1. Watching youtube videos about booktok and online reader communities. This channel was pretty good: According to Alina. Also found a London history youtuber I like: J. Draper.

2. Enough people mentioned bookshop.org that I finally ordered books through it when I couldn't find what I wanted from Barnes and Noble. Good experience: the correct books arrived in a reasonable timeframe, and I was able to choose my local indie bookstore.

3. Since my last post I finished A Delicate Deception (barely adequate, but it made me want to read nonfiction about the industrial revolution in Britain) and Mansfield Park (excellent all the way through). The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands had really vivid and frightening descriptions, and I was excited about it until the end when the whole plot fell apart??? Maybe it looked fine as a plot outline, but the ending did not feel earned; sure, empires/corporations/the industrial revolution might be the *real* evil, but the book spent a long time convincingly establishing that the wastelands are in fact incredibly deadly so the conclusion just felt hollow to me.

I'm currently reading five books, most recently picking up Clear by Carys Davies.

4. I started a few Fanlore pages in July: Ship discourse and Mo Du