things and also books
May. 24th, 2023 09:15 amWaiting on Telus, because my internet has been out (again) since at least Saturday. Supposedly they'll give me a call in the next hour or two, and then show up and do something to fix it. I am not optimistic.
Also my new glasses have picked up a permanent smudge on the inner left lens. It looks like a coating has degraded or fuzzed up. I am Not Best Pleased. Going in this afternoon to talk to the optician about that. I have an unpleasant suspicion that these are about to become a backup pair of glasses and I will spend Too Much Money elsewhere for another pair that I like less but can see out of. But perhaps I'll be wrong.
Speaking of Too Much Money I have registered for fall classes at BCIT. I figure I'll do the two-year program, front-load as many classes into the first year as I can and find some sort of employment starting next summer, and look into financial aid once my internet is back. I am nervous as all hell but I have faith in my ability to scrounge money out of somewhere. If nothing else I can raid my RRSP. (Unsurprisingly therapy yesterday dug up A Lot of anger at my ex. Maybe someday I'll figure out something to do with that other than say "oh well" and try to squelch it.)
What are you reading now?
Aspects, first reread, because what on earth do you do when you've just finished something that's so good anything else is going to feel like a letdown?
The lovely thing about a reread is that I can savor a book. There's no tension over "what happens next?" or "will they live?" (or, in this case, "who are they and who are they talking about?"), there's just the characters and the prose and the scene-setting. And they are wondrous, and now I can savour Varic's intricate guarded dance around his feelings for Longlight and Winterhill's barbed jollity. And the words. I want to quote passages but they all want pages of explication as to why they hit so hard.
I will come to the fragmentary end and be sad and angry all over again that we won't get the other two books. And grateful that we got even this little.
What did you just finish reading?
Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh. Early candidate for best book of the year, and an easy recommend for anyone with an interest in space opera. Tesh's list of reference material in the afterword includes books on North Korea, Sparta, Scientology, and the rise of twenty-first-century fascism, but for all that it's not a grim book. (Thirty pages or so around the middle excepted.) It's a book of survival and recovery and ... maybe not healing, but maybe so.
Before that, Kat Howard's Unseen World duology. A Sleight Of Shadows is, mm, less focused? less tight? than An Unkindness Of Magicians. Still well worth my time. Both of these ... you know how when you watch a movie that's been made from a book it often feels rushed, because there's just not time to include everything needed? These each feel to me like they're an attempt to cram a network season of television into one book. Huge cast of characters, all of whom seem interesting and not enough of whom do we get to spend nearly enough time with to develop beyond seeming interesting; big sprawling plots and ideas, mostly well-developed but that would have benefited from having far more space to play in. Kat calls it a duology but then she called Unkindness a standalone, and there's certainly room for a third book exploring magic outside of the insular New York City world. I'd read it.
What do you think you'll read next?
Possibly Fonda Lee's novella Untethered Sky. Possibly Alix Harrow's Once And Future Witches or Silvia M-G's Mexican Gothic, because they're here and have been waiting patiently for several months and I probably have time to finish them in fancy hardcopy without trying to travel with a SubPress book. Or I might be due for a reread of The Last Hot Time.
Also my new glasses have picked up a permanent smudge on the inner left lens. It looks like a coating has degraded or fuzzed up. I am Not Best Pleased. Going in this afternoon to talk to the optician about that. I have an unpleasant suspicion that these are about to become a backup pair of glasses and I will spend Too Much Money elsewhere for another pair that I like less but can see out of. But perhaps I'll be wrong.
Speaking of Too Much Money I have registered for fall classes at BCIT. I figure I'll do the two-year program, front-load as many classes into the first year as I can and find some sort of employment starting next summer, and look into financial aid once my internet is back. I am nervous as all hell but I have faith in my ability to scrounge money out of somewhere. If nothing else I can raid my RRSP. (Unsurprisingly therapy yesterday dug up A Lot of anger at my ex. Maybe someday I'll figure out something to do with that other than say "oh well" and try to squelch it.)
What are you reading now?
Aspects, first reread, because what on earth do you do when you've just finished something that's so good anything else is going to feel like a letdown?
The lovely thing about a reread is that I can savor a book. There's no tension over "what happens next?" or "will they live?" (or, in this case, "who are they and who are they talking about?"), there's just the characters and the prose and the scene-setting. And they are wondrous, and now I can savour Varic's intricate guarded dance around his feelings for Longlight and Winterhill's barbed jollity. And the words. I want to quote passages but they all want pages of explication as to why they hit so hard.
I will come to the fragmentary end and be sad and angry all over again that we won't get the other two books. And grateful that we got even this little.
What did you just finish reading?
Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh. Early candidate for best book of the year, and an easy recommend for anyone with an interest in space opera. Tesh's list of reference material in the afterword includes books on North Korea, Sparta, Scientology, and the rise of twenty-first-century fascism, but for all that it's not a grim book. (Thirty pages or so around the middle excepted.) It's a book of survival and recovery and ... maybe not healing, but maybe so.
Before that, Kat Howard's Unseen World duology. A Sleight Of Shadows is, mm, less focused? less tight? than An Unkindness Of Magicians. Still well worth my time. Both of these ... you know how when you watch a movie that's been made from a book it often feels rushed, because there's just not time to include everything needed? These each feel to me like they're an attempt to cram a network season of television into one book. Huge cast of characters, all of whom seem interesting and not enough of whom do we get to spend nearly enough time with to develop beyond seeming interesting; big sprawling plots and ideas, mostly well-developed but that would have benefited from having far more space to play in. Kat calls it a duology but then she called Unkindness a standalone, and there's certainly room for a third book exploring magic outside of the insular New York City world. I'd read it.
What do you think you'll read next?
Possibly Fonda Lee's novella Untethered Sky. Possibly Alix Harrow's Once And Future Witches or Silvia M-G's Mexican Gothic, because they're here and have been waiting patiently for several months and I probably have time to finish them in fancy hardcopy without trying to travel with a SubPress book. Or I might be due for a reread of The Last Hot Time.