31 August 2020

Review: Tampa Bay Noir edited by Colette Bancroft

Published: 2020
Acquired and read: August 2020

Tampa Bay Noir 
edited by Colette Bancroft

This is the third of the "urban noir" books from Akashic that I've read, but the first of them set somewhere I actually know; I've lived in Tampa for three years now. Perhaps the reason I got more out of it than the others, that little frisson of knowing what "Swann Avenue" is, or of realizing that a character in one story must be a professor at the same school (and in the same department) that I am!

But I actually don't think that's just it, though I'm sure it helps. A sense of character emanates from Tampa Bay here; unlike in Columbus Noir, it's not just an endless sequence of stories about gentrification. There are stories about the heat, about the cruelty, about the promises and failures, about the wanna-bes and never-bes. It's not a positive character, but it's not like a book of noir stories would be. The stories assembled by editor Colette Bancroft do a good job of capturing the vibe of the city.

Particular favorites of mine included Tim Dorsey's "Triggerfish Lane" (two losers come to the defense of their meek middle-class neighbor with hilarious consequences), Sterling Watson's "Extraordinary Things" (a creepy story of a man finally figuring out what was behind a weird confrontation from decades ago), Luis Castillo's "Local Waters" (a substitute teacher gets desperate as he can neither control his classes nor give his family what they want), Ace Atkins's "Tall, Dark, and Handsome" (a woman falls for an older rich man who is not all he seems), Sarah Gerard's "The Midnight Preachers" (a freelance reporter tries to track down an incendiary preacher in the wake of Trump's victory), Danny López's "Jackknife" (an ex-cop tries to track down his ex-lover's new lover in a carnie town in the middle of a hurricane), Eliot Schrefer's "Wings Beating" (a man with anger management issues tries to bond with his recently-out son on a trip to a mediocre spa), and Colette Bancroft's "The Bite" (a little girl is sexually harassed by colonel from MacDill AFB). They all have a sense of desperation, of a sunny facade covering up dark grime.

There were really only two I flat-out didn't like. Unfortunately one is the opener, "The Guardian" by Michael Connelly, a mediocre mystery with a boring linear plot and no theme or character work of interest. The other was "It's Not Locked Because It Don't Lock" (what a good title, though!) by Ladee Hubbard, where too many characters are discussed in dialogue and I got lost really fast. That's probably the best hit rate I've seen in one of these.

There's also "Pablo Escobar" by my friend Yuly. I might be biased because I read and gave feedback on an early draft, but I really enjoyed this, a dark story of isolation and desperation, as a Colombian immigrant in high school finally meets a friendly face. (It was thanks to this story that I learned of the Clearwater Virgin Mary, surely the most Tampa Bay miracle that could ever exist. Manifested in an office building!)

28 August 2020

Food Log: Quick Sauerbraten with Gingersnap Gravy

This is what he did when I was cooking Chinese food: got a handful of flour out of the cabinet and began moving it back and forth between two bowls and a cupcake wrapper.
Over the past couple months, Little Buddy suddenly became interested in cookbooks. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but he pulled some off the shelf in the kitchen and demanded we read them to him. He's been into cooking/baking for a while now-- specifically he's really into "mixing." He loves to pour the ingredients into the bowl and then try to mix them himself. He will just randomly go into the kitchen and try to open the cabinet (he recently figured out how the child-proof locks work, hurrah), and go, "mix, mix, mix."

At first it was a pair of Pillsbury cookbooks (one for muffins and bread, one for cookies) that we own, but soon it was every cookbook that had nice illustrations. You have to go through the cookbook page by page, and either he tells you what each image is (he has a very good memory), or you tell him. A lot of times he'll tell you that he would eat it: "[Little Buddy] eat cookie." Yes, I'm sure you would, pal!

For a while, he was particularly obsessed by a smoothie cookbook we have, so I started buying the stuff to make smoothies with him... this hasn't panned out too well because it turns out that turning the blender on makes him break down in tears!

But one thing this did do is make me conscious of the wide array of cookbooks we own that I've never really looked at. It's not even as many as it could be, as Hayley purged a lot of them before we moved to Florida. But it's still a lot. I have a tendency to kind of make the same dishes again and again, so it's been a nice change of pace. 

Recently, I've settled into alternating between two different cookbooks. One is A Wok a Week: 52 Lite & Easy Meals, which has-- you might guess-- fifty-two weeks worth of Chinese recipes, each week giving you a main dish and two sides. (Many recipes repeat across the book, but in different combinations.) I have sporadically cooked out this for several years, but the title is a bit misleading, as not all the recipes are wok-based, and I used to only pull it out if I wanted a stir fry. But now I've been working through it in order; not literally doing every recipe in turn, but doing ones in turn that look good to me, and since I'm not opening it when I specifically want a stir fry, I've been trying different things. This week I made "Baked Gourmet Beef Patties," for example, with "Shanghai String Bean Salad" and "Fragrant Rice" on the side.


The other one I've been into is the 1969 Betty Crocker's Cookbook (1974 printing), which used to belong to Hayley's Great Aunt Mildred. (Is there a more stereotypical great aunt name?) I'm not working through this one in order; rather I use a random number generator to pick a page, and then work forward from that page until I find something that sounds good.

Most recently, that was "Quick Sauerbraten with Gingersnap Gravy." Sauerbraten is a German dish of marinated meat-- usually marinated for several days, but this one is quick because you only marinate for fifteen minutes! Despite my German heritage, I've never had sauerbraten as a far as I know, but my father informed me that his mother used to make it, and that one of his sisters used to always request it as her birthday meal.

Why is there butter on the table? Because he grabbed it out of the fridge and helpfully carried it over to the table! It has no role in this stage of the recipe.

Part of the meal is that you take the juices at the end and thicken them: specifically with crushed gingersnaps! The blog of Dann Woeller the food etymologist (a fellow Cincinnatian) informs me that this is specifically a German-American immigrant thing; rather than do the fiddly work of making a roux, you'd just take some stale gingersnaps, crush them, and throw them in your sauce! (I guess your average nineteenth-century German immigrant was always likely to have a box of gingersnaps to hand.) As he says, "The gingersnap method was so widely used that Good Housekeeping listed 15 gingersnaps as equal to one cup of roux flour."

The sauerbraten was delicious. The meat was tender and tasty, and I really liked the gravy. (Publix gingersnaps, by the way, have quite a lot of kick to them!) So I've reproduced it here for you, though with the modifications I made in the course of cooking, thanks to ingredient availability and/or laziness. (I am a failure of a food blogger, though, because I didn't take any pictures of it!*) To be forewarned, though, it won't be ready until about four hours after you start, so plan accordingly.

I served it with gnocchi (frozen gnocchi from Publix; I wasn't making my own!) and buttered carrots (I used the recipe from Betty Crocker and seasoned with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves). Hayley said, "This one is a keeper."

Recipe: Quick Sauerbraten with Gingersnap Gravy 

adapted from Betty Crocker's Cookbook (Golden, 1969), p. 241

Ingredients

  • 4 pounds beef (rolled rump roast)
  • 4-5 ounces instant meat marinade (about 3 packets)
  • ⅔ cup white vinegar
  • 1 medium onion, sliced
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 teaspoon Old Bay seasoning
  • ¼ teaspoon pepper
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 tablespoons flour
  • ⅓ cup crushed gingersnaps
  • 1 teaspoon sugar

Directions

  1. Place meat in large pot. Mix marinade and vinegar and pour over meat. Pierce surface of meat with fork; marinate 15 minutes, turning occasionally.
  2. Add onion, bay leaves, Old Bay, and pepper. Cover tightly; simmer on stovetop for 3 hours.
  3. Remove meat. Strain drippings to remove onion and bay leaves. Measure out 2½ cups of the liquid (add water if you don't have enough).
  4. Melt butter in the now-empty pot on low; blend in flour. Stir until mixture is smooth. Gradually stir in liquid, and heat to boiling while stirring constantly. Boil and stir for 1 minute.
  5. Return meat to pot; cover and simmer for 30 minutes, turning meat occasionally. (This is the ideal time to make your sides; see above.)
  6. Place meat on platter and keep warm. Stir gingersnaps and sugar into liquid left in pan, heating to boiling while stirring constantly. Boil and stir for 1 minute.
  7. Serve meat with gravy (and sides).

* No, I must be a successful food blogger because I blathered on for ten paragraphs before actually getting to the recipe. Sure it's annoying when other people do it, but when I do it it's interesting!

26 August 2020

Review: Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack

Hardcover, 322 pages
Published 2020

Acquired January 2020
Read July 2020
Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope
by Una McCormack

This prequel novel to Star Trek: Picard sets up the basic premise: that Picard undertook a massive effort to do the right thing, and lost. It covers about five years, from when Picard learns about the need to evacuate a massive number of Romulans because of an imminent supernova, up to when the renegade synth attack on Mars utterly destroys his plans. It's a quick, strong read, as you might imagine of Una McCormack. She has a good handle on Picard: one he sees what the right thing to do is, he pursues it utterly. What distinguishes Picard from The Next Generation is that every time Picard stands up for what's right in TNG, it works out for him. Picard is a tragedy, the story of the time Picard's moral convictions lead to his downfall. McCormack does a good job taking the base attributes of Picard from TNG and transposing them into a new situation, and also surrounds him with a strong cast of characters, a mix of ones from the show and ones original to this book. I really liked how she wove in and out of them: Raffi, Clancy, Tajuth, and Koli were my favorites aside from Picard. There are a number of good scenes, but I liked Raffi talking about Romulan music and the scene in Paris between Jurati and Maddox after the attack the most.

(Two objections: I don't buy the novel's revelation that Jurati is Starfleet, and I wish we had seen where Laris and Zhaban came from.)

McCormack is a top-tier tie-in novelist, and that's partially because she has a voice: almost every Star Trek novel (my own included) is told in a bland third-person limited format. McCormack The Last Best Hope has a neat retroactive, omnipotent voice that occasionally intrudes, telling us what happened to character years later. It adds to the sense of tragedy, and helps deepen the sense of character. To be honest, I feel like her talents are wasted on tie-in novels. Where's her original sf novel?

This novel kind of makes me mad, though, because I found that Picard abandoned its potentially interesting premise as it went on. The idea of Picard dealing with and confronting his great failure was downplayed in favor of a really dumb story about an ancient Romulan conspiracy and rogue androids that had no character weight at all. The Last Best Hope does a good job showing how the Federation could pretty justifiably let down the Romulans so badly. It does such a good job setting up Picard's failure that it made me mad about the show's direction all over again. Why wasn't it working with this material instead of doing... whatever the hell it decided to do?

24 August 2020

Review: Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 by Roy Thomas et al.

DC's JLA/JSA / Earth-One/Earth-Two crossovers were an annual tradition from 1963 to 1985; several years ago, I read the Crisis on Multiple Earths trade paperbacks which collect them in their entirety... except that in classic DC fashion, they stopped publishing them when just one volume more would have collected them all! As I neared the 1985 crossover in my reading of Infinity, Inc., I realized that I ought to bung in the two before it and thus get the experience of what that nonexistent volume 7 would have been like...

Unfortunately, they're not the series's best work, even allowing for the fact that I was never particularly wowed by most JLA/JSA crossovers to begin with. Each one has the germ of a good idea, but it isn't really realized. I really enjoyed reading part one of Crisis in the Thunderbolt Dimension!, where Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt goes berserk and begins attacking the heroes of Earth-One in the midst of the annual JLA/JSA team-up. The writers do a pretty fun pastiche of how these things usually go; as it often is, the best part is when the members of the two super-teams are just chilling on the JLA satellite before things begin to go south, as we get to see (for example) Firestorm moon over Power Girl. Part one is credited to both Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, but I would guess that they plotted it together and Conway wrote the actual script; Conway was responsible for what were in my opinion the best of these crossovers (see volumes 5 and 6).

You wouldn't need the credits, however, to know that part two is entirely the work of Roy Thomas, because everyone immediately begins speaking in continuity and exact dates, telling each other things they already know and/or don't need to know.
  • "It's Sargon the Sorcerer-- another who was born on our Earth and later migrated to this one."
  • "I left the world of my birth for this one, in 1950."
  • "Before you wandered onto the scene in 1947, Black Canary."
  • "And who took his place in spring of '48? A certain wig-wearing wonder we all know-- called the Black Canary!"
  • "The Wizard's idea, I'd guess. He's the one who dreamed up that 'patriotic crimes' caper in the late 40's, remember." "I don't-- because I was retired back then."

from Justice League of America vol. 1 #219
(script by Roy Thomas & Gerry Conway, art by Chuck Patton & Romeo Tanghal)
It's not just the dialogue, though; the entire story is constructed around explaining how Black Canary could have debuted in the 1940s but still be young enough in the 1980s to date Green Arrow (and was still drawn the same) while most of the other JSA members had aged. This is an okay thing to explain, but the actual explanation is so convoluted it beggars belief. Apparently, Dinah (Black Canary) and her husband Larry had a daughter also named Dinah, but she was cursed with a sonic scream, so she was transported into the thunderbolt dimension, where she aged normally but was comatose, and Dinah and Larry had their memories wiped of her! Like, what!? But wait, there's more when Larry died and Dinah moved from Earth-Two to Earth-One, Dinah began to die of radiation poisoning, so Superman detoured into the thunderbolt dimension and switched the consciousnesses of the mother and the daughter, so the mother has actually been in her daughter's body since 1969, as the daughter remains trapped, comatose, in her mother's radiation-ravaged body in another dimension! Only Dinah had no idea this happened to her. So much for informed consent! What is all this? It's terrible. Like, c'mon Roy, just say she got zapped with a youth spell. (Indeed, during his run on All-Star Squadron, Thomas would establish that many JSA members had had their aging slowed.) It's a terrible idea, and it makes for a terrible story. There may have been some JSA-related downsides to the Crisis on Infinite Earths, but one of its upsides was the new generational history for Black Canary that was developed.

from Justice League of America vol. 1 #232
(script by Kurt Busiek, art by Alan Kupperberg)
I felt that Family Crisis! started strong, with narration from an unknown narrator testing some of the heroes of Earths-One and -Two during their annual team-up. The whole thing is about a scientist whose mind gets taken over by an alien conqueror, but also his family was involved. Part two devolves into a pretty generic punch-up, though, and the family thread never really takes off, unfortunately.

The last JLA-JSA team-up actually took place during Crisis on Infinite Earths. As JLA-JSA crossovers go, there's not much to it; the JSA barely features in favor of Infinity, Inc., but Infinity, Inc. barely matter to the story: it clearly slots into and partially resolves an ongoing story in Justice League of America. There's not much to it outside of that. In the first part, some aspects of Infinity, Inc.'s recent "Helix" three-parter (#16-18) are tied up, and then Commander Steel (also a star of All-Star Squadron, just forty years younger) comes to ask Infinity, Inc.'s help against what he claims is a bunch of renegades using the name of the JLA. They travel to Earth-One and fight the JLA (now in its "Detroit" phase). Then in part two, the JLA goes to the wrecked satellite to use its transmatter to get help from the JSA, and everyone whales on Commander Steel-- who doesn't like how his grandson Steel or the new JLA have turned out-- together. (Commander Steel is aided by Mekanique, the robot from the future who would also bedevil the All-Star Squadron.)

It's mostly a couple fights. The most effective part is the segment where the JLA drift through the wreckage of their old satellite headquarters, which is atmospherically written by Conway and atmospherically pencilled by the ever dependable Joe Staton.

I look forward to reading this story in its JLA context when I get around to reading my Justice League: The Detroit Era Omnibus in its entirety, but as the final JLA/JSA team-up, it's a whimper. The JSA are barely in it, and I feel like there was some mileage in teaming the upstarts in Infinity, Inc. up with the upstart new version of the Justice League, but Thomas and Conway get nothing out of it; they barely interact meaningfully. How would these two group of youngsters remake an old tradition?

I'm glad I read these, but I feel like the last few JLA/JSA team-ups were victims of the concept's success. Because the concept had been so popular, it had spawned ongoing Earth-Two stories in All-Star and Infinity, Inc.-- but that meant those series were carrying the weight of Earth-Two, resulting in the last few crossovers being largely inconsequential side shows that couldn't do much of note.

Crisis in the Thunderbolt Dimension! originally appeared in issues #219-20 of Justice League of America vol. 1 (Oct.-Nov. 1983). The story was written by Roy Thomas (#219-20) & Gerry Conway (#219), pencilled by Chuck Patton, inked by Romeo Tanghal (#219-20) & Pablo Marcos (#220), lettered by John Costanza (#219) and Cody (#220), colored by Gene D'Angelo, and edited by Len Wein.

Family Crisis! originally appeared in issues #231-32 of Justice League of America vol. 1 (Oct.-Nov. 1984). The story was written by Kurt Busiek, illustrated by Alan Kupperberg, lettered by Ben Oda, colored by Gene D'Angelo, and edited by Alan Gold.

The Last JLA–Justice Society Team-Up! originally appeared in Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #19 (Oct. 1985) and Justice League of America vol. 1 #244 (Nov. 1985). The story was written by Roy Thomas (#19) and Gerry Conway (#244), pencilled by Todd McFarlane (#19) and Joe Staton (#244), inked by Steve Montana (#19) and Mike Machlan (#244), co-plotted by Dann Thomas (#19), colored by Anthony Tollin (#19) & Adrienne Roy (#19) and Gene D'Angelo (#244), lettered by Cody (#19) and Albert De Guzman (#244), and edited by Roy Thomas (#19) and Alan Gold (#244).

This post is the ninth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers issues #11-53 of Infinity, Inc. Previous installments are listed below:
  1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
  2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
  3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
  4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
  5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
  6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
  7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
  8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)

21 August 2020

Working the Polls

I remember thinking this summer about working the polls, and I looked into it a little bit-- and promptly forgot about it. But then a few weeks ago, I watched a Daily Show segment where at the end Trevor Noah suggested there was a poll worker shortage due to coronavirus, and that prompted me to finish my application and send it in shortly before our fall primary.

I don't know what things are like behind-the-scenes in other places, but here in Hillsborough County, the polls are a pretty slick operation. I actually have never voted in person since moving to Florida (anyone can use vote-by-mail here), so my first experience of the polls here was working them! Poll workers here aren't volunteers per se; we actually get paid a couple hundred dollars. I had to watch a bunch of on-line videos and take some quizzes. I think there would have been an in-person training, too, but that was cancelled due to the pandemic, and instead I watched a few long videos that were seemingly recorded Zoom sessions (so I assume if I'd signed up earlier, I would have had to attend these Zoom sessions).

I was initially assigned to a polling place pretty close to our house, but the day before set-up got reassigned to a different one even closer to our house, actually the one we would vote at if we voted in person, a big Protestant church (one of those ones whose denomination is vague). (This meant that there was a part of voting where a Christian rock band was practicing in the next room. Also the church apparently operates a day care and exercise classes.) Set-up is the Monday prior to the election, and mostly involves stuff like arranging the space (positioning check-in tables, voting booths, and so on). Each location has a clerk and assistant clerk who are kind of in charge, and then all the other poll workers (me included) are "inspectors"; our location had over a dozen inspectors assigned. This all took just over an hour. Both our clerk and assistant clerk were new to their positions, and the church hadn't been used as a polling place for a few years, so no one was familiar with the site; I gather both of these things made it go a little slower.

(I was never removed from the text chain for the polling place I was originally assigned to; I intuited from its messages that the clerk and most of the inspectors assigned there had already been assigned there many times before. They apparently also usually did a potluck dinner for set-up, but not in the era of coronavirus!)

The polls are open from 7am to 7pm, and all poll workers are required to be there from an hour ahead of time through the conclusion of packing up, which takes about an hour, so it is a long day! I ended up tasked with placing signs during set-up: arrows saying "VOTE" that had to guide cars from the street to the actual polling place in the church lobby, and signage indicating parking and social distancing guidelines and so on. Different inspectors rotate in and out of the "deputy" position, who maintains order outside of the polling place, and I also helped the deputy measure out the 150 feet radius from the doors: no one is allowed to campaign within that zone, which is marked by cones.

There were five "ePollbooks" for checking people in, but many of the poll workers bagsied those quickly so I didn't get to do that. It was interesting to note how much more high-tech the Florida set-up is than what I was used to in Connecticut. In Connecticut, they crossed your name off a paper list; in Florida, they can swipe your driver's license through the ePollbook (or search your name if you don't have one) and pull up your record; it will indicate where you should be voting, and if you got a mail-ballot, and even if it was returned. (If you got a mail-in ballot but didn't send it in, you can vote day-of; you just have to either surrender it, or promise you will destroy it when you can.) If someone has moved into the county, the poll workers can even search the state voter database and pull their record into Hillsborough County!

After checking in, voters get a ballot style ticket and take that to the ballot table, where the exchange it for the ballot they need. (Our polling place covered four different precincts, and you would also of course get a different ballot depending on what party you were a member of.) You vote, and then head out; there is an "Exit Inspector" who hands out what our training always called "the ever-popular 'I Voted' stickers." (The training isn't lying; I can think of no other context in which I've seen so many adults get excited about stickers.) There are also "Future Voter" stickers for the kids!

Voters can ask for assistance from poll workers; the poll worker who assists you needs to be registered with the same party. From how the clerk asked for volunteers for this, I am pretty sure that of our dozen-plus workers, just two were Republicans. One of those two mentioned driving over half an hour to get to the polling place, so they must distribute poll workers to get ones of each party at each polling place. Most of the other poll workers seemed to live five minutes away at most, like me. (You can also bring your own person to assist you, but they have to sign a form that says they don't represent your employer or your union!)

I ended up being the "DS200 Inspector" and also the "Floor Inspector" (in theory people rotate, but it didn't seem to happen much in practice). The DS200 is the machine where people insert their ballots once they've filled them out, and I helped guide people to it (it was sort of awkwardly positioned, so it wasn't super obvious what you were looking at if you were coming from the booths), and also helped them actually stick the ballot in if they needed the help. We had two DS200s, which is good, because the ballots kept getting stuck in one after scanning, and the clerk had to keep clearing the jams; after five ballots, it started rejecting every ballot. The clerk just had us cover that machine, but mid-morning someone from the Supervisor of Elections office stopped by to see how things were going, and he called in a support ticket; in pretty short order, a guy came out from the main office and fixed it. We could have definitely got by on one machine, though.

DS200 Inspector is a pretty undemanding job. I think just five people had problems greater than getting their ballots into the machine. One's ballot was rejected because instead of bubbling the circles, he just put X's in them. One accidentally double-voted in a race but decided he didn't care and told the machine to take it anyway (they means it will ignore his vote in that particular race). The other three had errant marks of various sorts, meant they have to turn in their ballot and get a new one, which is actually sort of an involved process where they have to sign some kind of oath. I talked a lot to the Exit Inspector, an older fellow for whom this was also his first election, and that rarest of creatures, a Tampa native.

(There's also a machine called the ExpressVote, designed to help people with disabilities fill out ballots (it has audio prompts, for example), but no one used it. As Floor Inspector, I periodically checked the voting booths for left-behind materials; I think I removed just four discarded privacy sleeves all day.)

We had some coronavirus precautions. We all wore masks (and some of us face shields). This was actually my first experience wearing a mask for more than an hour's trip to the grocery store; I can't say that I was fond of it! Voters also had to wear masks; I don't think anyone ever argued about this, though as you'll know if you've gone anywhere, some were better about wearing them properly than others. We also reduced transmission risks by not collecting pens (people also get very excited when you tell them they can keep pens) and using disposable privacy sheets instead of reusable ones.

I don't think the Deputy ever had to yell at anyone for violating the solicitation barrier; there was a young woman who had a megaphone to shout about a particular candidate for judge. I think there were only two campaign people all day, and neither stayed the whole time; this again contrasted strongly to what I saw in Connecticut, where there were always big crowds of people from the campaign outside the polling place. There were a huge number of campaign signs out by the street, though, which somehow appeared between when set-up ended at 7:30pm and I got to the polling place at 6am! I assume there will probably be more campaigners during the general.

When I was outside taking a mask-free break, I did have a guy get huffy that he couldn't drop off his mail-in ballot (you can only do that at an early-voting site, or at a Supervisor of Elections office).

In the morning, we averaged about 30 ballots per hour, but things picked up during the lunch hour, and also became pretty steady from 3pm onward. We never had a line of more than one or two people waiting to check in, but we also never had a completely dead time. By the end of the twelve hours, we had 609 voters come through our location in all.

One voter arrived about three minutes after 7pm, and had to be turned away. Another arrived at about 8pm, when we were almost done tearing down. I was the one who ended up talking to her; she asked if we were still open (no!), and if she could go vote anywhere else, like on-line! (also no)

Tear-down was a little tricky, in that several procedures sort of bottleneck around the clerk, and the clerk has a ton to do in tear-down. One of my favorite things is that the results actually get taped to the door of the polling place; I assume this is a holdover from pre-Internet days where this was how initial results were distributed to the public. The results take the form of reports that the DS200s print on receipt tape; each one is probably over six feet long! It looks silly.

Observers from campaigns can watch set-up and tear-down and the process of voting; members of the media can watch set-up and tear-down. No one did.

By the end of the day, my legs were sore; the stool I had wasn't comfortable, so I spend a lot of time standing. I was also pretty hungry despite packing what I thought was a decent amount of food! But I had a decent time, and even read about a hundred pages of The Relentless Moon in snatches between busy times. I will definitely be back in the fall for the general (I teach M/W/F this semester, so it is easy for me to have Tuesdays off), and I am glad I did it, and glad I got to do my thing for democracy.

19 August 2020

Listening to James Bond at the BBC (Part IV: 007 Reloaded)

In 2012, BBC Audio (in its short-lived incarnation of AudioGO) released a new set of James Bond audiobooks under the branding "007 Reloaded." It was a project spearheaded (I think) by Lucy Fleming, niece of Ian Fleming, but better known to me as the actress who plays Jenny in Terry Nation's Survivors. Each book was read by a different prominent British actor, including Dan Stevens (what's-his-face in Downton Abbey), Bill Nighy (you know who he is), Jason Isaacs (Captain Lorca in Star Trek: Discovery), David Tennant (fake Mad-Eye Moody in the one about the wizards), and Kenneth Branagh (Kenneth's Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). AudioGO went bankrupt in 2013, but they were republished by the current rightsholders. These are still the versions of the Bond audiobooks most readily available; I got both of them via Overdrive at my local public library.

I didn't have the desire to listen to all of them, since experiencing each James Bond story as a novel, as a film, as a radio play, and as a comic is more than enough, thank you. But I did decide to listen to two of them. One is the reading of The Spy Who Loved Me: the novel has a first-person female narrator, and the audio is read by a woman, Rosamund Pike. I doubt Spy Who will be adapted in BBC Radio's adaptations, but you can imagine this as a radio adaptation, given its first-person frame and overall lack of Bond.

The other one I decided to listen to is You Only Live Twice, because it is read by Martin Jarvis, who narrates the current BBC Radio adaptations, so it slots right in as well. You Only was previously adapted by the BBC in 1990s, but hasn't been adapted as part of the current Toby Stephens strand. I imagine it will be eventually, but who knows.

My thesis about audiobooks is that an audio reading makes a good book better and a bad book worse. I find nothing to contradict that thesis here. I enjoyed The Spy Who Loves Me: it's weird for a James Bond book, but I find that Fleming creates a mostly plausible female character (easy for me to say, admittedly), and puts her in a harrowing situation with his usual style. Rosamund Pike's reading elevates the book: with her as the voice of Vivienne Michel, she seems a even more real character. Pike brings her to life in all her young inexperience and conflicting desires and out-of-her-depth-yet-working-to-hang-on-anyway-ness. Pike puts on a Canadian accent, but I didn't notice any issues. I listened to it last summer over a couple afternoons while pushing my son's stroller while he napped, and I greatly enjoyed the experience despite the Florida heat.

You Only Live Twice, on the other hand, drags on and on when you have to listen to someone read every word, even if you use your iPod's "speed up" feature. It's also worse on a second read, since you know that all the stuff in the first half where Bond gets taught how to "be Japanese" isn't even going to matter. His Japanese-ness doesn't help him on his mission, it's never put to the test, it doesn't change anything about him. So why do we have to listen to so much about the cultures and the mores? Martin Jarvis is a great reader; I wish he had more action scenes to work with, because he's good at them. He does good with the various parts-- I think he could play M well-- but particularly excels with "Tiger" Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service, who really comes to life as a full character in  Jarvis's performance. The bit where Tanaka remembers the beauty of being a kamikaze pilot was actually a bit moving. But overall, it felt like it dragged on for ages, at 7½ hours to Spy Who's five.

I am curious about some of the other ones now, but as I near the end of the novel series (just Octopussy & The Living Daylights and The Man with the Golden Gun to go), I think I've had enough of Bond to last me a while, so Hugh Bonneville's Goldfinger will have to wait until I start to get nostalgic.

17 August 2020

Review: The Expanse: The Vital Abyss by James S.A. Corey

Kindle ebook, n.pag.
Published 2015

Acquired January 2020
Read July 2020
The Vital Abyss: An Expanse Novella
by James S.A. Corey

The Expanse original ebooks haven't done a lot for me so far, to be honest; the strength of the novels is in their long-form construction and plotting, and the multiplicity of perspectives they assemble. The ebooks, since they are all short stories and novellas, don't really go deep enough to reveal anything interesting about the characters, and aren't long enough to be interestingly plotted. (Other authors can do those things in short fiction, of course, but it seems to me that Corey cannot.) But The Vital Abyss is the clear standout of these thus far, a compelling read about one man's descent into his belief that the ends justify the means, and somewhat horrific in the detached way that it tells the story. I think this is all backstory to explain something in the main series I've already forgotten about, but that's fine, because it works completely well on its own as a dark bildungsroman. Hopefully future Expanse shorts are more like this one.

I read an Expanse story every eighty-ish days. Next up in sequence: Babylon's Ashes

14 August 2020

The 2020 Hugo Awards: Interesting Statistics


I called my post from last week "Results and Final Thoughts"... but after it went up, I had another thought. So that title was a lie! Many people out there analyze various aspects of the results, but I want to look at two things: how many people vote in each category, and how many people vote No Award.

First here are the categories ranked in terms of how many ballots were received:

So you'll see that the prose fiction categories pull in the most ballots typically, and the fan activity categories the least. I do think it's interesting that Best Novel (won by A Memory Called Empire) does the best of all the prose fiction categories, and Best Short Story (won by "As the Last I May Know") the worst (except for the Lodestar, won by Catfishing on CatNet), even though reading six short stories is the least amount of work! Best Series (won by The Expanse) gets a lot of votes, which makes me think people are voting based on their general knowledge of the series rather than, say, diligently reading all of Emma Newman's Planetfall books.

You'll also see that the "body of work" categories (those that go to a person, not a specific item), like Best Professional Artist (won by John Picacio), Best Editor (won by Ellen Datlow and Navah Wolfe), and so on, all languish pretty far down, with Best Fanzine (won by The Book Smugglers) coming in lowest of all categories, getting just a third of the ballots of Best Novel. The Best Novel Hugo is the one that has all the prestige attached to it, and that clearly leads to it garnering the most fan ballots, too. Best Dramatic Presentation (won by Good Omens and The Good Place) is probably the least amount of work to cover (I had seen three of the six nominees in Long Form beforehand, for example), which probably helps it.

Next, here are all the categories ranked in terms of how many ballots ranked No Award in first place:

Voting No Award in first place usually means one of two things, I would claim. First, it could mean that you find the concept of the category invalid. Every year, I vote No Award for Best Series, Best Editor, and a couple other categories, for example, and leave the rest of my ballot blank. I have some fundamental disagreements with the premises of those categories, and do not think they should be awarded. (Very few Hugo voters agree with me, though, clearly.) It could also mean that you just found everything in that category subpar: this year I voted No Award for Best Short Story, but still ranked finalists below it.

We might guess that Hugo voters agreed with me about Best Short Story, for example, as it had the highest level of first-place No Award votes of any prose fiction category. On the other hand, Best Novella (won by This Is How You Lose the Time War) had the least, indicating a category where every voter but seventeen felt comfortable saying one of the six finalists deserved to win.

One interesting piece of information given on the results is how many ballots ranked No Award above the eventual winner. This could mean 1) the ballot just No Awarded the entire category, as I did Best Series and Best Short Story, or it could mean that 2) on that voter's ballot, No Award was placed higher than the winner, as was true for me in Best Related Work, where I had No Award in 6th, and the actual winner in 7th (Ng's acceptance speech for the 2019 Campbell Award). (This is reported because if a certain number of ballots include No Award above the winner, No Award wins, even if it doesn't on the normal counting method. I don't think this has ever actually come to pass.)

So here are all the categories ranked in terms of how many ballots had No Award ranked above the eventual winner:

What this lets us see is particularly controversial winners. For example, we can tell that though Ng's 2019 speech won Best Related Work, over 10% of voters thought (like me) that they'd rather see nothing win than see it win. Best Short Story still ranks highest on this list of all the prose fiction categories, too, potentially indicating a weak set of finalists. (To the extent that we can call a set of finalists 5% of voters objected to weak!)

We can highlight controversial winners even more by subtracting the number of people who ranked No Award first from the number of people who ranked it above the winner. So this shows how many ballots had No Award in 2nd place or lower, but above the winner:

What this reveals, I would argue, is how many voters believed a category had some basic level of validity (so they didn't put No Award first for whatever reason), but didn't like what actually ended up winning. You'll see that Best Related Work sticks out very prominently by this metric-- almost 10% of voters in that category didn't think the category was bad per se, just the work that won it. In this new metric, the most prominent prose fiction category actually becomes Best Novelette, indicating that N. K. Jemisin's Emergency Skin was arguably a controversial winner. (I didn't rank it below No Award, but I did think it a weak finalist.) Best Fanzine, which was really high on the last list, drops very low, showing that many people are against the category as a whole, but those who did vote in it largely thought the eventual winner a worthy one. And I guess everyone just loved Catfishing on CatNet!

There's one other statistic I want to explore, but I'm not sure if it even represents a real thing. Is there a correlation between how many people vote in a category, and how many first-place No Award votes it receives? Without looking at the data, you might expect a positive correlation: the bigger a category, the more people vote No Award, so a consistent-ish percentage. But in fact, there is an inverse correlation: the bigger a category, the fewer people vote No Award.

One explanation I came up with was perhaps there's just a dedicated core group of No Award voters? So say there are thirty Hugo voters who like using No Award a lot. They would be a bigger percentage of a category with 700 ballots received (4%) than one with 1,800 ballots received (1.5%). But if you look at absolute numbers, there's still a trend, just not as clear of one:

(I think; I'm not statistician, obviously.) The bigger the category, the fewer No Award votes it received. I'm not sure what to make of this fact. Does it indicate that the bigger categories are bigger for a reason, i.e., people view them as more legitimate? What I find particularly interesting, though, is the two outliers: there are just two categories where the number of No Award votes is significantly higher than we would expect based on category size. One is Best Short Story, which I've discussed a couple times already as an outlier, but the other is Best Series (won by The Expanse). I mentioned above that I always No Award this category because I don't believe it's a good idea; for whatever reason, a disproportionate number of other voters are also voting No Award here.

I'd be curious to know if the supposed trend I've identified here actually is a trend. Perhaps in a future post I'll look at the use of No Award in previous Hugo years to see if anything similar emerges.

12 August 2020

Review: Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt by Roy & Dann Thomas, Dick Giordano, et al.

Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt reinvents the character of Johnny Thunder for the 1980s, though really it takes the name of the character and basically nothing else. Jonni is a private investigator, formerly in partnership with her father until he recently died; a man dies in her office, thrusting her into the middle of a complex situation with multiple participants jockeying for possession of a small statuette she's had since she was a child... only she's somehow gained possession of superpowers?

I read Jonni Thunder because I believed it took place on Earth-Two (and I understand that Jonni ends up appearing in Infinity, Inc. during Crisis on Infinite Earths), but within this four-issue miniseries, it's not really connected at all. When Jonni gains superpowers, her referents are tv shows, not real superheroes buzzing around, and the one reference to Wonder Woman could easily be construed to WW as a fictional character. Though it has some of the trappings of it, it's not really a superhero story, but something else entirely.

This is very much the hard-boiled detective genre, one I don't have a ton of experience with, but I have enough to identify how it slots in. It's kind of like Chinatown, if Jack Nicholson suddenly manifested the ability to mentally fuse with a thunderbolt and leave his body behind. Jonni has to figure out who she can trust (no one) and has to compromise her morality in order to accomplish her goal of solving the murder. Things richochet back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco as she fights gangsters, movie stars, technical geniuses, good cops, lazy cops, sleazy P.I.s, and the starter on her 1957 Thunderbird.

from Jonni Thunder #3
(plot & script by Roy & Dann Thomas, art by Dick Giordano)
I enjoyed it. Like I said, I don't know hard-boiled well, but I'm always up for a good pastiche, and this is a great one. Roy and Dann Thomas have a good knack for the genre, and the supernatural elements don't feel too grafted on. Jonni is a great protagonist, in slightly over her head, but quick-witted and always planning her next move. Dick Giordano is one of comics's most reliable artists, and he does good work here, though I found myself wishing it had been printed on nicer, Baxter paper-- the inks would have held up better, but also more interesting things could have been done with the coloring. Ernie Colón (originally slated to be the artist but it didn't work out) gives Jonni great style, men's suits in black and white, but they don't really pop with the primitive coloring technology of the mid-1980s. Imagine a moodier, atmospheric version of this comic!

I've read a lot of Roy Thomas comics by now (all of All-Star Squadron, America vs. the Justice Society, and the first seventeen issues of Infinity, Inc.), and this is the first one where his wife Dann gets a full co-writer credit, not just co-plot. Surely not coincidentally, it has the best dialogue and other prose of any Roy Thomas comic I've read. The banter is fun, and first-person narration is characterful and insightful. Apparently the plotted the issues together, than Dann wrote the scripts, then Roy did a little polish-- but, he says in the lettercol, not much was needed. On the strength of this, I look forward to reading the Infinity, Inc. issues where she graduates to full co-writer.

Jonni Thunder is in some ways a simple comic, but simple pleasures are still pleasures. This is a delightful mash-up of superhero and P.I., and I wish there had been more of it. In the lettercols, Roy suggests that thought he and Giordano didn't have time to write an ongoing, they could do a succession of miniseries and/or graphic novels. Alas, they never came to pass. But I am curious to see how Jonni will integrate into the very different style of full-color superheroics in Infinity, Inc.!

Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt originally appeared in issues #1-4 of Jonni Thunder (Feb.-Aug. 1985). The series was created by Roy & Dann Thomas, Dick Giordano, and Gerry Conway, with special thanks to Ernie Colón; scripted by Roy & Dann Thomas; illustrated by Dick Giordano (#1-4), with an assist by Mike Esposito (#2); co-plotted by Gerry Conway (#1); colored by A. Tollin (#1) and Adrienne Roy (#2-4); and lettered by L. Lois Buhalis & Orzechowski.

This post is the eighth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7. Previous installments are listed below:
  1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
  2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
  3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
  4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
  5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
  6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
  7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)

10 August 2020

Review: The Crimean War by Trudi Tate

Trade paperback, 203 pages
Published 2019

Acquired January 2020
Read July 2020
A Short History of the Crimean War by Trudi Tate

This monograph does exactly what it promises, providing a 166-page (not counting backmatter) history of the Crimean War, primarily from the perspective of the United Kingdom. I picked it up because though I've been studying the Victorian era for over a decade now, the Crimean War is still somewhat obscure to me, and some of my recent research has brushed up against it (Two Years Ago and Lynton Abbott's Children both have epilogues where characters go off to serve in the Crimea, for example). There's a lot to pack in, and sometime it gets overwhelming, especially in the early chapters, which bandy a lot of names around, and have a lot of complicated geopolitical relationships to keep track of. I'll admit (and I don't think this is Tate's fault), the actual cause of the war still seems somewhat obscure!

The book succeeds best when it can zoom in on specific issue and explore it in depth; this happens in three spots, with the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Siege of Sebastopol, and the naval campaign in the Baltic. I especially liked Tate's discussion of Sebastopol, both the siege itself (covered in ch. 3) and its aftermath (the entirety of ch. 4). She goes in depth on how the conquering British came into the city, what they saw there, and how it was represented in the press and in art, especially photography. The book's strongest thread is its focus on the Crimean War as a "modern" war, in that it was the first war where the telegraph had a big influence (so reports got back to Britain quickly), and the first war where photography was extensively employed. She has some great stuff on how war came to be perceived differently as a result, a transformation that would only deepen with the coming of the Great War.

So a useful primer, and one I can see myself referring to if I encounter the Crimean War more in my research.

07 August 2020

The 2020 Hugo Awards: Results and Final Thoughts

The timing of this year's Hugo ceremony was such that I couldn't watch the livestream: 7pm Eastern time overlaps too much with my toddler's bedtime routine! By all accounts, it sounds like I made the right call in any case, given that the ceremony ran over three hours instead of the usual two-ish. One would have thought that pre-recording most of the ceremony (as has to be done in "these unprecedented times") would have made it easier to keep the ceremony to time, not harder. Have Worldcon chairs ever had to apologize for their Hugo ceremony before? Between this and last year's Hugo losers' party fiasco, it seems like George R.R. Martin might be more trouble than he's worth as an ambassador for the World Science Fiction Society.

Also if you want a cool visual representation of how ranked choice voting works, I recommend this thread on Twitter by someone named Martin P.

So what did I think of the results, and how did they compare to my own votes? Just some brief thoughts here:

Category What Won Where I Ranked It What I Ranked #1 Where It Placed
Best Novel A Memory Called Empire 1st A Memory Called Empire 1st
I believe this is the first time in my four years of voting where the thing I voted into first place for Best Novel came first! (It was the only such category this year.) So naturally I am pleased because my favorite won, and also pleased because I called it: "My guess is that Memory Called Empire will win; it has the slightly-literary-and-set-in-space-but-not-too-weird tone that I think appeals to Hugo voters." I had been surprised and disappointed that Ann Leckie's Raven Tower wasn't on the ballot, since I wanted an excuse to read it; it turns out that it did have enough votes to make the ballot, but Leckie declined nomination, allowing The City in the Middle of the Night (which I ranked second but came in fifth) on.

Best Novella This Is How You Lose the Time War 3rd The Deep 6th
I enjoyed this; as I said in my ballot post, I would have happily seen anything in my top three in this category win, and I predicted that either it or Ted Chiang's "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" would win. Chiang came in fifth, though, so I'm not such a savant! I am bummed but not surprised that The Deep languished down in sixth.

Best Novelette Emergency Skin 4th "For He Can Creep" 4th
I am both surprised and not surprised by this outcome. Surprised because Emergency Skin was not great; not surprised because Hugo votes love rewarding people who already won Hugos with more of them for substandard work. This was a weak category this year, though, so I find it hard to get worked up about it. (The work I placed sixth did come in sixth, though, so I wasn't the only one who found it obscure.)

Best Short Story "As the Last I May Know" 7th No Award --
In my notes on the winner, I wrote, "it is overall banal and obvious and unaffecting, and I am surprised it was published, much less nominated for a Hugo." Well, now I have to revise that to "much less won a Hugo"! Clearly I am out of step on this category, which I No Awarded because nothing really struck me as award-worthy. I look forward to reading Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year for 2019 and seeing if he found more worthy short fiction than the Hugo nominators.

Best Related Work 2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech 7th The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein 5th
One of my Hugo pet peeves is when Worldcon members award something that happened at Worldcon, but it clearly is not a pet peeve of the wider membership. I do find it funny that there's a group of people (mostly on Twitter) who complain that WSFS is full of sexist racist dinosaurs. Perhaps it is... but who do they think is voting for Hugo Awards for things like this and AO3, other than WSFS members? The Heinlein book deserved better, but judging by this and last year, nuanced discussions of Golden Age sf figures are clearly out of fashion.

Best Graphic Story or Comic LaGuardia: A Very Modern Story of Immigration 3rd Paper Girls 6 4th
This category should be cancelled, in my opinion. Hugo voters have a strong preference for mediocre comics written by people who have won Hugos for prose work, and by and large, the best in contemporary sf comics is not making the ballot, and when it does make the ballot, not winning. The longlist shows, for example, that two different Seanan McGuire comics ranked eighth and eleventh, and I refuse to believe Spider-Gwen and Nightcrawler were among the form's best work for 2019. Thank God we were spared Questionable Content, inexplicably down in thirteenth!

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) Good Omens 6th Russian Doll Season One
3rd
Of course.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) The Good Place: "The Answer"
2nd Watchmen: "This Extraordinary Being" 5th
Somehow the good Watchmen episode on the ballot came in fifth, and the bad one second. But the Hugo voters did agree with me that the 2019 Doctor Who New Year's special deserved to come in last.

Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book Catfishing on CatNet 3rd Riverland 4th
Catfishing was one of three books I thought might win this category, because Hugo voters love rewarding previous winners, and Catfishing was a sequel to a Hugo-winning short story. I also knew it wouldn't be Riverland, and indeed, it languished down in fourth. Minor Mage had a nice second place showing, at least. I do feel that anyone looking to the Lodestar as a guide for the best in YASF is going to find a very eclectic bunch.

As always the reading experience was a bit of a mixed bag; Gideon the Ninth (which I ranked sixth for Best Novel but came in third) nearly made my whole reading process stall out before it even began! But I did get to read and watch some great stuff I wouldn't have gotten around to for a long time, if ever: Russian Doll, both stories from Exhalation, "For He Can Creep," This Is How You Lose the Time War, The Deep, The Light Brigade, The City in the Middle of the Night, A Memory Called Empire, Becoming Superman, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Minor Mage, Riverland. I was pretty disappointed in short fiction this year, but at least all that is, well, short. Much worse to slog through a bunch of bad novels, as I have done in years past!

05 August 2020

Review: Columbus Noir edited by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Trade paperback, 284 pages
Published 2020

Acquired February 2020
Read July 2020
Columbus Noir
edited by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Akashic Books's "Urban Noir" books are frequently offered through LibraryThing's EarlyReviewer program; I picked up one many years ago and found it so-so, so I haven't picked up any since... but I have kept an eye on the offerings, because I decided I was sufficiently intrigued that I'd pick up any set in places with which I was familiar. It took a long time, but finally Akashic has released one set in my home state of Ohio, Columbus Noir. I have to admit, however, that despite living in Ohio from birth to age 23, I've only been to Columbus three times, so I'm not overly familiar with it.

I feel like the selling point of a book like this would be to make the city come alive... but you don't really get a sense of Columbus from Columbus Noir. Really the only thing you come out of it knowing is that it is gentrifying: I think half or more of these stories deal directly or indirectly with gentrification, with people remodelling homes or going to fancy coffee shops in run-down neighborhoods. While I'm sure this is an important part of Columbus in 2020, it did get repetitive, and doesn't really feel unique. But can you make a unique book about Columbus? Maybe this is just because I haven't gone much, but the vibe one gets off Columbus is that it's Ohio's least interesting major city (aside from Dayton). I feel like I would have done a Cincinnati Noir or Cleveland Noir long before I did a Columbus Noir-- those cities have dark and seedy histories that lead to dark and seedy presents.

All that said, there are some good individual stories here. Things occasionally get repetitive (there are a lot of hot but ill-intentioned women), but there are some good pieces of dark fiction. I particularly enjoyed Kristen Lepionka's "Gun People" (middle-class woman falls for working-class home renovator), Andrew Welsh-Huggins's "Going Places" (about the governor's bodyguard), Tom Barlow's "Honor Guard" (a guy's dad accidentally kills someone, and he has to deal with the consequences), Mercedes King's "An Agreeable Wife for a Suitable Husband" (a period piece about a woman with an awful husband; I wish there had been more period pieces, actually, but this was it), Laura Bickle's "The Dead and the Quiet" (a homeless junkie finds liberation), and Julia Keller's "All That Burns the Mind" (the rare academia story that gets the details right). So it's worth reading if you come across it and want to spend a diverting couple days reading it.

03 August 2020

Reading Roundup Wrapup: July 2020

Pick of the month: Riverland by Fran Wilde. I really enjoyed this, and it received my top vote for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book; you can read more about why at the link. Of course, I also finished The Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One this month, which contains both The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, two excellent novels, but I usually try to emphasize things that aren't rereads for this "honor."

All books read:
1. Deeplight by Frances Hardinge
2. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
3. Riverland by Fran Wilde
4. Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher
5. The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark
6. The Vital Abyss: An Expanse Novella by James S.A. Corey
7. A Short History of the Crimean War by Trudi Tate
8. Columbus Noir edited by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
9. Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack
10. Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Volume Two by Paul Levitz and Gerry Conway, with Paul Kupperberg, Len Wein, and Steve Apollo
11. Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One: Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions / The Left Hand of Darkness / The Dispossessed / Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

All books acquired:
1. Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
2. The Well of Ascension: Book Two of Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
3. The Hero of Ages: Book Three of Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
4. The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal
5. Gullstruck Island by Frances Hardinge
6. The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 663 (up 3)