Blurt! — Sben

Blurt! — Sben
pile.org

Finished reading Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer, the fourth and final book in the series.

A fitting end, perhaps a little more neatly tied off than I’d like, but perhaps that’s appropriate for a story of this length and intensity. I do sincerely appreciate that it barely hints at an answer to one of my big questions I’ve had since the first book — I don’t think an answer would have improved the books one bit.

The series is a little too weird for me to recommend whole-heartedly to just anybody, but I loved it, and will probably reread it one of these days.

Also

Finished reading Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme by Arika Okrent. Full of charming, bite-sized little pieces about why English is the way it is. I already knew much of it, but there was plenty I didn’t know, and a couple times it ventured deeper into linguistics than my dilettante self could quite follow. You know whether or not you would enjoy the book from the title.

— 11/11/2021 9:26pm ∞
Finished reading Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, a delightful story (or, really, three stories) of crime and family, set in late ’50s and early ’60s Harlem. Highly recommended.

— 11/4/2021 9:16pm ∞
Finished reading My Real Children by Jo Walton. The book started very bluntly, but became much more nuanced well before the halfway point, and was heartbreaking at the end. Not a perfect book, but I very much enjoyed it.

— 10/28/2021 11:24pm ∞
Finished reading Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, one of those niche books I sometimes read about the history of role-playing games. This one focuses on TSR from before its inception to the ouster of Gary Gygax. It was mostly just sad: The two principal figures (Gygax and Dave Arneson) come across as bitter, insecure, and emotionally-stunted grudge-holders; the story is fascinating (with much more detail than I’d known before), but their animosity left me with a bad taste in my mouth long before the end of the book.

— 10/22/2021 7:39am ∞
Finished rereading The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian, book 6 of the Aubrey/Maturin series. As foreshadowed in the previous book, the backdrop is the War of 1812. This one shines a spotlight on Maturin’s spycraft: It played an important role in the previous books, esp. H.M.S. Surprise, but Maturin is uncharacteristically the more active character for much of the novel.

— 10/19/2021 9:08am ∞