reading things

I had a terribly ignominious incident in December in which someone asked me to identify a book that I knew I had read recently and I had only the vaguest of ideas what it was. So, back to logging of readables, at least in some sketchy way.

Dragonsong for the nth time. I would like to continue to Dragonsinger if I could find it, but part of the stress-related reread syndrome is that also things are a real mess around here.

Instead I went on to E. Rose Sabin's Arucadi series. I rarely see anyone talk about these, and it looks like the author has been driven to online publishing, but the first one, A School for Sorcery, won Andre Norton's Gryphon Award. They're all enjoyable, though I liked the first protagonist better than any of the others and there's an odd flatness to any of the peril or death. One good thing is that the characters in book 3 are explicitly dealing with the consequences of books 1 and 2. The fourth, Bryte's Ascent (Chapters 1-24 and 25), stops being a school story but is instead a wronged-urchin-makes-good story, though still with character overlap, and we learn a bit more about the magic system (which I always like).

I hadn't read Cherryh's Wave Without a Shore before and was very impressed by both the creepiness of the solipsist society and the glorious descriptions of sculpture. Not quite as convinced by the protagonist's change of heart. I can definitely see how one would get to writing Cyteen from the social-engineering ideas here.

Kate Atkinson's Case Histories was very good, so I picked up Behind the Scenes at the Museum from the library. I went through annoyance (there can be no first-person narration of one's own conception, that's ridiculous) and apathy (all these people are so unhappy, why am I reading about them?) on the way to reluctant admiration for the weaving together of different times in family history to form a cohesive story. I never did come to like the protagonist very well, though, and the unreliable narration and memory could've been handled better.

Mind of the Magic by Holly Lisle is a sequel I hadn't known about to Bones of the Past and Fire in the Mist. Magic-geeking. Liked it.

Notable blog posts:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2011/08/17/fair-is-fair-kindergarten-and-the-american-dream/
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2011/10/23/mandolin-on-sex-neutrality-and-call-outs-with-lots-of-decorative-swearing/

Yuletide notes await, but I'm not through even my known fandoms yet. Lots of games instead of reading lately.

papersky's visit, etc.

Friday, after a hard but mostly fun day of prospective grad student interviews, I was happy to go to the U Bookstore to see Jo Walton interviewed by Nancy Pearl. I've known Jo online for ages but Nancy Pearl only from her action figure. The discussion was edifying and charming and all sorts of good things, and I went up afterward to say hi to Jo and introduce Wim, since there's also a Wim in Among Others. We agreed to have breakfast.

Breakfast is really why I want to post about this, since I think I'll remember the fun of going around with papersky and Z but I'd already forgotten the name of the restaurant by the time we left. After some searching today, I find that it was Seatown Seabar and Rotisserie. Everything we ate was delicious, and they were very accomodating about food sensitivities. I had a fried egg sandwich on a sort of English-muffin bread with delicata squash and Beecher's cheddar; I have no idea what they did to make it so good, but I would eat one again right now. They did not ruin the fresh fruit, which shouldn't be possible anyway but so often is.

After some organizational steps, we then went to the Museum of Flight. We walked through the Concorde and a retired Air Force One, then saw many fine space things including a used Soyuz re-entry capsule and replicas of the Mars lander and lunar rover. Jo and I agreed that we would be going on the commercial lunar flight just as soon as we have whatever enormous amount of money it costs. There's a great deal to see at the Museum of Flight these days, including a section on early Boeing manufacturing and associated aviators; I was glad to see the coverall of a woman aviator and a rather attractive portrait of the first head engineer, who was a Chinese man. Also, I can highly recommend going through the WWII section with someone who knows a great deal about the Battle of Britain. I'm very slow to remember and relate historical information myself, so having help contextualizing made it all much more interesting. Next time maybe we can go to a science museum.

I bought a salad spinner to spin plates for my qPCR in the lab, found some lunch, and did lab work for a while (all by myself, with Adele and the Shins). Quite satisfactory.

Overall an excellent day despite a half-headache making me dreamier and more withdrawn than usual.

So far today it has snowed lightly with much melting, snowed like a very snowing thing, and snowed lightly again. I hope it's mostly picturesque rather than disastrous for everyone. I'm staying in, weighted and warmed by cats.