mayhap | Entries tagged with wednesday reading

What I've been reading

Well, I've mostly been watching the Olympics, except for when I've been watching the Olympics and a baseball game at the same time. (That's pretty disorienting, especially when the announcers start talking about gymnasts warming up in the bullpen.)

But I did reread "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang—just the novella, not the whole short story collection—after I saw the trailer for Arrival during the Olympics and was very confused by the idea of a movie being made out of that story as I remembered it, although I wasn't entirely sure how well I remembered it.

On reread, the trailer definitely has them changing a bunch of stuff about the setup for no immediately apparent reason that isn't necessarily important either way, but makes me wonder even more how on earth they've attempted to represent the important part of the story, which the trailer doesn't even really hint at. Which, I mean, it shouldn't; that would be horribly spoilery. But I'm so curious! How did they even end up making a movie out of something so seemingly unfilmable? I'm so curious now!

Current Mood: curious

What I've been reading

I read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Thanks to the long time between the play opening and the script being published, it was the first time I consumed a Harry Potter book (-like object) without it being a scrupulously-unspoiled experience. I did start out avoiding the spoilers, but it ended up being untenable.

( spoilers )

I read The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, a really entertaining collection of oral history. Deservedly a classic.

I read But Didn't We have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870, which covers even earlier days than The Glory of Their Times. I was personally looking for more about gameplay and how it changed during that time period, which this book touches lightly on but focuses more on changes in attitudes towards playing baseball at all, and also the shift from local amateur teams to recruiting professional teams, which is also very interesting.

I read Full of Briars, an novelette in the October Daye series but with Quentin as the POV character, and i don't know why. I mean I do know why, because I still keep up with the series and I like Quentin, but then I feel like Seanan McGuire's writing really only works for me with a POV character who fits within this very circumscribed range that is her sweet spot and this…does not fall within that range. At all. Also the whole encounter with Quentin's parents just fell unbelievably flat. I dunno, this made me actively less excited for the next actual Toby book, which is not great.

I read Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball, which follows a pretty good number of minor league players and managers (plus an umpire and a groundskeeper) through a minor-league season.

Current Mood: listless

What I've been reading

I read Whatever Life Throws at You, a young adult/new adult romance novel (I'm not entirely sure what the difference is, which I believe makes me an old adult) about how the daughter of the Kansas City Royals' new pitching coach falls in love with their new hotshot rookie pitcher. My expectations were low; I was mostly curious and expecting to be mildly entertained by how it depicted, or more likely failed to depict, the town where I live. It delivered roughly what I expected, occasional moments of semi-accuracy amidst a lot of blandness.

What transfixed me, though, was the author's complete and utter lack of understanding of how a major league pitching staff functions. I suffered through all the boring, poorly-written romance bits just to see what insane pitching changes they were going to make next. At one point, the hotshot rookie pitcher/love interest pitched at least three innings every day for four days in a row. They appear to use starting pitchers in relief constantly, but I think this is just a misunderstanding about what the terms "ace" and "number five pitcher" actually mean, because elsewhere there is a reference to a "number five mid-relief pitcher, which is…not a thing.

Then there's this gem from the deciding game of the ALCS against the Yankees:

The other starter was coming off four days in a row of pitching and Brody was fresher and more ready, so his name got pulled from the roster.

That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

I think my favorite part, though, is where Brody is throwing a perfect game in the World Series—because of course he is—and he's already been named Rookie of the Year—because of course he has, even though that doesn't even happen until the World Series is over—and apparently he's been relying either entirely or almost entirely on a mid-nineties fastball, with his slider and curveball being described as "newer pitches" that he's still "trying." What? No. No way has he even been starting without commanding, at a bare minimum, two pitches that he can mix effectively, much less is throwing a perfect game, much less is he throwing a perfect game in the World Series. Especially since his arm fell off from overuse months ago.

Current Mood: bitchy

What I've been reading

I read The Girl in the Spider's Web, the continuation of the Millennium books, because I was just mildly curious enough (mostly about shippy stuff, TBH) even though I didn't think it looked very good. It, in fact, wasn't very good, and didn't really do anything I liked with the shippy stuff either. ( Cut more to spare you from boredom than from spoilers. ) So, meh.

Also, I'm sorry, Lisbeth was the world's biggest Apple fangirl. You can't just have her go switching platforms all abruptly like that. And there was nowhere near enough quoting the specs of actual computers. I expect this from my Millennium books!

I read The View from the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman's collection of selected nonfiction. A lot of the bits I'd already read, but they're still much handier to have collected in one place, and I had missed out on gems like this aside from an introduction to Bone:

The first time I read Moby-Dick, as a boy of ten, I read it for the exciting bits (and finished it convinced that it would make a terrific comic; then again, I recall, at about the same age, finishing King Solomon’s Mines utterly certain that it would make a brilliant musical. I must, in retrospect, have been an odd child)

I read The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America by Joe Posnanski, whom you may know as the guy who wrote that blog entry about taking his 14-year-old daughter to see Hamilton. (That was a piece of fandom cross-pollination that I was not expecting.) It's a really lovely book, both really personal and intensely focused on its subject.

Current Mood: bouncy

What I've been reading

I read Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan Maguire's novella about a boarding school for kids who have returned from portal fantasies, because I liked the idea so much that even though most of the non-spoilery reactions I'd seen were pretty neutral on the execution, I thought it couldn't be all that bad, and anyway, it was short. ( I definitely did not expect to hate it as much as I did. )

Current Mood: annoyed

What I've been reading

I read Necessity, the concluding book in Jo Walton's Thessaly trilogy. I really liked it, even though I felt like ( spoilers ).

I was also persistently earwormed by the song from Finian's Rainbow. It's very catchy.

Current Mood: bouncy

What I've been reading

I read Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I felt like a lot of the essays tended towards bland summaries with the occasional dash of critical namechecking without ever actually saying much. There is some good stuff in the essays on disability, and I liked the essay about the use of alternate history in the Five Gods books. The essay on the Sharing Knife books maybe does the most to really dig into them and see what makes them tick, maybe because they are relatively unpopular.

Current Mood: listless

What I've been reading

I read Girls Standing on Lawns, which is a sort of multimedia collection containing vintage snapshots from MoMA's collection, paintings inspired by said photographs, and bits of text by Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket). I'm not sure how much the latter two elements really add to the original photographs, but I like the idea of the collaboration anyway. I scanned a bunch of old family photographs of a similar vintage and girls standing on lawns were everywhere.

I read Bertram Cope's Year, which caught my eye when

lysimache read it. It's so odd to think that it was actually published in 1919—self-published and to a pretty cool reception, from the sound of it, but still. Without being explicit as such it's very frank about its gay characters, especially their various foibles. I could personally have done with a little less of the A-plot of single girls hopelessly throwing themselves at the hapless Bertram Cope and a lot more of the tensions among the various male characters, but so it goes.

I read The Worst Night Ever, the sequel to Dave Barry's middle grade book The Worst Class Trip Ever. Owing to not being set during a class trip, it returns to Miami, which is where Dave Barry's work comes closest to approaching realism, and it made me laugh muliple times.

I read Sex with Shakespeare: Here's Much to Do with Pain, but More with Love. You might recall that Jillian Keenan wrote that Modern Love column about her spanking fetish; this is the much longer version of that story, with a lot more imagined conversations with Shakespeare characters. I related pretty hard.

Current Mood: anxious

What I've been reading

I read The Frogs and Toads All Sang, a collection of silly poems written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel for private distribution among his friends, which were rediscovered and published a few years back with the illustrations remastered by his daughter, Adrienne. They are super charming and fun.

What I'm reading now

The new Temeraire book, except slowly because I don't really want it to end.

Current Mood: busy

What I've been reading

I read Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Fauna and Family, the second and third volumes of Gerald Durrell's memoirs about his childhood on Corfu, which I had to request as interlibrary loans. As the introduction to the second book promises, he left a lot of the best stories out of the first book; both of these books lean more towards funny stories about his family and funny stories about his various animals with a little less rhapsodizing about nature, which is about where my sweet spot is.

I read My Sister Rosa, which is the followup to Liar that I've been wanting Justine Larbalestier to write which she has failed to provide for me until now. I mean, it doesn't do anything like that particular narrative thing that Liar does, but it's another ridiculously gripping, ridiculously creepy book, this time about a boy trying to keep the world safe from his little sister, who he clearly sees is a sociopath (which is also set in contemporary New York, so it's not like they have nothing in common). Loved it, couldn't put it down, definitely would recommend.

I reread "There are Rocks in My Socks!" Said the Ox to the Fox to make sure that I still thought it was readaloud-worthy before I inflicted it on a friend as a baby shower gift. I remember we acquired a copy somewhere when I was long past the age of being read to but I used to read it repeatedly to my little brother, in spite of the fact that it was pretty beat up and a previous owner had scribbled in pen throughout. It's too bad it's not in print.

Current Mood: depressed

What I've been reading

I read Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Life and Art. I've always loved 17th c. Dutch still lifes with food, which comprise the majority of the selection of paintings. There are also period recipes that you can try yourself to go with it, but they are in a separate companion pamphlet.

Current Mood: sleepy

What I've been reading

I read Lolly Willowes, which is a very odd book. It reminds me of something Jo Walton said once, about how she would be reading a literary fiction book and stumble across a metaphor involving, say, vampires, and then get distracted by what the book could be like if it contained actual, non-metaphorical vampires. It seems like a perfectly normal book about a woman breaking out of her constrained spinster existence and building an independent life for herself in the country and then, whoa, witches' familiars and dances with the actual devil. I had previously read Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of T. H. White but didn't know anything about any of her own work.

I read Call Me by Your Name, because I heard that there was going to be a movie and that Armie Hammer was going to be in it. It's weird because, having read it, it's not obviously suited to film, being mostly composed of exquisite introspection, but even if you take the all that out the residue still seems promising—sizzling slow-burn chemistry, lovely Italian scenery, hopefully reasonably-explicit sex scenes.

What I'm writing now

I started Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer, and I have to admit that I'm finding it slightly slow going so far. There is a lot of worldbuilding going on. And it's interesting! But it's a lot.

Current Mood: sleepy

What I've been reading

I read Duplicate Death, one of the only Georgette Heyer mysteries I hadn't read. I had hoped that the bridge game would come more into the mystery and it really didn't; it did, however, manage to feature two of my least favorite elements in mysteries of this vintage, ( mild spoilers )

I read Fairy Tale Comics: Classic Tales Told by Extraordinary Cartoonists. Even though this anthology features a lot of really interesting artists, I feel like you just can't do that much with versions of fairy tales that are a few pages long each.

Current Mood: sleepy

What I've been reading

I read Brain Camp, another graphic novel that Faith Erin Hicks drew but did not write. I wasn't that excited about this collaboration, though. It's a summer camp horror story with some reasonably creepy touches but not a lot going on in terms of its cast of characters.

I read The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team. Two writers for Baseball Prospectus got to try to play moneyball on a shoestring with an indy ball team last year, and as though they thought it was an essential part of the moneyball process, they immediately handcuffed themselves by accidentally appointing a manager who, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe-like, was not interested in and did not intend to implement their statistically-driven suggestions or experiments. Although this makes for some entertaining drama that is good book fodder, it really limits the extent to which they are able to put their stamp on the Sonoma Stompers' season, for good and ill. A lot of writers could have written an observational book about the strange world of indy ball, and these are some of the only writers who would have been interested in implementing a five-man infield, so it seems like a bit of a waste. Very entertaining read, though.

Current Mood: ecstatic

What I've been reading

I read Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre. A few of them are straight-up fanfiction, a few more are so loosely "inspired" that I never would have guessed it in a million years, and most of them are somewhere in between. By far my favorite story in the collection is Audrey Niffenegger's, which is an AU fic sort of thing with ( spoilers ).

I read The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer. I'd read the original comic when it was going around but didn't realize that there was a whole book and that it was gloriously overstuffed with footnotes. I enjoyed the footnotes at least as much as the comics; they're filled with delight.

I read The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg because Paul Rudd, the dreamiest Royals superfan/cosplayer, got cast as Berg in a film adaptation. It's an interesting story and I'm curious if a movie is going to even try, much less succeed, at capturing how very peculiar Berg and the life he made for himself were. I enjoyed the book quite a bit, although I don't quite understand why in an otherwise chronological account the author chose to reserve a bunch of stuff about Berg's relationship with his father and how it affected him until the last chapter. It's not even like the rest of the book just recounted his actions without trying to understand his motivations! He just saved that particular motivation for last for some reason!

Current Mood: nerdy

What I've been reading

I read The Arm: Inide the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports, which is about pitchers and Tommy John surgery and how helpless we still are when it comes to which of the former are going to need the latter, as well as how difficult the process of recovery still is even as the surgery has become routine. It was really interesting, although I do wish Danny Duffy, whom he initially approached about following his recovery for the book, had been interested, because I adore Danny, but I totally understand why anyone would prefer not to.

I read My Family and Other Animals, because I love families of glorious eccentrics. There's a new ITV miniseries that looks visually perfect but I only made it through the first couple of minutes before deciding that they had missed the boat entirely on the adaptation. I did place interlibrary loans on the second and third books in the Corfu trilogy, though.

I read The Raven King, after weeks of dodging spoilers from people who got the book early. ( Cut for spoilers, obviously. )

Current Mood: blah

What I've been reading

I read Hamilton: The Revolution and pretty much the only way I could have enjoyed it more would be if it had even more annotations, because they're all exactly the sort of thing I like to read. Or alternately it could have had more pictures of cast members in their underwear. Either way.

Current Mood: recumbent

What I've been reading

Not that much, because it was a busy week.

I did read this anthology of villanelles, because I enjoy villanelles. Especially the whole section of villanelles about villanelles, like this one by John Hollander:

This form with two refrains in parallel?
(Just watch the opening and the third line.)
The repetitions build the villanelle.

The subject thus established, it can swell
Across the poet-architect's design:
This form with two refrains in parallel

Must never make them jingle like a bell,
Tuneful but empty, boring and benign;
The repetitions build the villanelle

By moving out beyond the tercet's cell
(Though having two lone rhyme-sounds can confine
This form.) With two refrains in parallel

A poem can find its way into a hell
Of ingenuity to redesign
The repetitions. Build the villanelle

Till it has told the tale it has to tell;
Then two refrains will finally intertwine.
This form with two refrains in parallel
The repetitions build: The Villanelle.

Current Mood: exhausted

What I've been reading

I read Tales of Wrykyn and Elsewhere, a collection of P. G. Wodehouse's early school stories, including appearances previously unknown to me of Wrykyn's most famous former student, one Mike Jackson. Delightful as always.

What I'm reading now

I started this biography of Thomas Becket and it's really interesting so far.

Current Mood: amused

What I've been reading

I read Lusty Little Women for the lulz because it was on the actual shelf at my library. I was fully expecting it to be terrible, so I can't say that it didn't meet my expectations. I mean, it's not like I wouldn't have liked it to be good! I'm all about porning up Louisa May Alcott books! It's just the execution was…lacking.

Like, okay, first of all, this book contains nearly the complete text of regular flavor Little Women, with a very occasional small snips for length, and the interpolated material is minimal. Say what you like about the gimmick of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, but at least the zombies present throughout the book. I mean, I don't think the interpolated material is generally very good, so arguably limiting its presence makes it better, but it also makes it kind of redundant. Let your porny fanfic stand on its own! It's better for the environment!

Not that there is actually anything in this book that you could actually describe as porn. It's all very tame, euphemistic and fade to black, as well as not being particularly well-written. (Apparently, in the throes of passion, Professor Bhaer forgets how to conjugate the archaic second person singular in English. Steamy!)

I don't really even recommend reading it for the lulz, because there isn't enough lulzy material to go around.

Current Mood: bitchy

Profile

mayhap

My Fic

February 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Base style: Marginless by momijizukamori and branchandroot
Theme: Midnight by momijizukamori

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated May. 29th, 2025 12:23 pm

potentialities

mayhap's journal

Entries tagged with wednesday reading

Wednesday reading — adapted screenplay

Wednesday reading — good and bad luck

Wednesday reading — boggling

Wednesday reading — take me out

Wednesday reading — through the wardrobe

Wednesday reading — there ought to be a law against Necessity

Wednesday reading — essays on Bujold

Wednesday reading — explorations

Wednesday reading — amphibians and dragons

Wednesday reading — family problems

Wednesday reading — still lifes

Wednesday reading — seductions

Wednesday reading — by the book

Wednesday reading — summer activities

Wednesday reading — analysis and intelligence

Wednesday reading — arms, wings and other appendages

Wednesday reading — annotations

Wednesday reading — rhymes

Wednesday reading — cricket and larks

Wednesday reading — published badfic