Points south

- I took a mental health half-day on Friday. Helped a bit. Did not have a lot of luck in finding a place to relax, though. Settled into one place - until a pile driver started up next door. Found a different park...until un-predicted thunderstorm sent me scrambling. Tried a tea shop...until the iPhone they had plugged into the sound system got a flood alert and everyone jumped out of their skin.

- We took ARR on a trip to the Philly area. Hit up the Please Touch Museum, which was about as awesome as I remembered from a museum conference years and years ago. Weirdly, ran into Fairest there with her kid. She doesn't actually live there.

- We have a new family game. It's called "Customer Service Swan." ARR found a giant fiberglass swan, which he sat on, because what else do you do with a giant fiberglass swan. Then he demanded that we pretend to be angry customers. (I have no idea where this came from.) We had to complain about things. Now, I was expecting an anthropomorphic swan, since when he's a dinosaur, he can talk. But no. When the customers complained about their ill-advised purchases, the customer service swan did what a swan would do. He honked in our faces. ...I now kind of want to replace our company's customer service reps with swans.

- We hit Sesame Place yesterday. It was...really crowded. Unpleasantly so. After some dismay at standing in line, though, ARR got used to the idea, and he and I had a really pleasant afternoon hanging out and chatting and then riding the occasional water ride.

Books, not that I ever keep up

#38 Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. 3.5. I never read this in high school. I kind of expected to hate-read it, as I generally do not like people who say this is their favorite book. Oh god, they all totally missed the point. Holden is a mentally ill unreliable narrator you're not supposed to like, people. It's a lot more skillful than I was actually expecting. That said, he's still a desperately unpleasant person to hang out with and the book is literally just hanging out with this kid while nothing happens. So much better than I gave it credit for, but I still didn't particularly enjoy the experience.

#39 The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2017 Ed. by Rich Horton. 4. Very nice collection of SF/F short stories.

#40. The Bookburners, Season 1. (multiple authors). 5. I've been thoroughly enjoying a bunch of the serialized stuff coming out lately...after it's been collected. Not a big fan of the serial format. This one, an urban fantasy about a secret team of Vatican operatives trying to keep magic from getting loose in the world, is sort of a series of short stories ended with a novella. It's a little more disjointed than others, but it works very well by its own terms and is highly enjoyable.

#41. A Thousand Endings and Beginnings ed. by Ellen Oh. 4.5. Own Voices done right. Re-imagined Asian fairytales, from all over the continent, done by Asian-American authors only. A ton of delightful stories, most based on older stories I'd never heard. (Note: I'm friends with one of the authors. But I liked most of the stories, regardless of who I knew.)

#42: After the Gold by Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese. 4. Sports romance with an angle I hadn't seen before - the first chapter has this ice skating pair winning gold, and then the rest of the book is about them trying to figure out what to do with their lives afterwards. Katie made me want to smack some sense into her, but it's completely believable behavior. Very satisfying. (Note: one of the authors is an acquaintance.)

#43: The Power by Naomi Alderman. 4. This was both a deeply powerful and deeply distressing book. Women start being able to generate electrical energy. Men are terrified. It plays out all too believably, today's headlines tweaked slightly. It's...the slow worst case scenario. It's really well done. I can't say I enjoyed it.

#44: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. 4. Fun but still lyrical retelling of Norse myths.

#45: Whitehall, Season 1 (multiple authors). 4. Another collected serialized novel, this one is more of a standard plot arc than some of the others. (Oh, the coordination that must have happened. Then, it's historical, so they had their plotline already.) Particularly refreshing in that I don't think I've ever read a historical romance set in the Restoration before. How refreshing to get something other than Tudor/Regency/Victorian!

#44: The Healer's War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. 4. Beautiful, slightly horrific and fairly depressing fantasy story about an army nurse in Vietnam. Informed by the author's own experiences, it's searingly vivid. The hint of hope at the end helps.

#45: They Keep Killing Glenn ed. by Peter David. 3. Look, this is a novelty book. I find it difficult to believe it will be read by many people who don't actually know editor Glenn Hauman, who spends this anthology being murdered in creative ways. But while none of the stories are particularly noteworthy, most of them are written by excellent authors and so at least are good yarns. An impressive variety of deaths.

#46: The Flowers of Vashnoi by Lois McMaster Bujold. 3.5. Short tale of Ekaterin trying to deal with the (literal) fallout in Vashnoi. If those words mean nothing to you, skip this. But it's a nice side story about Vorkosigan supporting cast.

#47: After the Wedding by Courtney Milan. 4. Delightful forced-marriage romance. (That is, one in which the couple is forced into marriage and then gradually fall in love before anything regrettable happens.) Bonus points for believable hero-of-color in a Regency romance, and actually dealing with the ramifications.

#48: A Study in Sable by Mercedes Lackey. 3.5. At this point in the Elemental Masters series, they end up running into Sherlock Holmes, because why not? This is another Nan and Sarah book, with the usual last word going (effectively) to Grey. She's run through most of the fairy tales she wanted by now, so this one's a retelling of a ballad. Not spilling which one, though - if you can't guess, it's a major spoiler.