what should [personal profile] wychwood read next?

Sep. 7th, 2025 11:15 am
wychwood: Joe Kennedy Sr demanding to know baby Ted's ambitions (gen - unambitious baby Ted)
[personal profile] wychwood
I have inventoried my to-read pile and am slightly horrified to find that it contains 98 books (39 non-fic and 59 fiction, which is interesting because I thought it was mostly non-fic! But in fact it's just that the average non-fic book is much larger so the fiction takes up less space). The fiction is about half SFF. I'm not going to make a poll of the whole lot, because I'd be here forever, but I have picked some categories:

Poll #33582 what should wychwood read next
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 11


Which loan book should I start next?

View Answers

Acts and Omissions - Catherine Fox
1 (9.1%)

Cavedweller - Dorothy Allison
3 (27.3%)

Data Structures and Algorithms - Alfred Aho, John Hopcroft, Jeffrey Ullman
2 (18.2%)

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton
5 (45.5%)

Which detective story should I start next?

View Answers

Aunty Lee’s Chilled Revenge - Ovidia Yu
6 (60.0%)

In the Shadow of Agatha Christie - ed Leslie S Klinger
1 (10.0%)

Land of Shadows - Rachel Howzell Hall
0 (0.0%)

Murder in Williamstown - Kerry Greenwood
0 (0.0%)

Night Train to Memphis - Elizabeth Peters
2 (20.0%)

The Chemistry of Death - Simon Beckett
1 (10.0%)

Which non-fic book should I start next?

View Answers

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat - Samin Nosrat
4 (36.4%)

Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries - Kate Mosse
2 (18.2%)

Black Tights: Women, Sport and Sexuality - Laura Robinson
0 (0.0%)

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense - Suzanne Haden Elgin
4 (36.4%)

The Augustinians from the French Revolution to Modern Times - J Gavigan
1 (9.1%)

Carrying the Fire - Michael Collins
0 (0.0%)



The bedside pile is down to four books, including the ongoing Oxford History of England project and the current SFRG book, so it is time to build it up again!

Foundation 3.09

Sep. 5th, 2025 06:12 pm
selenak: (Empire - Foundation)
[personal profile] selenak
In which it's penultimate episode of the season time, which means things get very dark indeed, though not in all storylines.

ExpandThe Cleons Strike Back? Revenge of the Cleons? Master and Apprentice? )
wychwood: Kosh has moments of revelation (B5 - moments of revelation)
[personal profile] wychwood
I am on a real reading tear at the moment, and my bedside book pile is down to five! Naturally I then celebrated this by buying another six or seven cheap ebooks, because I delight in causing my own suffering. I'm hoping to finish another couple of the bedside books soon and then do a poll so you all can decide which bits of the epic to-read shelf I should use to rebuild it with.

A proper gaming post is in the works, but I have been delighted by the recent changes which mean that all Steam games now work on Linux - I haven't tested it extensively, but I've already played several previously-Windows-only games with no issues at all. Aside from work that was the main thing causing me to spend time in Windows, so suddenly I'm spending a lot more time logged into Linux, which means I'm getting to more of the tasks I do there! Including writing up my booklog, although at the rate I'm reading it's going to be a while before that's ready to post, and I've already finished six books in September...

Miss H and I are going to see Florence + The Machine in February, which was extortionately expensive but I'm still looking forward to it! This is why I don't believe people who say that classical audiences are low because tickets are too expensive, because you can get into most CBSO concerts for under £30 and the cheapest Florence tickets were £45 plus fees for standing room only. Which is not to say that £30 isn't a lot of money, but if pop artists can sell out in ten minutes for an average price over £100 then I just don't believe that price point is the major issue.

It's really funny how the last couple of weeks are suddenly waving AUTUMN IS COMING signs. We've had more rain this week than in about the previous month, and while it's still warm, I'm becoming increasingly aware that the sheet I sleep under is going to need to be switched for the duvet in the near future, and that there is a limited time for shirt-sleeves at home. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to being able to wear my jacket again. I used the hot water bottle on Tuesday night, but it's not back into the regular rotation quite yet...

Alien: Earth 1.05

Sep. 4th, 2025 05:10 pm
selenak: (Spacewalk - Foundation)
[personal profile] selenak
No sooner did I finish with episodes 1-4 that episode 5 got dropped. I’m currently travelling (for work, not fun) and only intermittently online, but I did have the chance to watch it.

ExpandIn Space, No One…. )

More books, more tv

Sep. 3rd, 2025 09:48 am
selenak: (Six by Nyuszi)
[personal profile] selenak
More books:

Stella Duffy: The Purple Shroud. The sequel to her novel Theodora, this one covering the time from when Theodora becomes Empress to her death. It's as readable as the first one, though I have a few nitpicks. Not about what I feared - the novel Theodora keeps morally ambiguous, and it confronts head on that once you are in power, you cannot simultanously be "one of the people", no matter how low you were originally born or how disadvantaged a life you've lived until this point. Doesn't mean your decisions can't benefit the disadvantaged, but you yourself are no longer one of them. So far, so good, and in case I hadn't mentioned it before, Duffy's characterisation of Narses is my favourite after Gillian Bradshaw's, and Thedora's relationship with him, ditto; they're firm allies from before she married Justinian, but they also sometimes have different opinions, and his ultimate loyalty is to Justinian, not to her. Also, Antonina (Belisarius' wife) in several lhistorical novels of the period tends to be presented as a none too bright promiscuous tool of Theodora's, and not so here, where they are friends, but up to a point, and Antonina has her priorities which are neither about her sex life nor about Theodora.

ExpandSpoilery Nitpick is Spoilery Because Not Historical )

Naomi Novik: Spinning Silver. I've heard many good things about this one but didn't get around do reading it before now. Turns out it is absolutely worth the hype. I had been charmed by Novik's Temeraire saga, though less so the more books were published and stopped reading before Laurence and Temeraire got to Australia. This novel, by contrast, didn't just charm me but made me fall in love and start it all over again as soon as I was done. Rather unusually for what I've read of Novik's novels so far, almost the entire main cast is female, and she even pulls off multiple first person narrations without this reader getting confused as to who is narrating which passage (note: in my copy, this isn't marked with "Name of Character" to signal a pov switch), because the individual voices are that individual.

The setting is vaguely Russian, using various fairy tale elements (Rumpelstiskin, Cinderella, Baba Yaga) to weave something new. The main narrating ladies are: 1.) Miryem, daughter of a Jewish moneylender who isn't very good at moneylending due to being too kind and exploitable by his antisemitic village, who takes over the moneylending business, makes a success out of it and makes the fateful for fairy tales boast of being able to turn silver into gold, which gets overheard by a Staryk (= essentially fairy for the purposes of this novel) Lord who decides to take her up on it, 2.) Wanda, downtrodden but strong and determined daughter of a drunken and abusive farmer who is in debt to Miryem, which causes her to work for Miryem, 3.) Irina, daughter of the provincial Duke who through a plot device involving Miryem's business with the Staryk lord sees a chance to gain power by marrying Irina to the young Tsar despite said young Tsar's very sinister reputation. There are more first person narrators among the supporting cast, but these are the three main characters who drive the narrative, who have to use their wits to first survive increasingly dangerous situations and then get a step ahead and actually defeat the cause of said situations, and who along the way form relationships with other characters (and each other) that help them achieving this. It''s really, spinning metaphors being inevitable, a fantastic and brilliant yarn, and every time I thought "hang on, I can see where this is going, but how does that work with Character X' previously established behavior", the novel surprised me by making it work in the best way.

More tv:

Alien: Earth, episodes 1.01 - 1.04: Not a sequel but a prequel, setting wise, though made with an awareness that most of the audience will be familiar with at least the first few Alien movies. Mind you, with the heavy emphasis on AI beings already introduced in the pilot I thought, hang on, to which Ridley Scott cult movie is this supposed to be a prequel to? (Four episodes later: leaving aside the four years limit on the life span of Replicants in Blade Runner, this actually would work in a kind of shared early Ridley Scott films universe.) Not that Alien and its sequels don't have robots (robots here being used as a collective noun for various different AIs in human shape) as important parts of the plot, of course, but this show really puts them centre stage (perhaps recalling David was one of the key elements of Prometheus that worked even for people who disliked the movie?), and it absolutely works. It also so far provides a good remix of core elements. Ripley in I think not one but two of the Alien movies said that the company (not just Wayland-Yutani which she originally worked for, but also its successors in the movie plots) were the true monsters, given that the Xenomorphs "just" follow their instincts but Wayland-Yutani et al sacrifice fellow human beings for greed. If this was late 1970s and early 1980s scepticism of capitalism and where it's going, well, now we the audience live in the world of tech bros and politicians not even trying to hide their corruption anymore but boasting of it, and so this tv series so far doiubles and triples down on Ripley's observation. Not just the good old Xenomorph but newly introduced creatures like the T-Ocelius deliver the creeps, horrors and scares, sure, as they go after their organic victims, but the character you really loathe and with every episode more wish to fall to an extremely unpleasant fate is the resident main tech bro billionaire, Boy Kavalier (what he really calls himself), so covinced of his own brilliance, so utterly unconcerned with any empathy whatsoever, and seeing both human and synthetic workers as his property.

(Future eras may write their film and tv thesis about tech bro villains from Glass Onion onwards.)

But any genre that involves horror needs sympathetic characters as well, characters the audience cares for and wants to survive, not getting torn apart by the Xenomorph (and other murderous species). Which is where this show also excels, Expandbut saying why gets too spoilery to talk about it above cut. )

World building wise, the Earth as presented by this show no longer has nation states, it's run by five cooperations (this reminded me of what Mike Duncan did for the Mars part in his Podcast Revolutions, and he couldn't have known), with Weyland-Yutani as one of the older powerful ones and Boy Kavalier's company, inevitably named Prodigy, as the newbie which together with another new company changed the "Triumvirate" to "The Five". Democracy, of course, is also a thing of the past. For once, North America isn't a location (so far), instead, the Weyland-Yutani vessel in the series pilot crashes down on what used to be Thailand, and Boy Kavalier's lair seems to be located somewhere in South Asia (Vietnam, I'd say, given the scenery) as well. We all know how a Xenomorph looks in the various stages of its existence by now, but the design team came up with four other creepy species as well which are new and are excellent at bringing on body horror. Though like I said: the truest revulsion is created by human greed. Contrasted, which makes it compelling and not nihilistic, by the capacity of doing better than that, by artificial and human beings alike.

at least i'm up to date on laundry

Sep. 1st, 2025 06:05 pm
wychwood: Teyla wonders if you meant to do that (SGA - Teyla mean that)
[personal profile] wychwood
Back to work was a slog today! That was my last day off until Christmas, and September is looking like being pretty intense as a month. The "be on campus for a week to act as a reserve for visa checks" has morphed into "three and a half days of being a reserve plus two full days of actual checking" (yes, this does add up to more days than exist in the work week; I have refrained from accepting the relevant calendar invites until someone can clarify quite how they expect me to staff two desks at the same time). I've also been voluntold to attend a full-day meeting on campus the previous week, which is not only on a work from home day but also a day with choir in the evening (not to mention choir the office day before it and choir the work from home day after it). I am trying very hard not to think about the number of things which I really ought to be getting completed before the start of term, because my odds are looking extremely poor.

On the other hand, I did get through the 300 system emails, 84 personal emails, and 31 Teams notifications which were waiting this morning, and only have a dozen or so new actions to pick up from them. And I did the first round of monthly reports, including desperately scraping my brain to extract suggestions as to what I did during August (not very much, apparently!!). I left the intimidating email from Legal for tomorrow morning, and then have ambitious plans to make a proper list of what I want to get done this month and try and make some progress on... well, anything. Something. A Task of some kind. Perhaps if I can manage that I will feel less like the human incarnation of the scream emoji.

july booklog

Aug. 31st, 2025 12:32 pm
wychwood: Sinclair in the light (B5 - Sinclair light)
[personal profile] wychwood
Expand63. Our Precious Lulu - Anne Fine ) This isn't what I would normally call id fic, but there's something of that visceral satisfaction in it; "person with rubbish family wins in the end".


Expand64. The Gabriel Hounds - Mary Stewart ) Not perhaps one of the top Stewarts, but even middling Stewart is pretty good.


Expand65. Enchanted Glass - Diana Wynne Jones ) Even a whole bunch of really annoying elements can't take the pleasure out of this book, but it's not one of her top hits.


Expand66. The Return of the King - JRR Tolkien ) The triumphant conclusion, followed by lots of realisations about what happens after the triumph and how much harder it gets, and then a whole bunch of appendices, which I enjoyed more than I expected! This is a cracking book, though, even as I develop more complicated feelings about it over time.


Expand67. Stone and Sky - Ben Aaronovitch ) Another fun volume; I'm interested in seeing where Aaronovitch is going to take things from here.


Expand68. The Islands of Chaldea - Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Jones ) DWJ is basically never less than entertaining, but this doesn't manage much more than that.


Expand69. The Adventure of the Demonic Ox - Lois McMaster Bujold ) I feel like I'm saying this a lot this time, but: this is fine! I enjoyed it! Wasn't much more than that!


Expand70. Kid Wolf and Kraken Boy - Sam J Miller ) Fine but I'm not sure I'd read Miller again.


Expand71. Behind Frenemy Lines - Zen Cho ) Deeply delightful; I do prefer SFF to romance, but Cho's romances are so fun I don't mind!

Foundation 3.08

Aug. 29th, 2025 10:35 am
selenak: (Visionless - Foundation)
[personal profile] selenak
In which cult leaders do as cult leaders are wont to do, and all Cleons find out something new.

ExpandRemembering childhood lullabys can be key to one's survival )

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