Intersection Logs

I won't say it wasn't a struggle, or that the end result is anything like a finished product, but I got there. And now I can go off on my travels tomorrow with a clear conscience.

Am I crazy to already be thinking about November? I'm still not sure this kind of thing is good for me, but I may have to keep trying until I get it right. Unfortunately, I suspect that means doing a *lot* of advance planning, and November is only two months away.

Still, I did what I set out to do this month, if not exactly according to plan.

Seriously, the rose was only about two inches across!

	Ocotillo
	Claret Cup

Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey. Surreal future dystopia run along the lines of a 1950s English boarding school, where social status is determined by colour vision. I kept muttering to myself about colour theory not working that way. Also, limescale in the Welsh reservoirs that serve Birmingham? The whole point about the Welsh water in Brum is that it's dead soft.

Gene Wolfe, The Sorcerer's House. A man released from prison squats in a mysterious house outside a small American town, which turns out to have been left to him, and also not to be entirely in this world. I kept hoping it was just the unreliable and not very admirable narrator, but there seemed to be some rather nasty attitudes in this; also there seem to be some major dropped threads, but that might just be me missing things.

Seanan McGuire, An Local Habitation (e) More shenanigans among the faerie and part-faerie denizens of San Francisco; mostly inoffensive and engaging, and the protagonist does experience some personal growth.

Also the first half of Surface Detail by Iain M Banks, but I'll deal with that when I finish it.

Tad Williams, Shadowrise

Kage Baker, Mendoza in Hollywood (e)
Kage Baker, The Graveyard Game (e)
Kage Baker, The Life of the World to Come
Kage Baker, The Children of the Company
Kage Baker, The Machine's Child
Kage Baker, The Sons of Heaven

Barbara Hambly, Homeland

I now feel the need of something very light and fluffy to read next. The Williams was incredibly tedious for about the first third, as the characters kept stopping dead in their meanderings about the landscape to tell each other myth-stories, which seems an odd choice for the third volume of a quadrology. After that it picked up a bit. The Company novels, on the other hand, were compulsively readable but extremely grim in parts. Then I read the Hambly for a bit of something-completely-different; it's an extremely well done epistolary novel about two young women corresponding across the lines of the American Civil War, weaving together the harsh realities of their lives with the comforts of reading Dickens and Austen, but not exactly cheerful.

36 new books, 11 rereads. Apparently not having a job (and hence not having a commute or a lunch break away from the computer) means that I read less rather than more. I'm mostly only reading at night, and if the book isn't very compelling, or I'm tired, that might only be a few pages. Kraken took me a whole month to get through, and I'm currently slogging through the third instalment of Tad Williams' latest series; on the other hand I got through All Clear in not much more than a (travel) day. This tends to mean that I reach for smaller books; the last two volumes of the Malazan series, and a few other large tomes on the to-read pile, just look too intimidating. I need to figure out a way to fit more reading into my day next year, and more non-fiction, too.

Another observation is that once I got my physical books back, the e-reader didn't get much use. Again, I might have used it more if I'd been travelling/commuting more.

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The warm weather is bringing out butterflies -- and wasps -- that probably should be dormant by now.