary POV characters). As usual, the primary POV is written in first person and the other POVs are written in third person, which works really well for me, as a reader.

Anyway, a most pleasant read. I would hesitantly recommend starting at the beginning of the series, there's a fair chunk of background, but it may be enough to sort-of catch up in this volume?

watersword

1. I went to my mentor's memorial and it was awful in basically every way possible, but I showed up and that is important.
2. I got to see my sister and my best friend.
3. Cat-petting!
4. Asian pears at the CSA.
5. Tea.

ironed_orchid

I am so bad at this updating thing.

Between having a week off work and then getting sick (again), I've been spending a lot of time on the couch binge watching. Here is a list of tv stuffs I have been watching in the last month or so:

The Good Place: I find this fun, but now that I am caught up and have to wait for weekly episodes, each one feels short.

Glitch: season two - so good, so interesting, but now we are more into the SF of how people came back from the dead, and less into their personal histories.

Bojack Horseman: I watched the entire 4 seasons in just over a week. I'd assumed this was yet another mean and sarcastic cartoon for adults, but I ended up caring a lot about the characters, even the mean and sarcastic ones.

Star Trek: Discovery: I think I want to like this more than I actually do, but it doesn't matter as I am utterly smitten with Michael Burnham and want her to be happy, which means I'll probably keep watching forever.

Dance Academy: seasons one and two on Netflix, season three on iview - I find this silly show for teenagers about a Sydney ballet school surprisingly charming and easy to watch.

Grace and Frankie: Another show I didn't watch before and then devoured in a few sittings. I have loved Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda since I was about 12, and they are a delight to watch together. Some good stuff about ageing and being single older women. I find some of the story lines a bit clunky, but there is good natured humour to keep me watching.

American Vandal: Who drew the dicks? I wasn't sure about it but the mockumentary format really works, and the kids actually look and act like teenagers and their theories are so dumb that it's beautiful.

The Good Fight: A spin off from The Good Wife and does assume background knowledge for some plots and characters. I like Rose Leslie's character, strange to see her playing and American, but she does it well. It still does that annoying thing of ever so slightly fictionalising actual people and events and the episode with the character who was Not!Milo was one of the weakest.

I am frustrated with Netflix for making new shows I want to watch which only air weekly. I guess it's because they want to sell them to other networks, but it sucks.

vatine

Previously unread.

Takes place about a year (I would say, give or take) after the previous book in the series. What happens if you kidnap the wife of the head of a government agency, and the first child born to any two members of said agency? In front of the mother's child?

I wish I could say "hilarity ensues", but I guess "calamity ensues" has about the same ring to it. I think I've said that I like this series? Hm? You probably want to read ALL of them. Right now.

vatine

Previously unread.

The third book in Spangler's Rachel Peng series. This time it looks relatively innocent, "just" a murder, and some suspected theft. Unfortunately, the crime scene is in the basement of the White House. Again, a most excellent read. I could try to say more, but, you know, I can't quite figure out how to say it while remaining both entertaining and non-spoilery.

Oh, yes, there's one thing. This is, I believe, a point where the bok series forks (in one fork, the next book is Greek Key and in the other, it is Brute Force, the latter will soon have an entry all of its own).

On the whole, I quite like this series.

vatine

Previously unread.

This is the second book in Spangler's Rachel Peng series. All in all, eminently readable. It takes place a few months after Digital Divide and starts with a series of explosions "somewhere in DC" (sorry, can't be more precise, there's a specific street mentioned, but, you know, I am sufficiently unfamiliar with DC that it pretty much has escaped my mind, now that I get around to do the write-up several books and days later). Not entirely surprising, this ends up being very investigated and we get a ring-side seat, as we see Agent Peng, members of the MPD and several other Agents from OACET follow up and try to solve the crime.

vatine

Previously unread.

Leckie is back! We're in the same fictional universe, but we're not in Raadch space (I think?) and we're pretty much not seeing anyone we've seen before.

Anyway, our primary viewpoint character (and, thinking about it, I think only viewpoint chaarcetr) is Ingray, the foster daughter of a Hwae politician, second in line (as it were) to be named heir, after her brother Danach. And she has an audacious scheme to further her prospects of becoming the named heir.

Then, things outside INgray's control start interfering with her best-laid plans.

Eminently readable. I can't say if I like this better than the original trilogy, or not. They're all good, so it's hard to do internal ranking here.

vatine

Reread.

What happens if you let the US Military-Industrial Complex play with biocomputers implanted in people's brains? Maybe you get cyborgs with... interesting complications. That's certainly the tack that Spangler has taken in this book (as well as in the A Girl and Her Fed web comic). And I just realised I'd left this in "compose" mode for several days.

No matter, eminently readable book. Based on this, I bought the following three volumes the other day, going "you know, it's time I read the sequels".

vatine

Previously unread.

This is a book that takes place in (presumably) the same world as the Mistborn books. There's still allomancy and feruchemy, although it seems (FSVO of "seems") that the rules of allomancy have either changed or expanded. Or we simply had an incomplete picture in the first books.

All in all, eminently readable .All things considered, I would not mind more books tightly coupled to this one, sinc e it felt as if there were many more stories to tell, but I have not (yet) checked up on what the status there is.

watersword

Things my job has taught me, today or in the past couple of years:
people will prefer to use a broken system they know over a new-and-improved system
people are terrified of computers
the clipboard doesn't acknowledge the existence of ligatured characters in PDFs
the name Jeffrey was very popular among boys who graduated from this institution in the early '80s

From which you may deduce that I have spent a lot of today digitizing the next issue of the institutional alumni magazine, and fuck everything about said process.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

sharp like a pen

context is my favourite word

Reading

2017 - #97, "The Warrior's Bond", Juliet E. McKenna

gratitudes

media consumed

2017 - #96, "Brute Force", K. B. Spangler

2017 - #95, "State Machine", K. B. Spangler

2017 - #94, "Maker Space", K. B. Spangler

2017 - #93, "Provenance", Ann Leckie

2017 - #92, "Digital Divide", K. B. Spangler

2017 - #91, "Alloy of Law", Brandon Sanderson

[got no driving wheel]

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August 2010

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