Words are inadequate

Silmarillion update: I used to have what turns out to be a first-US-edition Silmarillion (not first printing, not in great shape) that was Pop's. Emily had the same edition in better condition and less smoke-infested, so Pop's went before the crosscountry move fifteen years ago, and then Emily's obviously went with her. In conversation Steph determined the particular edition from my vague description ("white-ish dust jacket, big fold-out map of Beleriand glued to the endcover"), found a site with a few copies that were well within my budget, and then while I was dithering bought one for me. So that was a nice end to the year.

The last time I read LotR, some ten or twelve years ago, was the first time I'd read Pop's copies. Before that almost all my reads had been in increasingly-decrepit Ballantine paperbacks from the eighties, bright blue/green/red with Darrell K. Sweet covers. It turned out to be extremely distracting to have the familiar words in different places on the page. Apparently I imprinted hard.

My nice fancy new edition of The Hobbit has an extensive editor's note from Christopher Tolkien talking about the changes they've made to bring it in line with what can be deduced of JRRT's desires for a Preferred Text. Unfortunately this means it's missing Tolkien's second-edition note, the one that begins "In this edition several minor inaccuracies, most of them noted by readers, have been corrected." (AKA "the Watsonian explanation for why I had to retcon 'Riddles In The Dark' to bring it in line with Lord of the Rings.") It felt downright weird to read the book without that note. Thankfully I also have a paperback with the psychedelic pink fruits and emus (no lion, alas; must be a later edition), so I can read the introductory note as is Proper.

... it occurs to me that Pop's hardbacks lack the Peter Beagle essay/encomium that appeared as the front page of my Ballantine paperbacks, which also imprinted though I was far too young to understand it. Text follows, so that I'll have it.

( Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. )

Ordered replacement zipper sliders for my suitcase. Suitcases, rather; I never got rid of the one that lost its zipper last year. So I've got one to practice on, and maybe I'll have two good checked-bag-size suitcases.

Yesterday I went down to the States to ship my parents' xmas box (the last part of the gift arrived a few hours after I left for Minneapolis), and also drop off used books and thrift-store donations and poke around in both stores. In the event it was like treating myself to Xmas. The used bookstore supplied me with: a paperback of Walter Jon Williams's post-scarcity nanotech/cyberpunk thriller Aristoi, which for typographical reasons really needs to be read in hard copy; Caroline Stevermer's When The King Comes Home, which I have vague recollections of someone recommending and even vaguer recollections of having read at some point; Tom Stoppard's last play, Leopoldstadt; and the collected poems of Hope Mirrlees, who you know (if at all) as the author of the very English fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist but who was apparently also a minor Modernist poet.

And from the thrift store there was a DVD of the Harrison Ford remake of Sabrina, which is something of a comfort watch for me, and also two madeleine pans. Yesterday evening and this morning I made two separate batches of madeleines; the first tasted fine but had a texture that wasn't really right, but the second seems to have turned out pretty well. Turns out they're serious about "room-temperature eggs," and also I may have used too much flour the first time. The pans did fine, which is a pleasant surprise for cookery from the thrift store. I suspect they may have been used maybe twice.

On the advice of the catsitter, a month or two ago I got Mr Tuppert a treat-puzzle, with sliders and pivot lids and little pockets for treats. He's been enjoying it, and has gotten quite good at getting the treats out of even the more complex bits. He's been much less impressed with the cardboard thing I got him to scratch on. Not even catnip can induce him to try it out. Ah well.

I'm staying warm, I'm staying fed. Next month is for sorting out What Happens Next.

So, I'm not journaling. I am doing quite poorly, I think. Mostly this is a response to Lack Of Job but partly it's that I have spent an inordinate amount of time playing Silksong, a video game that came out somewhat unexpectedly at the beginning of September. Which is also something of a response to Lack Of Job.

Continuing to apply for both GIS and tech-writer jobs; so far I've seen a grand total of three responses, since May. Not great.

Anyway, I'm currently in Duluth MN at a GIS conference, in the hope that there will be Networking Opportunities. Not that I know how to Network; I am notoriously bad at being social with strangers even at SF/gaming/etc conventions.

In other fun news, the connector port on my phone died last Monday (while I was spending the day accompanying Mya for minor outpatient surgery), and the connector port on my tablet died on the way to Minnesota. The phone I can at least charge magnetically; the tablet is as good as dead until I can get it fixed. Bah. Never rains but etc. I would consider replacing my phone but a) money, and b) it is the Correct Size of phone (iPhone Mini) and they don't make them like that anymore.

Finally getting around to reading Neon Yang (fka JY Yang)'s Tensorate novellas. I forget who recommended these, or if it was anyone specific vs a general "hey these exist and are pretty good". They are in fact pretty good: Chinese-inflected fantasy, magic that feels magical, excellent prose and broad but quite believable characters.

Onward. Sleep and then more sociable.

Oh hey, I meant to write this all up last week. Well. It's more interesting this week.

What are you reading now?

The Count of Monte Cristo, translated by Robin Buss. Someone, presumably on Mastodon, recommended this translation specifically a few years ago, and I made a note of that but not of why. An internet search reveals that it's the only translation of the complete book; all others are working from an abridgement bowdlerization from 1846.

It's great, of course. The Three Musketeers is Dumas's most famous novel, but I would bet money that there have been more adaptations and retellings of Monte Cristo. It's a universal story. Heck, The Crow is a Monte Cristo retelling.

I read it once in the late nineties and enjoyed it. Sometime in childhood I read the chapter detailing Edmond's escape from the Chateau d'If, where he disguises himself as the dead abbé to get the jailers to carry him outside. I froze in delicious terror at the absolutely chilling line "The sea is the graveyard of the Chateau d'If." Unclear why I didn't seek out the rest of the book at the time, when that one chapter was so great.

What did you just finish reading?

Emily Tesh's latest, The Incandescent, about a teacher at a contemporary Magic School. It's spectacular. It's not quite as vehement as Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy but it still gets in some solid criticism of The System, and I think the worldbuilding hangs together a bit better than Scholomance's. It shares with Scholomance a feeling that the latter third is suddenly very different, but in Incandescent that's more obvious and with a very very good reason. Highly recommended. I suspect I shall reread soonish so I can figure out whether I think it all hangs together metaphorically as well as ... whatever the opposite of metaphorically is, in-the-world-of-the-book.

(I have a theory, which is by no means an original theory, that if a writer does not consciously direct her themes and metaphors they will tend to reinforce the prevailing social order of the time she is writing in, which may or not be a desired result.)

Before that, Elizabeth Bear's Lotus Kingdoms trilogy. These are ... fine? The characters are great (I don't entirely believe Chaeri's heel-turn but that might just be me), the first book has a lot of moving everyone into position but once they're there the trilogy does not drag. I think this just caught me at a moment when I am spectacularly disinterested in powerful people complaining about how stressful it is to be powerful, and there is a lot of that. But: if you're looking for some colourful secondary-world fantasy, these are absolutely that, and excellent examples of it.

What do you think you'll read next?

I'm nine chapters into the 117 of Monte Cristo. "Next" seems like a very long ways away. Having said that, I'm carrying around a paperback of Morgan Locke (Laura Jo Mixon)'s 2011 shoulda-been-award-winning SF novel Up Against It in case my devices fail me, so hopefully not that but maybe.

Well. I just had the fastest checkin / security experience I've ever had at YVR: no one in line ahead of me to check in, two slightly slow people in the fast line at security. I think the time from stepping off the train to thru security was on the order of ten minutes, and most of that was walking from one end of the domestic terminal to the other and back again.

The gate isn't empty, but it's not as crowded as I expect the Toronto redeye to be. I'm okay with that.

What are you reading now?

Just started Melissa Scott's Dreamships, about which I know pretty much nothing except that Steph is a fan of Scott's work. (I think I read one or two of hers before moving here but they did not survive the Great Cross-Country Purge.) It's enjoyable so far.

What did you just finish reading?

For some reason I had a strong desire to read Gene Wolfe's four-volume crypto-Catholic generation-ship epic Book Of The Long Sun. I think this is somehow only my second reread; might be my third. I can confirm that the crypto-Catholicism is ... not really all that crypto. On the other hand the ending of "and then a bunch of us got on the lander and went down to the planet, and it turned out the Pope had been a vampire from the neighbouring Vampire Planet all along, the end" is more telegraphed than I remember. Though it helps if you remember the Pope really is a vampire from a previous read. (Er. Spoilers for a thirty-year-old tetrology, I suppose, though honestly if you're paying attention you find out the Pope is a vampire early in the second or third book.)

These are very Wolfean books, by which I mean they excel at doing the thing where something happens that means one thing to the characters in the book and quite another to the reader. They also have an awful lot of scenes of the main character explaining things to other people, which is less fun. But they're good, and there's not much out there like them.

Before that, Martha Wells's Books of the Raksura. I like these a little less on this read, I think. Partly it's that they're overflowing with characters that I have difficulty telling apart. Partly it's that they lean into the fantasy trope of The Evil Race. The final duology tries to undermine that, with the hybrid queen whose name escapes me but who is trying so hard... but then Wells brings in the groundling race who've decided that killing everyone else is fine if it means it kills off all the evil Fell as well. They're still enjoyable, they still have great characters with complex and real-feeling relationships. Just ... not quite as solid as I'd like.

What do you think you'll read next?

Beats me. Something else in ebook, since I only brought one paper book (Wells's City Of Bone). When I get home I may read Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun, the sequel trilogy. Or I may not; I remember it as being extremely depressing, mostly because it's narrated by someone who's not sure who he is and is extremely depressed about it.

Classes are done for the term. I have almost certainly maintained my 85% average, which is lower than I'd like but understandable and acceptable. Then over the weekend I had a bit of a depressive crash but managed to pull myself out of it. Or rather wait it out, it was pretty clearly triggered by external factors like "reading over my journal from early-vancouver when i was, in fact, Really Depressed and Unhappy and mostly not admitting it except for when it all boiled over". Sunday was a nothing-day but by Monday lunchtime I was more or less back to normal. Yay for being able to recognise things like that and to take the time to just roll with them.

Today I went into town to accomplish a variety of errands. Got a replacement CPAP mask since the previous aftermarket one tore (and was not actually any cheaper, either; going with name-brand from now on). Got my eyes checked, and my prescription is slightly worse, as usual. More significantly this prescription includes bifocals since reading small print like on game cards has become "remove the glasses and hold it up at my nose" difficult. All told I'm out over twelve hundred for those, because my glasses are stupid expensive and I am willing to pay to have someone take care of fitting the frames etc for me. Oh well. Not like I'm running on limited funds here or anything.

I've also mostly accomplished xmas shopping: couple last things, and then box them up and send them home. I don't -think- I'm repeating xmas gifts to my cousins. It's possible, I don't remember what I got them last year, but it's not too likely. I don't think. Eh, I guess we'll see.

Reading has been a bit difficult this last month. It was something of an unexpected delight to start on Susanna Clarke's Piranesi last night, and devour most of it over the course of today. It's not Strange & Norrell, it's ... I was going to say less baroque and that's maybe a little true but mostly it's differently baroque. It's also exactly the sort of thing I like, done quite well: a person trapped(?) in a mythic(?) surrealist-allegorical(?) landscape, with limited knowledge of how they got there or what they're doing. It concerns itself with questions of knowledge and identity, while building an internally consistent and coherent world and using that world to reflect on the "real" world within the novel and on the world outside the novel. The narrator is an enjoyable person to spend time with, too, which helps.

Once my errands were done, I wandered over to a bakery and got a London Fog and a couple of pastries, and sat outside with my book. I should do that more often. It makes me happy.

Yesterday was all travel all the time: a three-hop flight from Cleveland to home. Turns out three flights is Just Too Many Flights. I was ready to be home about the time we were taking off from Calgary to Vancouver. In the event I rolled in shortly before midnight, unpacked my CPAP, and went to bed. Mr Tuppert was happy to see me at least. He's happier today when I'm Behaving Properly, sitting in the work chair and petting him. (And, yep, there's the demand for playtime.)

But: I am Home. I have my cat and my tea, in a mug that Erin made special for the eclipse. (Beautiful coppery glaze with a black sun.) I know I used to go straight back to work from a redeye and I am unclear how I managed that. Younger, I guess, and more willing to push through / ignore pending exhaustion. It's easier when someone else is telling me what to do, too.

Today: schoolwork, cat, and hopefully eclipse journaling. And also books.

What are you reading now?

One of the few advantages to not being at the Gathering right now is that my copy of Lyorn (Taltos #17) showed up while I was eclipsing. (Being eclipsed? Probably more accurate but sounds less good.).

Lyorn opens with a dedication to Mike Ford, "because it breaks my heart that I can't show it to him." Five pages in I said "Oh, because it's a theatre book." Two pages later, and less amused, I said "Oh, because Steve thinks he can write How Much For Just The Planet?." (Planet is JMF's Star Trek novel in the form of a musical comedy.) So far, thirteen pages in, we've had versions of "Modern Major General" and "My Favorite Things". I am still interested but my side-eye is armed and waiting. Which, it occurs to me, has been my response to most of the Taltos books post-Tiassa. (That one included the in-retrospect-prophetic line "I was told you think you're funny. That's alright, I think I'm funny too.")

I've also read a couple of chapters of Gardens of the Moon, the first book in Steven Erikson's ginormous fantasy sequence Malazan Book Of The Fallen. It's good: a bit more grim than I've been into lately, but good. Looking forward to getting back into it.

What did you just finish reading?

Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire (Hexarchate) trilogy. The first, Ninefox Gambit, remains my favourite: I quite like Cheris as a viewpoint character, and the occasional missives from one opposing character to another were a lot of fun as well. I -think- Raven Stratagem, the second, is probably the best of them? It's doing a bunch of interesting things with the plot and with the ideas of, well, empire. I'm not as fond of Brezan's narration, though. And Khiruev, the character who spends the most time with Cheris (who mostly doesn't get viewpoint anymore), is interesting but reminds me how much I miss Cheris.

On first read these felt like a duology with a third book tacked onto the end. I'm seeing a lot more thematic coherence this time, and I appreciate Revenant Gun more for it. It's not going to ever be a favourite but it's a fine conclusion to the trilogy. And the servitors, the intelligent robots, are some excellent characters too.

What do you think you'll read next?

Apart from Malazan? I've also started on Lee's collection Hexarchate Stories, and will doubtless finish it. At this point I am unfortunately prepared to concede that short story collections are Not For Me Anymore. I read an awful lot of them in junior high and high school, and then... I slowly dropped off. And now I have trouble switching gears from story to story. I still enjoy the stories quite a bit but multiple in a row have become difficult.

(I also hope against hope that Commonweal #6 will see the light of day sometime soon, but that depends heavily on Graydon's mental and financial state.)

Just got done writing a program in Java that encodes a text file using 'run-length encoding'. Simple but kinda interesting. Marred by the assignment's insistence on COMMENTING EVERY LINE (heck with you then, you're getting comments on my open and close braces) and on the class's non-ChatGPT policy: "If you choose not to utilize generative AI tools to assist in completing this assignment, provide a separate reference document indicating this. Also, provide a list of the resources (course materials and/or external) that you did use and how they were used." I USED THE PDFS YOU PROVIDED BECAUSE THAT'S WHY YOU PROVIDED THEM.

Rob's two classes last term annoyed me. Comp in particular felt like he'd done a half-assed job of slapping something together from previous notes and just kind of left it. This (non-Rob) class is making me actively angry. Between the 'generative AI' stuff and the fact that there are only four lectures in a twelve-week course (one week each for midterm and final, which, fine, and the rest are for "group work") I am unclear why I have paid money for this. Apart from credentialism, yes yes.

Spoke with the ADHDoc today. She re-upped the Concerta and we'll talk again in three weeks, which should be plenty of time to decide if I want to up my dosage.

And also books.

What are you reading now?

Beasts of Ruin by Ayana Gray. Pan-African-inspired YA fantasy, sequel to Beasts of Prey. Good worldbuilding and atmosphere, decent characters and plot, okay writing. I'll read the third when it's available but I'm in no particular rush.

Also one chapter left in Polywise, which is unsurprisingly quite good if not as revolutionary as Polysecure.

What did you just finish reading?

Mm. System Collapse, the latest Murderbot. It reads like a coda / second-half for Network Effect. Suspect I will consider those two as a unit, in the same way I consider the first four novellas a unit. Annoyingly this means that I will now be reading Fugitive Telemetry in chron order (before Network Effect) rather than pub order (between NE and SC). Pro: going straight into SC from NE means all of NE is fresh in one's mind, which is helpful since SC really does read like a second half of NE. Con: the ending of both Exit Strategy and FT feature fights with nonsympathetic bots, which feels less repetitive when there's NE to break it up. Oh well.

Murderbot is coming to terms with its massive untreated trauma. I think I liked SC not quite as much as NE but NE was so very good that that's a high bar. Also, with Murderbot hacking governor modules / teaching other SecUnits how to hack them, it feels like we're moving towards some kind of world-shaking tipping point. Very curious to see where things go from here.

Before that, Scholomance 2 and 3. I continue to love these, between El's voice and the way the books make their commentary on modern (western?) crab-bucket society ever more overt. ("Oh, it's Omelas," I said when I got to a certain point in the third book, and then a chapter or two later IT LITERALLY WAS OMELAS.) The third, which takes place out in the Real World and away from the Scholomance, is ... certainly different, and maybe feels overcrowded? Suffering from the corresponding lack of tight focus? I dunno. I'm vaguely unsatisfied by it and I'm not sure why. Will need to reread at some point and see what I think.

What do you think you'll read next?

Nth reread of The March North, because I'm traveling north myself next week and want ebooks, and because it's been too long, and because Rachel Manija Brown wrote a great review of A Succession of Bad Days. "In a world rendered post-apocalyptic by thousands of years worth of warring Dark Lords, a group of adult students attend magic school to learn how to do civil engineering with magic. ... It's the sort of book bound to attract a following whose numbers are inversely proportional to their enthusiasm."

After that, if I don't just keep rolling on the Commonweal, likely either Discworld (Men At Arms) or Craft (Full Fathom Five). Probably not an immediate reread of Scholomance but no promises.

Classes are going ... alright? I have no concerns about three of five: Intro to ArcGIS is "just how to use this fairly complicated program," and Intro To GIS and Intro To Mapping are, well, intro courses. I'm more concerned about GIS Programming and GIS Computing but that's mostly because I am annoyed by the professor (and, in the case of Programming, at potentially having to spend $90 on a book to learn Python).

What are you reading?

Other than stuff for class, which is mostly PDFs and video lectures at this point ... oh, I guess I'm still in the middle of Mike Carey's The Unwritten comic, I should get back to those. And I've still got a bookmark in Jessica Fern's Polysecure.

What did you just finish reading?

Rick Shelley's early-nineties portal fantasy The Varayan Memoir, because I had fond memories of them and they were in the used bookstore. More specifically, I had fond memories of the first but not so much the other two, which seemed odd. Having reread, I can confirm. These ... are not good. Shelley's got some interesting worldbuilding ideas but with maybe three exceptions his characters are not even two-dimensional, they're one-dimensional, and his plots are "a bunch of stuff happens, with no real narrative progression from A to B." I couldn't tell you most of what happens in the second book and I literally read it three weeks ago. The first book sets up an interesting world ("the buffer zone" between Fairy and the 1990s human world) and some potentially intriguing characters and situations. Then the second throws all that away for a stupid end-of-the-world fetch-quest, and the third doubles down on that. Oh well.

Over the last week and a half I also read the entire archive of the webcomic Dumbing of Age, which is a terrible name for a really good comic. It follows a bunch of college students, mostly freshmen, through, well, so far through their first semester and a half or so. (The first nine? years of real time got through I think about two months of comic time.) The characters are an interlocking Absolute Drama-Prone Mess, and it’s genuinely amusing and occasionally actually-laugh-out-loud-funny, and well-written and plotted and drawn. And with a dash of unreality to keep it interesting. The "main" character's a recovering fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which felt pleasantly familiar. (I shook that off mostly during high school, but the process was not dissimilar.)

It's also got an Obviously Autistic character, Dina, who's my favourite (everyone's favourite) who everyone thinks is weird but is also solidly a part of the group. Here, have some Dina comics:

• Dina doesn't understand people ("I prefer dinosaurs.")
  
• Dina likes cereal (I sympathise a lot with Amber in this one)
  
• Dina plays Apples to Apples ("In my experience, whenever someone claims that there is no correct answer, that is never actually the case.")

Sadly I'm caught up as of yesterday evening, so now I get them one strip a day like everyone else. Alas.

What do you think you'll read next?

Jeez, I don't know. I'd like to read either The Dragon Republic or A Spindle Splintered but I do not know that I have the brain for something new. Maybe I'll go back to Mercedes Lackey ebooks.

Return to regular blogging needed. The last week or two have been something of a disturbance in normal operating patterns, to the extent that anything is normal these days anyway.

It is Too Warm but at least the cold robot still works.

What are you reading now?

Freedom & Necessity, by Steven Brust & Emma Bull. Sixth or so reread. I read/reread (first reread in twenty years) Wrede & Stevermer's Sorcery & Cecilia before/during Fourth Street because Marissa Lingen was hosting a conversation with them about it, and I both enjoyed it a decent bit and kept thinking "I really wish I were reading F&N."

So. F&N is an epistolary novel that began life as a Letter Game, with four protagonists/writers instead of the usual two, and an exceedingly twisty plot centred around occultists and Communists in 1849 England. It contains fantastical elements, all of which are witnessed by skeptics. (I have a recollection that it's connected to Brust's Agyar, I think Jack Agyar is at school with James Cobham, but I'm not certain of that.) I continue to enjoy the process of reading it, and as always I'm not sure who I'd recommend it to. It's wordy, and I'm not certain what the wordiness is in service of, other than "being a kind of fun that I enjoy."

Also slowly working my way through Jessica Fern's Polysecure, finally (got about halfway a couple years ago). So far it's a fine introduction to both attachment theory and consensual nonmonogamy. Looking forward to how she ties those together.

What did you just finish reading?

A couple of weeks ago I needed something utterly unchallenging to read at midnight in a strange airport where I couldn't sleep. I'd just picked up an ebook bundle of All The Valdemar, so I started in on Mercedes Lackey's first three Valdemar books: Arrows of the Queen, Arrow's Flight, Arrow's Fall.

These are deeply wish-fulfilment-y fantasy novels, in which a teenage girl is carried off by a magical horse to Paladin School because she's Special, and becomes Way Too Empathic and finds True Love. Points for an almost complete lack of slut-shaming, and for gay characters and even a touch of polyamory; minus points for unpleasant and unexpected gender-essentialism ("Men!") and for the first half of the third book, which is one long exercise in People Refusing To Speak To Each Other So There Can Be Conflict. But: I read them (and the Last Herald-Mage trilogy) to death during junior high and early high school, and I have no particular regrets about that, or about revisiting them now. Not something I'll be doing often, though.

What do you think you'll read next?

The plan had been to read Martha Wells's Witch King before I got sidetracked by F&N, so, probably that? Possibly a comic series (The Unwritten) by Mike Carey so I can decide if it's for the go-away stack, though.