REALLY really good, except for one interlude that slowed the whole book down, and then the last quarter, which had both too much information and not enough information. I would still recommend it. I liked it.
Another non-fiction recommendation by Sarah Gailey. Another pass by me. I don’t think it’s the quality of recommendation so much as my own general lack of interest in non-fiction.
The next Maisie Dobbs book. I’ve been saying this for several books now, but I’m not sure if I’m going to keep reading these. They’re easy, they’re good enough, but Maisie needs more as a character.
I like my fiction weird, and I’m happy to be dropped into an unexplained or unexplainable situation right off the bat, but this was incomprehensible to me. Two seemingly normal people dropped into a situation that immediately got super-weird, and they’re barely questioning it. Certainly not panicking like anyone else would. Am I supposed to be reading into it? Probably. Did I have the patience? I did not.
Love T. Kingfisher. This is horror, just scary enough in the beginning and the middle that I refused to read it at night, but it got less scary after that. Very weird. In a good way.
I loved the Linesman series so much that I jumped at these when I saw my library had them. I didn’t love these two books quite as much, but I still really enjoyed the story. Found family, spaceships, mysteries, a ragtag crew on the run – all good stuff.
Recommended by Sarah Gailey. There’s a cult! And a missing sister! And trauma! Good, but I was disappointed by the reveal and the end. Which were both quite abrupt.
My website is back up (yay!), but I’m feeling a little down. Today was the eighth anniversary of Roxy’s death. Eight years – it feels like forever ago and yesterday. I miss my anti-social puppy.
In cuter news, Jack got butter on his hands this morning and absently rubbed his hair, so he smelled like popcorn all day.
We voted today – the town held a referendum on some school-improvement funding. Jack charmed the election officials (naturally) and got extra “I Voted” stickers.
We went to our first outdoor story time in a year and a half, we took a long walk in the stroller and brought back lunch, we had a dance party before dinner, but the Roxy thing just brought down my whole day.
I liked, but didn’t love, her first novel, but I had heard really good things about this one. Of course, then it took me a while to get into this, but once I did, I was completely hooked. Cried twice. Good stuff, and better than her first book.
My website has been up and then down, then up and then down, and then up and then down and now up again. (Thank you, Erik, for noticing!) John says something has been attacking it. It’s always easy to bring back up, but he hasn’t had time to get into fixing it yet.
Someday, perhaps, we’ll be more stable around here. In the meantime, if you notice I’m down, please let me know.
SO GOOD, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this book is a 2021 Hugo nominee! (Just announced.) This has been on my radar since it was published last year, both because she’s great and I’ve loved many of her books and because everyone in the SF community raves about it, and it lived up to the hype.
Another Sarah Gailey recommendation, another good one. It’s a book about a fictional band in LA in the 70s, told in the style of an oral history. Very rock biography/documentary, and very real.
Book 17 in The Dresden Files, which I have been re-reading via audiobook for the last year or so. I probably should have been listing the last several as new books for me, but I’ve been lazy about it. Anyway, I’m enjoying these books more than ever, particularly the later ones, at least partly because he really dialed back the low-key sexist descriptions of women THANK GOD.
Also, something in this latest book made me cry, and there was a bonus short story at the end that made me SOB. Jim Butcher has made me yell in annoyance, shout at unexpected events, laugh many times, but he’s never made me cry before.
Book 4, I think, in the Maisie Dobbs series. I like the stories, but I’m over my love for them. Maisie needs friends, please! Someone she actually talks to or has fun with, not just clients and employees and sponsors/mentors. She might become more human.
This was a Sarah Gailey recommendation. It has battles and intrigue and inventions and the exploitation of the underclasses. It started a little slow for me, but I was totally hooked after a while, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.
This was Paul Tremblay’s first book, and it shows. There’s a narcoleptic detective, bad at his job, unwilling to change anything to improve, and why should I care about this character? I don’t. I gave up pretty quickly.
I tried one of her other books and gave it up fairly quickly, but this one grabbed me right from the beginning. I’m glad to realize it was content (I don’t always have patience for capricious gods on earth stories (that was the other book of hers I tried)) and not style. This one was horrifying and strange and gross and GOOD.
Tomorrow is Pi(e) Day, and so I must do my nerdly patriotic duty and make pie. (Don’t tell anyone, but I also bought a pie because strawberry rhubarb pie is one of my weaknesses and that one feels out of my league at the moment.)
A link for a coconut custard pie crossed my path recently. Looked simple enough, so I googled other recipes for variations and found a few I could mix and match. I figured I’d bake two because I like to share.
It looked simple:
Blind-bake the crust. Done. (I used pre-made crust – saves me time.)
Toast the coconut flakes. Easy.
Mix the filling. No problem!
Pour it into the pie crusts. Well…
I mean, that’s not hard, but I had more filling than will fit into two 9-inch crusts, and this is where things started to get (literally) sticky. I did NOT overfill them. I feel like I need to say that up front, considering what happened next. One of the recipes I found recommended baking the pies on preheated cookie sheets, and I am SO glad I followed that advice. Advice I could have used: pour the filling into the pie crusts as close to the oven as you can possibly get to avoid carrying a pie full of liquid across the entire kitchen. I had the oven open, the rack out (mistake #2, although it was the lower rack and I don’t know what else I could have done), and I had banished Jack to the pantry. I didn’t drip any filling onto the kitchen floor, but lowering myself down to the level of the lower rack in the oven was not so successful. Yeah, that’s pie filling on the window in the oven door. Yes, that’s pie filling on the cookie sheet the pie is going to sit on. And no, the rack did not slide smoothly back into the oven, so yes, I lost even more pie filling to the cookie sheet as it jolted back into place. The second pie, going to the top rack, lost less filling. I got the oven closed.
THEN, as always happens with my cookie sheets in the oven, I heard a loud metal sound because my cookie sheets bend in the heat, and of COURSE they’re going to do it today. I turned the light on and looked through the cloudy pie-filling-covered oven window. The pie still had all of its filling, but it’s tilted dangerously to the back and super uneven now in the crust.
They’re both baking now, and what could have been a lovely smell of warm coconut is drowned out by the smell of burnt milk and eggs.
Update: out of the oven, they look okay, and the smell up close is much nicer.
Here’s the not-quite-as-filled one, with burnt filling all around.