Reading

Current Mood: tired

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let there be books (& there were books)

Various media-(mostly book-)related things

Silver and Lead, the newest October Daye book (and the first one published by Tor) is out today!

The ebook came to about $25, and I just bought it, but OUCH. Just. Ouch. Since the Toby books started getting initially published as hardcovers, I've been buying the ebooks initially and then getting paperbacks later, but this might keep me from rebuying in hard copy going forward. >.< We'll see.

I expect I'll start reading Toby today (it's a day off), but up to this point, for the last week or so I haven't been trying to get my brain to engage with a new story of any kind, what with the work crunch. I've mostly stuck to watching things with

scruloose when there's been a chance. We're caught up on The Summer Hikaru Died (and I think the most recent episode might've been the season finale? Anyone know offhand?) and made more of a dent into season 1 of Silo.

Other than that, I watched a couple episodes of Leverage on Friday (late season 4, and finally into the chunk of episodes I know I haven't seen; I think from here on the only ep. of the original show I've previously seen is the series finale) and I've been sifting through cookbooks.

C&Ped from elsenet, posted yesterday:

After months of not getting around to it, I just ordered a heap of danmei (and one manga volume) from the Beguiling in Toronto (a fantastic comic store to begin with, and I appreciate them enough now for maintaining a masking policy that I'd rather order from them even though free shipping requires a $300+ order).

I always enjoy seeing (and envy) people's danmei shelves, but nearly all of my danmei is in ebooks a) to save both money and shelf space and b) because I'm much better at actually reading things that way. But the Rosmei danmei doesn't have that option, and they licensed some priest titles, so hard copies it is!

[Yesterday's] order: Coins of Destiny 1, The Defectives 1, Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire 1-2, Global Examination 1, Kaleidoscope of Death 1-2, Silent Reading (Mo Du) 1 special edition (one of my hard copy exceptions from 7S), and Kaze Hikaru 33.

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talking 'bout the weather

Weather | A cookbook on sale

Woke up to a very classic autumnal bluster that made me just as glad to not have to venture outside, given the humidity. (One local on Bluesky: "It's a rainy day, and VERY warm. Expect individual ecosystems to form in your rain jacket this morning. Un-zipping the armpit holes for ventilation is a MUST this AM" Another local's response: "This is the sort of weather report I want. Not “plan for this temp or that precipitation”. I want “don’t straighten your hair, and make sure you have good armpit ventilation.”")

And our friendly local meteorologist measured 20.5mm of rain overnight--hardly drought-ending, but still very appreciated.

I don't know how widespread this sale is, but at least on Kobo Canada, the ebook of Margaret Eby's You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible is currently $2.99.

I've bought this book twice, when after reading it in ebook I really wanted a hard copy. Have I actually cooked from it? No. (No one is shocked.) But for a second rec,

runpunkrun reviewed it in a more informative way last month. (In comments there,

jesse_the_k noted that this subset of cookbooks--which includes other excellent books such as The Sad Bastard Cookbook--is called "struggle cooking".)

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The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi

To begin, a complaint.

( if I can't be petty about my book collection, what CAN I be petty about?! )

I had a good time with The Shattering Peace. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

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turning of the seasons

Mostly food-related things for the first day of fall

It's autumn! Or spring! Happy equinox!

And happy Rosh Hashanah to those celebrating! May the coming year be sweet.

It's not actually in honor of autumn's arrival, but we have a chicken marinating in the fridge for tonight's supper. ( food chat under the cut: very little more about the chicken, a bit about apples, and a bit about breakfast [read: banana bread] prep )

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Weekly proof of life: work, impending work, and at least a bit of clutter tamed

Posted elsenet yesterday: Queen's Quality is the only manga I've worked on with a simulpub release (for the last few years of its run), and now I'm down to odds & ends and small corrections that need doing for its final compiled volume. Feels a bit strange, having properly said goodbye months ago when adapting the epilogue.

That's this weekend's work, which I'd hoped to get done sooner than this (due to the Dayjob crunch starting this week, not because I'm running late), but I don't have the translation for my next assignment yet anyway, so I guess it's worked out fine. I do hope I can get this done today, though. (And I wish I'd gotten that translation and could have started adapting it this weekend, given. >.<)

Queen's Quality is one of those series that switched publishers/titles partway through its run (very early, in this case), and there's always something a bit amusing about being like, "I'm working on vol. 25, which is the final volume. I've worked on this story for 27 of its 28 volumes." (Which is to say, in this case, that Queen's Quality was preceded by three volumes of an initial series called QQ Sweeper, and someone else adapted vol. 1 of that one.)

scruloose and I have been getting some household puttering done, which was desperately needed. We're both prone to letting piles of ~stuff~ slowly accumulate, and getting some of that beaten back before work swallows my life for however long is a relief. (Especially since that type of visual clutter is one of the sensory things that starts to bother me far too easily when I'm stressed. It starts to feel like I'm being loomed over.

scruloose also hung up a piece of wall shelving for displaying things in my office! I have no clear idea yet of what will wind up on it, as most small things that go on such a shelf are just sort of stashed around my office in bins or odd places. I'll have to dig through some drawers and see what surfaces.

(I see the usefulness of the "a place for everything, and everything in its place" concept, but am terribly unclear on how that actually works for most people in practice, given how many sorts of objects [that do in fact see use] don't really lend themselves to "this object resides here in the house". We're very much not minimalists, which doesn't help, but...yeah. Like what do you do with, say, a vacuum cleaner if you don't have some closet space that lends itself to being the vacuum's home?)

(A while ago my mother-in-law forwarded a couple of pics she'd come across of our place not long after we'd moved in, when we were unpacked and a bit settled. It's incredible how alien it looked--the original horrible paint colors, some furniture that's been LONG since replaced--but I think the biggest thing is the complete absence of anything cat-related.)

Current Mood: drained

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Almost two weeks' worth of reading

The seasonal crunch at Dayjob hasn't even started yet (so soon, though) and I already feel like I'm falling behind. >.< But I've been reading, so here's a fairly bare-bones post about that.

scruloose and I finished listening to Exit Strategy, and reluctantly are not moving forward until after said crunch period. This is a good resting point. We're both really enjoying these, which isn't really a surprise (heaven knows everyone raves about the Murderbot audiobooks!) except that I so thoroughly think of myself as not being someone who takes in much(/any) audio media other than music. It's possible that these are the first audiobooks I've listened to since...maybe since some Robert Asprin book on cassette during a family road trip when I was a teenager (which I only recall even that much of because the reader's delivery of "'Gleep', said the dragon" has stuck with me), and whatever snatches of audiobook I've heard while road tripping with Ginny and Kas.

Saint Death's Daughter (C.S.E. Cooney) was a really good read and rather brutal; I imagine I'll pick up the sequel at some point.

Julie Leong's The Teller of Small Fortunes was a much softer book (it may count as "cozy", but that seems to be a very subjective classification). It didn't leave much of a mark on me, but I enjoyed it.

The most recent novel I finished was When Women Were Dragons (Kelly Barnhill), which was one of those books where I didn't think I had much idea of what it would be like but then found it was nothing like I'd (subconsciously, I guess) expected, based on having read a few sentences about it somewhere. It too was good, and the fact that both the tone and the actual unfolding of the concept threw me is on me, not it.

Now I'm reading The Starving Saints (Caitlin Starling), but I'm only a few chapters in.

Non-fiction: Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World is not a fast read, but then, I didn't suppose it would be. Slow progress is still being made.

I mostly don't mention cookbooks I've read, but a couple days ago I finished reading the ebook of The League of Kitchens Cookbook: Brilliant Tips, Secret Methods & Favorite Family Recipes from Around the World by Lisa Kyung Gross and the Women of the League of Kitchens Cooking School, with Rachel Wharton. And then the second book of collected Murderbot novellas (3-4) popped up on Book Outlet, tempting me to place an order even though I ordered from them pretty recently, and they also had the hard copy of The League of Kitchens Cookbook, so I pounced on it.

I don't remember where I heard about it, but someone somewhere mentioned it and then I snapped it up a while back when the ebook was on sale. I had no real idea what the League of Kitchens was until I was reading, and it turns out to be such a neat thing! From the book copy:

Founded in 2014 by Lisa Kyung Gross, the daughter of a Korean immigrant and a Jewish New Yorker, League of Kitchens is a unique cooking school that empowers immigrant women to share culinary expertise and culture through hands-on cooking workshops, both in their homes and online. The instructors pass on their knowledge, skills, recipes, and most importantly, their secrets for how to cook with love. At its heart, League of Kitchens is a celebration of the invaluable contributions of immigrants to our food culture and society.

IIRC from the intro to the book, they don't/didn't go searching for people from specific backgrounds as instructors; rather, it's about finding people who match what they're looking for, regardless of their country of origin. (Here's their current list of instructors.) Some classes are taught online, which is tempting, although I don't realistically like my odds of ever actually signing up.

(One thing I really like about the book is that the recipe instructions are broken down into incredible detail. I pretty much always want more detail than I'm given when learning something or being asked to do something. When I was still very early in the book, I was excitedly calling out to

scruloose about how the recipe I was reading--which was not for something super-complicated, I don't think--was broken down into seventeen steps. SEVENTEEN. Yes, please!)