Finished reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. This was a wild ride — I couldn’t put it down — about labor and sentience and connection. Very briefly: a woman and the only possibly-sentient android explore the possibility of an octopus civilization, while a man is enslaved on a fishing trawler run by an AI and a savant tries to hack into a more sophisticated AI. This will be sticking with me for a while, a candidate for book of the year.

Rhymes with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin and, unexpectedly, Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” which I’ve already been listening to quite a bit lately.

Mom came up for the kids’ band concert.

Finished reading Witch King by Martha Wells, whose protagonist is the demon a bunch of fools tried to bind in the first chapter. Turns out he’s mostly a nice guy, or at least trying, as he tries to (in one arc of the story) overthrow an evil empire and (in the other) prevent a new empire from taking its place. Quite good.

The neighborhood bookstore was crowded on its opening day!

The dude voted in his first election.

I’ve been gradually getting sick for the last few days, but maybe I’m turning a corner today.

Finished reading Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, a short fantasy novel about an orc who retires from the adventuring life to open a coffee shop in a city where nobody has ever heard of coffee. This was completely ridiculous and cozy and charming, and the kids would probably describe it as “so gay (affectionate)”.

Finished reading Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett, followup to Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries. I guess I didn’t mention that the first book was a romance novel in addition to all the other stuff it had going on. This book continues right along the same path, and was equally charming.

Meghan and I went to MariPili with Amy and Dave. Great evening.

Fixed a few lingering and/or latent bugs on this here microblog, including the nagging time zone abbreviation bug.

This morning’s kitchen victory: migas (Meghan’s belated birthday breakfast).

Saw a coyote hustling down the street.

Finished reading The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi. Several short murder mysteries linked by an explicit exploration of the form, the overarching story doesn’t play fair but nevertheless is clever and ends on a satisfying note.

Walked down to Northgate and back up past Bitter Lake: about 20k steps, 10 miles, 3¼ hours.

The bambina has consistently tested negative.