All these things that I have done

tinyjo @ 2020-05-10T12:45:00

2020-05-10T19:31:53Z

Did some more yoga this morning. I think one of the things I've previously found difficult with trying to set up an exercise routine is that a half hour work out requires 20-30 minutes of getting there, changing, showering and changing back etc. I've switched to doing my exercise first thing in the morning when I get up now that I don't have to factor in commuting time and I'm definitely finding that has reduced my frustration at that aspect of things. It hasn't improved my enjoyment of it of course, but I've given up on the idea of finding exercise I actually enjoy doing. I might just conceivably keep this up after lock down, although I might swap the Saturday yoga session for a swim when the pools open again.

tinyjo @ 2020-05-09T18:14:00

2020-05-09T17:16:12Z

Have decided to try posting a quick daily update - not for any particular reason, just for my own interest really.

Spent today divided between lounging around and reading (Patrick Ness and Robin Stevens) will it was hot and doing a bunch of gardening once the sun moved behind the big tree behind my garden. Put in all the peas and mange tout so far, the courgettes and planted up some more seeds - lettuce and corn medallion microgreens and some extra courgettes, cucumbers and peas in case the slugs defeat the first lot. This evening will be BBQ kebabs - summers here.

tinyjo @ 2019-04-25T11:15:00

2019-04-25T10:15:31Z

Am feeling slightly restless/discontented at the moment. The summery weather at the weekend was lovely and I did get some gardening in, but I also did a lot of lounging around reading when there was stuff that I should have been getting on with really. Work has felt a little fraught this week due to the fallout from a mistake (someone else's, but it's just leading to a slightly constrained atmosphere). I've also struggled to get out of the office with time to go to the gym this week, so I need to get back to being much more strict about that. I guess it's just a feeling that I've slacked off an little and need to get back moving again.

tinyjo @ 2019-03-31T15:21:00

2019-03-31T14:21:45Z

Pushed myself to start the book group book (Ra) today, despite my developing Stardew Valley addiction and am glad I did - it's really good! I think I'm quite likely to get it finished even though it's long - it's clipping along at a fair old rate and I'm really enjoying it. One of the things book group and getting back into reading new fiction generally has made me realise is that I have a strong bias towards protagonists who take action - it doesn't have to be successful, or even the right action. Protagonists who just sort of wander around and things happen to them tend to really annoy me. As such, I'm really liking Ra, because whatever her other faults, Laura definitely takes action! I really like her as a character, actually, although I suspect that by the end of the book I might like her twin more, and that's a big part of why.

Stardew Valley has definitely sucked me in again - I am now married to Leah and saving up to buy a big coop for my chickens/dinosaurs. I've also been out Stardew Valley-ing in real life again - the garden is getting started, I've planted up the wheelbarrow, radishes are sprouting, it's all very exciting. The next job will be to actually eat up all the winter greens from the trug so I can refresh the soil and re-plant it for this year!

tinyjo @ 2019-03-24T16:02:00

2019-03-24T16:02:56Z

Actually went to a gig this week, for the first time in ages and really enjoyed it - it helped that it wasn't super busy so I could perch on a stool for part of it, but also it was just a really nice way to spend an evening. I have also been getting the garden going again - I refilled the wheelbarrow with soil and sowed some lettuce, some rocket and some land cress. Our winter greens have been filled with vim and vigour by the coming of the spring and we're close to self sufficient for leafy greens this year already. Next step, tomatoes! Also, I managed to roast a joint of pork for the first time, which went pretty well, if I do say so myself! All in all, I feel like, public affairs not withstanding, I'm full of the joys of spring. Maybe it's being back into Stardew Valley :)

tinyjo @ 2019-03-18T10:19:00

2019-03-18T10:19:38Z

I happened to do my semi regular search for Stardew Valley on Android on our way into London on Saturday and finally met with success! I've been really wanting it as a phone game for ages and, of course, I immediately got sucked into it big time and did quite a bit of that and not enough chores on Sunday (sorry, fellow Habitca party members!). I now have a farmer named Carol with a cat named Goose and 2 chickens whose names I have forgotten. I am pretty impressed with the implementation on the phone, tbh. The only time I notice it being a little slower than the PC version is when it's saving overnight events, which, tbh, is fine and for such a cute game with pretty graphics, it's fairly good on the battery life too.

We were on our way to London to go to this year's BAHfest, this year with added igNobel in the afternoon. The igNobel stuff was missable tbh - the papers mentioned and the speakers were quite good but far too much of it was the chap who runs it talking, over explaining and thinking that he was a lot better as a comedian/public speaker than was actually the case, which at least lent the bit of Dunning-Kruger opera video he played for us a level of charming irony. BAHfest itself was really great this year, plus we turned out to know one of the presenters! The whole standard was very high actually and full of laughs. The winning hypothesis ended up being that dark matter is made up of vampires, which is why you can't see it using space telescopes.

tinyjo @ 2019-03-10T12:02:00

2019-03-10T12:02:37Z

It's kind of bizarre listening to the news at the moment, or at least the news podcast. They're all full of people who are supposedly experts on the UK political scene basically shrugging their shoulders and saying "who knows!" about what comes next. Still, it was interesting to listen to the FT team saying that the conservatives really need to recognise that austerity cuts to benefits, policing, youth services, schools and child mental health were too much and that those services are either gone or at breaking point. It feels like a car crash I can't quite bring myself to look away from - I'm not listening to news bulletins or interview type programmes like the Today programme but I am now up to 4 regular pundit analysis type podcasts (Week in Westminster, Brexitcast, FT Politics and Guardian politics). It feels very strange to have it quite so visible to everyone that our political class are woefully inadequate, and I wish I could believe that there was some likelihood that after the crash something better might happen, but even Labour aren't behaving in a way which gives me any kind of confidence in their ability to get some of their manifesto done (which I really rather liked) without descending into infighting and personality cults.

tinyjo @ 2019-03-02T18:13:00

2019-03-02T18:13:27Z

My enthusiasm for the veg patch seems to continue unabated this year - I have lots of things I want to grow and the wheelbarrow will be making a reappearance to give me more growing space in the sunshine. It has gone together with my renewed enthusiasm for finding a good, farm-shop butcher (which I think I have done, by the way) and it felt very much in keeping when, while in there last week for the meat shop, I spotted that they had boxes of beets in. Rather than, as I would have previously done, just sort of dismissing them with the thought that I quite like beets but am not sure what to do with them, my reaction was "ooh, beets!" and to immediately try to decide what I could cook with them when I bought them home. Unsurprisingly, they will be back in this year's veg plot and we're having the farm shop ones tonight with chicken and goats cheese - should be lush!

tinyjo @ 2019-02-25T15:21:00

2019-02-25T15:21:53Z

I keep starting entries here and then not finishing them, which is irritating. I'm currently stuck in a slight limbo today waiting for my boss to merge some of my last batch of changes back into the main codebase so I might as well take the opportunity for a bit of an update. Went out to Le Manoir for my birthday last week, which was just as amazing as I remember it - each dish perfectly designed to provide little flavour bursts - intense, but also delicate. One thing I have noticed is that although I have a very strong appreciation of flavour, I have a very poor vocabulary for describing it, which makes it difficult to convey an experience like the Manoir. I find it difficult to pin down what a flavour might remind me of or anything around "notes" or that sort of thing - it feels like an odd sort of blind spot. Anyway, suffice to say, dinner was amazing.

As well as dinner, I had a really lovely day with my folks on the day itself - we went out fabric shopping at John Lewis, thanks to the very generous voucher I got from work, so now I have lots of fabric for trying out new projects with, which is quite exciting. We also went to the garden centre and I'm already getting excited about veg growing this year. I really loved having fresh garden veg, especially the tomatoes and courgettes, what with last year's wonderful BBQ weather. Most of what I grew last year will be back this time, but I'm going to have a shot at growing all of my salad veg, so adding cucumber and sweet peppers to the mix. Having conceived of the wheelbarrow last year as a one off, temporary addition to the veg plot, it will be making a reappearance this year as there's just so many things I want to grow some of!

This weekend, we met up with Alex's folks for a theatre trip to see a ISIHAC special - rather than being for recording, there were lots of guests all dropping in and out for different games. It turns out the show was originally conceived as a fundraiser for Jeremy Hardy when his friends realised he needed some financial support while he was sick and unable to earn. When he died, the decided to still put the show on but create a charity foundation in Jeremy's name which would be for supporting charities and causes most likely to piss of the Daily Mail - as the producer of the show said, it's what he would have wanted. The show took a little while to get going, but the second half was absolutely hilarious, especially the twister variant of Mornington Crescent. They even played in a couple of classic clips of Jeremy singing on the show, which made me a little sniffly but all together a wonderful evening. We speculated on the way in as to why they'd decided to do it in Oxford rather than a London theatre and I wondered if some of the more elderly Clue regulars might be Oxford locals. Barry Cryer came on in a wheelchair, and was obviously pretty doddery (although still making some hilarious contributions) so I wonder if he might be based round here somewhere.

tinyjo @ 2019-02-11T12:01:00

2019-02-11T12:01:38Z

Fell down a rabbit hole this weekend of pricing Magic cards. Basically, as part of tidying up the library, Alex and I decided that realistically, we're just not going to get back into playing with our old Magic cards, and my default reaction was to say that in that case, we should just chuck them out but Alex was sure that we ought to do *something* with them - perhaps sell them, perhaps pass them on to someone who still plays. We couldn't think of anyone in the latter category, so on Saturday morning, I started looking into selling options. I'd initially assumed that we'd just sell the whole thing in bulk to someone, perhaps through GamesKeeper, and was focused on finding out what a sensible "lucky dip" type price would be but all the threads I found seemed to suggest that you should sell the singles yourself. Even that might not have convinced me on it's own, but for two things - number one was that I recognized at least two high value cards as ones I was certain I had somewhere (we're talking over £100 per card here) and number two was that I found a site specifically dedicated to providing a UK market place for Magic singles, meaning I wouldn't have to worry about complicated postage problems.

I decided to give it a try so I took one of our boxes of old decks and went through about half of them, pulled all the rares and uncommons and then went through and listed them. I found one of the really valuable cards I'd remembered in the process and by the time I'd listed them all the collection was worth about £500, which made me decide to take the plunge and go the whole hog. Over the rest of the weekend, I sorted about 40% of the boxes and listed all the rares/uncommons I could easily identify and the collection is now worth about £2500, which is a significant chunk of a holiday if it actually sells. The big unknown at the moment is how much of it actually will sell. I did get one sale almost immediately but it was for a card that I realised afterwards I'd significantly underpriced so that's not necessarily an indication of how busy things will be but I guess I can only wait and see. If it goes well, there are lots of cards still in the boxes that might be worth something because they're from an era when the rares/uncommons weren't given gold and silver symbols to make them easier to spot but I'm probably not going to do that trawl through unless there's enough volume on the easy cards that it seems worthwhile. I'll probably finish the rest of the boxes over a few evenings in front of the TV though. On the off chance anyone on here is interested, you can see the collection here: https://lilianamarket.co.uk/tinyo

Something about the whole process of sorting and listing was rather hypnotic though and I ended up basically spending the whole weekend doing it rather than, say doing the gardening. Still, it is useful, at least in theory, so I guess that's not too bad.

tinyjo @ 2019-02-07T12:12:00

2019-02-07T12:12:23Z

Read the book group book again this month - 2 in a row! I wasn't impressed by the book at all (The Rift by Nina Allen, very pretentious and pretty dull) but I did feel good about the fact that I finished it and made it to the discussion (where I was not very sparing). Overall, I have really noticed an uptick in my interest in reading new fiction (as opposed to re-reading, not necessarily things published recently. I started on the Age of Innocence the other evening, purely because I have it as an eBook and I've never read it. I've not got far yet, but I'll push on at least a little more before making a decision about whether it's for me. Also, having bought this month's book group book on Kindle, I was snagged by the first page and read 2 or 3 chapters last night, which is a good sign. I am even considering going to back to one or two things that I abandoned despite recommendations from others and seeing if I can get closer to the end now that I have more reading stamina again.

tinyjo @ 2019-02-03T17:22:00

2019-02-03T17:22:18Z

I've been writing quite a few entries in my head over this week about the complete and utter mess that is our current political situation, but somehow when I get in front of the posting window I feel like anything I could possibly say about the whole thing would be redundant. The whole thing is really rather depressing and yet, as it gets closer, I can't seem to look away.

I've been re-reading Night Watch and have gone from finding it one of my least favourite Watch books to thinking it's one of the best. I found the main time travel plot something of a distraction from the underlying theme of what it means to live a good/moral in a corrupted society, something which, sadly, feels an increasingly relevant question.

I seem to be in a slightly low mood this afternoon, so I should mention that life in the private sector is still very good and is meaning that I'm regularly surprising myself with my weekend energy levels. I managed to tidy up the library at last this weekend, something that's been on my to-do list for ages and I've just not been able to make any headway with it until now. I've finished the book club book for a second month in a row and I'm managing to get to the gym at least 3 or 4 times every week. It's all going surprisingly well on a micro level, really, it's just the wider world that seems to be sliding into disaster.

tinyjo @ 2019-01-24T15:33:00

2019-01-24T15:33:07Z

Went to see John Finnemore in London on Tuesday, which, despite snow making the travel portion a little more complex than needed, was a really lovely evening. The comedy was great (listen to the new series of Souvenir Programme when it is released) and afterwards, we went to a lovely fish restaurant and had fancy fish and chips before heading back to Oxford. A little bit of a late night but worth it, I'd say. I need to get a little bit more confident in asserting when I want to come in/leave early or something like that I think - I guess that'll come once I've been here longer and am feel more comfortable that I'm definitely pulling my weight.

Over the weekend, I had my first go at butchery, which also went really well. I ended up with 4 pheasant breasts, 3 pigeon breasts and a strong feeling of accomplishment. I was surprised that it really was as easy as YouTube made it look and it felt like an intensely practical process, which I found quite satisfying. The moment where it goes from looking like a bird to looking like the sort of meat that I'm used to seeing delivered by the supermarket was quite strange the first time. Now one of the other shooters at work has given me 2 more birds so I'll be doing it again next weekend, which I'm sure will delight the cats - Harry thought the whole thing was amazingly exciting, as you can imagine :)

tinyjo @ 2019-01-18T11:13:00

2019-01-18T11:13:39Z

I wrote quite a bit of an entry yesterday in between bits and bobs at work but then I forgot to post it and I guess draft saving is not a thing these days? Maybe I turned it off somewhere or something. Anyway. The most annoying thing about the project I'm working on at the minute is that every time you change the code you have to do a rebuild of the whole solution and then it takes about 3 minutes to spin up on first load which is enough time to be boring but not enough time to do very much. That being said, it does work for things like writing journal entries or, hopefully, writing the Brownies letter I need to do at some point today, I just have to make sure I have enough little things like that.

The developing is still working out well - I was the SQL expert for my colleague yesterday, which was a pretty good feeling and I'm definitely feeling like the ASP.NET skills have de-rusted pretty fast and I'm making actual contributions. I'm also getting into the swing of things at the gym, I think. I've managed to go three times this week and I have a session booked with a personal trainer on Sunday - you get three as part of the sign up package so I figure getting a bit of advice on using machines, etc can't hurt.

The other excitement of this weekend is that I have a new experience coming my way. Having heard that I like game, my boss immediately decided to offer me the results of his weekend shooting, with the result that I now have two pheasants and 2 wood pigeons hanging in my shed! I've never actually dealt with a carcass before, but I'm game to have a go at anything so we'll see how that goes! If nothing else, I expect that it'll fascinate the cats!

tinyjo @ 2019-01-09T17:23:00

2019-01-09T17:23:18Z

Well, I am now officially a developer again! It's kind of weird because it doesn't feel very like work yet - I've got used to seeing getting the chance to tinker around with code as a leisure only activity. I have a very flash set up with lots of monitors and a nice surface laptop with a stylus that I can make notes on and so forth, which I'm quite liking in a weird way. The current project I'm working on has a weird wrinkle where every time you build it, the first load of the website takes about 90 seconds, which is rather irritating, but I am filling with doing things like this post on another screen so isn't too bad. I feel like I'm picking things up again, which is good, although it's hard to tell if I'm doing it faster or slower than they were expecting but overall, I feel pretty positive about how things are working out and it's definitely leaving me with a whole lot more brain space than teaching! In the evenings this week so far, I have been out to the FMs to do some co-op gaming and finished off the book group book in time to head out for book group this evening and still been able to get in and get started in the morning every morning, which feels like a pretty good record!

Speaking of book group, this month's book was Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, which proved to be an interesting read. Contrary to coalescent's skeptical look, I would have managed it over the weekend if I hadn't had a horrible cold and thus spent all of Saturday on the sofa feeling drowsy and bunged up and watching dumb TV. I managed the rest of it over Sunday afternoon and evening and Tuesday evening, although I will admit it is a pretty hefty proposition, so I can see why he was inclined to side-eye me. I ended up enjoying it much more than I was expecting to. I noped out of The Gone-Away World pretty hard, which left me with a definite instinct that Harkaway was a writer I wouldn't enjoy. This meant that for at least the first third of the book, I was reading it feeling rather resistant to and almost resentful of the fact that I was rather impressed by it - I kept waiting for it to tip over into being too pretentious or all-over-the-place. For me, it never quite did, although it came close a couple of times, which put me in the interesting position of having an experience not entirely unlike that of the Inspector. I found myself speculating at about 80% of the way through whether Harkaway had done the same OU philosophy course as me, but looking at his bio, I guess he must have just included a similar module in his Cambridge degree. I might re-read the end as it felt like it didn't quite hang together as tightly as the middle portion of the book, but generally, I really did enjoy it quite a bit. Perhaps I should even try some of his other stuff again?

tinyjo @ 2018-12-31T12:15:00

2018-12-31T12:22:25Z

So, I made it through! Did the final day at school with only a bit of a sniffle as my class sang a goodbye song for me (which was very charming of them, bless them - they'd filked something I didn't recognise but the result was lovely), and had a great time with my new colleagues at their Christmas party. There was an end of year meeting beforehand and I came out of that feeling super positive about the whole thing, which feels like a good sign. I like all the other people I've met so far, which is always a good start, and am looking forward to getting started next year. The one thing which was less good was that in the course of the dinner, we discovered that I am really quite allergic to truffle oil, we think - the odour of several people's plates all at once (including mine - I hadn't noticed it listed as an ingredient in the steak sauce) was so awful that I broke out in a sweat, got light headed and had to go outside for some fresh air, which was a bit of a surprise! Fortunately, that was enough to recover and the restaurant were kind enough to swap the food but that's something I won't be trying in a hurry.

Have been using the between jobs/years gap to get lots of things booked in for next year - my calendar of holidays is already looking pretty full for 2019, assuming that we do make it to Bangkok as well, but it's all super exciting stuff. Who knows what's coming on a more global scale, but at a personal level, I'm feeling pretty up about 2019 :)

tinyjo @ 2018-12-02T15:16:00

2018-12-02T15:22:56Z

As I get closer and closer to the end of term, I'm finding I've got more and more free brain cycles to do things at the weekend, make plans, feel bouncy and cheerful. It's a very freeing thought. Next week should be fairly straight forward because we are having assessment week, so that takes up a lot of timetable time, and although it does involve quite a bit of marking, it's not too bad because it's all quite specific/straight forward marking with a mark scheme. Then there's just the residential to get through. I'm a little nervous about that - I worry about managing the homesick ones - but I think overall it should be a fairly good week if the weather is ok. So close now though!

tinyjo @ 2018-11-25T15:01:00

2018-11-25T15:07:34Z

Somewhat to my surprise, I have found myself actually doing some swimming again over the past few months and rather enjoying it. I rejoined a gym in October on a limited 3 month deal as the nights began to draw in, the weather got colder and Pokemon Go lost it's appeal. Not really with any sense of anticipation, just a grim sense of resignation that it was something that would have to be got through in my own best interests. I originally intended to use the gym/treadmill on work nights and swim occasionally at the weekends, but as part of that I treated myself to a cheap waterproof MP3 player and I've found to my surprise that with that addition, I'm actually quite enjoying swimming at the moment. I started off listening to my weekly politics podcasts in the water on Saturday mornings but have since discovered that Critical Role also makes an excellent companion for swimming, although it occasionally makes me smile too broadly and take in a little unexpected pool water as a result. The other previous barrier I've had - the fact that long term swimming tended to reach a point where I just smelt of chlorine all the time - hasn't yet re-emerged as an issue, so I'm feeling cautiously positive about the whole thing - enough so that I've been looking up alternative pools for the new year when I won't be passing this one on the way home any more, which was the primary reason for choosing it in the first place.

tinyjo @ 2018-11-18T13:55:00

2018-11-18T14:12:37Z

Term crawls on but I was in a better mood most of this week - a couple of good nights of sleep helped, as did some very very soppy cats snuggling up to me. I spent yesterday afternoon going through my book case purging teaching books. Although I have a lot of these, they are mostly either (a) gifts that I never got around to reading, (b) set texts from my qualification or (c) books that other teachers have passed on to me from their categories (a) and (b) when they retired. Lots of them are hopelessly out of date at this point so I ended up with one bag I think Oxfam can sell and 3 that are going straight to the recycling centre. I barely ever read any of them - I never had sufficient energy/desire to and from my position of having decided to cut ties from the profession I look back and wonder if I should have asked myself about my lack of intellectual connection with teaching earlier, although asking that now isn't itself particularly valuable. In fact, trawling through our non fiction shelf reminds me that I very rarely have the energy to read serious non-fiction, although I often find it tempting/fascinating. I rediscovered several history and philosophy texts that I wasn't able to resist buying but have easily manage to resist opening. Maybe I'll start reading some of those in January.

tinyjo @ 2018-11-10T16:02:00

2018-11-10T16:17:56Z

Ugh. I'm finding the long run up to leaving school really rough. It's really making me dwell on the things I don't like about teaching or can't cope with any more, instead of being able to focus on feeling excited about what I'm going on to. I spend a probably unhealthy amount of time mentally writing long involved think-piece type blog entries about what's wrong with teaching today, although, in common with most of the times I do this, I expect that I'll eventually decide that they contain significantly more pontificating than content and just not post them. I have a literal tally in my classroom (hidden from the children!) where I can cross off the number of days to go. I did have a good time socialising this week though - it was girly, book group and games one after another, which could have been draining but actually was good. I think it helped that both girly and games were small gatherings this time around, which is easier for me to cope with generally. And generally, work has been annoying this week for reasons which are just specific annoying things rather than the generality of teaching and aren't necessarily long term. Hopefully I'll perk up a bit as I get closer to getting out!

tinyjo @ 2018-11-04T11:30:00

2018-11-04T11:44:03Z

Things feel like they're changing so fast at the moment that I always have to check on what had happened last time I posted before I start an update! So the last update was written the weekend before half term, when I was still job-hunting. On the Friday of that week, the last day of term, I suddenly got an interview with a company who were very keen to talk to me having just seen my CV that morning and I ended up heading over there straight after school, and then from *there*, straight to Brownies! That was a really good conversation, and I got on really well with them so that seemed very optimistic. Separately, over the Thursday, Friday and Saturday I ended up setting up 4 separate phone interviews for the Monday, which made for a quite surreal day, as we were visiting with my parents so I was taking these calls in between doing sewing things with Mum. Tuesday saw me finishing off a coding test while stopped of in Cambridge to see Alex's family on the way home and nearly all of the companies I spoke to on Monday set up interviews for later in the week. On Wednesday I went back to see the company I saw on the Friday (as well as one other) - again, got on really really well with the people and they made me an offer that afternoon. I dithered about waiting and going to one of my Friday interviews, which had sounded really interesting, but in the end I decided that I wasn't going to find a better culture fit and it seemed likely that the job was going to be a bit wooly, which I felt less confident I could definitely do after my time out of the industry so I accepted and will be starting in January. They're a small marketing company which specialise in loyalty programmes, mostly for businesses selling to smaller businesses. People look politely baffled when I say I find that fascinating but I really do think there's the potential for some really interesting data stuff in there which could be genuinely cool. It's also a good balance of stuff I remember well and am certain I can be good at again very quickly (data feed management) and stuff which is a bit more hazy and has changed rather more since I went into teaching and all in all, I think it will really suit me well.

School has been back this week and been very busy and I spent yesterday slumped on the couch, to tired to do anything really, which really reminded me why I want to leave! The weekend before I'd been really active and cheerful and now I feel pulled down and grey again. Only another 6 weeks to go!

Summer reading 4: The Explorer + rereads

2018-08-14T19:08:02Z

Book: The Explorer by Katherine Rundell
Amount read: All of it - this was an actual physical book so I feel percentages are inappropriate :)
Thoughts: I really liked this. It's a kids book - I would say aimed at 10-13 year olds probably, so not even what I would call YA. It's got a good sense of realism about what it might actually be like to be stranded in the Amazon - it doesn't romanticise it as much as this type of book often do. I found the explorer himself a little more unlikely as a character but not enough to give me a real problem with the narrative. It clips along well and I found the ending affecting, in a good way.
Overall: Nothing of any great depth, but a pleasure to read.

Book: Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Re-reading because: I re-read Night Watch and remembered how much I like Pratchett!
Thoughts: I love this one very much because I feel like it's Pratchett's observation of human nature at it's sharpest, particularly when it comes to the description of the different financiers who take over the Grand Trunk. I love Reacher Gilt as a villain but also the fact that Moist is confronted with his crimes and forced to acknowledge that there are actual victims, even if he doesn't know who they are.
Overall: I have read this one many times now, but I still love reading it!

Book: Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
Re-reading because: Same as above - this is my favourite Watch book, I think.
Thoughts: Yeah, I still love this one. My particular favourite moment is at the end, where Red Dragon, hearing Dorfl speak for the first time, says "You gave one of them a voice? That's blasphemy!" and Vimes replies "That's what people say when the voiceless speak." I also love when Dorfl faces down the assembled clerics at the end.
Overall: Yeah, Pratchett is basically my favourite writer. The way he describes people feels so right to me.

Book: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L Sayers
Re-reading because: I've been re-reading all my Sayers in the order they appear in my e-reader because I just really enjoy her detective fiction.
Thoughts: Actually, this one is rather less interesting to re-read than some of the others because it is more focused on the crime and you get less of Peter as a character, although I do quite like what we see of his relationship with Parker. It turned out that I'd only remembered the first half of the crime plot though, so it was quite fun to re-discover the rest.
Overall: Great if you haven't read it, not so much worth the re-reading as some others.

Book: Unnatural Death by Dorothy L Sayers
Re-reading because: Same as above - this was the last one on my list.
Thoughts: I remembered the motive for this one but had forgotten the method, which was most of the story here, so that was fine. I did find that this one, like the previous one, is quite focused on the mechanics of things rather than developing the characters as much as some of the later ones, but it's an intricate enough puzzle to be pleasing in it's own right.
Overall: Not the best style of plot for re-reading unless you've forgotten some of the details, I'd say.

Summer reading 3: A Skinful of Shadows, Winterglass and Exit West

2018-08-14T18:19:00Z

Book: A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge
Amount read: 100%
Thoughts: I am oddly resistant to Frances Hardinge and I don't really know why. A piece of historical fantasy, with ghosts and characters learning how to come to terms with their own powers should be something I absolutely love. I did enjoy reading this - I thought the concept was interesting and properly unsettling, it clipped along at a really good pace (I read it over an afternoon/evening) and I generally liked the characters, although I did think that Makepeace was a little too willing to welcome random ghosts into her head, or that her fear of the idea was inconsistently expressed, perhaps. I also found the fact that it is mentioned that Makepeace is not her true name and then nothing happens with that faintly annoying. The thing is, while this was all well and good, it just didn't grab me in the way that, say Uprooted did last year. I doubt this is something I'd re-read particularly. Like all her writing, it feels Diana Wynne Jones like but missing some vital ingredient that would make it really take fire. I'm explaining this poorly (not being a proper reviewer, I suppose) but that's the closest I can come to conveying it.
Overall: Good, but lacking something and so not great.

Book: Winterglass by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Amount read: 100%
Thoughts: I quite liked this! It was super weird and unsettling though and definitely had flaws. I loved the setting, which felt genuinely strange and fantastical. I took a little while to warm to the characters but I did generally quite enjoy inhabiting their point of view for a while. I was totally taken aback by the ending though, which was not what I expected at all - I couldn't decide if it was just a surprising twist that I should take at face value or if it was setting things up for something else that's part of a longer book? It was very short and, by the end, I actually kind of wished it had been longer/wanted to know what would happen next.

I did find the book's approach to gender a little distracting - I couldn't decide whether it was trying to do something clever that I wasn't understanding or if it was just being boundary pushing in places or what. I particularly found General Lussadh confusing - she's referred to by female pronouns throughout but clearly has male anatomy and I wasn't sure what that was supposed to convey to me in terms of the character and or her relationships. I also found the sex included in the story felt a little forced in places, but it is a thing which is hard to write well, so I'm not knocking off major points for that.
Overall: Intriguing. I would definitely read a sequel to this (I wonder if there is one)

Book: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Amount read: 21%
Gave up because: I just found the narrative incredibly stilted and found the air of disconnect that the story (such as it was) fostered unappealing. I picked it up in the first place because I found it in the shared kindle library, saw it was on the Booker shortlist and wondered whether those two things together implied something more interesting than run of the mill literary fiction. I have to say that if it did, it didn't keep me interested long enough to get to it.
Predictions for the rest of the story: Saeed and Nadia get together and try to leave the terrible war torn Middle East for the West but discover that things are bad for them there in different ways.
Overall: Standard issue lit fic without enough heart to grab the attention.

Summer reading 1: Europe in Autumn

2018-08-01T14:20:27Z

So, I thought this might be a fun summer project - we shall see, I guess!

Book: Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
Amount read: 36%. Yes, I am not a completist and will stop reading a book if it fails to engage me enough.
Gave up because: I got tired of waiting for some semblance of engaging plot or characterisation? Or even some sense of the setting? The author is obviously a massive admirer of Le Carre and the book feels so far like he really wants to write a Cold War spy thriller but doesn't want to do the level of historical research that would require and so has decided to hand-wave "OK, there's a Cold War like situation going on!" Unfortunately, that feels like an accurate description of the level of world building that's been done so far, and it really doesn't work for me! I mean, I too have read and enjoyed Le Carre but he doesn't describe the geo-political situation in great detail because the fundamental assumption of those books is that the reader already knows all that and understands the stakes involved. In this, I basically have no idea why Rudi decides to get involved with the transnational 70s spies or, conversely, why they pick him to recruit or what stuff people want smuggled across these borders or why. It comes across as if it's a group of people *playing* at being 70s spies - an impression reinforced by the fact that so far none of them have mobile phones.
Predictions for the rest of the book: Given that I'm not going to finish the book, here are some predictions for what might happen
1. A femme fatale shows up - probably the one from earlier in the story (Marta?)
2. Rudi discovers that the Coureurs are actually the baddies.
3. There's a mole!
4. It turns out it's all some sort of immersive video game experience. This would make the fact that Rudi seems happy to dive in to this life threatening occupation for basically no reason make more sense.
5. It turns out that everyone else is living in Utopia and this is a Special Circumstances type arrangement for the people who *really wish* they were Cold War spies.
Overall: I'm actually too uninterested to even go and read the Wikipedia summary of the plot to find out what happens, something I occasionally do for books I decide I'm not going to finish anyway.

Summer reading 2: Ballad of Halo Jones + re-read of Night Watch

2018-08-01T14:20:08Z

Book: The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson
Amount read: 100%
Thoughts: Hmmm. I know this is a classic and all, but the first thing I feel like I want to say here is that I found the art style really tough to wade through. I've been consistently surprised, although I probably shouldn't be, by how much difference this makes when reading comics. Some of the pages were really busy and as well as not being aesthetically to my taste, I found some of it genuinely hard to parse and it took me quite while to figure out which character was which.

I wasn't in love with the pacing, and for a lot of the time I felt like I couldn't figure out what the story it was trying to tell was. Some bits really dragged and some bits I got kind of swept along with. If it hadn't been the book group book for the month, I'm not sure I would have persevered with it. That being said, the thing that I did like and found really interesting was something I noticed half way through, which is that the narrative is completely female focused; it's not in any way a feature of the story, but I realised part way through that all the characters are female unless there is a specific reason for them to be male and that reason is usually for them to be in some way a love interest/sex object. I just loved the fact that, just like in reverse in most stories, it's never mentioned, it's not a feature of the universe to be 90% female or anything, it's just that's the way the writer chooses to be focused.

Overall: So yeah. I'm kind of pleased to have read it from an academic point of view but I wouldn't recommend it as a piece of storytelling in and of itself.

Book: Night watch by Terry Pratchett
Re-reading because: Someone on my twitter feed mentioned re-reading this in order to do a podcast on it. I was looking for something to read just to chill out on the garden seat and started The Shepherds Crown, which I found depressing and will finish and post about later in the holiday so decided to switch to this instead.
Thoughts: I mean, in general TP books stand up incredibly well to re-reading because what's amazing about them is his razor sharp understanding of people and his use of language, not especially what happens. This is actually one I didn't love so much when I first read it because I was distracted by the plot, which didn't quite feel right in the setting somehow (I think I mentally associate time travel with sci-fi rather than fantasy) and I have found that on re-reading, I've actually enjoyed it a lot more because I focused in more on the themes and ideas he's trying to explore. I found myself thinking about the fact that although this book focuses on the way that Vimes was created by Keel/his older self but actually doesn't quite acknowledge that Carrot is also key in creating the Vimes of the present - like this plants the seed, but without Carrot, it wouldn't come to fruition or something? The line that sticks in my mind most strongly at the minute is Vimes talking to Ned Coates, probably the most effective revolutionary the book shows us (unless you count Vetinari), when he says "Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again - that's why they're called revolutions. People die and nothing changes." I think it encapsulates what I love about Vimes as a character - that world weary cynicism is something that I think we share.
Overall: If you haven't read any Pratchett, I wouldn't start with this one, but I do love it and if you read it once and didn't quite connect, I would definitely recommend giving it a second pass.