This furry little asshole sits in my lap while I read all the time, and this is the first time she’s decided to take a bite out of one of my books. There are literally teeth marks in the dust jacket now. Brat.
Anyway, I survived the field trip and the reward party, and now I have two days of ILEARN practice tests and a Goddamned data-collecting exercise that no one is going to actually look at but we sure had better have done by Friday or there will be UNSPECIFIED CONSEQUENCES.
I’m overreacting juuuuuuust a little bit, maybe, as normal grown men with reasonable temperaments and decent mental health recognize that waiting one extra day for a book is not that big of a deal, and also because slightly unhinged book goblins with perhaps more money than they really ought to have can just order the ebook for another fifteen dollars that goes to the same company that is shipping your preordered book late and start reading it today anyway.
This is how I know that trying to shame me out of shopping at Amazon is never going to work: it is specifically their fault that I don’t have this book right now, and I gave them more money so that I didn’t have to wait 24 extra hours.
I have a sickness.
Today was madness from start to finish, my room was way hotter than it had any reason to be, and I am very nearly dead. I meant to stop at the post office (this Amazon thing here is not the only problem I’m having with getting my shit shipped to me; I’ve had a package tied up in Evansville, of all fuckin’ places, for over a week) and at some point after pulling off the highway I slipped into a fugue state and the car starting driving me home instead of to the post office without my permission. Once I realized where I was actually going, I lacked the strength to alter my direction and just went the hell home. Tomorrow we have a field trip, then half a class, then lunch, then two shortened classes and a reward party. I already told the kids in the two and a half classes I’ll actually see that we aren’t doing a damn thing. There is no universe where education can take place under those circumstances. There is only keeping them alive and me out of jail.
Also, after talking to my boss, I’m taking the day off instead of going to this.
I’ve got 300 pages left in A Court of Silver Flames, which means that I ought to be ready to start A Court of Splintered Harmony by bedtime tomorrow at the latest, so hopefully the damned thing shows up on time, as my luck with packages lately has been absolutely atrocious. This is going to be a really weird week; tomorrow is a relatively normal day but it’s a Tuesday after a long weekend. Wednesday the 8th graders have a field trip all morning and then the afternoon is going to feature a reward party for kids who got through the first quarter without being idiots or assholes. Thursday and Friday will be practice tests for the ILEARN, and then the first actual checkpoint is next week, after an election-related e-learning day. Maybe I’ll go to the training on Tuesday and get arrested! Maybe there will be civil unrest too! Who knows.
Oh, and we have parent-teacher conferences for the boy on Thursday and a meeting with a lawyer on either Wednesday or Friday. (Adulting stuff. Nothing to worry about, but one more thing in the context of the rest of the week.)
One way or another I’m hoping the next fourteen days soar by, and this week is going to be fast no matter what, I think. We shall see.
I read the first He Who Fights With Monsters book back in May, and I didn’t like it very much. It was far from the worst thing I’d ever read– hell, it wasn’t even the worst thing I read in May— but the main character was more or less unbearable and the writing wasn’t very good. Travis Deverell had the affliction so annoyingly common to the recent burst of indie writers who have gotten their big series trad-pubbed: he had a terrible habit of using words that were close, but not quite, the word he wanted. Mark Twain would have had a field day. I three-starred it, my usual signal for “I finished this book, and that’s really all I have to say about it,” and then …
… ordered the sequel? Because I’m a fucking moron, apparently.
Well, I just finished the God damned thing, and it’s better than the first book to such an extent that I almost want to go back and read the hardcover of the first book– I’m wondering if there was another editing pass between the original epub versions (which is what I read, since it was free) and the new hardcover rereleases. The improvement in the writing is that stark. There’s still the occasional clunky sentence, but I got sent into editor mode within the first couple of pages of the first book and never got out of it, and it never happened in this one– and I also never got the “that’s not the word you wanted” feeling after it was nearly omnipresent in the first book.
(An example of the “that’s not the word you wanted” phenomenon would be if I had used “omniscient” in that last sentence, if you’re wondering what I’m talking about.)
Shit, Jason is even bearable in this one, showing … actual growth as a person, I think? I normally like snarky MCs, but there was something about this guy that just got under my skin, and if you read negative reviews of this series the most common criticism is that the person doing the review couldn’t stand Jason. He’s got a self-awareness about him in this book that simply wasn’t there in the first one, and while I can still see someone being annoyed by him it feels a little less reasonable.
There are thirteen of these fucking things, people. I’m two books away from the end of Wheel of Time and I have the Goddamn Realm of the Underlings to read next year. I want to reread Throne of Glass. I don’t need another maxi-series! No! Bad authors!
I haven’t finished it yet, but unless it completely falls apart on me you can expect a positive review of Well Dweller in a few days. Today marks the midpoint of my fall break; I have done precisely two things: 1) read books, and 2) played this game. I did manage to finish the book I was talking about yesterday, and don’t really have much to say about it, but at least I got through it.
Played anything fun lately? I’m about to dive back into this one.
I’ve been reading a lot of Sarah J. Maas lately– ACOTAR 6 comes out in a few days, and in the last month or so I’ve reread the first four books; I’ll finish A Court of Silver Flames next week sometime, then go into the new book, then in between ACOTAR 6 and 7 I’ll reread the Crescent City books. The Throne of Glass series is actually my favorite of her work, but it’s not as tied into the rest of them, so rereading that will have to wait until next year.
I don’t argue with people about books very often– it just doesn’t come up, to be honest– but I especially don’t argue with people about SJM. She has a couple of little quirks about her writing that drive some people up a wall, and while I don’t share them, I get it, more or less. The biggest one is her insistence on using “male” and “female” to refer to her fae and angelic characters and never, ever “man” or “woman.” Men and women are human. It’s a hard line. I noticed a moment in ACOWAF a couple of days ago where a character actually uses the wrong word, and she immediately corrects herself.
The other one is her use of “mate.” The mating bond in ACOTAR isn’t entirely voluntary and tends to make its own decisions, for lack of a better word– simply making eye contact with the person who is supposed to be your mate can trigger it, and once it snaps into place, it can be ignored, at some cost, but it can’t be reversed. The fun bit, also explored in ACOWAF, is that sometimes the mating bond makes shitty decisions? The main male (sigh) character’s parents were mated and weren’t good for each other at all.
You’re gonna see the word “mate” a lot in ACOTAR. A lot a lot. And if it gets on your nerves, you’re not gonna have a good time with the series.
Anyway, I read ACOWAF and ACOFAS back to back, and I picked up another book off my Unread Shelf as a sort of palate cleanser before going into the next book. This book has lizard people in it. Lizard people are nearly deaf and psychic, so they communicate via telepathy. Only the book never uses the word “telepathy.” The word the author has chosen– or, at least, the translator, as the book was originally written in Korean and it’s not entirely clear how one translates neologisms from one language to another– is nearm. Nearm is both a verb and a noun; one nearms a nearm. I’m not sure how to pronounce it, as I’m reading the book and not listening to it; the one TikTok video I found discussing the book pronounced it “neerm,” and I can’t shake “knee-arm” out of my head even though “neerm” is probably closer.
Nearm is a dumb word. It might sound less dumb in Korean, maybe; I don’t know a damn thing about Korean. It sounds really dumb in American English. I’m pretty sure it sounds equally dumb in all the other Englishes as well. And any time one of the lizard-people shows up on the page you’re gonna see the word as many times as you might see “said” for any other character. God help you if there are more than one of them and they’re talking– sorry, nearming— at each other.
It’s got me ready to put the book down, and I was really looking forward to this book, and damn, Maas-haters, if I didn’t get it before, Iget it now.
I can’t post a picture of the sticker I didn’t get, so have a picture of a co-worker’s car and feel free to come up with an explanation. I have none, and I don’t know whose car it is, so I can’t ask.
I voted today, in case that wasn’t already clear, and judging from the size of the crowd at just past noon on a random Thursday a couple of weeks before the election, I feel like turnout even in Indiana is going to be decent. We are having a singularly boring election this year; the most high-profile race is for the Secretary of State, for God’s sake, where polling indicates that Democrat Beau Bayh may actually have a chance– the current Republican SoS pissed off his entire party something fierce in a manner I’m not clear on, and came in third in the primary, with less than ten percent of the vote. The election I’m most concerned about is for my State House representative; I know the guy I voted for, and his opponent is an odious piece of bigoted garbage who sponsored a bunch of anti-trans bills. I’d hit him with my car if I had a chance. Fuck that guy.
There were two proposed Constitutional amendments: Should We Be Able To Lock People Up Without Bail Whenever We Want (no) and Should We Be Able to Use Rural Judges in Cities with Democratic Mayors (also no). My School Board member is up for re-election; he is one of the two current Board members whose picture can be found in dictionaries next to “local crank”; sadly, he is running unopposed. I’d run against him myself were it not for the small detail that I absolutely do not want to be on the School Board. I have been to School Board meetings, and if my life in any way involved having to attend them and having to pay attention and having to be there the entire time, suicide would swiftly follow. I simply cannot.
But yeah. No Senate, no Governor, it’s the midtermiest of midterm races. I suppose the latest Democratic sacrificial victim for IN-02 doesn’t seem entirely incompetent, and if there’s a sufficient nationwide Blue wave she might be swept into office, as my current rep is a replacement-level MAGA NPC who has not distinguished himself in any way while in office, but I’m not holding my breath.
