YouKneeK’s 2020 SF&F Overdose Part 4

Welcome to part 4 of my 2020 thread! :) Here’s my usual introductory info:

• I read mostly science fiction and fantasy, with a heavier emphasis on fantasy.
  
• I tend to read slightly older books versus the newest releases.
  
• I hate spoilers. Any spoilers in my reviews should be safely hidden behind spoiler tags.
  
• I prefer to read a series after it’s complete, and I read all the books pretty close together.
  
• I’m 45, female, and live in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA in the U.S where I work as a programmer.
  
• My cat’s name is Ernest and he’s a freak.

2020 Reading Index

Clicking on the Date Read will take you to the post containing the review.

   Date Read/
 # Review Link  Title                            Author(s)		
 1 2020-01-06   This Alien Shore                 C. S. Friedman
 2 2020-01-11   Honored Enemy                    Raymond E. Feist and 
                                                 William R. Forstchen
 3 2020-01-15   Murder in LaMut                  Raymond E. Feist and 
                                                 Joel Rosenberg
 4 2020-01-19   Jimmy the Hand                   Raymond E. Feist and 
                                                 S. M. Stirling
 5 2020-01-25   Jane Eyre                        Charlotte Brontë
 6 2020-01-31   Talon of the Silver Hawk         Raymond E. Feist
 7 2020-02-02   King of Foxes                    Raymond E. Feist
 8 2020-02-07   Exile's Return                   Raymond E. Feist
 9 2020-02-09   Ubik                             Philip K. Dick
10 2020-02-15   Flight of the Nighthawks         Raymond E. Feist
11 2020-02-18   Into a Dark Realm                Raymond E. Feist
12 2020-02-23   Wrath of a Mad God               Raymond E. Feist
13 2020-02-25   Memory of Water                  Emmi Itäranta
14 2020-03-03   Rides a Dread Legion             Raymond E. Feist
15 2020-03-06   At the Gates of Darkness         Raymond E. Feist
16 2020-03-13   The Diamond Age                  Neal Stephenson
17 2020-03-16   A Kingdom Besieged               Raymond E. Feist
18 2020-03-21   A Crown Imperiled                Raymond E. Feist
19 2020-03-29   Magician's End                   Raymond E. Feist
20 2020-04-03   Starship Troopers                Robert A. Heinlein
21 2020-04-04   Bunnicula                        Deborah Howe and 
						James Howe
22 2020-04-05   Catseye                          Andre Norton
23 2020-04-07   The Great Gatsby                 F. Scott Fitzgerald
24 2020-04-08   The Comedy of Errors             William Shakespeare
25 2020-04-14   The Bone Witch                   Rin Chupeco
26 2020-04-18   Sphere                           Michael Crichton
27 2020-04-25   The Snow Queen                   Joan D. Vinge
28 2020-04-27   World's End                      Joan D. Vinge
29 2020-05-16   The Summer Queen                 Joan D. Vinge
30 2020-05-22   Song of the Beast                Carol Berg
31 2020-05-25   Parable of the Sower             Octavia E. Butler
32 2020-05-30   Parable of the Talents           Octavia E. Butler
33 2020-06-03   The Ghost Bride                  Yangsze Choo
34 2020-06-17   The Black Prism                  Brent Weeks
35 2020-06-23   The Blinding Knife               Brent Weeks
36 2020-06-29   The Broken Eye                   Brent Weeks
37 2020-07-05   The Blood Mirror                 Brent Weeks
38 2020-07-05   Gunner's Apprentice              Brent Weeks
39 2020-07-17   The Burning White                Brent Weeks
40 2020-07-19   The Memory Police                Yōko Ogawa
41 2020-07-25   The Bear and the Nightingale     Katherine Arden
42 2020-08-07   The Girl in the Tower            Katherine Arden
43 2020-08-11   The Winter of the Witch          Katherine Arden
44 2020-08-15   Dreamsnake                       Vonda N. McIntyre
45 2020-08-23   Shadowshaper                     Daniel José Older
46 2020-09-14   Hyperion                         Dan Simmons
47 2020-09-28   The Fall of Hyperion             Dan Simmons
48 2020-10-11   Recursion                        Blake Crouch
49 2020-10-24   The Canterbury Tales             Geoffrey Chaucer
50 2020-10-31   Gun, with Occasional Music       Jonathan Lethem
51 2020-11-11   Kushiel's Dart                   Jacqueline Carey
52 2020-11-21   Kushiel's Chosen                 Jacqueline Carey
53 2020-12-02   Kushiel's Avatar                 Jacqueline Carey
54 2020-12-06   The Glass Menagerie              Tennessee Williams
55 2020-12-14   The Humans                       Matt Haig
56 2020-12-25   Kushiel's Scion                  Jacqueline Carey
57 2020-12-31   Kushiel's Justice                Jacqueline Carey

Review: Hyperion by Dan Simmons



Hyperion is an interesting sort of science fiction book. I had heard it referred to as “Canterbury Tales in Space”, which is a good description for it. You don’t need to have any familiarity with The Canterbury Tales to read this book, though. The main point of the comparison is just its structure. Both books have a group of strangers traveling together on a pilgrimage, with each traveler telling a story to help pass the time. I would say the stories in this book are stranger than the stories in The Canterbury Tales, but I’ve been slowly working my way through that book this year and I’d have to say some of its tales are pretty darn strange too! Just a different sort of strange.

In Hyperion, everything is a bit of a mystery and the different tales approach the answers from different angles and different time periods. We start off with 7 people who have been chosen to go on a pilgrimage to a mysterious entity on a mysterious planet. Nothing is explained straight out, but through the course of the book we slowly learn more about that entity, more about that planet, and more about why these particular people were chosen for this pilgrimage and how their presence might affect events. Although these people are traveling together, they aren’t exactly contemporaries. The nature of space travel means that some of the pilgrims' lives have spanned hundreds of years more than others and so the stories encompass quite a lengthy period of time.

I enjoy stories where you aren’t given all the answers, as long as you get them by the end. Likewise, I enjoy non-linear stories where you have to put some real effort into piecing everything together for yourself. I thought those elements were done well in this book. I enjoyed trying to follow the chain of events and I enjoyed speculating (mostly incorrectly) about what was going on. Some of the pilgrims’ stories were more interesting than others, but all of them were reasonably interesting. I thought a couple of them started slowly, but they picked up maybe halfway through. I also liked that several of the stories had just a slight creepiness to them, more so in the earlier stories than the later stories.

I still have a lot of questions and there are things I’m still pretty fuzzy about, which I think was the intent at this point in the story. I’d been warned this book doesn’t end with any sort of resolution, and that was definitely a good warning. However, one thing I sure as heck didn’t expect was for the book to end with the characters all walking along singing “We’re Off to See The Wizard”! I look forward to reading the next book, finding out what happens next, and hopefully getting more answers and a stronger understanding about what’s going on.

Next Book
I’m going to try to knock out a few more tales from The Canterbury Tales first, then I’ll move on to the sequel of the above book. I had originally split The Canterbury Tales up into five groups with the intention of reading each group in-between other books. However, I’ve only finished my first group and stalled out on the second group in late July due to external circumstances. For my second group, I originally planned to read both fragments III and IV, but I think I’m just going to read fragment III for now -- the Wife of Bath, the Friar, and the Summoner. I’m anxious to get back to the Hyperion story before I start to forget the details.

As I mentioned in a previous post, even though I already read The Wife of Bath’s prologue, I’m going to read it again because I was way too distracted to get anything out of it the last time I tried. I won’t post an actual review until I finish the entire book, but I’ll probably at least make some brief comments at some point before I set it aside for my next book. The Canterbury Tales was supposed to be my third quarter classic selection, but I think it’s safe to say I won’t be finishing it this quarter. I’m going to aim to finish it by the end of the year and push my original fourth quarter selections into the first quarter of 2021. Now that my personal life has settled down a little, at least schedule-wise, my work life is about to get nuts. After 2 or 3 weeks, I’ll likely be working long hours and weekends for a couple months, so you can expect my slow reading and reviewing pace to continue at least until December.

>3 YouKneeK: Congrats on the new thread and I'm glad you enjoyed Hyperion.

>3 YouKneeK: Ditto to what >4 Karlstar: said.

Also, I notice your previous thread got to 151 posts in <2 months so there is a good chance this one will culminate prior to 2021. If not, we can always start you a holiday piffle party!

>4 Karlstar:, >5 ScoLgo: Thanks!

>5 ScoLgo: I figure worst case, I can always introduce some sort of controversial conversation about food. Those seem to be reasonably successful conversation starters around here. ;)

Great review of Hyperion! I must move it up my TBR pile (after I figure out which box my copy is in ...).

>3 YouKneeK: "I enjoy stories where you aren’t given all the answers, as long as you get them by the end."

"I still have a lot of questions and there are things I’m still pretty fuzzy about, which I think was the intent at this point in the story."

More clarity does come by the end of The Fall of Hyperion. However, in order to get a full explanation about everything, it's necessary to continue through the Endymion duology as well. In my opinion, there is a ratio of diminishing returns with this series but, if you want all the answers, it's definitely worth reading all 4 books.

>6 YouKneeK: Welp... your previous thread got a big boobst from the breast quotient discussion so you might need something like that in this thread to help get over them there hills, (punapologies in advance to @clamairy).

>7 Sakerfalcon: Thanks, I hope you enjoy it too! I suspect the process of trying to find the book in the box will result in finding many other must-move-up TBR books. ;)

>8 ScoLgo: That’s good to know, thanks! I did put all four books in my reading plan, although if my interest drops off I may cut my losses on getting all the answers and drop out early. Hopefully not, though. That’s how I typically schedule my series reading – I schedule an entire series of whatever series I'm starting. If I don't care for it, the disappointment is offset by the joy of clearing a whole bunch of books off my schedule and suddenly having room for more.

LOL about the boobst! You’re right, that was another effective way to add some peaks to my thread’s post count. ;)

>8 ScoLgo: >9 YouKneeK: Terrible, just terrible!

>3 YouKneeK: Excellent. I am glad to see you enjoyed this as much as you did. I had forgotten about the ending, heck, I've forgotten a LOT of the book, so that almost made me want to re-read it sometime. It has been 13 years so the original duology is probably due it's re-read. Maybe next year or the year after :-D

Glad to hear that life has settled down a bit. These past 2 weeks have been a weird one for me, hence my very light interaction here on LT. Stupid wordpress AND blogger editor and sleep issues. When did just being alive become so difficult? Sigh :-)

>11 BookstoogeLT: I could see this working great for a reread since there are so many nuances that one is likely to forget, plus it would probably be a different experience altogether reading it when you already understand what’s going on.

I’ve finished “Fragment III” from The Canterbury Tales. This consisted of prologues and tales from the Wife of Bath, the Friar, and the Summoner.

Even after a re-read, I didn’t get much more out of the Wife of Bath’s prologue than I did the first time. I did see some humor in it this time, but it surely wasn’t a favorite. And her story – it was fairly short, but I would have ended it much more quickly by having the main character promptly beheaded or locked up or something. I think this is a case where the culture of the times led to a story that conflicts too much with my values here in the year 2020 for me to overlook and just go with it. My biggest issue was probably with all of the women defending the main character and preventing him from being executed after raping the girl. I mean obviously I objected to the rape itself, but it was the reaction of the women I had more trouble accepting. When the main character gave the ugly old hag her “sovereignty” at the end, in direct contrast to his actions of raping the girl in the beginning, this did not redeem him and possibly wasn’t intended to based on how it was presented. In any case, I found the opposite extreme of letting the woman be in charge (or think she is) slightly annoying also. Neither the beginning nor the end represented behavior that would lead to a happy relationship between a man and a woman. So yeah, I probably took this one more seriously than it was intended.

The Friar’s tale didn’t make much of an impression. The end was moderately amusing.

The Summoner’s tale was very crass, so naturally it made me laugh. ;) My reaction here was similar to that of the Miller’s tale in which the laughter was driven more by an “I can’t believe I’m reading this” reaction than any genuine amusement with the story itself, but there was a teensy bit of amusement with the story itself too.

And now I’m moving on to The Fall of Hyperion.

>13 YouKneeK: I am impressed at how you are persevering through these Tales. after reading your various thoughts, I don't think I could make it through this and so, I'm not even going to try. I can tell when I'm beaten before I even start :-D

Enjoy The Fall ;-)

>14 BookstoogeLT: Haha, I’m nothing if not stubborn, but I think I would have had much more trouble if I’d tried to make it through the entire book in one go. Even so, this is surely not going to be one of my favorite classic attempts. No doubt there’s a whole lot more depth that’s going over my head, but life is short and studying the classics in minute detail is definitely not how I want to spend any significant portion of that time since it isn’t something I enjoy. I just enjoy gaining some general familiarity with it so I at least know what people are talking about when they refer to it.

The Middle English does add a little bit of fun I think, although it also slows the reading process down a lot. The “wait, did I read what I thought I just read?!” becomes a more genuine question when I feel like there’s an actual possibility that I deciphered it wrong and generated such insanity in my own head.

>15 YouKneeK: I hear you about taking it in bits and pieces. That's what I'm currently doing with the Gulag Archipelago. But I'm going much slower :-D

I'm not a huge fan of looking indepth into a classic for some sort of nebulous wisdom. Unless I'm going into it for a specific purpose, enjoyment is the name of the game...

Hey, there's a novel way to get your thread count high. Invite the spammers ;-)

>16 BookstoogeLT: Agreed on enjoyment being the name of the game. If I happen to find some unexpected wisdom in the process, that’s great too, but not the goal.

>18 BookstoogeLT: Oh no, you figured out my master plan! ;)

The Canterbury Tales made a lot more sense to me once I learned what his goal was in writing it. Apparently he was trying to show off his virtuosity by writing a story in each of the popular genres of the time.

Boris Akunin tried to do the same thing with his Erast Fandorin novels. Akunin is a wonderful writer, but the sequence hits the same problem as the Canterbury tales: although admiring the virtuosity, I have met no one who actually enjoyed ALL of them!

>20 -pilgrim-: Interesting info, thank you! Now I find myself coming up with some sarcastic and completely off-base names for some of those genres based on the parts that stood out to me. ;)

>21 YouKneeK: You are not alone. ;-)

>20 -pilgrim-: I never knew that about the Fandorin novels! I've only read the first one and didn't want to continue the series, but now I'm curious. I did enjoy his trilogy about Sister Pelagia.

>23 Sakerfalcon: They are all about Erast Fandorin, but they are all different stylistically. Liking or disliking one is no guarantee about the next! Fandorin is not always the POV character either.

Also be careful, the initial UK publication order does not match the internal chronology (or writing sequence). Seems like the publishers though an Anglophone audience would not want to read about Russia's wars in the South from an anti-British perspective and skipped Turkish Gambit initially.

ETA: I really want to get hold of the films. Apparently there is one, for Turkish Gambit, at least.

I haven’t posted any pictures of the furry freak lately. He demanded that I rectify that.

Ernest got a new toy today. Well, technically he got it a few days ago, but it took me a while to get around to unboxing it and putting it together. He’s had a cat tree since he was a kitten, over 6 years, but it was one of those carpeted monstrosities that are difficult to clean and get really ratty looking with age. It was also a little boring for him, with nothing to really climb. There were little ledges and boxes leading up to the top, forcing him to take a series of small jumps that didn’t allow him to demonstrate his athleticism. Now we’re both happy. He's happy because he has something to climb properly, and I'm happy because this one doesn’t look as horrid and also takes up less space. The last one was quite a lot wider, but not quite as tall. You can see part of the last one in this post from last year, which is one of my favorite pictures of him despite the horrid cat tree he's standing on.

I’d been eying this one for a few months because I thought he’d really like it, but it took me a while to get up the nerve to buy something I’d have to anchor into my wall. I’m not good with mechanical type stuff at all, not even a screwdriver, and putting holes in my wall is a thing to be avoided. But after all the chaos of this year, I figured what’s a few holes in a wall? There are worse things in life. Worst case, if I totally screwed it up, I could have paid somebody to come fix it. The only part I really had any trouble with were the cam nuts – I’d never used them on anything before and I didn’t understand what the instructions were trying to tell me. Youtube videos cleared things up quickly.

So far he seems pleased. I’m pretty sure he’s going to use it to strengthen his muscles so he can cause even more trouble than he already does.





As far as reading goes, I’m still slowly making my way through The Fall of Hyperion. This one hasn’t been holding my interest as well as the first one did, but I finished the first part last night and the second part seems to be focusing more on the parts I’m interested in. I’m leaning toward stopping the series after this book, especially since I’ve heard from a couple of you that the later books aren’t as good as the earlier books and my interest is waning already. We’ll see, though. I may change my mind by the end since I’m only 26% through.

>26 YouKneeK: So would you say you knew ahead of time he'd take to it, or were you just hoping? We have 2 of the shorter box type cat towers and our older cat won't go near either one, while the younger cat loves one of them, especially since it has a mouse hanging on a string. Neither one likes the other tower, won't do anything with it. I suspect our older cat would love this type, she loves tree climbing. How old is Ernest?

>27 Karlstar: Nothing’s ever certain with him, but I was pretty confident. He has some scratching posts that are maybe 2/3 of the height to the first platform in his new cat tree, and he’s always climbing up those in a similar fashion, then pulling himself up to sit on the top. Whenever I’ve seen him do that, I’ve always thought I needed to get him something taller to climb.

He also enjoys anything high. He used the old cat tree, but more as a part of his sleeping spot rotation than to play on. I’m hoping this one might give him a way to burn off some excess energy, but he might not use it as enthusiastically after some time has passed and it’s old news. But as long as he uses it at least as much as the old one, and I don’t have to look at the ugly old one anymore, I’ll be happy.

Ernest is 6 years old, 7 in late April.

>26 YouKneeK: Looks like Ernest is thoroughly enjoying his new toy!

>26 YouKneeK: That's an amazing cat toy. What was that about welcoming our new feline overlords ... but when was it any different?

>26 YouKneeK: Ernest looks like he's having a blast :)

>26 YouKneeK: Ernest looks adorable.

>29 Sakerfalcon:, >31 Narilka: It’s especially fun if I hide a toy at the top. :)

>30 haydninvienna: LOL, that’s definitely the status quo around here.

>32 BrokenTune: Thanks!

>26 YouKneeK: Okay, that looks awesome! I too have one that is starting to look a bit tatty. How big is the diameter on that hole? I'm asking because the very pricey Rx food my cat is on seems to be giving her a round belly. LOL (I am hoping to wean her off it soon as the ingredients look horribly unhealthy. Lots of corn & pork fat, and only 'chicken by-product.' UGH)

>34 clamairy: LOL, if I’m measuring right, the diameter is right at 8 inches. I hope your cat is able to get off the unhealthy food soon!

Ernest hasn’t been climbing to the top of his tower very much since the first day or two, though. :( He’s done it a few times to knock off the toys I’ve put up there, but for the most part he jumps directly to the first platform without climbing and sits there. At least he’s using it, but I was hoping he would do more climbing on it.

One comment I saw several times when I was reading the reviews was that it’s difficult for cats to get down from the top platform unless there’s some other lower furniture nearby that they can use as a path down. They can’t really seem to go back down the way they came. Since Ernest jumps from the top of doorways, and this is about the same height, I wasn’t too worried about that. He does seem to jump down from the top fine, without any hesitation, but maybe he’s getting old enough that jumping down from such heights isn’t that comfortable for him anymore. I can't use his door-jumping as a barometer until I turn the heat on, since that's what motivates him to jump on top of the bathroom door -- he likes the heater vent on the ceiling right by the door.

Review: The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons



This is the second book in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. I liked the first book better. There were sections where I was really interested in what was happening, but also sections that I struggled through. In this book we learn more about what’s going on in the larger universe instead of focusing exclusively on the pilgrims. I was theoretically interested in that larger universe stuff, but somehow I often found it dull to read about. Parts of it were definitely interesting, but I was usually more interested in the parts focusing on the pilgrims.

This book makes a lot of references to Keats and his poetry, as well as some references to poetry in general. I have minimal knowledge about Keats (well, I have more now, I guess!) and I lack much appreciation for poetry. It was apparent the author did some pretty clever things here, but I wasn’t really the right person to appreciate it. I did appreciate some of his non-poetical cleverness, but it also sometimes felt like too much random stuff was crammed into one story. There’s a stronger cyberpunk vibe in this book, or at least it seemed so to me, and maybe that affected my enjoyment as well. The “too much random stuff crammed into one story” is something I’ve come to associate with cyberpunk and it’s a large part of the reason why it’s not one of my favorite subgenres.

Some things made sense, and some things didn’t. I guessed several things in advance, so there was some logic to the story and its conclusion to allow me to do that. I didn’t feel like the author just threw a bunch of random answers together at the end that came out of nowhere, but I didn’t buy into all of it. I liked the way some things were wrapped up, but a big part I had trouble with was the stuff surrounding Lamia’s unborn baby. For example, before Lamia knew there was anything special about her baby, she was told to “trust”. She had no idea what she was trusting, but somehow she had the power to walk on water and defeat the Shrike because of her baby. And then when she lost her unspecified “trust”, she could no longer walk on air and fell. I felt like I’d turned the wrong page and ended up in a fantasy novel for a while there. I also didn’t feel like there was ever a satisfactory explanation for the Shrike(s), nor did I feel like the explanation about Rachel/Moneta was very solid, although I had guessed early on that they were the same person. Maybe there are stronger explanations for those things in the next books.

I don’t plan to continue to the second set of books. I think there’s definitely stuff to like here, but I also don’t think this is really in my wheelhouse and I’m not feeling any temptation to learn more or see what happens next. This one became a slog for me at times, and I think it would get more sloggy if I tried to continue.

Next Book
I’m going to return to The Canterbury Tales and read at least one more fragment. Possibly more.

The group I’m in on GR is reading Recursion by Blake Crouch for October and I plan to join that one since it appears to be a standalone. I haven’t read anything by Crouch before. The spoiler threads for the group reads usually don’t open until the 7th of the month. I prefer to finish a group book after that thread is already open if I can manage it, so I can jump straight into the conversation with everything fresh in my head. To do that, I'll probably keep plugging away with The Canterbury Tales until at least the weekend, unless I get sick of it. One constraint I’ve set for myself is that I need to complete full fragments (can I use those two words together?) each time I go back to it, because the prologues within the fragments seem to usually tie together and give some background for why the character is telling that particular story – such as when the Friar and the Summoner each told tales intended to disparage the other’s profession.

>36 YouKneeK: I gave this one a higher rating than you did, but I agree with your sentiment. I also chose not to continue with this series. (Just an aside, I am familiar with Keats and his work, and that barely helped. LOL)

>37 clamairy: Haha, that’s reassuring. Sometimes I wondered if it would have been a completely different reading experience if I’d had more familiarity with Keats and his work!

>36 YouKneeK: I'm glad you read it and thanks for your review. I don't remember it well enough to have many comments, but from my reviews, the fantasy/mysticism aspect appealed to me, I guess I related it to Dune.

>37 clamairy: I also rated it higher, though I'm wondering now if my 5 star rating was accurate. I'm usually a fairly tough rater, so maybe it was, at least in my opinion. I did finish the series, it was different than the first two, but good.

>39 Karlstar: Thanks. The fantasy/mysticism aspect was actually one of my complaints about Dune too (which I rated 3.5 stars), so I guess I’m consistent at least! :)

>39 Karlstar: & >40 YouKneeK: Apparently mysticism only bothers me some of the time. Maybe it has to do with how subtly it is put to use. When it's laid on with a trowel I object. (I think that's why I bailed on The Sparrow.) I enjoyed some of the Dune series, but not all of them.

>41 clamairy: Ha, what’s funny is that I loved The Sparrow. I may have forgotten something, but I don’t remember interpreting that one as having any mysticism. Just characters with religious beliefs that affected their own behavior and choices. I didn’t feel like the author was trying to make me buy into any of it as either an explanation for events in the book or in an attempt to affect my real-life beliefs.

I think mysticism is mainly a problem for me if it’s the “explanation” for mysterious things that happen in a book, especially if it’s a science fiction book. In SF, I want everything to have a more tangible, clear-cut answer, or at least some decent technobabble. :) I do tolerate it better in fantasy, as long as it’s portrayed consistently and doesn’t just come up out of the blue at the end to explain things away. It all depends on how it’s written, though.

>42 YouKneeK: I bailed on The Sparrow before that was made clear, then. I did enjoy her writing style, so maybe I'll give it another shot at some point. And yes, I agree with you. I can deal better with nebulous forces in fantasy.

>36 YouKneeK: I gave both Books 1 and 2 four stars but I think I read them back to back, so there might have been bleedover? I enjoyed them enough to read the next 2 and boy howdy, did the ratings drop off quick. 2stars for the third book and 1 for the final book.

I can definitely understand the cyberpunk vibe completely. Personally, I found it more "Esoteric SF", the dividing lines between sub-genres is so fine that really trying to separate them comes down the person doing the separating. Heck, I know I can waffle from book to book :-D

As for the mysticism, it usually doesn't bother me because I like how it shows the authors underlying philosophy about life, or at least what they're trying to portray within the story as that. Of course, when it comes down to "And then our brave group of heroes were backed up against a cliff, facing 10 million nuclear bombs and Suddenly Magic", well, that's just lazy ;-)

I think you're making the right choice in not continuing. Law of diminishing returns and all that.

As for that hack Crouch, if you think of him as a made for television version of Michael Crichton, you'll probably enjoy his stuff more. Plus, if you didn't watch much SFF tv in the 90's or 00's, (where he steals all his ideas as far as I'm concerned), then he'll be a bright star. But don't let me influence you, oh no. I want everyone to make up their own mind about him. Ha! ;-)

>43 clamairy: I was a bit worried about The Sparrow when I first started reading it, afraid it would get preachy or repetitive or otherwise obnoxious, but it worked really well for me. I could see others not feeling the same, though.

>44 BookstoogeLT: Ha, that makes me even more glad I decided to call it quits on the series. Yeah, I think with subgenres, unless it’s really clear-cut, for me it depends a lot on which parts stuck out to me – and that’s usually because I particularly liked or disliked those parts. Esoteric definitely seems to fit too! And LOL about Crouch. I’m expecting a light and not-too-demanding read, which actually sounds kind of nice right now. I’ve only read one book by Crichton (Sphere, read this past April) and I liked it pretty well in that same spirit of "light and not-too-demanding". It wasn't the deepest thing in the world (well, I guess it was pretty deep, but not that kind of deep), and with some definite issues, but entertaining for a change of pace.

---

In other news, I just finished the next story in The Canterbury Tales – The Clerk’s Tale. My comments are as follows: “!!!?!!?!?!?!?!?!!”

>44 BookstoogeLT: I can't stop laughing. I hadn't read anything by him, but now I think I'll run screaming if anyone mentions him.

>45 YouKneeK: Crouch is definitely Crichton-lite.

>46 clamairy: As long as you take my comment as completely biased. I had just heard such wonderful things about him, how original he was, etc, etc. Then when I read him I realized I'd read it all before, and better. I'm probably reacting MORE to other peoples' opinion of him than to anything about him or his writing :-D

>45 YouKneeK: I love your comments on The Clerk's Tale. I really will have to move Chaucer up the list.

>44 BookstoogeLT: I read that and my mind said 'Barty Crouch'? Thanks for making up my mind for me!

>45 YouKneeK: Thanks for saving me from ever trying to read Canterbury Tales. Weird olde fyction. No thanks!

>48 BrokenTune: Don’t blame me if you hate it when you read it! ;) It’s a bit torturous really, but not too bad in small pieces. There’s definitely some humor in the experience, anyway.

>49 Karlstar: LOL, I like your description for it! :)

With The Clerk’s Tale, the story was actually very straight-forward, but this was a case where the morals of the time in which it was written conflicted (violently and angrily!) with my own beliefs. I was annoyed throughout the entire story and just felt incredulous about the whole thing by the end.

I wonder if people who are better versed in stories from this era would be more bored by this. According to the commentary I’ve read so far, most (all?) of the tales have been based on other stories known at the time, but with different twists or interpretations added. The Clerk’s Tale was based on Grisilde (Griselda). I’d heard the name, which was the closest I’ve come so far to “recognizing” any of the source material, but I didn’t know anything about the story.

>50 YouKneeK: Ah, The Decameron. I think that's one of the earlier sources. There may also be a version in Christine de Pizan. I will admit it is a story guaranteed to get up modern noses.

>50 YouKneeK: It is possible that Chaucer was satirising the typical pious morality tale there, rather than expecting you to buy into it.

Remember his goal of demonstrating virtuosity in different styles. He seems to "re-imagine" quite a lot of the Decameron.

>51 Maddz: It certainly got mine up. :)

>52 -pilgrim-: That would make sense. Since Chaucer presents a variety of different viewpoints through his tales, I wouldn’t even try to guess which (if any) he agreed with himself. This one read to me as if the Clerk telling the story took it very seriously and considered it a model for how women should behave, so my anger was directed at the fictional Clerk who I now hope falls off his fictional horse. ;)

>53 YouKneeK: One of the pilgrims is meant to be Chaucer - and he makes fun of himself, which suggests to me that he has a good sense of humour, and that we should take a LOT of this as firmly tongue-in-cheek.

Want to invest in some fictional caltrops? ;-)

>54 -pilgrim-: Haha, I think I’d prefer a method that’s less destructive to the poor, fictional horse!

Here are my quarter end stats, as generated by my Access database. The 3rd quarter was hell, and my average pages per day reflects that. It was already on the low side this year – 89 at the end of the 1st quarter, then 84 at the end of the 2nd, and now 70. It is what it is, though. I track these stats because I find them interesting, not because I have any goals surrounding them.

If I stick with my schedule, my next series will be Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Universe, after I read another standalone or two and get through more of The Canterbury Tales. I debated pushing Kushiel out for fear I might not have enough time and energy to devote to it right now, but I think I’ll make the attempt. My reading focus is getting better, but time is likely to be an issue due to work projects over the next two months. I’ve wanted to try this series for a long time, though. I’ve seen a lot of mixed opinions on it, and I’ve tried to avoid reading any specifics too carefully so I don’t know if this is the sort of thing I’ll actually like or not, but for some reason I’ve had high hopes for it. If I stall out, I should be able to tell if it was because of my current circumstances or because I just didn’t care for it. If I stall out because of circumstances, I can always set it aside and come back to it at a better time. If I do read all nine books, I plan to read standalones between each of the three trilogies in a similar manner to how I normally break up a longer series.

>56 YouKneeK: Wow. I love the variety of stats that you track. As you've been doing this for a number of years, have you seen many shifts / trends over time in your reading?

>56 YouKneeK: I have the first book of Kushiel in my TBR. I'm definitely looking forward to your reviews since I think you'll get there before I will.

>57 BrokenTune: Thanks. :) If anything has shifted, it would be my ratio of SF vs Fantasy. I still read significantly more fantasy, but it used to be a much larger percentage than it is currently. That's the only thing these stats have caused me to make a conscious change on. I do like fantasy better than SF, but I still enjoy them both and was surprised to see just how little SF I was reading. I realized it was because I was reading lots of fantasy series, but mostly only reading standalone science fiction books. Last year I started making a more concerted effort to fit in some science fiction series too and that’s reduced the disparity.

My male vs female ratios are much more even this year than they normally are, but that’s just a coincidence. Those numbers end up all over the place every year because I don’t take author gender into account at all in my book selection process. The other things, except for this year’s reduced reading volume, are pretty consistent.

>58 Narilka: Oh great, it will be fun to read your review once you do get to it and compare notes! :) I’ve had that first book on my Kindle for nearly 4 years now.

>56 YouKneeK: As long as you're prepared for some soft core porn, Kushiel shouldn't present a problem. One of the people I follow on WP is doing a group readalong, with questionaires, so I'm learning more about the book/s than I ever wanted to :-D I'm at the point where I don't even bother to read those posts anymore.

As for the stats. That 3.8 Average is making me wicked jealous. Considering that September was a highwater mark for me, and I was at 3.82, well...... hahahahaaa, sob, sob, sob.

>60 BookstoogeLT: LOL, wonderful. I prefer fade-to-black if given a choice, but more explicit content isn’t necessarily a no-go for me. The main problem I have is that those parts get very repetitive, especially if there are several of them. I’m more concerned that this might mean the series is also heavy on romance and will have a lot of annoying romantic plot tropes, but some writing styles are more tolerable for me than others in that regard, and I did really like a short story by the author that I read a while back, so I guess we’ll see. Worst case, I can clear a 9-book series off my reading list and get to something else I was interested in faster!

Regarding the 3.8 average rating -- I think we’ve established that I'm over-generous on my ratings. :) Especially when it comes to epic fantasy which I’m more forgiving on because I enjoy the tropes so much. I’m sure I should have rated a lot of those Feist books lower than I did, especially since the plots are running together and/or fading from memory even after less than a year.

>61 YouKneeK: While romance tropes are present in the Kushiel series, and while soft core (SM) porn isn't inaccurate, they really develop more into adventures with with significant sexual situations/solutions than say the fuck fests of the middle Laurell K. Hamilton books.

>62 quondame: I'd agree with that - the Kushiel series is still in my library, the Anita Blake series isn't (although a couple of Merry Gentry's are lurking on my e-reader). The other thing I disliked about Anita Blake was the overt violence.

>62 quondame:, >63 Maddz: I haven’t read the Hamilton books, although I have heard of them – probably in the same context you all are mentioning. :)

One thing I’m fairly confident of -- none of these books, neither Kushiel nor Anita Blake will have a sex scene quite like the one I encountered last night in The Canterbury Tales! I hope not, anyway. :) (The Merchant’s Tale – Secret lover climbs a pear tree and waits there. Wife convinces husband to boost her up into the tree because without a pear she shall surely die. Up she goes, in goes the secret lover, and the wife is apparently “swived” before she can even get settled in the tree.)

>64 YouKneeK: I think that type of scene dates back to Apuleius' The Golden Ass. There it was a wife being given a good seeing to by her lover while leaning over the edge of a barrel. She was directing her husband in cleaning out said barrel at the same time...

I think that trope is referred to as 'trickery of women' in The Arabian Nights.

>65 Maddz: The commentary in my edition noted that “the story of the blind husband cuckolded by his wife making love in a fruit tree above his head has many parallels” but then she points the reader off to some other place I haven’t found yet (no direct link) for more detail, and I didn’t care enough to search since I wouldn't likely be familiar with those parallels anyway. That seems like a strangely specific thing to have “many parallels” of, though!

>60 BookstoogeLT: >61 YouKneeK: >62 quondame: Thanks for the warning! I've looked at the Carey and Hamilton books and said maybe, maybe not, maybe? To myself over years. I think you three confirmed 'not' for me, just not my style.

I’ve now made it through six out of ten fragments of The Canterbury Tales. Page-wise that also amounts to about 60%. The last four tales didn’t inspire me to rant and rave like the previous two did, but a couple of them kept putting me to sleep. The seventh fragment is pretty long at almost 150 pages, and I’m ready for a break from it anyway, so I’m going to start Recursion next as mentioned earlier.

In cat news, Ernest has been climbing his cat tree more and more, even climbing the entire height from the bottom sometimes instead of just jumping straight to the middle platform and climbing to the top from there. He’s also spending some time sleeping on the top platform. We’ve developed a fun game in which he sits on the top platform, I toss a toy up, and he bats it back down at me. Over and over. ;) He often manages to bat it down before it even lands on the platform, like a weird game of volley ball, and sometimes he catches it on his claws in mid-air, drags it onto the platform, plays with it for a bit, then smacks it off. If I manage to get it on the platform, then naturally he smacks it off right away. Like many cats, he loves knocking things off shelves. As you might imagine, I get tired of this game before he does!

Ok, I just now entered Recursion into my database and discovered I was wrong. I have read Blake Crouch before. I read Run back in late 2013. I rated it 3 stars. I liked the writing style, but found parts of the story tedious.

>68 YouKneeK: For a while our younger cat liked to volleyball spike fuzzy toy mouses, if they were set to her properly. Now she just kinds of bats them. It is a fun game! :)

>70 Karlstar: Haha, cats are strange but funny creatures!

>68 YouKneeK: Sounds like a fun game the two of you've invented :)

>61 YouKneeK: "I prefer fade-to-black if given a choice..." Yes, the less detail the better. I'm not squeamish at all, just not interested in minutia. LOL

>68 YouKneeK: I'm so glad that you're both enjoying that tower. I definitely have to add something similar in the room I call the library.

>72 Narilka: I suspect it’s a pretty common game, but he and I both pretend it’s a very novel thing we've come up with! ;)

>73 clamairy: Haha, right! I hope you’ll post something in your thread or somewhere if you do get some sort if tower. I’d like to hear how it works out!

>74 YouKneeK: I have one, but there is no straight shot of climbable pole. She just jumps from shelf to shelf, and she only sleeps in the top section. She uses the lower one for bird watching. (The one in the middle is only hit on the way up or down.)

>75 clamairy: That seems to be the way most cat “trees” are made – they look fun, but don’t have any opportunities for the cat to actually climb. I guess maybe they sell better if people don’t have to hammer holes in their wall to keep them stable…

>76 YouKneeK: That's fair. I know I often have to move stuff like this around a while before I decide on a permanent spot. The one I have is very stable, though I have seen it rock and sway when my daughter's cat is visiting and he leaps from the floor to the top shelf. (He doesn't have an ounce of fat on him, but he is a long boy and is extremely muscular.)

Review: Recursion by Blake Crouch



This was a fast-paced and, for the most part, a fun read. I’m going to be vague about the plot for the sake of other people like me who might want to go in completely blind, but there’s a lot more to it than what I describe. In the first chapter, we learn that some people are experiencing false memories, where they might suddenly remember a sequence of events, even a large portion of their life, having happened differently from the way they know it really happened. They have two sets of memories. In the second chapter, we meet Helena who wants to build a device to record and replay memories so that it can help people with Alzheimer’s re-experience things they’ve forgotten. Naturally all of these things are connected. If you want a more explicit explanation of what’s going on, the device Helena builds allows the person using the device to go back in time to the point of the memory that’s replaying and start reliving their life from that point. When they make changes to what happens, anybody else affected by those changes experiences the “false memories” from the previous timeline.

This is definitely not a “hard science” book. You won’t be able to buy into the science. However, it was mostly portrayed in a consistent manner so that made it easy for me to suspend my disbelief and just go with the premise. The characters also made decisions that were mostly logical. The problem I did have was that sometimes things got a bit predictable. Sometimes the storyline would start to feel just a little tedious due to the combination of some repetition plus the predictableness, but it never lasted too long before the story would take a different turn and things would get interesting again even if I had predicted that turn.

To provide an example of what I mean in my above paragraph, it seemed obvious to me in the early chapters that Helena would learn what her chair could do and use it to go back and try to prevent its invention. However, since it was early in the book, I was worried that this wouldn't happen until closer to the end and that things would continue on as they were for quite a while, so things started to feel tedious to me, almost more in anticipation of expected tedium than actual tedium. Then Helena went back in time as predicted, but she did it earlier in the story than I expected. But that made the next sequence of events predictable -- since it was too early in the book for Helena to have solved anything that way, I guessed right away that Slade must have learned how to build the chair for himself so that he could recreate it if that happened. And sure enough. In this manner I just always felt a step ahead of what was happening so that it wasn't quite as twisty and surprising as I would have liked..

The ending was a little ambiguous, which I don’t usually like, but enough of a foundation had been laid regarding character personalities and past explanations that I felt confident how things would play out from that point.

A few more comments for the spoiler tags:
Near the end, when Barry went back to the point of his meeting with his ex on their daughter’s birthday, I was briefly very annoyed because I thought the author had screwed up his timelines. Barry claimed he was in the original timeline before FMS had started happening, but I remembered that Barry had watched Ann jump off a building just before that meeting due to her experience with FMS. Then my nose started bleeding (no, not really), and I remembered a scene in the context of the rest of the book and it all made more sense. I’d misinterpreted that scene at the time I read it because I didn’t have all the info yet. When Barry had his first FMS experience shortly after meeting Ann’s previous-timeline husband, that was on the day that Slade first used the chair to go back in time. And he remembered a sequence of events where Ann hadn’t jumped off the building, etc. So the “false” memories Barry had that time were actually the true memories of the original timeline in which Ann didn’t have FMS and so didn’t jump off the building. Barry therefore would have still gone to that lunch in that timeline and that was the version of that lunch that Barry went back to.

I loved the Berenstain Bears thing early on in the book. It was funny to me because I would have sworn the spelling was Berenstein, and the character in the book said the people who remembered it as “Berenstein” were the people suffering from FMS. Then I had to look it up to see what the correct spelling was. I imagine a lot of people have been confused about that spelling though, so it was a good choice on the author's part to make a segment of confused people such as myself laugh.

It would have been interesting to see some exploration of what, if anything, happened to somebody’s memories if they hadn’t been born in the original timeline but they were born in the new one.

I liked this far more than a typical time travel story, because I liked the way people would eventually regain memories from the previous timeline, causing a person’s changes to have more consequences and making it more difficult to undo things completely.

Next Book
I’m going to go back and plug away at The Canterbury Tales some more. The next fragment, Fragment 7 of 10, is a pretty long one, so I’m not sure if I’ll only read that one or push on a little further. I expect I’ll probably be ready for a break by the end of it, but I think I ought to be able to finish the whole book up on my following session with it.

After my next Canterbury break, I’ll probably read another standalone book. I think I’ve decided to push the Kushiel books out until at least December. Now that I’m deep into the work project that will be keeping me busy for all of October, with another one following it up in November, I’m remembering how difficult it can be to read during times like this. It took me 8 days just to read this one short, fast-paced book. Over the past 7 days, I worked about 70 hours, and that’s on the light side versus what I expected. I’m hoping October will stay about like this, but November will probably be worse. It’s great to be able to support the projects from home though instead of having to travel to support in person like we usually do. It’s still hectic, but it’s so nice not to have to try to debug programs and write code while trying to watch and help workers out in the warehouse, or sitting in a noisy conference room with people shouting their heads off.

>78 YouKneeK: Wow, suddenly my 47hr week seems like a vacation!

Glad you enjoyed Crouch as much as you did. While I don't like him as an author, he never annoyed me to the point where I'd actively try to influence other people to dislike him. Best of luck with canterbury. Can you imagine what you'd be feeling about them if you'd tried it all in one big go?

>79 BookstoogeLT: Haha, 47 working hours doesn’t sound like much of a vacation! ;) A typical week for me is about 45 hours, and I’m also on call for after-hours issues about 1 week out of every 10. I consider that a huge improvement from my previous job where an average work week was at least 60 hours and I was on call 24/7. I try to keep that in perspective during the one or two months of madness I have per year where work takes over my life. I don’t enjoy it, and I always get grumpier as it goes on, but it could be worse and at least I know it’s temporary.

There have been pretty mixed reactions to Recursion in the group read threads over on GR. It’s been fun to read the responses. I wrote something like 3 books’ worth of replies. Where I found the time for that, I don’t know! ;) Among the people who didn’t like it, I saw several comments that it felt derivative of and/or not as good as Dark Matter, which I haven’t read. I think I did also see some comments about it being derivative of some movie I’ve never seen, which I guess kind of goes back to what you said about him stealing all his ideas from SFF TV. :) I get the impression it would be a bad idea to read too many of his books in too short of a time period, even for somebody who likes his writing style.

I’m really glad @-pilgrim- put it into my head to split up The Canterbury Tales. I hadn’t thought about it before she mentioned it, although I might have ended up doing it anyway after I’d started it and realized just what I’d gotten into. I’m not sure I ever could have made it straight through the whole thing, not even if I had read it last year when life was calmer.

>78 YouKneeK: Wow. I hope your busy period passes soon. 70-hour weeks are no fun. >79 BookstoogeLT: Nor are 47-hour weeks, tho this probably closer to my normal, too.

>80 YouKneeK: I'm still both intrigued and put off by your description of The Canterbury Tales. If I ever tackle them, it will be in installments, too. Would you say it has been worth it overall?

>81 BrokenTune: Thanks. I’m looking forward to December. :)

>82 BrokenTune: I would really enjoying reading what you think of The Canterbury Tales if you do try them! Truly, if I had understood exactly what my experience would be like when I put it on my reading list, I probably wouldn’t have. I’m definitely finding some entertainment from them, and I am glad to be learning about a somewhat commonly-reference classic so that I’ll at least know what people are talking about. It’s also kind of fun reading the middle English, and the exercise of interpreting it helps keep my brain engaged a little more than it would be otherwise. I’m not getting a great deal out of it beyond that, though, nor finding much enjoyment overall. I’m finding more enjoyment from the memories of some of my experiences with the book rather than enjoyment in the actual reading experience. I do get more sleep during the days when I’m reading it, though! :)

Somebody with a better foundation and/or appreciation for the classics would probably fare much better than I am. I don’t have a strong background in the classics, I didn’t enjoy them in school, and I’ve only started reading them as an adult over the past 4 years in limited quantities. I’ve also never enjoyed stories that were heavy on romance. These stories aren’t what modern readers would expect from a romance, but romance and/or lust seems to be the foundation for most of the stories. Greedy, dishonest, manipulative people also abound, sprinkled with the occasional flawlessly innocent and naïve person who doubles as a doormat.

I bet I’m not helping at all. ;)

>83 YouKneeK: I very much like the sound of the way that the book makes you engage with it, the way it demands some effort on the part of the reader. That sounds very appealing. Tho, I can imagine that this is not the book one might want to seek out when working crazy hours.

On the other hand, I have found that a challenging book can be more rewarding in times when reading acts as stress relief...

I'll have a look for a pretty edition and make up my mind whether to start this before or after finishing the Will's World project. Tho, it will probably be after.

>84 BrokenTune: Yeah, my brain has usually gotten enough of a workout by the end of the day lately. Something a bit more of the Blake Crouch speed is probably better for me right now. Or maybe Dr. Seuss. ;)

How long do you anticipate your Will’s World project going?

>85 YouKneeK: Ah, good point... I don't know when that will end. And I am in no rush at all. I'm really enjoying it. But I have about 15 plays left, and about 7 "side-reads" to go with them.

I have, however, ordered a Penguin Classics copy of the Chaucer so I'll probably start once it arrives and see at what speed I can comfortably read this one. I am not in the habit of reading text from that era, so it will take some getting used to.

>86 BrokenTune: Oh great, I hope you get some enjoyment out of it! The Middle English gets easier the more you read, I think. I've also found reading it out loud to help me. The meanings are sometimes more obvious when you hear the words because they sound more familiar than they look. Remembering that the lines rhyme in turn helps with getting the pronunciation right, at least for the last word on each line. The downside is that, if you spend too much time reading it, your thoughts will be rhyming in your head for quite a while. That gets annoying fast. ;)

>86 BrokenTune: The downside is that, if you spend too much time reading it, your thoughts will be rhyming in your head for quite a while. - You say that like it is a bad thing?!? I have been known to delight my colleagues with utterances that were influenced by whatever I was reading at the time. I believe everyone enjoyed it. Once or twice it certainly lightened up some very dull conference calls.

>88 BrokenTune: Haha, I think it's a bad thing when my thoughts are slower because I’m taking time to rhyme them!

>88 BrokenTune: I know what you mean! Unfortunately I just get blank looks when I come up with something that's either the style of a book I'm reading or a paraphrase.

>90 Karlstar: I do, too, mostly. But it doesn't deter me. ;)

Hi everybody, I’m just popping in to note that I’m still working my way through The Canterbury Tales. I think I may end up just pushing through to the end.

I finished fragment VII and am at least halfway through fragment VIII. Fragment IX is very short, only 14 pages, so I might as well finish that too. That just leaves fragment X which has the longest story in it, but it’s only that one last story and then I’m done with the tales. I’ve mostly been reading the commentary as I go, although I confess it’s become more of a skimming than a reading as time goes on, so I shouldn’t have too much commentary left to read by the time I finish the last tale. Then there will be great rejoicing. :)

>92 YouKneeK: That's great! I'll probably start tonight. Tho, I just noticed that the Penguin edition I have is a modern translation. :(

>93 BrokenTune: Yes, that is a totally different experience.

My own opinion is that modern translations miss out on a lot. Chaucer is playing with language, style and register, and translating those shifts and deliberate dissonances, as well as fitting the plot to a metre, is asking a lot of any translator!

ETA: I am periodically going to a modern translation that I inherited, and finding the commentary very enlightening. But only for parts that I have already read in the original. I don't want to spoil the other sections.

>92 YouKneeK: When you finish that you will need to watch The Knight's Tale. Just because. I love Paul Bettany as Chaucer, and of course, Heather Ledger. :)

>93 BrokenTune: I’m going to reply about this over on your thread. :)

>94 -pilgrim-: Now that I've read (almost) the original version, I'm a little curious to see how a modern translation would handle some of it. Not curious enough to read one though. :)

>95 MrsLee: I watched the trailer and that looks kind of fun. I won’t be able to even think about it until December when my work schedule calms down, though.

>95 MrsLee: Are you referring to "A" Knight's Tale?

>95 MrsLee: Paul Bettany as Chaucer is so much fun in that film. ;)

Review: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer



I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to be done with a book. Maybe when I was in school, but not in more recent memory. So… apologies to all the people who have a proper appreciation for classic literature and what Chaucer accomplished here. I do realize this was an impressive and ambitious work and deserves a higher rating for many objective reasons, but my reviews and star ratings are based primarily on my subjective thoughts. I’ve started trying to fit some classics into my reading schedule over the past few years, but I’m not a very scholarly reader and I don’t have a strong foundation in or love for the classics.

For anybody not familiar with the basic premise, The Canterbury Tales has a framing story in which a group of pilgrims who don’t know each other are traveling together toward a shrine in Canterbury. The host of the group talks them into telling stories to help pass the time as they travel. So we have a couple dozen or so pilgrims riding together on horses and somehow sharing stories amongst all of them. I can only assume they were passing around a megaphone or shouting their poetic tales at the top of their lungs or using some sort of relay system…

My edition is in the original Middle English. I was worried I might have trouble with it, and it looked a little intimidating at first, but it wasn’t as difficult as I expected. I read most of it out loud (my cat hates me now) because I found it easier to understand the words through a combination of hearing in my own ears how they sounded combined with the context, plus most of it is in verse so I was able to appreciate the rhythm of it better that way. My edition also has a lot of commentary, ranging from definitions of the words to more extensive commentary about the sources of Chaucer’s tales, their themes, and historical references. I have to admit I skimmed the commentary more and more as I went along, enjoyed the stories less and less, and lost motivation.

According to the commentary, it’s believed that all of the tales were inspired by other works known at the time, but Chaucer put his own spin on it or combined different aspects of different versions of those stories. Most of that went over my head and I was only aware of it thanks to the commentary. The tales were not at all the sort of thing I enjoy reading. Some of them were romances, some of them were “lustances”, lots of them were populated by dishonest, cheating, manipulative people. Some of them were very preachy.

There was some humor here and there. Some of it also caught me by surprise. There I was, reading along in this archaic language about people living in archaic times and suddenly there was something like a guy kissing a woman’s butt and mistaking her pubic hair for a beard. I was so surprised the first time I came across something like that that I had to re-read the text to make sure I hadn’t misinterpreted it. Fortunately I hadn’t misread it, because I think I would have been really alarmed to realize I’d come up with that all in my own head. So in that respect I had some humorous moments, particularly with some of the earlier stories, as some of the content was not at all what I’d been expecting. There’s also some humor just in remembering my reactions as I read various things. So I didn’t enjoy the reading experience itself very much, but I guess I have some enjoyment from the memory of the reading experience now that it’s over!

As far as holding my attention, I think the Man of Law’s Tale probably worked the best for me. The Clerk’s Tale enraged me. That wasn’t the only tale that I had conflicts with of course, but I don’t usually get too up in arms when I read older works that conflict with my values. That one pushed some buttons for me, though. And that last “tale”… that one might have done me in if I hadn’t known it was the very last tale. I guess it was a fitting end considering the characters and the premise, but I think I would have preferred to read another trope-filled romance story and I hate those.

Ok, I have to stop typing this ridiculously long review and go sing and dance about how happy I am that I’m finally done now! ;)

Next Book
Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem. I know absolutely nothing about this book or the author, so I’m curious to try it.

I mentioned earlier that I was probably going to push the Kushiel series out until at least December due to my work schedule. However, I just learned the other day that our big November project is probably going to be postponed to January. So I’m hoping to have a more normal schedule in both November and December and will probably therefore go back to my original plans. Things are still busy, but they’re slowing down to a more reasonable pace as we’ve hammered out the biggest issues and the site is getting familiar with their new processes. Having a break rather than jumping straight into the madness of a second new project go-live will be nice.

Edited to add touchstones which weren't working earlier.

>99 YouKneeK: Oh,... Wow. You really hated it. LoL.

>100 BrokenTune: LOL, yep! My mental star rating dropped lower and lower the further I got. :)

>101 YouKneeK: Well done for finishing. If I had felt that way, I probably would have abandoned the book.

>101 YouKneeK: So, apart from the last one, which tales did you hate the most?

>102 BrokenTune: I think abandoning a book is the wiser course of action when one dislikes it that much, but I’ve never developed that skill! Being able to break it up did help.

>103 BrokenTune: I don’t know that I really hated any of them so much as was terribly bored by some of them. A few others I particularly disliked were the Merchant’s Tale, the Pardoner’s Tale, and the Tale of Melibee. The Prioress’s Tale bothered me from a moral standpoint, and the Clerk’s Tale definitely pushed some buttons but held my attention in a fuming sort of way. I also disliked the Wife of Bath’s prologue which was quite long and tedious, although it had some humor in it.

>99 YouKneeK: I have to admit, I was sure you were going to dnf this at some point. I am glad you finished this, so now I know to never try it again myself.

Good luck choosing whatever you decide on next. It has to be better than this was :-D

>99 YouKneeK: Is that your first 1 star review since coming to LT? They are so rare! And now I never want to read the Canterbury Tales :)

>105 BookstoogeLT: LOL, I think this shows just how incapable I am of abandoning a book. If I've saved you from the trouble of reading this again, I think you owe me some cash for all the time and torture (and resulting therapy costs) I've saved you! ;) 782 pages of tales I mostly didn’t enjoy plus another 550 pages of commentary on the tales I wasn’t enjoying.

>106 Narilka: Yep! The closest I’ve come is Neuromancer which I gave 1.5 stars last year. I even considered giving this one .5 stars, but I did laugh quite a bit remembering some of my experiences with the stories. I figured it deserves at least one whole star for the fun I’ll have remembering how much I disliked it. I’m probably the world’s worst person to use as a barometer for whether this is worth reading though, as this wasn't up my alley at all. @BrokenTune is reading it now and enjoying it much better than I did so far! I don’t know that I’d recommend it to anybody who shares my issues with abandoning books though.

Random aside. Remember how you read This Alien Shore at the beginning of the year? The author is publishing a sequel next month, This Virtual Night.

>108 Narilka: Oh wow, a sequel over 20 years later. I don’t think I’d heard about that, thanks for letting me know! I remember enjoying the first one quite a bit so might consider reading this.

>99 YouKneeK: I've never read it but I think the idea was that the tales were told around the campfire after each day of traveling, not while they were traveling.

>110 jjwilson61: I would have thought pilgrims stayed at monastery guest houses in such a settled part of Britain if their journey took several days. Does the text talk about where they stayed - I only remember the description of the Abbess's? table manners as being delicate and so always imagined her at board not perched around a fire.

>111 quondame: I agree.

But I think guests would be expected to listen to edifying devotional readings over the meal, assuming that they dined in the refectory. I have assumed that they were told en route, but maybe for midday meal breaks?

Remembering the Cadfael books, I think the pilgrims would have eaten in the guesthouse, but would have been given food from the monastery kitchen. Perhaps high-ranking visitors would dine with the abbot.

Agreed if they ate in the refectory they would listen to devotional readings, but perhaps not so in the guesthouse. Otherwise, there's after the meal before they went to bed.

>110 jjwilson61: Nope, they were definitely telling the tales while traveling. There’s evidence of this in the various prologues. For example, in one of the prologues (can’t remember which one), the host wants a particular character to tell his tale, but he’s too drunk and in fact falls off his horse so they let somebody else tell a tale. Then there’s another prologue (The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale) where a stranger overtakes the company while traveling and tells a tale about the Canon he works for. (Who at one point also overtakes the company and forbids the Yeoman to tell the story, but he refuses, so the Canon rides off in a hurry.)

It was also made clear in the very first prologue. After the knight drew the short straw and it was determined he had to go first:

He seide, ‘Sin I shal biginne the game,
What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name!
Now lat us ride, and herkneth what I seye.’
And with that word we riden forth our weye,
And he bigan with right a murye cheere
His tale anoon, and seide as ye may heere.

>113 Maddz: Given that they were pilgrims, rather than simply travellers, I thought the monks might treat them to a more "devotional" experience. Maybe someone who has read the Tales more recently can enlighten us?

>115 -pilgrim-: I haven't read those tales yet (many attempts, no finishes), but I recently read a book which had many excerpts in it from a female pilgrim. She was hated and despised for her virtue and especially for the way she tried to get the other pilgrims to practice virtue and give up their drunkenness, foul language, and sexual immorality. They actually abandoned her several times and only took her back because they were afraid she might have an "in" with God.

>116 MrsLee: I would be interested to know who that pilgrim was.
The Canterbury Tales make it clear that many (most?) of the pilgrims are far from virtuous.

You have to remember that pilgrimages were penances that could "wipe the slate clean" for mortal sins. That is the original structure behind a sentence of outlawry - someone who had committed murder (in hot blood, "by accident") might be permitted to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to get absolution for his sin. If he took longer than the specified time to get to a ship, or strayed from the agreed path, he was "fair game" for the deceased's family members, or anyone else, to slay him without thereby committing a crime.

Lesser pilgrimages were sufficient for lesser sins.

So although some pilgrims would have been very devout, others would have been, from the Church's point of view, very much in need of saving.

For both categories, the monks might feel they needed spiritual edification.

>117 -pilgrim-: Her name was Margaret Kempe. The book I read is not one I recommend, because the author's bias dripped from the pages, IMO. Memoirs of a Medieval Woman, however, it did give a vivid picture of the times.

So one of the less disastrous side effects of Zeta is that it came through my area as a tropical storm and I'm now wrapping up day 2 with no internet. No ETA on when I'll have it back, but I probably won't be posting much if at all until it's up.

Yesterday I had a brief power outage also, for a few hours, but it was back up a little after 10am. Internet has been my biggest issue. Yesterday I couldn't even get 4G on my phone so literally no internet. I had tons of work to do so ended up going into the office for the first time since March.

Today I have 4G so at least I can use my phone as a hot spot and work from home. The LT website is really slow on the laptop though so I'm typing this on my phone which has by this point used up my mobile keyboard typing patience for the next 5 years. Besides, I don't really want to abuse the data for much personal use because I used almost all my company's free data allowance in one single day of working. My boss's boss said not to worry about it, the bill will be covered, but I don't want to abuse it.

So I'll post again once I have proper internet service. Meanwhile I've been so busy with work that, aside from its affect on my ability to work, I've hardly missed it!

>119 YouKneeK: At least you have power! But yikes... Hope it's all resolved soon. Hang in there.

>119 YouKneeK: I've had many coworkers in your situation or similar. Hope it comes back soon. No issues at all on my end, kept power and internet and no damage.

If you all heard any screaming about 5 hours ago, that was me noticing my modem was finally lit up again.

>120 clamairy: Yeah, not having power for an extended period of time would have been worse. I wouldn’t have minded the internet being down if work hadn’t been so busy. For personal stuff it’s a minor inconvenience, but I have plenty of things I can do that doesn’t require it.

>121 Narilka: I’m glad you haven’t had any issues! That’s how it usually is for me when some weather or other issue affects the power and/or internet of a lot of people in the area. My neighborhood rarely loses power aside from an occasional blip, and this was by far the longest I’ve been without internet (about 54 hours) in the 10 years I’ve lived in the area.

>122 YouKneeK: o glad to hear you're back with both power and Internet. :)

>123 BrokenTune: Thanks!

Review: Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem



The characters in this story mix their own special blends of drugs to give them just what they need to get through life. This book is its own special blend of sub-genres – mostly detective noir with a heavy dash of cyberpunk and a sprinkling of dystopia. I think it was missing some addictol though, because I never had trouble putting it down. I liked it more toward the beginning, but it started getting tedious around the middle. Toward the end things picked back up, but there were things that annoyed me.

I haven’t read tons of them, but I’m not usually a big fan of detective noir. This one has a lot of the inevitable tropes. Some of them were slightly different from the norm, but it felt like the usual anyway. The main character, Metcalf, is a down and out male detective. He has an addiction to drugs. Usually I expect an addiction to alcohol and/or tobacco, but drugs are the thing in this book and they’re available for free because they help keep society under control. Metcalf had the inevitable problematic history with a woman, although in this case that problem was a bit different and moderately amusing. And of course Metcalf was trying to solve a case that nobody wanted him to work on. Very familiar stuff, although the setting itself was a bit outside the norm and I kind of liked the answer to the original murder mystery.

Despite the tropes, I enjoyed it more often than not. Metcalf has a dry sense of humor that appealed to me and provoked a few chuckles, although he was also crude at times. The cyberpunkish dystopian world had a lot of familiar aspects to it also, but it was reasonably interesting and not so overdone as to get on my nerves. (Cyberpunk is another subgenre I don’t usually do well with.) Metcalf’s questioning of various people and the types of things that happened grew repetitive, so that was one issue. If I’m going to read a mystery, I also prefer to see things done more logically and methodically. This was one of those stories where the main character repeatedly goes into things unprepared and figures things out more through dumb luck and intuition than by finding and assembling tangible clues.

Also just a note that my Kindle edition had several OCR errors, mostly in the form of missing or stray punctuation, with just a couple words that appeared to be misprinted because they looked similar to the intended word. It wasn’t the worst I’d ever seen, but a little distracting at times. I bought it on sale from Amazon U.S. in late 2019.

Next Book
Kushiel’s Dart, the first tome in the Kushiel’s Universe series by Jacqueline Carey. It’s a little over 1000 pages, so I may be slow to get my next review up. Work ought to be calming down next week, but this past week sure as heck was not calm, so we’ll see.

>125 YouKneeK: Sounds like it was an interesting concept that lacked in the execution. Shame. I hope the next one is better, but the 1000 pages sound terrifying.

>126 BrokenTune: Thanks, I only had time and energy to read a very few pages of it last night, but it has a promising start and I'm hopeful I'll have more time for it today. Epic fantasy is my favorite subgenre, and long books are a common feature of it that I usually enjoy, so I'm not too worried about this one. I do sometimes feel reluctant to tackle equally long books in other subgenres that I’m less confident I’ll enjoy, though.

Just a note for people not following the posts about the design changes, there’s now an option to choose been four different font styles affecting the Talk pages. Look for a link at the bottom that says “Change Style”. I know at least a couple people in this group weren’t thrilled with the new font, so hopefully everybody will find one they can tolerate. I went with B myself on both my phone and PC as I prefer its more condensed look that fits more on a page. Your selection will be tied to your current browser and device, so you can have different settings if you want.

On the reading front, I’m a little over 400 pages into Kushiel’s Dart and really enjoying it. So allow me to apologize now to all the people who aren't remotely interested in seeing me review Kushiel’s Universe books for the next several weeks. ;) It could all go downhill and make me abandon the series, but that doesn't look too likely at this point. It’s comprised of 3 trilogies, so I’ll take breaks to read unrelated standalone books in-between the trilogies as per my usual strategy.

>128 YouKneeK: What's the difference between A and D? Every time I click to compare, the page suddenly goes up or down so I can't compare easily.

>128 YouKneeK: Thank you for the heads-up about "Change Style". I have tried to look at the relevant fora, but unfortunately the very changes that I am unhappy about also make it extremely difficult for me too scan a topic p agree or thread for information.

Unfortunately all 4 styles offered retain the problematic habit of seizing hold of my phone screen, and preventing me either zooming out scanning.

So I am still struggling. (I write my reviews in a more congenial environment and simple copy-paste the result, but reading other people's threads (or indeed going back over my own) is becoming more and more difficult.

I usually have a mild headache after visits to the Greek Dragon now.

>129 BookstoogeLT: I’m not good at distinguishing the differences between fonts, but A has a wider spacing to it than D but takes up less height. The letters on A also look a tiny bit thicker to me, maybe?

As part of my scientific endeavors, I took out a ruler and measured the height of post #128 from the top of the letters in the first line to the bottom of the letters in the last line. (All 4 styles show as 7 lines with my browser window size, so it was apples-to-apples in that regard.) I’m not the most efficient measurer, but this was what I ended up with:
A = 1.19 inches
B = 1 inch
C = 1.19 inches
D = 1.31 inches

Then I figured I’d better be thorough about this matter since I’m sure the scientific journals will be wanting to publish this. So I measured the width of my first sentence, starting with “Just a note…” and finishing with “…affecting the Talk pages.” in all the styles:
A = 10.06 inches
B = 8.94 inches
C = 8.56 inches
D = 9.25 inches

>130 -pilgrim-: I’m sorry none of them worked for you. Hadn’t you switched to Desktop View a while back so you could zoom in/out? Did that not work out?

>131 YouKneeK: Yes, desktop view helps with the zooming. But I lose wordwrap to my screen size (which I did have pre-changes).

So it solves a lot of the resolution problems, but at the price of having to scroll for every sentence. That's a lot more hand effort than I am used to - and particularly problematic at present.

>128 YouKneeK: Thanks for mentioning this. I notice the quoted text in post >114 YouKneeK: looks quite different between the four formatting choices.

>132 -pilgrim-: Ah, ok. I never had word-wrapping within the visible space for LT posts when reading on my Samsung phone prior to the changes. For me it was always an annoying process of zooming in/out and scrolling right then back left again to see the entire lines.

>133 ScoLgo: I hadn’t noticed that, but I see you’re right. On my browser the block quote font looks identical to me between A and B, and also between C and D, but there’s a big difference between those two sets.

>134 YouKneeK: ,>133 ScoLgo: For the quoted text, I am seeing a big difference between B and the other 3.

I am starting to wonder how much variation between devices there is!

ETA: you can probably measure the difficulty that I am having by the increasing number of AutoCorrect substitutions that I fail to detect in my posts!

To be honest, I don't see much difference between the styles apart from font size and spacing. It's a choice between A and D for me with A having the edge; B is way too condensed, and C isn't much better.

Mind you, I have Chrome set to use Tahoma anyway, 16 preferred, 12 minimum.

Regarding the blockquote size (>114 YouKneeK: for example), it’s no longer quite so monstrously huge on A and B. Tim said he fixed it.

I did just notice that my Reading Index in >2 YouKneeK: is excessively tiny, even for me, with setting B. I think it looks ok on A, C, and D. I have all that embedded in <pre> tags for the fixed-width-ness. I mentioned it in the same thread, so maybe that will get fixed too although it sounds like I'm in the minority on choosing B anyway. :)

>131 YouKneeK: Thanks for doing the dirty work. I think I'll just stick with A and call it a day.

For anybody who prefers serif fonts, they added an option E to the Style chooser. They created a separate thread here to announce the new feature, if anybody wants to follow it in case of further developments. I probably won't mention it any more here if they make other changes, unless they do something I find particularly exciting.

I'm getting pretty close to finishing Kushiel's Dart and still enjoying it for the most part. I don't know if I'll finish it tonight, but I'm thinking tomorrow at the latest.

Ever since you posted about the style chooser I think I change the font daily. It's inconsistent letter spacing that's bothering me. Each of the font options has certain letters that end up smooshing together and bugging me. I think I'm going to play around with a browser add on for my font needs.

>140 Narilka: I’ve never tried any of the browser add-ons myself since fonts don’t seem to have much of an effect on me, but I’ve heard a few people mention doing that. It’s always sounded to me like a good option for people who need more control over the font they have to look at on frequently-used sites. I hope you’re able to get something that works well!

Review: Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey



Kushiel’s Dart is the first book in an epic fantasy series consisting of three trilogies for a total of nine books. I enjoyed it a lot, although I did have a few complaints.

The story is narrated by the main character, Phèdre, some undisclosed amount of time after the events in the story. Phèdre more-or-less fits the typical epic fantasy main character in that she was sold by her mother when she was I believe four years old. Not exactly the epic fantasy orphan, but close enough. Beyond that, though, I found her pretty unique as compared to other epic fantasy main characters I've read about. She’s sold to the Night Court, which is essentially a really fancy and elaborate brothel, except this is more of an honored thing with an important religious context in this setting. We spend many pages growing up with Phèdre before we really get into the meat of the story, so it’s difficult to tell much about the actual story without giving anything away. I’ll just say that Phèdre gets caught up in a lot of political intrigue.

I wouldn’t recommend this book to anybody who prefers to avoid sex in their books, because there’s quite a lot of it. Based on things I’d heard before reading it, I was worried it would be excessively explicit. Maybe those expectations affected my opinion, but I didn’t actually think it was overdone within the context of the story. However, I would warn that (minor spoiler that we learn early in the story) Phèdre is turned on by pain, so the sex scenes were often quite a bit different from what you might expect if you just went into this book expecting it to have a lot of standard sex. For me, there wasn’t much that appealed to me about these types of sex scenes, and I often found them disturbing, but I thought they mostly advanced the story rather than being gratuitous. It wasn’t done in a fade-to-black style, but it also wasn’t drawn out in excruciating detail either, at least I didn’t think so. The author gave us details about the parts relevant to the plot and glossed over or skipped the rest.

There isn’t much magic in this story, although it does exist. For most of the book, the most blatant form of magic is that some characters can occasionally tell bits of the future. There is a little more than that, but it’s mostly all religion-based magic.

This book helped scratched my oft-recurring epic fantasy itch. I also enjoyed how well-fleshed-out the world is. We have politics, factions, races, religions, geography, all feeling substantial and real, and revealed without info dumps. Although there’s only one main plot thread, there’s kind of a lot of different types of stories over the course of the book as events progress. I enjoyed them all, but it did start to feel a little never-ending by the end. This was when I first suspected this was the author’s first book, because it felt sort of like she had all these ideas for stories she wanted to tell and so she crammed them ALL into her book for fear she might never get another chance.

I Googled and found this was in fact her first book, which may or may not have had anything to do with why she tried to cram so much into one book, but I think it did explain one of my other complaints. I feel like I’m usually pretty good at puzzling out what an author is trying to convey if I try hard enough, and I usually do try if I’m invested in the book because I hate just glossing over things. I also don’t usually need or even want everything to be stated explicitly. However, there were some parts I re-read several times and finally just had to shrug my shoulders, give up, and move on. Part of it was phrasing I think, but it also seemed like the author sometimes forgot that her readers don’t live in her head and know all of the background context she had in her mind but never shared. There were also some other phrases that gave me that “first book” feel, just certain unnatural phrasing that I think was intended to give the book a loftier and more heroic vibe, but came across as being overused and sometimes distracting. The latter didn’t bother me very much, and some of it even appealed to me, I just wished it had been used more sparingly. There was also more blatant foreshadowing than I would have liked, with Phèdre frequently hinting at things to come in her narrative so that the story was less surprising than it might have been otherwise.

Still, despite some issues with some aspects of the author’s writing style, I really enjoyed the story and was invested in the characters. There are some plot threads left open at the end, but the main story is wrapped up well. I plan to continue straight into the next book as per my usual series reading strategy, but I think I would have been pretty satisfied with how this one wrapped up even if I hadn’t planned to read the next book right away. If the author’s first book was this good, I’m hoping it will only get better from here.

Next Book
Kushiel’s Chosen, the next book in this series.

>142 YouKneeK: Well, if you liked her debut work this much, I'd say you've got a good stretch of positive reading ahead of you then.

>143 BookstoogeLT: Thanks, I hope so!

> 142 Fingers crossed that the rest of the series will hold up for you.

>145 BrokenTune: Thanks!

Anybody see anything wrong on this screen? :)

>147 YouKneeK: What problem? Oh, THERE! XD

>147 YouKneeK: 😂 Yep, there it is!

>147 YouKneeK: Also - 72 pages of Dramatis Personae. Really?

>150 -pilgrim-: That sounds more inline with a Malazan Book of the Fallen :-)

>148 Majel-Susan:, >149 quondame: LOL, this caused me an unreasonable amount of amusement last night when I got to that chapter there. :)

>150 -pilgrim-: Those are actually Kindle locations, not page #’s. Most of the Kindle books I read have real page #’s, and the first book in this series had them, but this is one of the exceptions. If the book doesn’t have real page #’s, it defaults to the internal locations which is based on bytes. 128 bytes per location or something like that. For perspective, that screen is only a tiny portion of the book. There are 83 chapters and about 10,800 locations in this book.

>151 BookstoogeLT: Haha, not quite that bad from what I’ve heard! I counted a mere 133 characters listed in this Dramatis Personae.

Review: Kushiel’s Chosen by Jacqueline Carey



Kushiel’s Chosen is the second book in the first of three trilogies in the Kushiel’s Universe books. It picks up not long after the first book left off, and Phèdre decides to pursue one of the loose ends from that first book. As before, the story ends with a satisfying conclusion to the main issues, but with some loose ends left to carry into the next book.

I enjoyed this as much as the first book, but not as evenly. The first half was on the slow side and easy to put down, but things really picked up in the second half and then I raced through to the end. Part of my frustration in the first half was all the angst between Phèdre and Joscelin. That grew tiresome fast. Once that was no longer a constant part of the story, I enjoyed it more.

The writing was a little more polished, I think. I didn’t find myself confused by certain sentences the way I did at times in the first book. It also didn’t feel as overly stylized as the first book sometimes did, if that’s the correct term for it. Part of that might just be because I’ve read over 1600 pages of it now and have become accustomed to it. She does continue to use “somewhat” in abundance, though. For example, ”No, I need somewhat else.”

For those concerned, there are 80 instances of “somewhat” in this book, compared to 79 instances in the previous and longer book. So the “somewhat” quotient has increased, but the boob quotient on the other hand (for those who read my reviews of Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer series) has remained low in both books, despite all the sex. ;) Speaking of sex, I thought there was quite a bit less of it in this book. Phèdre doesn’t solve quite everything with it this time, although her great beauty is still highly influential!

A character was introduced in this book whose name is the title for the second trilogy, so I can’t help but speculate about that. I look forward to reading the final book in this trilogy, and I hope for a satisfying resolution to some of the ongoing plot threads, but I suspect at least one plot thread will be left dangling to lead into the next trilogy.

Next Book
Kushiel’s Avatar, the next book in the above series. This will be the last book in the first trilogy, so I’ll take a break to read something unrelated after that.

LT is crazy slow right now; I can't get to the book page to post my "official" review, which will be the same as this one anyway. I'll try again later, probably not until tomorrow since I'm usually off the computer for the night by now. Edit: Got it.

>153 YouKneeK: So it's not just me. The slowness is crazy making. I'm glad you're enjoying the Kushiel’s Universe books. They were some of the first fantasies I read the more sexual variety - not that there wasn't unusual sex in Jo Clayton's books but the emphasis seemed to change a good deal around the start of this century. The aspect in your spoiler annoyed me too!

>154 quondame: There was??? I didn't think that at all, except in the Larry Niven rishathra sense.

>155 Maddz: I'm thinking more in the B&D/LGBT+ scale as opposed to quantity or species of partners. Though I'm not sure what your exclamation was about. A (male) friend stopped reading the diadem books at the volume which in which the sexual partner was insectoid. Of course some of my friends were freaked out by Janet E. Morris or Jane Gaskell.

>156 quondame: Oh, right. IIRC, to me the insectoid one came across as more parasitic wasp rather than consensual. It's been a while since I read them.

In some ways, SFF books written by female authors in that era do seem to espouse Erica Jong and Germaine Greer.

>154 quondame: The site performance seems much better this morning, thankfully! I just went back and found your post in >62 quondame: again and definitely agree with your statements there based on the two I’ve read so far.

I actually haven’t yet read any of the authors you all have mentioned in >154 quondame: through >157 Maddz:. Well, I did read Larry Niven once, but he was only one of three authors of the book I read, and it didn’t make much of an impression on me – Fallen Angels.

>153 YouKneeK: I hate to ask, but do you know what book you'll be reading after you finish up this trilogy? and I am struggling to find anything to say because these books are so outside of anything I would read :-)

>159 BookstoogeLT: No worries, I don’t expect anybody to even read my reviews of books they aren’t interested in, much less comment on them!

I’m planning to read The Humans by Matt Haig next. It won the December sci-fi poll in the GR group I'm in, and was conveniently on sale on the U.S. Amazon site for $1.99. I know nothing about it, beyond verifying that it appears to be a standalone and was published in 2013, and haven't ever read anything by the author.

>158 YouKneeK: What, you've never read Ringworld? Do give it a try! The loosely-linked Known Space series is classic SF.

>161 Maddz: I'd like to, eventually!

>160 YouKneeK: I'm in a similar boat comment-wise. I'm intrigued by your reviews even if I have never heard of the books/authors, but can't comment anything sensible. The more I read SFF reviews and comments on them, the more interested I become in the books, tho.

Anyway, have you read Haig before? I read and enjoyed his How to Stop Time.

>163 BrokenTune: Yeah, I find it very difficult to comment on discussions about books I’m unfamiliar with. I enjoy commenting if I have something to say, and I read all the threads in this group, but I think life is too short (and too busy!) to spend time trying to think up things to comment about if nothing comes to mind immediately. I enjoy comments very much when I get them, and the fun discussions are the reason I continue to maintain this thread, but I don’t feel at all offended if I don’t hear from somebody for a while, especially since I'm not good at commenting myself.

No, I haven’t read anything by Matt Haig before. It’s promising to know you liked one of his other works!

>157 Maddz: There was the non-consensual waspoid and the waspoid that helped Aleytys.

>158 YouKneeK: >161 Maddz: Yes, Known Space is Larry at his best, which, depending on taste, he is not when a co-author, though I think the books with Pournelle may be his best sellers. One of my favorites co-authored books is The Burning City, but then I'm a local!

>161 Maddz: I'm trying to think of what you are referring to in Ringworld, but I'll admit it has been a long time since I've read that one.

>167 Karlstar: I wasn't referring to anything specifically in Ringworld, just recommending it and others in Known Space as being rather better than Fallen Angels.

What I was commenting on was the Jo Clayton with the insect reproduction (can't remember which one that was) and referring to it as rishathra (which of course was coined by Larry Niven). At least the Kushiel books spare us that (which is more than can be said for a lot of paranormal romance).

I think all of Jo Clayton's "Diadem" books have appeared in Good Show Sir! at some time. Here's Irsud: https://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/?p=11279.

>169 haydninvienna: LOL, geez. One of the comments had links to two of her other books with similar covers. Or at least, they all had a "moon" on them.

Stolen from @Narilka who stole it from @fuzzi who stole it from SandyAMcPherson's thread, who stole it from RD’s thread, who stole it from PC's thread.

It took me a while to get around to this because some of these questions are a lot of work! I saw it in @Sakerfalcon’s thread recently too, which reminded me I meant to do this, so I finally buckled down and got it done. Mostly.

***

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
That would be 1993. There are a few, but let’s go with A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny.

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
The dreaded Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. 881 pages. I wouldn’t normally mind a book of that length, but I haven’t been that crazy for the other books I’ve read by him and I have no DNF skills, so I’m expecting a slog.

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey would qualify, I think. Finished on November 11, 2020.

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Alas, see answer to #2. No DNF skills. I can’t even remember a book I didn’t finish. I guess if I include audiobooks I could think of several, but that’s because I’m horrible at audiobooks and many of the ones I failed to finish were books I had enjoyed (and finished) in print.

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
Bunnicula, read this past April. I didn’t sleep for a week.

No, I’m kidding! Actually, I have no idea. I read a lot of horror in my youth and I think I became a little numb to it because I don’t usually get much more than a faint creepy feeling, if anything. I did get scared more easily when I was young, and I remember thinking Pet Sematary was pretty darn scary, but I was like 10 when I read it.

Just scrolling through the books I’ve read in more recent years, I can’t see anything I was truly scared by. Sphere and Starfish had people-under-water-for-extensive-periods-of-time which tends to make me antsy, but I still have all my bejeebers and was never really scared at all. Still, if I were forced to make a choice, I would choose sky diving as the less scary option versus scuba diving.

Weaveworld, read back in 2017, did scare me because I didn’t think I’d ever get the term “menstruum” out of my head again. As you can see, those fears were well-founded.

Ok, that was a really long non-answer.

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
This one is difficult too, because I read a lot of SF&F. Of the books that actually take place on Earth, the location often isn’t that relevant to the story so I’m likely to forget where they took place. I scrolled back through my recently read list, as far as I had the patience for, and I think the closest might be Recursion which I read last month. It has some parts that take place in NY. I’m in the Atlanta suburbs, so not terribly close, about 850 miles.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
I hardly ever read non-fiction, but they most likely would have been computer science.

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
I read a lot of pretty well-known books, at least in SF&F circles, since I’m a latecomer to SF&F and am still catching up on everything I’ve missed. Kushiel’s Dart might count, finished on November 11, 2020. If not that, then The Canterbury Tales would surely count, finished on October 24, 2020.

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
The Bear and the Nightingale, read in July 2020.

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Similar to what @Narilka said, I read a lot of series books. So in that regard, there are tons of books that I've read because I liked the earlier book(s) in the series. I’m currently reading Kushiel’s Avatar because it’s a sequel to two earlier books that I enjoyed enough to continue the story.

If you take series out of the equation, I read Three Men in a Boat in April 2019 as a direct result of reading To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, which refers to that book quite a lot.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
I don’t think I can answer this one. Taken literally, I’ve never been infatuated with an actual person who was an author. I suspect this question is probably referring to an infatuation with an author’s work. There are authors whose work I admire and whom I would call favorites, but this sounds more to me like an author whose new publications I’ll buy and read as soon as they’re published, or whose books I seek out and read everything they've ever published while ignoring other books. I don’t do that for any authors.

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
The first book I read this year was This Alien Shore which starts on a satellite orbiting Earth, but soon heads out much further into space.

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Kushiel’s Dart which, to oversimplify a bit, features a war between the Skaldi and Terre d’Ange.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
I’m not sure. I tend to stubbornly stick to my own reading plans and I know I am sometimes influenced by the discussions we have about books here, but I think more often it’s a case of the review or recommendation causing me to pull forward something I was already planning to read eventually but was inspired to read sooner.

The most specific example I can think of wasn’t really due to a LT review or explicit recommendation, but I remember back in 2017 I had a poll in my thread for three Steinback books I was trying to choose between reading. There weren’t a ton of votes, and I ended up with a three-way tie of two votes for each book, then @ScoLgo kindly broke the tie by voting for Of Mice and Men – a book which I really enjoyed.

I’m sure there have been other more recent influences that I’ve forgotten though, so I apologize to anybody who’s reading this and thinking, “How could she possibly have forgotten…?!” Feel free to jump in and point out my folly. :)

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion which I read in August and September of this year would count I guess since they’re set in our distant future.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Kushiel’s Avatar, which I’m reading right now, as well as the two previous books in the series which I also read this month, all have parts of the story that take place at sea.

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
I have absolutely no idea. Nothing recent I don’t think, but I gave up pretty fast on trying to find one. I don't usually pay much attention to where the authors whose works I read are from.

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Well, I’m not terribly fond of the Kushiel book covers which I’m reading now as I’ve never been fond of the half-naked-people style of covers. I don’t usually have very strong opinions about covers, though.

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
It sounds like this probably means the author who died most recently, but I refuse to do that much research, so I’m going to go with the most recent book I read by a dead author. That would surely be Geoffrey Chaucer, who died in 1400 but whose book I finished a mere month ago.

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
Bunnicula! April 2020. It won the April 1st group read poll in the group I’m in on GR. Sort of.

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Oh good, another easy one. Conrad Metcalf in Gun, With Occasional Music, read last month.

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
I’m not sure short stories count here since they’re technically not a book, but the shortest “bookish thing” I’ve read this year was Gunner’s Apprentice, a short story set in Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer series. Shortest actual book (I think?) would be The Great Gatsby at 76 pages.

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
The Canterbury Tales!!!!! (Yes, I know multiple exclamation marks are a sign of insanity, but that one nearly drove me insane.)

What was behind the struggle? Obnoxious characters, deceitful characters, idiotic characters, doormat characters, characters ranting and raving about boring topics, boring plots, and generic stories -- although I recognize that the latter was inevitable given that Chaucer was borrowing from existing stories and that any influential stories from over 600 years ago are bound to feel generic today. Apologies to all the people who loved it, I just enjoy ranting and raving about this book now. ;)

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
I don’t add books to my library on LT until I start reading them, so the most recent addition was the book I’m reading right now – Kushiel’s Avatar

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Bunnicula. :)

BONUS QUESTION!
26. What is the title and year of the oldest book in your physical library that you have reviewed on LT?
Since this question specifies a physical library, that narrows it down to two possible books for me. I read almost exclusively e-books and, if I do need to read a physical book, I usually borrow it from the library rather than purchase it. There are only two books that I wanted to read badly enough to purchase physical copies since they weren’t available from my library. Of those two, A Night in the Lonesome October is the oldest, published in 1993.

>168 Maddz: Thanks! I guess it is time for a re-read.

>162 YouKneeK: Yes, you should!

>171 YouKneeK: Great answers! I like that you gave more in-depth answers than I did (although I was filling it in as a distraction from work so it didn't seem right to take too much time over it!).

>173 Sakerfalcon: Thanks, I enjoyed reading yours also! They were fun to answer, but I’m bad about going into way too much detail on these types of Q&As, so I usually burn myself out on them before I get halfway through. :)

>171 YouKneeK: Great list :)

>175 Narilka: Thanks!

>171 YouKneeK: Fun list. I took a bullet on The Bear and the Nightingale.

>177 Jim53: Thanks, I really hope you enjoy The Bear and the Nightingale if you read it!

Hi all, just checking in. I’m still working my way through the third book in the first Kushiel trilogy. I’m at about 70%, so it will probably be a few more days. I think it’s headed for another 4-star rating. I’m still enjoying it quite a bit, but it’s not usually too hard to put down. I was on call over the past 7 days though, and also training somebody else who will join in the on-call rotation next year, so that created some reading distractions.

Meanwhile, Bookstooge had been soliciting kitten pictures*, so I dug up the below photo to post as a comment on his latest WordPress post. Since I already had dug up the image, uploaded it, and gotten the link, I thought I might as well share it here too.

*This is both a bald-faced lie and a bold-faced lie. That sentence led to a Google search to figure out which one was the correct term, where I learned both are, but bald-faced is closest to the original terminology which was bare-faced lie. Personally I prefer bold-faced, because a bold-faced lie is distinguishable from, say, a shame-faced lie. On my face, all types of lies are going to be bald-faced due to the female factor. But I hate lies very much, which is why I confessed to this one immediately after telling it.

This was Ernest in August 2014 when he was about 3.5 months old, studying a computer networking book. This is why he's so good at computers; he started early. I can’t remember if I’ve ever shared this picture here before, but I’m thinking not. This image also happens to tie nicely with #7 in the above Q&A, although I'm pretty sure it wasn't one of the last two non-fiction books I read. And actually I just realized I have another lie to confess to, although it was accidental. I have several computer and other textbooks that I've reviewed on LT and still have in my physical library, so my answer to #26 might not have been correct. I was only thinking about fiction books. I'm only confessing the lie, not correcting it, because it would take too much time to check. The fiction book I listed is probably still the oldest, since any textbook that old would have been too outdated by the time I read it.

>179 YouKneeK: My goodness, SO MANY LIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now I'm ashamed to even be seen on this thread ;-)

Obviously Ernest was starting his alter ego as a cat meme at an early age...

Paul keeps showing me pictures of a co-worker and his Siamese master. My favourite was the picture of co-worker asleep in bed and his master obviously sending the subliminal message: "prrrr....brrreakfaast now...prrrr...feeeed meee...prrr"

>179 YouKneeK: Ernest was absolutely adorable as a little kitten :)

>180 BookstoogeLT: You should be, I know I am!

>181 Maddz: LOL, Ernest certainly suffered through enough photos when he was a kitten. Cats can be quite creepy the way they stare at you when you’re asleep! Mine is free fed so he doesn’t ever wake me up for food, but he does wake me up in the middle of the night sometimes when he wants some petting. Some things just can't wait.

>182 Narilka: Ernest has graced you with a slow blink in thanks. :)

>179 YouKneeK: >182 Narilka: Only as a kitten? Surely he's still adorable, if better at organizing his hoomin slave!

>160 YouKneeK: I read The Humans back in early 2019. My review is here . Looking back, I appear to have liked it more at the time then I remember doing.

Perhaps my memory is coloured by having gone on to read The Radleys by the same author. The point that I found a little problematic, but probably justified by the narrator being an alien, turned up in a more 'in your face' manner there (where it certainly was not justified).

And yes, it is completely stand-alone.

>184 hfglen: Haha, as a proper hoomin slave, I’ve been brainwashed into thinking he’s still adorable, the better to ensure I cater to his every whim.

>185 -pilgrim-: I’ve made myself a note to come back and read your review as well as your spoiler tagged comment after I’ve finished reading and reviewing the book myself. I like to go in blind, but I always enjoy reading reviews from people I know afterwards.

>179 YouKneeK: Ernest was an adorable kitten! Looks so sweet and innocent!

>186 YouKneeK: Don't expect too much of my review. I wrote less in those days!

>179 YouKneeK: Those ears!!

>187 Sakerfalcon: "Looks" being the operative word! ;)

>189 -pilgrim-: LOL, yeah, it took him a while to grow into those.

>179 YouKneeK: Aww. Ernest is so cute.

>191 BrokenTune: Thanks for contributing further to his inflated ego. ;)

>192 YouKneeK: Is it possible to inflate a cat's ego? They all know from birth that their destiny is as Supreme Overlord of the Galaxy (and expect to be treated with the deference due to their position).

>193 -pilgrim-: Unfortunately, Ernest now thinks he’s Supreme Overlord of the Universe. ;)

Review: Kushiel’s Avatar by Jacqueline Carey



Kushiel’s Avatar is the last book in the first of three Kushiel’s Universe trilogies. All three books were a solid four stars. I enjoyed the stories, cared about the characters, and looked forward to reading it each day. I didn’t find it very hard to put down, and there were slow spots here and there, so that’s the main reason I’m sticking with four stars.

I think the amount of sex scenes decreased as the series went on, but I would caution that there is some pretty major violence in this third book, at least during one section of it. This included (general spoiler, not specific) violence against children and rape of children, although that part took place mostly off the page and was difficult to read, although the story itself was very riveting for me in that section. I did think the author did a good job of showing the long-term impact those experiences had on the characters.

This book gave the trilogy a satisfying conclusion, tying up the most significant plot threads while leaving room for the reader to wonder what the characters might do next. I’m really looking forward to the next trilogy, which is listed as Imriel’s Trilogy. We spent quite a bit of time with Imriel in this book and I really liked him, so I look forward to reading more about him.

Next Book
I know I said I would be reading The Humans next, and I do plan to read it soon, but it’s a group read on GR and the spoiler thread won’t open until December 7th. With my slower reading pace I might not finish before then even if I start now, but I’d rather reduce the risk and start reading it a little closer to that date since it's a fairly short book. When I participate in a group read, I prefer to finish at some point after the spoiler thread opens so that I can jump into the conversation right away with the story fresh in my head.

So I’ve decided to slip in at least one if not both of the 4th quarter classics I’d originally planned for this year. I’d decided to skip them after my 3rd quarter read of The Canterbury Tales took me so long to finish and proved so torturous to me, but I expect my original planned books to both be fast reads since they’re plays. I’ll start with The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, which is also extremely short. Assuming I finish that within the next 2 or 3 days, I’ll probably also fit in the second Shakespeare play I’d planned for this year, the rather dreaded Romeo and Juliet.

>179 YouKneeK: I think Ernest was adorable at a very early age. Can you post a photo of him now as an adult? I love other people's cat photos.

>196 jillmwo: Here’s the adult version, as recent as about 10 min or so ago.

I would like to call everybody’s attention to all the little scratch marks that you can just see at the bottom of the picture, on the top part of the drawer. This is from the little freak opening the drawer over and over and over with his claws. He doesn't use the handles, he wedges his claws in at the top. Bad cat! :) He’s also guarding my Kindle, the blue thing behind him.

We're currently on a conference call together for a major system problem at work... 2nd day straight of being on the computer all day, so he's a bit annoyed!

>197 YouKneeK: That's a cat of opinions!

>198 quondame: Haha, and he’s not afraid to meow about them either.

Edited to fix post reference #.

>197 YouKneeK: holy smokes, those claw marks are really there! Looks like termites :-)

>197 YouKneeK: He's still very handsome, and clearly has quite a personality!

>197 YouKneeK: Reuben has done the same to the drawers of my nightstand. He's not trying (or able) to open them, he just likes the way it feels on his claws.

>197 YouKneeK: I think he's handsome. And if you'd just leave that drawer open, I'm sure he'd stop leaving claw marks on the furniture, right? :>)

>197 YouKneeK: He's a gorgeous cat! And obviously annoyed you are not worshiping him enough lol

>197 YouKneeK: By 'guarding my Kindle', do you mean attempting to prevent you from using it so you'll pay more attention to him?

>195 YouKneeK: Thanks for reading these and confirming that I should not!

Whew, hi everybody. I feel like I’ve sort of dropped off the face of the planet for a few days. We had a MAJOR issue at work when a critical disk array was damaged and eventually declared unrecoverable. It affected multiple critical systems for our company including the one I support for 30+ different warehouses around the world.

The funny thing is that we were planning our twice-annual disaster recovery testing for next week and suddenly here we are doing a real disaster recovery. This has never happened in the 10 years I’ve been on the team. It could have gone worse, at least most of our data was in-tact and the main application itself is mostly functioning as normal. Since I have spent a lot of time over recent years hounding the replication team to death when I see data discrepancies in our replication process, to the point of making one of them quite mad at me because I was still pestering them over “a few discrepancies”, I now feel a bit vindicated because this would have been so much worse if our replicated data had been as bad as it used to be. But there are a still lot of little non-data things missing that affect the sites’ abilities to function, and some big lessons learned. We’ve been working non-stop trying to get the sites back up and running at regular production levels.

I worked something like 50 straight hours with only 2 hours of sleep. I’m trying to get a break now while other team members fill in. I did just manage a couple more hours of sleep and am now catching up on some food and just trying to stay away from the work computer for a while so I can recharge. I’m hoping I can catch up a little more sleep also, but it’s hard to sleep through the chaos my mind knows is going on. :)

I’m not sure how long this will last, but this is where I’ve disappeared to if I’m very quiet for a while. I’m not trying to read other people’s threads or blogs right now as I just don’t have the bandwidth, but will catch up when things calm down. It feels like we still have a long way to go, but eventually we’ll get through it. I guess I can be grateful that, if this had to happen, it happened early in December and not over the holidays when I was planning to be on vacation. (Not going anywhere, just enjoying some time off at home.) Hopefully we'll have everything pretty stable again long before then.

>200 BookstoogeLT:, >201 Sakerfalcon:, >202 Darth-Heather:, >203 jillmwo:, >204 Narilka:, >205 Karlstar: Thank you all for the kind and funny comments on my crazy little freak! He’s a little bewildered by his human's odd behavior right now, but at least he knows where to find me because I’m always at my computer! He might think I'm guarding the drawers from his pesky claws. :)

>207 Karlstar: I hate it when disk arrays go bad with no warning! Was it a cascade failure of multiple disks in the array? Congrats on having the replica up to speed, I hope someone recognizes that was a huge savings in time and effort. Were there at least good backups too?

>206 YouKneeK: Yikes! Good luck with the recovery. I've been through a similar situation and it was utterly exhausting.

>207 Karlstar: In our case, the root cause was a little unique I think. The array was physically damaged. I don’t know all the details as it’s a department I don’t work directly with and in a different state from me, but we were told a tech on site from our hardware vendor had a "physical mishap" that damaged the array. They tried for several hours to repair it, but eventually had to declare it unrecoverable.

>208 Narilka: Thanks! This is my first experience with anything on this scale. I thought our software implementation go-lives were rough, but this is a whole 'nother thing! :)

Fortunately things seem to be calming down for now, at least on our side of things. We seem to have our sites that work weekends stabilized. I expect it will get crazy again on Monday when the rest of our sites start up. I’m hoping very hard that tonight at least will be quiet so I can get a good night’s sleep. I’d even settle for a mediocre night’s sleep. ;)

Ooooph. That sounds brutal. I'm guessing it's something a couple of swings of a machete wouldn't solve. too bad, otherwise I'd be glad to step in and "help" :-D

>210 BookstoogeLT: Wait a minute… where were you on Thursday, December 3, 2021 at around 2pm Eastern or so? Machete swinging sounds exactly like the sort of thing that could have led to our catastrophe! ;)

>211 YouKneeK: I was actually in England getting the Medal of Bravery from the Queen of England herself. The Film-Authority was a witness. And since he is scottish, you know that means he can't lie ;-)

>212 BookstoogeLT: Ah ha, I caught you in a lie, because you couldn’t possibly have been there on the date I specified since it hasn’t happened yet! Unless you have a time travel device in which case, could I please borrow it and try to avert some catastrophes? ;)

(I only just now noticed I typed 2021 instead of 2020 in my post. I blame the exhaustion!)

>213 YouKneeK: Oh, I noticed. Unfortunately, for you, my timemachine is for Blogging Related Purposes only. Dr Who taught me that. Anything else and things get messy. And I think this week it's Film-Authority's turn to use it anyway. Sorry :(

>214 BookstoogeLT: Drat! :)

Review: The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams



The Glass Menagerie is a short, classic American play from the 1940’s. I have vague memories of reading this in school, but I didn’t remember anything about it, not even whether or not I liked it.

It’s difficult to explain much about the story without spoiling it since it’s so short. The majority of the play has only three characters: Amanda (the mother), Laura (her daughter), and Tom (her son). Tom also serves as a narrator to provide some context for the story. The father abandoned his family and they live in a cheap apartment, barely scraping by. Both children are past school age, and the son has a low-paying job at a warehouse. The daughter is extremely shy and timid. The mother desperately wants her children to do and be more than they are.

This is a pretty depressing little play about people who are stuck in a bad situation and lack the motivation or ability to better themselves, squandering their opportunities and making things worse for each other . Laura’s and Tom’s actions were really frustrating to me, especially when Tom financed his escape by using the money allocated for the electric bill instead of saving it up from the money he was spending on cigarettes, alcohol, and movies. The mother was pretty obnoxious and I’m not sure she was entirely sane, but she was the one whose motivations I understood best.

I thought the story was well-told, though. It felt real, and I could understand the characters even if I didn’t like them very much. As a play, it was easier to picture what was going on as compared to the few other plays I’ve read, mostly Shakespeare. The stage directions were pretty detailed, describing characters’ expressions and actions and movements, and even their motivations or thoughts at times. Add to that quite a bit of narration from Tom, and it almost felt like reading prose that just had a lot of dialogue.

Next Book
Since my work catastrophe made this read take much longer than it should have, I’m going to skip Romeo and Juliet for this year and go straight to The Humans by Matt Haig so I can join in with the group read on Goodreads.

>216 YouKneeK: Sounds pretty interesting! I'm gonna look into it.

>217 Majel-Susan: I'll look forward to your thoughts if you try it! If nothing else, it's an extremely fast read.

>216 YouKneeK: The language makes it slightly depressing when performed onstage, but its still plenty grim.

>219 quondame: Have you had the opportunity to see it on stage then? That would be interesting I think, especially after reading all the stage directions to see how they chose to carry them out or reinterpret them.

>206 YouKneeK: Yikes! I'm glad you have the crisis mostly under control. Hope you get to catch up on sleep, reading and other essential things.

>220 YouKneeK: Yes, back in the 60s and 70s when my mom and I went to LA or she visited me here and we took a play along with shopping and medical visits almost monthly.

I remembered shabby looking sets with very little color.

>221 Sakerfalcon: Thanks! Today got a little crazy again since our non-weekend sites started up and had new issues, but I’m hoping it will slowly get better from here on out. I’m finally starting to catch up on sleep, and I did get a little bit of free time on Sunday.

>222 quondame: That sounds like it would be fun. I’ve been to a handful of plays, but not very many at all.

>142 YouKneeK: Glad to see you enjoyed the Jacqueline Carey trilogy. Good lord, I didn't realize there were three trilogies. I have the first book of the first one languishing on my kindle. Our tastes seem to be very similar, so I might bump this one up.

>179 YouKneeK: What a sweet baby! (He's lovely as an adult, too.)

>216 YouKneeK: Pretty sure I saw a TV movie of this with Katherine Hepburn as the mom, and Sam Waterston as the son. Great performance by both, but what a depressing play.

So very sorry about your work disaster!

>224 clamairy: I’d love to find out what you think if you try the first Kushiel book!

I think I do remember the introductory material (which I read at the end) mentioning Hepburn as one of the people who had played the mom in The Glass Menagerie over the years. Apparently the story had a lot of parallels with the author’s own life, which kind of makes it even more depressing.

Thanks for your comments about Ernest and the work disaster!

I have a new confession… I went something like 5 days this past Monday through Friday without reading a single word from my book. An unheard-of travesty! Even when I’m busy I usually find at least a few minutes for reading. At most, I might miss one full day if there are extenuating circumstances.

Work was still busy this past week from the aforementioned disaster. It did calm down some, but by the end of the day when I was finally able to stop working, I was too tired to concentrate on reading. A lot of my trouble was that I never had a day off to catch up on the sleep I lost while working through two days and two nights, so I felt constantly exhausted. I’ve done a handful of all-nighters for work before, but never more than one in a row and after that I usually had the next day off. This time I worked 12 straight days with two lost nights of sleep in the middle of that, so there was never a chance for extra sleep. I’m always envious of those who can remain functional with minimal sleep; I am not one of them! I was typing and doing strange things all through this past week and I had to quadruple check myself if I was doing anything important for fear of causing a disaster of my own.

But yesterday I finally had a day off and I took many, many naps. I did finally fit in about 100 pages of reading between the naps, although sitting down to read was usually the trigger for another nap! :) Today I’m feeling a little more human. Thank goodness this has (so far) been a quiet weekend for work.

Meanwhile everybody is posting here like mad and I can barely keep up! Isn’t it usually quiet around here toward the end of the year, and then it picks back up in January? I guess maybe more people than usual are hanging around at home instead of doing lots of shopping and/or planning of large celebrations.

>226 YouKneeK: Ouch. I'm glad you're starting to catch up on lost sleep. (Though all the books I've read say it's not a thing, I've always felt better after several days of extra sleep after some sleep deprivation.) Back-to-back all-nighters sounds like torture. (I think this is a well-known interrogation tactic, sadly.) I don't doubt that your reading took a hit!

This is usually a slow time, but the plague has changed all that.

>226 YouKneeK: You know life is tough when you don't read for 5 days! Glad you got some naps and reading in yesterday.
Is the busy'ness because of people trying to get to the 151 mark by month's end or is it more "serious" busy'ness of actual posting?

>226 YouKneeK: Reminds of cramming for exams. Not something I want to do again!

Next week for me is going to be super-busy - not only do I have my own work to complete before going on my 2 weeks of Christmas leave (and the other developer is on sick leave, and we're losing 2 analysts), I'm on the rota for a surveillance dashboard which involves at least half a day every day of the week - plus a lot of hurry up and wait for an external data source to post the national data.

Half a day once per week is one thing, but 4-5 days??? I pointed out that nobody is doing our surveillance work - we have to do that as well. My manager thinks it's going to be re-thought in the New Year because the instructions are very poorly written and a struggle to understand.

>226 YouKneeK: Hopefully the work craziness is over now and you can get back to normal.

>227 clamairy: Same here, I always seem to need extra sleep before I feel like myself again after a night without proper sleep. And for me, "proper sleep" means at least 6 hours. I can definitely see where sleep deprivation would make an effective interrogation technique. You all really missed a golden opportunity to interrogate me, actually!

>228 BookstoogeLT: I think it’s a bit of both, but the piffle parties did seem to start 2 or 3 weeks early this year so that’s probably a big contributor.

>229 Maddz: That sounds like quite a bit of madness. I hope you’re able to get through it all without having to work excessively long hours so that you aren’t worn out before your leave starts!

>230 Narilka: Thanks, if this weekend was any indication, it seems to finally be calming down.

Review: The Humans by Matt Haig



The Humans is a standalone science fiction novel written by an alien. Actually, I think the author is a human, but the character who takes credit for writing the book is an alien. A mathematician on Earth has just proven the Riemann hypothesis, and this is dangerous for the whole universe. Just before the story begins, the mathematician is killed by an alien species for the good of the universe. The alien who wrote the book was assigned to take on his appearance, figure out just how far the knowledge had spread, and eliminate all evidence of the mathematical proof, including any people who know about it. The alien makes many missteps as he attempts to fulfill this duty.

This was a funny, fast read. I chuckled several times throughout the book. However, it was also completely illogical and too sappy for my tastes. We have a highly intelligent and advanced race of aliens who know enough about what’s going on with Earth to be aware that a random mathematician figured out how to prove the Riemann hypothesis. They're so on top of it, that they take action within just a few days. And yet apparently they were completely unable to prepare their alien spy with knowledge of the language and such basic fitting-in skills such as wearing clothes. Our alien "author" went in with no preparation whatsoever aside from being told what his objective was.

Logic wasn’t really the point of this story. That was clear from the first chapter, and I tried to set it aside, but my brain doesn’t really work that way. The story I think was meant more as a vehicle to let the alien make clever observations about human nature and to provide hope and encouragement to people who are struggling with their membership in the human race. Even while some of the alien’s observations made me laugh, I had trouble with the alien’s convenient tendency to understand certain nuances of human nature while completely misunderstanding others. Which way things went, understood or not understood, seemed to be based not so much on logic but rather on whichever would be funnier.

This book joins Bunnicula in feeding toxic food to dogs without anybody seeming to be aware of the dangers. On behalf of the dogs on our planet, and any other planets where they might be found, I would like to warn people not to feed their dogs grapes. Not even a single grape. Grapes (and raisins, of course) are toxic to dogs.

So anyway, the book. It was cute, and it made me laugh. I don’t regret reading it, but I think I would have really enjoyed this premise more if it had been told in a more serious, believable manner. However, I do understand that this wasn't the author's goal in writing the book based on the details he provided in his acknowledgements.

Next Book
Kushiel’s Scion, the first book in the second trilogy of Kushiel’s Universe by Jacqueline Carey. I look forward to getting back to this.

>185 -pilgrim-: Thanks for linking to your review. I enjoyed reading it! I agree the romance part was kind of sweet. I was a little bothered on her behalf that she was to a large extent falling in love with an illusion, but I thought her reaction when she found out was fairly realistic. I did more fully enjoy the parts with Gulliver, the son. It was kind of cliché I guess, but I liked seeing the alien get through to him and help him increase his confidence and his ability to cope.

>229 Maddz: That sounds crazy! Why is it so manual?

>234 Karlstar: Because of the way the dashboards were originally created earlier this year. Although there is some automation, it's been set up so everything is coming from different directories, the instructions are so badly written, and the same thing gets downloaded by different people to different places. We're also relying on emails being forwarded - we've had to chase somebody at least twice.

I'm also having issues in that I can't get into the workspaces - they all default to offline for me and all I see are empty folders. This has been happening since I got upgraded to a Windows 10 machine in the summer; I've 'fixed' this for the workspace I routinely use, but obviously not for workspaces I have no reason to access in the course of my regular job.

Fortunately, I won't be doing this at all in the New Year (or so my manager tells me)! Just as well, today I only managed to spend an hour on my work - it's not something I can pick up and put down at a minute's notice. I also have the issue in that although I work in Public Health, I have nothing to do with Public Health work (I'm exclusively adult social care), and I haven't a clue what it's all about - so I've refused point blank to present to the meetings we're supposed to, especially as we're expected to provide interpretation on request.

Don't get me started on PowerBI...

>233 YouKneeK: One could argue that all romance is falling in love with an illusion. The question is whether love can arrive gradually getting to know the reality.

Like all subterfuge replacement stories, there is the undercurrent of obtaining sex by misrepresentation, which is just as much rape as it was when Uther Pendragon conceived Arthur! But since the professor and his wife were in a strained relationship, I think we can assume that sex was no longer involved. (And I suspect the author at things up that way to avoid the situation.)

Her initial complete rejection of him, in response to the deception, removed her from the category of "misused doormat" for me. He had to start again. It felt a very real reaction, as did her realisation that the deception did not negate what had made her reconsider her relationship with her "husband". That she forgives the deception, and the murderous intent depends on how excusable this appears in the light of an alien culture. And, as you say, depiction of that culture is not a strong point of the book.

>236 -pilgrim-: I agree regarding there being elements of illusion in all relationships. I don’t find that kind of illusion at all similar to an alien replacement situation like this one, though. Isobel’s rekindled feelings were based on the foundation of her original feelings for the real Andrew before they grew apart plus the shared experiences she’d had with the real Andrew. The alien had never been a part of those things. It wasn’t just the sex that I was uncomfortable with. I understood the alien’s choices, and the interaction between the two of them was sweet, but the deception kept me from getting very invested in the romance so I was happy when her reaction upon learning the truth was realistic.

I also kind of liked how we don’t know how their relationship turned out. I usually prefer more closure on stories, but sometimes closure for romance subplots can feel too trite, so I think maybe I don't mind as much if those parts are left open.

>237 YouKneeK: I agree completely that it needed her rejection of the fraud to make that aspect of the plot acceptable. The story never portrays what he has done as "OK". He had reasons, but it still may have cost him a relationship, just as he understands exactly what he will be missing out on.

I think I don't see the alien as simply taking advantage of her memories of the real Andrew, since however unwittingly, he was actually an improvement on the original. Even if it was initially for mission reasons, he was trying to please her, whilst her actual husband was more selfish.

Therefore I do see it as only an extreme version of the guy who uses subterfuge to find out what you are looking for, and then fakes being that person.

Neither is acceptable. And if love is going to happen afterwards, it has to start again.

I don't actually have anything to say. I just wanted to get in on the spoiler action.

And that pretty much sums up the human condition!

>240 BookstoogeLT: LOL, well, I guess that just about covers everything!

>240 BookstoogeLT: :D

Review: Kushiel’s Scion by Jacqueline Carey



Kushiel’s Scion is the first book in the second of three Kushiel’s Universe trilogies. This trilogy focuses on Imriel, the son of traitors, third in line for the throne of Terre d’Ange, who wants more than anything to just be a good person and do the right thing. We met him in the previous trilogy when he was ten or eleven and he was a great character. I liked him even more in this book, reading from his own perspective this time.

We spend a lot of time growing up with Imriel in the first part of this book, with a little bit of recapping from the previous trilogy but mostly moving forward past that time. For a few hundred pages maybe, I wasn’t really even quite sure what the plot was since the little bit of dramatic news in the opening chapter didn’t really seem to go anywhere. Despite that, I was never bored. I was interested in Imri’s smaller-scale troubles and minor political intrigues while he was growing up, and I was interested in the later parts when the action picked up and reached a larger scale. I was more consistently entertained with his book than I had been with the previous trilogy. I did enjoy those books too, but they had some slow and sloggy parts. I didn’t think this book did.

For those who read my Lightbringer reviews earlier this year, you might remember the Boob Quotient chart. Jacquelin Carey is trying to give Brent Weeks some competition with her Phallus Quotient. She’s not quite there yet, but she’s closing in. Actually, Carey’s books were published first, so I guess she was the body part trendsetter and Weeks was just trying to dethrone her…

Sarcasm aside, I enjoyed this story a lot and I look forward to seeing what happens next. As with the previous books, this one has a mostly-complete story with some plot threads I expect to be carried throughout the trilogy. I’m rating it at 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 on Goodreads.

Next Book
Kushiel’s Justice, the second book in this trilogy.

I hope you get some of those at least as we all look forward to a better 2021.

>244 PaulCranswick: Thanks, best wishes to you for 2021.

>216 YouKneeK: This is a pretty depressing little play about people who are stuck in a bad situation Absolutely agree with your assessment. I once was invited in college to try out for the role of the lame daughter and just could not see my way clear to engage in something that was just such a downer.

I do hope you enjoy a nice holiday respite and a much happier and successful 2021...

>246 jillmwo: I can see why you wouldn't have wanted to take on that role, especially considering how much time you would have spent in it when you include rehearsals and other preparations.

Thank you, I hope you have a great 2021!

This ridiculously long post is mostly non-book-related, although I do kind of get to books by the end. I’m on vacation this week, so I’ve finally had a little time to catch up on life. When I have extra time on my hands, long posts are sometimes the result! This post rambles in sequential order about different topics that I’ve considered posting about here before, but haven’t done for various reasons – mostly due to lack of time and energy, or just not wanting to talk about them. I’m including headings so people can more easily skim to see what parts might be of interest and ignore whatever isn’t. :)

General Life Craziness
This year has been full of craziness for me personally, with various issues ranging from minor to major. Things in my personal life started calming down in September, just in time for work to get nuts in October. Work has ranged from busy to insane since then. At least personal and work things weren’t both crazy at the same time. There have been some pretty long working hours lately where I’ve woken up to an issue, logged onto the computer before even eating breakfast, and then been hunched over at the computer pretty much straight through until bedtime, hardly having time to take notice of the outside world.

I don’t have any room to complain about long hours at work in the last few months though, because in the grand scheme of things I owed some hours to make up for all my personal distractions earlier in the year. The biggest one was in August. My manager permitted me to work from out of town for an entire month. That wasn’t a big concession on the surface of things since I was working from home anyway due to the pandemic, but he also kept my workload low and kept the pressure off while I was the primary caregiver, with the support of Hospice volunteers making occasional in-home visits, for my mother who died at the end of August. I can’t imagine how people deal with something like that with a less flexible job. It was a difficult enough situation without having work pressures on top of it.

Ernest Alone
Although I have to admit he wasn’t the top thing on my mind at the time, I was pretty worried about my cat Ernest being alone for that long. Taking him with me wasn’t an option. He handled it far better than I feared. Russian Blues are supposed to be good at handling extended periods alone, which was the primary reason I chose to seek out a specific cat breed back when I decided to get a cat, because that was the one trait I really needed to be sure my new cat had. In normal years I work away from home for about 10 hours a day including commute time, and I occasionally have to travel on business. I needed a cat that wouldn’t be miserable being home alone, and Ernest has always been good about it as long as I give him lots of attention once I’m home.

I’d never left him alone for so very long though, so I was worried because he’s a social little guy who loves attention and he’d also gotten used to me being home all the time this year due to the pandemic. And I missed him! I have a sitter who takes care of him whenever I’m out of town. She stops by once a day to play with him, clean his litter boxes, etc. I’m pretty sure he terrorizes the poor woman, getting all his pent-up energy out while he has an audience. I was scared that my leaving him alone for so long would stress him out and lead to behavioral problems like not using the litter box or something, but he was fine and resumed our routine as if everything were normal once I got back.

Decluttering
September was spent trying to get my life back together after being away from home for most of a month plus take care of things related to my mom’s estate. I got off a bit easy on that score because she was living with her mom (my 88 year old grandma) who owns the home, so she didn’t have any property for me to deal with. Just various accounts at a single bank that were all either jointly in my name or for which I had been identified as the beneficiary. I didn’t have to go through probate court or anything like that, and I was able to handle the bank stuff at a local branch in my area. The main thing I had to do was help clean out mom’s stuff at my grandma’s house.

I think grandma (and my uncle who lives with her also) were a bit taken aback by my whirlwind attack on mom’s stuff, but my way of dealing with grief has always been to go on a major cleaning and/or decluttering spree. Maybe because it’s an activity that gives me some semblance of control over things, feeling like I’m putting things in order, plus it’s something I can do while my thoughts are all over the place, giving me a chance to process things while feeling like I’m still being productive. I also didn’t want to leave them with things undone before coming back home, because with the pandemic I wasn’t sure I’d be able to visit much for a while. Grandma sat with me while I worked on it to help me make decisions about what to do with things and I think she ended up enjoying that as a time for us to talk and reminisce. My uncle poked his head in and joined us a few times too.

I brought several of my mom’s things home of course, which meant I had to find a place to put them. So that meant going on a major decluttering spree in my own home, which I likely would have done anyway since I was still in that grieving/processing period. I was surprised at just how much clutter I turned up! I’m not one to hang onto things forever, and I abhor the idea of letting something I’m not using collect dust when somebody else could benefit from it, but I hadn’t done a full-fledged decluttering in recent years. I guess it had accumulated more than I’d realized, hiding away quietly in closets and drawers and trying to make itself invisible. Work took back over my life before I could finish my entire home, but most of it is done and I’ve been happy with the results. My newly-organized upstairs closets have been particularly satisfying to me.

Cross-Stitching
During the decluttering process, I unearthed all my old cross-stitch supplies from one of the closets. I’m pretty sure I haven’t mentioned that here before because I haven’t done any cross-stitching in several years, probably since before I joined LT. I learned to cross-stitch in high school and I kept up with it pretty consistently in my teens and twenties, but slowly drifted away from it in my thirties as life got busier. I stopped altogether when I got Ernest, since by then I wasn’t doing it much anymore anyway and I figured he would be a major cross-stitch menace. I always enjoyed it though, and occasionally missed it, so I figured I needed to make a decision – either get back into it or else bite the bullet and give the stuff away so somebody else could benefit from it.

I decided to try getting back into it and I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot. Picking up a "new" old hobby also provided a good distraction at a time when I needed it. I’ve stuck with it for about 3 months so far, and it’s become a regular part of my routine. I don’t have much time for it, and there have been a few crazy days when I couldn’t fit it in at all, but I usually manage about an hour on weekdays and a couple hours or more on weekends. This is having some effect on my reading since that’s time when I would have otherwise usually been reading. Ernest hasn’t been too much trouble with it. I don’t let him within paw’s reach when I’m actively working on it, and I keep my project shut safely away in a closet he can’t open (yet, anyway!) when I’m not working on it. It was easier in the pre-Ernest days when I could just leave it sitting out, because I could randomly work on it when I had a few spare minutes without worrying about having to put it back away if I had to stop. Now it’s more of a deliberate decision to pull it out when I’m pretty sure I’ll have enough time to devote to it in one sitting. I know better than to risk leaving it out with my little furry freak just waiting for a chance to dig his claws in and see if it’s climbable!

I used to like having two different projects going to give me some variety in case I didn’t feel like working on one of them, usually one smaller project and one larger project. Right now I have a “normal project” and a “crazy project”. The normal project is Teresa Wentzler’s “Floral Bellpull”. It’s composed of six floral squares aligned vertically. I stitched her Fruit Bellpull many years ago and had bought this pattern at the same time, always intending to do both of them. On Sunday I finished the first square, including the back-stitching. I do still have to do the French knots, but I’ll do all of those at the end when everything else is done because I worry about them getting messed up when I scroll up the finished sections on the scroll rods. I only work on this project on days when I have time for a second cross-stitching session, so usually just weekends or holidays.

Here’s a picture of the square I finished on Sunday. I’ll post a picture of my crazy project at some later date. I don’t expect to be flooding my thread with cross-stitch pictures, but I may post a picture now and then when I’ve reached a milestone. It’s a slow process, especially with how little time I have to work on it, so that shouldn’t happen too often.


Podcasts / Audiobooks
When I cross-stitched in the past, I usually just listened to music and/or to my own thoughts. When I picked cross-stitching back up this year, that was mostly what I continued to do. Recently though, I’ve found myself wanting something to listen to while I stitch. In the past few days, I’ve tried listening to a couple story podcasts which was a new thing for me. First I listened to The Deca Tapes which is relatively short, about 4.5 hours in total. It doesn’t have any real surprises for a Science Fiction reader/watcher, but it held my interest pretty well and I didn’t have any trouble feeling like I was following everything while stitching. And I didn’t find any horrible mistakes in my stitching either. :) After finishing that, I tried the first couple episodes of ars PARADOXICA which is a time travel story. That one isn’t really grabbing me, and it has tons more episodes, so I’m probably going to abandon it.

I think I might give audiobooks a try instead. That way I can get a little “reading” in while stitching, since recent experiments seem to prove I can handle listening and stitching at the same time. I’ve definitely done better with the listening aspect than I did back when I tried to listen while commuting. I’ve never been a good audiobook listener, as I believe I’ve already ranted and raved about a time or two on LT before. Sometimes I do ok with them, but I never feel like I get as much out of them as I do print books.

If I do audiobooks, I may do what I’ve done in the past and listen to books I’d already read and enjoyed in print previously. The benefit of this for me is that it’s less frustrating when I feel like I’m not getting as much out of the story as I would if I were reading it in print. I absorb and retain the written word better in general, plus reading on my Kindle allows me to quickly search for past references so that I can keep connections straight more easily. I also thought using audiobooks for re-reads would prevent me from rewinding as compulsively if my mind had wandered, but I find I still do that even when I know the story. I hate to miss anything. What’s really annoying is if my mind wandered because it was a boring section and I rewind and listen to it multiple times because I keep zoning out. By the time I finally manage to pay attention all the way through, I’m wondering what the heck is wrong with me that I was so determined to listen to all that!

Instead of using audiobooks to re-read, I’ve also considered using them as a way to sample series that I have on my list but probably won’t read in the near future, either because they’re incomplete, or enormously long, or just because there are other things I’m more interested in. This idea has been growing on me lately. If I do that, my intent would be to only listen to the first book in the series, no matter how much I like it. Based on that, I’d decide whether or not I want to read the series in print someday. If not, I can cross it off my list and it’s one less thing to keep track of. If I do like it, then someday, when I’m ready to get to the series for “real”, I’ll re-read the first book in print then continue on with the series for as long as I enjoy it. I’m not sure how well this would work for me, but I think the idea has potential and would be worth a try. I think I’d feel less pressure to absorb every teensy detail this way, since I’d know I had a proper print read in my future if I liked it. There are so, so many series I’m curious about and/or interested in trying but I don’t want to read them now. This might be a good way to do that, and also knock some stuff off my list, without eating into my regular reading time.

Whew, ok, I think I’ve been posting a bit less than usual lately, but this has surely made up for any lack of words this year and helped me get a head start on next year’s quota as well!

>248 YouKneeK: I'm sorry to hear about your mother; it's always difficult to lose a parent. Mine died 5 years ago now, and she'd been in a nursing home since 2013 - she'd had a stroke just before Christmas 2012. It was an interesting job clearing the house - we'd lived there since 1963, and her family never threw clothes away - they just got handed down. Most of the antiques got sold to pay her care home fees.

Little sister bought me out of the house - it's far enough from me for it not to be practical as a holiday home, whereas it's within fairly easy reach of my sister and her family. I'm more likely to go North or East rather than South or West, although we drove to Dublin last year for Worldcon.

Funnily enough, both my grandmothers were keen embroideresses - my maternal grandmother did it professionally (we have exquisitely embroidered baby clothes she made for me), and my paternal grandmother did petit point as a hobby. I've done embroidery in the past (I was rather better at it than knitting or crochet), but don't have time or patience to do it routinely. I'm more likely to do historical techniques though; I've been meaning to embellish a linen kirtle for a while now, not that I've been doing freeforms this year.

I've been thinking about digging out some of my audio 'books' - we're currently going through our respective comics collections, and cataloguing The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and the Hitch-Hikers graphic novels put me in mind of various dramatisations and recordings I have.

>248 YouKneeK: I am very sorry to hear about your mother. I quite understand why you felt that it was not something that you wanted to write about whilst you were going through it. I am glad that you got the time to spend with your family and reminisce. Hopefully it will help you build on the good memories.

That cross-stitch looks very fine - what count is it?

I used to do a lot of cross-stitch, back when it was thought that regular, non-loadbearing exercise would help my joints. (And I share your reaction to audiobooks!)

I shall look forward to seeing your "crazy project" photos.

>248 YouKneeK: I'm so sorry for your loss. That's not easy to deal with at the best of times, never mind how much extra the pandemic likely added to the stress of the situation. It sounds like Ernest is quite a trooper. Glad he got through it well too. Cats are resilient creatures.

Your cross stitch came out great. I used to cross stitch as a teen and through my early 20s. Sounds like a fun plan to try out audiobooks while you stitch. Hope you find some narrators you enjoy as thay can enhance a sub-par story or ruin a good one.

>249 Maddz:, >250 -pilgrim-:, >251 Narilka: Thank you.

I was hoping there might be some people in the Green Dragon who have cross-stitched, so I’m glad to see that there in fact are some!

>249 Maddz: I’m always impressed by anybody who can do any sort of freeform types of needlework, as I have no skills in that area. In truth I haven’t really tried any, but I’m not good with arts and crafts in general. Cross-stitch was the one “crafty” thing that appealed to me because there’s so little room for error. There’s no question about where to put the needle since there are precise, evenly-spaced holes, nor is there a question about what colors to use. Of course, more artistic people can be much more creative with it, but it’s also great for somebody like me.

>250 -pilgrim-: I’ve noticed in other threads that we seem to have some similar issues (and some different ones too) with audiobooks. For the cross-stitch in the picture, the fabric is 28 count, but I’m stitching it over 2 so the stitches are the equivalent of a fairly standard 14 count. My crazy project is on 28 count also, but stitched over 1. I can’t even tell there are x’s on that one without magnifying lenses. The last time I stitched regularly, I could stitch on smaller-count fabric and see what I was doing unaided. Now I have to wear these lovely glasses-like things with magnifying lenses so I can see clearly enough to make sure I’m placing my stitches correctly and neatly, even on the normal project. I feel very fashionable while wearing them!

>251 Narilka: Ernest has put up with a lot this year, from a cat’s perspective. He spent a good portion of the early part of the year confined to one of my home’s smaller rooms due to work being done in my master bathroom after a major hidden water leak was discovered. Between the constant noise and the confinement, I think he probably hated that most of all. In August, at least had the run of the house and the peace and quiet he’s accustomed to, if a bit more of it than usual. Narrators do make a big difference. I have the most trouble with people who read the story in a way that sounds too melodramatic to me, so I may try to avoid those types of narrators until and unless I get better at listening to audiobooks in general.

>248 YouKneeK: Very sorry to hear about your mother, my condolences.

Leaving a cat alone for extended periods is sometimes a challenge. My cat handled it well when she was younger, not so much now that she's older and my wife's cat doesn't like it at all!

What a year. May you not see another like. Condolences on the loss of your mother and condolences to your grandmother and uncle.
Hand work can be so satisfying and it's a bonus when the product is as lovely as your bell pull. Have you a bell needing a pull?

>250 -pilgrim-: I am very impressed. I normally worked 14, sometimes 16, and after trying 18 came away from that project muttering "never again"!

I have made a note of your super snazzy specs. Note only might they enable me to return to the hobby, but they might also enable me to continue reading during bouts of eyesight issues. From the construction it looks as if they can be added over normal spectacles - is that correct?

>255 -pilgrim-: They most certainly can. I wear specs -- have done since age 10 -- and have (rarely) used them for fine scientific work.

>248 YouKneeK: Condolences. There are no words that actually help.

>253 Karlstar:, >254 quondame:, >257 hfglen: Thank you all.

>253 Karlstar: I had a Persian cat in my younger years who didn’t much care for it either. She did ok while I was at work since it was part of our normal routine but didn’t at all appreciate being left alone for days if I went out of town.

>254 quondame: Haha, no, no bells needing pulled. It will just be decorative. One reason I chose to start back up with this pattern was because it was the only one I had all the supplies on hand for already. I didn't want to go into a craft store, and was too impatient to wait for supplies to be delivered.

>255 -pilgrim-: It would be great if something like those glasses could help you when you’re having eyesight issues! Unlike >256 hfglen:, I don’t have any prescription glasses (although I do have contact lenses) so can’t speak to that very well. However, I just tried them on while also wearing a pair of sunglasses and it did seem to fit together fine. There are a variety of similar models out there, so I’m not sure if another one might work better, but the ones I bought have been working well for me. I’ve only used them for the cross-stitching, but I did also just try using them while looking at something on my phone and that seemed to work fine also. They have 5 different glasses that can be swapped in and out with different levels of magnification. I settled on the middle one.

They have a little battery-powered light on them that shines in a small area at what you’re looking at. I don’t use that since I have a larger daylight-style light shining on my project. I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to think about taking the three AAA batteries out of the glasses to reduce the weight. The contraption felt quite heavy with the batteries and all that weight resting on my nose would leave it sore and with deep red indentations that took a while to fade. I just ignored it and kept working with them, but I was very annoyed with myself once I finally thought to take the batteries out because it made such a difference!

Sight-wise, they take a little getting used to. I hadn’t used any sort of magnifying glasses before. You have to keep whatever you’re looking at in a more precisely fixed distance from your eyes to keep it in focus. At first I had some trouble with things getting in and out of focus as I moved around, and also some trouble with the jump from magnified to normal vision when I would look over/under/around the magnifying glass. I started to get used to it after a few hours of use though, and now it feels natural to work with them.

>248 YouKneeK: That was quite a post. Thank you for sharing with us. I am also one of those people who tend to jump in and clear out while dealing with grief. I'm not sure my siblings understood that when my mom died, or at least some didn't, but they respected it. Covid made it very difficult in that they were not able to come sit with me as your grandmother did, and so I was unable to make any final decisions until they were consulted. Thank goodness for modern phones, texting and such. I finally cleaned out the last of my mother's things just before Christmas. I don't need many of her things, because I have so many of her travel journals and calendars, so feel close to her working on them. Take care.

Your cross-stitch is lovely, and I for one would not mind a flood of photos. :)

Along with the others, my condolences. And way to not just disappear with everything going on. I don't know what I would have done in your circumstances.

Mrs B got me a pair of magnifying glasses with lights on the frames for painting my Doom mini's. They fit right over my regular glasses. They didn't come with multiple lenses though. That sounds really nice.

>248 YouKneeK: Oh no! Please accept my heartfelt condolences. What a year for you...

The cross-stitching is lovely! I used to do some embroidery as well, but cats & kids put an end to that.

>259 MrsLee:, >260 BookstoogeLT:, >261 clamairy: Thank you all.

>259 MrsLee: Covid has definitely made everything more complicated this year. I think it’s wonderful that you have journals and such to remember your mom by. My mom didn’t do anything like that. I do have a lot of our e-mail exchanges saved on my computer though, and lots of family photos although they tend to be more of me than of her.

>260 BookstoogeLT: Have you started trying to paint the minis yet? I’m looking forward to your next blog post about that. :) For the most part I’ve just settled on one lens and stuck with that. It was nice to be able to try the different powers and decide which one seemed to work best, but I suspect I probably could have worked with any of them. On the other hand, it’s nice to have the other lenses as a backup – I’m clumsy and have already dropped the one I'm using a time or two. Fortunately they seem pretty sturdy, but I won't be surprised if I eventually break one. I'm as much of a menace as my cat.

>261 clamairy: I can understand why multiple cats and especially multiple kids would have made it difficult to fit embroidery into your life. Kids pretty much take over one’s life, and cats can be rather distracting too! For a little while, I was lurking on the Reddit Cross Stitch feed before deciding it was just too much to keep up with. Now and then people would post pictures of their cats using their project as a bed, or sitting with their little butts right smack on their projects. It was funny, but also horrifying!

>262 YouKneeK: I have not started in on the mini's yet. I ordered a big box of sharpie fine and ultra fine markers and once they arrive, then I'll starting marking away. And I'm sure I'll be putting up pictures, etc in a post. No event goes unnoticed in Bookstoogelandia ;-)

>259 MrsLee: As one who stood back and watched while my sister blazed through my dad's house - she sent nearly every useful item to her friend who was helping with Katrina victims - I surely appreciated her efforts. I was sidelined from life with foot, butt, and back issues not to mention a years long depression.

Review: Kushiel’s Justice by Jacqueline Carey



Kushiel’s Justice is the 2nd book in the 2nd trilogy of Kushiel’s Universe. This was good, as good as the first trilogy at least, but I liked the first book in this trilogy better. There was a lot of angst, particularly in the first half, and then a lot of wandering around in the second half, and I got a little tired of those things.

I still enjoyed the story though, and I still really like the main character of this trilogy, Imriel. Another thing I like is that the author tends not to take the story in the direction I sometimes fear she will. Some small examples: I was afraid we’d be in for a long, soap-opera like marriage of bitterness between Imriel and Dorelei, and I was much happier with the way it was actually written. I also like how characters who are friends or lovers trust each other unreservedly, without assuming the worst about each other at the least provocation like so many other authors make their characters do . I hope those trends will continue! I also think the author writes relationships well. Even though these books have more romance and sometimes angst than I necessarily want, I’m able to buy into and appreciate the main relationships.

My Kindle edition of this book had several editing errors, whereas I hadn’t noticed many in the previous books. Extra words added, words missing, the wrong words used, a place name spelled incorrectly through the first half of the book and then correctly through the second half, etc. It surely wasn’t the worst I’d ever seen, but it seemed like a lot to me. I hope this doesn’t represent a change in editing quality that will continue to be present in the remaining books.

Next Book
Kushiel’s Mercy, the last book in this trilogy.

Here are my year-end 2020 stats. Definitely not the best reading year I’ve ever had, but at least I managed to keep reading. :)

>206 YouKneeK: Hey, you did pretty good compared to poor old '14.

>267 BookstoogeLT: LOL, true!

>268 YouKneeK: Was that your first year on BL?

>269 BookstoogeLT: It was my first year on both LT and BL. I had joined GR a little earlier, in November 2013. Joining GR was when I first I started recording reading dates, star ratings, and writing more detailed reviews. So 2014 was the first full year for which I have that kind of data.

Happy New Year!

>271 Karlstar: Thanks, happy new year to you too!

I'll get my 2021 thread started a bit later... possibly today, but if not then I would expect by the end of the weekend at least. Since I just started another Kushiel tome, it will be a while before I have a review to post for 2021 anyway. :)

Happy New Year!

>274 majkia: Thanks, and the same to you!

>248 YouKneeK: I'm still catching up on reading posts. I'm so sorry to hear of your mother's passing.

>276 BrokenTune: Thank you.