Sci Fi stories better than pretty much any

At the Mouth of the River of Bees
Stories, by Kij Johnson



Well. Massive reality check. Every story seems to start smoothly...and then foxes become girls or bees flow in rivers or threatening mist must be bridged...and you're sucked into her stuff until even your own stuff starts seeming creepy. Words fail to describe--heck, words fail to even make sense.  I can't outline a single one of her stories.  Maybe they're not all that good, but at least three of them are going to knock you silly.

I think I'm going to have to check out one of her longer works.  But I'm a little scared of her power.  Who knows where I might end up?

A sad miss of a book--good aim, unwilling target

Slow Fat Triathlete
subtitled Live Your Athletic Dreams in the Body You Have Now
by Jayne Williams

Didn't inspire me to become a triathlete, but if I'd been leaning that way, it would have. I put it on my to-read list awhile back before my enthusiasm for such things disappeared.  But I already had a copy, so I figured why not?

It's a great book. Full of inspiration, useful facts you'd never guess until you'd been there, and droll anecdotes from one who did.  I'll donate the book to the library and maybe someone somewhere will get some good out of it.

Garden sleeps

I'm sure the garden likes this white sh***t but I don't. 

It's not snow, by the way.  It's ice.  aka sleet.  The snow is coming tonight.

Blah

Cynthia Voigt's Bad, Badder, Baddest had cover hype that told the biggest lie I've ever read.  (In a cover blurb.)  One of the bad girls wasn't bad at all, one suffered from poor impulse control and the normal human desire for excitement, and the third was so tangential to the story she never even got to be a "point of view" character.

So, no--the girls weren't even bad, let alone badder etc.  But the book wasn't bad either--IMHO Cynthia Voigt is incapable of writing a bad book.

I'd have enjoyed it as a teenager.

Under close supervision by the cat command

Proof that we did work in the garden this weekend. Now the rains are coming and I'm pooped.

salty title

Salt: A World History

Fascinating, but no more or less than I'd expected.  It's a fascinating subject and a well-written book.  Kept my attention through the end--although a couple of times I dozed off when the emphasis became political history rather than social, culinary, or scientific.

If you have a brain that is retentive of random facts, you can bore your friends with the stories of how salted cod changed history; what are the cheapest techniques for purifying sea salt; or how they make caviar from the roe of sturgeon.  (It's not boring in the book but might be in the retelling.  Depends on how good a storyteller you are.)   You'll get all that info and lots more here.

Do I recommend this?  Obviously yes, or I'd not have been able to finish all 449 pages of it.  But it made me nostalgic for the salt pork my mama used to cook.

Onions at large

I've not posted any book reviews in a while because I've bitten off three big chunks that seem unlikely to end anytime soon.  By the Mouth of the River of Bees, a collection of short stores that I'm only reading at work; The Rook, an audiobook with more disks than I've ever loaded for a single book before; and Salt, the history of, well, you know, salt.

Did manage to get out in the garden this weekend.  It was too wet to work but my onions are up already.  They happen to be the onions I planted last year and never got around to harvesting, but they look very healthy.

Failure of my reader's persistence

A Visit From the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan

She jumps from a woman with a stealing habit to a man fretting over losing his sex drive and trying to connect with his young son after divorce; to a band of kids in their late teen trying to break into the punk rock scene; to a safari in Africa including a record producer, his girlfriend, his two near-teenage kids, and various other completely uninteresting side characters.  And at that point, she proceeds to start telling the character's futures, like an annoyingly omniscient fortune teller.   So not only am I reading about people I don't even like, I'm having to hear the futures of random people who don't seem to be of much importance to the story.

Then she jumped twenty years into the future, to the record producer in his hospital bed after his second stroke.  Probably about to die, but first it appears he's going to be visited by the now-grownup punk rockers.
Then....
I gave up.