As alluded yesterday, there have been books.
What are you reading right now?Finally getting back into the ebook of Moving Pictures. What I actually want to be reading is either The Ten Thousand Doors Of January (Harrow) or The Poppy War (Kuang), because I have fancy SubPress editions of both waiting for me. But I'm reluctant to take those to work with me, so they await a stretch of time when I'll be Not Working for a bit. Maybe this weekend.
Anyway, Moving Pictures is a bit of a slog, which surprises me. If you had told twelve-year-old me that there was a forty-plus-book fantasy series that was more like a bunch of interlocking serieses, as funny and readable as Douglas Adams but with actual plots, but the subseries I'd like least was the one about all the wizards, well. I would have thought you were entirely out to lunch.
What did you just finish reading?Mm. First reread of Ann Leckie's Ancillary books. Still excellent. These prefigure Murderbot in some ways, which I had forgotten but which I greatly appreciate. Also the line "We're not cousins anymore" late in Ancillary Mercy remains the funniest line on the funniest page of anything I have read in quite some time. (I note with some excitement that Leckie
has a new Radch book out next year, heavily featuring a Presger translator.)
Also read the first two of Walter Jon Williams's new space opera trilogy, sequel to his previous excellent Dread Empire's Fall trilogy. I outsource my commentary to paraphrasing Marissa Lingen, who said of the first "it's more of the same, space battles and space empire politics, it's still good but start with the first trilogy," and of the second "it's MORE OF THE SAME, stupid awful interpersonal stuff with the leads hooking up and breaking up, and i may be done with it now." I note that she hasn't reviewed the third, which came out a month or two ago.
And reread Gibson's The Peripheral and read Agency, which ... these are
weird, but I like them. In both roughly the first third is sort of orientation, getting you used to the world(s) of the novel, and then most of the rest is ... nothing really happens, but you get a lot of nice character and worldbuilding and dialogue moments, and then in like the last thirty pages there is suddenly PLOT! and then it's over. Spook Country did this as well. It is very much not my normal reading mode. And Gibson's characters are... they're sort of emotionally muted, which contributes to the sense of not much really happening. I'm not describing this well at all. I think I liked them? Keeping them around, at the very least.
What do you think you'll read next?Maybe 10K Doors or Poppy War. Maybe Provenance, the sequel to the Ancillary books. Maybe the third of WJW's space opera books, it's on the shelf and then I can be done with them. (They /are/ well-written and fast-paced and well-plotted, it's just the relationship between the two leads that grinds my teeth.) Maybe whatever the next Discworld is.
And, from
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ironymaiden, the return of the Five Questions meme. Comment and ask and I'll ask you five questions of your own.
1. What has been the biggest surprise about life with Mr. Tuppert?It's the sitting-on-shins thing. The way he's not hugely a People Cat is a bit of a surprise, and not being able to tempt him up onto the couch to sit next to me is a bit of a disappointment, but. Starting from the very first night he was here, when I get into bed he comes up on the bed with me, and he'll usually come up for a few scritches first. Then it's like a switch gets thrown in his tiny cat-brain, and he tries to position himself lengthwise on top of my shin, and kneads at the blanket and makes meowy-growly noises of discontent that he can't get situated comfortably there. This goes on for several minutes, usually until I shift a bit at the right time or in the right way to shake him out of it, and he'll either get comfortable on my feet or curl up next to them.
2. What did you think of the "bonus episode" of Sandman?So, this is two questions, or maybe three. The "bonus episode" presentation in itself is kinda weird, though it makes sense: may as well at least try to tell the stories in something like the original order, and they want to seed 'Calliope' early to set up for the chain that leads to The Kindly Ones. So why not goose numbers with a bonus episode? Plus, they've already done the Hob Gadling story, and the Element Girl story is unfilmable without using DC's cosmos (and honestly skippable anyway), so why not give us all of Dream Country in its original place? Works for me.
'Dream of a Thousand Cats' was a basically perfect adaptation with a stellar voice cast. A+, no notes. The story itself is slight but fun.
I am perhaps overly sensitive to stories that revolve around sexual assault, so I hated 'Calliope' on my recent reread. I disliked it much less onscreen. And it's always nice to see Arthur Darvill getting work, and Derek Jacobi too.
3. What's your current favorite boardgame and why?With the caveat that I've only played it once in the last year-plus, and that's not too likely to change before April:
Sidereal Confluence. I doubt I can improve on what I wrote awhile ago:
SidCon is a trading game where the point isn't to make a few good (ie, lopsided-in-your-favour) trades, it's to make as many trades as possible. Everyone has a pile of Stuff, and everyone needs some Stuff to run their machines, but no one has the kinds of Stuff they need. So there's a mad flurry of exchanges and negotiations, and the more of those exchanges and negotiations you can be a part of the better off you are. Even if you're not technically "gaining" anything, you're getting more Stuff that you can actually use. Now add on to that what they call "variable player powers," where each player can break certain rules in certain extreme ways. The end result is an awful lot of busy chaotic noisy fun.
It is extremely interactive, it is surprisingly smooth-playing with low rules overhead despite the high emergent complexity, and it plays in under three hours. I adore it. I've only played with a full nine-player contingent once, and that was under highly nonoptimal conditions: multiple brand-new players that I had to hand-hold for the first couple of rounds, a loud room at a convention, a table setup that made it difficult for everyone to talk to everyone else. It was still a top boardgaming experience.
4. Still working through Discworld? What's your current favorite?I am, but slowly. Partly I've been reading physical books instead of ebooks; partly I'm just finding Moving Pictures to be slower going. My favourite is definitely Pyramids, though I've a soft spot for Wyrd Sisters, and Mort is also wonderful.
5. What food of your childhood is unobtainable where you live now, and is that a good or bad thing?Growing up an Army brat means I don't really have food 'of my childhood,' other than the stuff Mom made on the regular, and most if not all of that is replicable. Closest thing would be good Memphis-style barbecue, which we had whenever we went to see grandparents: both sets lived an hour and a half out of Memphis (different directions). That lack is unquestionably a Bad Thing. There's at least one okay barbecue joint in the Lower Mainland but it's not the same.
