all my choices are ill

Option 1: take acetaminophen + pseudoephedrine, stare blankly at wall while breathing through nose.

Option 2: skip Tylenol/Sudafed, sniffle every three minutes.

I was hoping I'd dodged whatever this sinus thing is that uilos picked up after New Year but no such luck. Oh well. If it follows the same progression yesterday & today are the worst of it.

I imagine the Sudafed will dull the WTFery of the Battlestar Galactica series finale if and when we watch it this evening. So far I am genuinely astonished at how the writers have made most everything follow logically from their utterly stupid plot shifts. ("Let's make some of the Cylons super-sekrit-Cylons!" "And they're crew members but they didn't know it!" "And they're two thousand years old!" "And God is speaking to Baltar!" "And Galactica is falling apart!" "And Cavil knew what was going on the whole time!") The characters keep talking about how "there must be a destiny / plan / meaning" and all I can think of is Nick Lowe's The Well-Tempered Plot Device:

One thinks irresistibly of Gandalf's famous words to Frodo when explaining the logic of The Lord of the Plot Devices: "I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker." Frodo, unfortunately, fails to respond with the obvious question, to which the answer is "by the author".

What are you reading Wednesday

What are you reading?

Godslayer by Jacqueline Carey, because it was a gift from semilocal J--. Second in a duology. I've also (still) got a bookmark in N.K. Jemisin's The Shadowed Sun where I stalled out.

What did you recently finish reading?

Banewreaker by Jacqueline Carey, first in the duology. I am not a huge fan of these books; they read like the author wanted to rewrite Lord of the Rings with the mythic gravitas of the Silmarillion, only from Sauron/Morgoth's point of view. Which is an interesting enough idea if the author can pull it off, but without decades of worldbuilding and a grounding in the epics that epic fantasy comes from, I don't think it's doable. Carey is no Tolkien, nor even Guy "ghostwrote the Silmarillion" Kay. On the other hand I am genuinely curious how far she'll carry the genre-twisting "bad guy's perspective" thing, and the characters are decent.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Good question. Probably not Tolkien. Likely either Princes of the Air by JMF, or something off the To Be Read shelf. Perhaps the Jemisin.