greenwoodside

 I read his Shardlake books in December 2019 and January 2020, very much in 'what, I'm supposed to go to work? do the washing? spend time on things that aren't reading? wtf world??' mode. I probably won't reread them, because gripping as they were, the last one was brutal. 

I will watch the TV show to see if it can catch something of the novels' atmosphere. 

It sounds as if he had been working on another Shardlake book. It would be wonderful if he'd managed to get it finished, or near-finished, but given that his long illness seems to have been so dreadful, I doubt there's much hope of that. 

Guardian obituary link

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Watching and Reading

I keep meaning to post reviews of the books I've read and TV I've watched, but never get around to it. (Also, Welsh practice, um. I'm sitting the advanced exam in June too! Perhaps that will panic me into doing more.) 

Anyway, a list will have to suffice. 

Books

The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde   – first one by him, liked it and will read more; it made me want to keep pet rabbits because I'm just that suggestible; instead I'll try ordering The Private Life of the Rabbit to shut up the rabbit-shaped thoughts. Though Fforde continues to get wrong a trend established by Richard Adams in Watership Down. Buck rabbits are not the burrowers. If you want some serious underground construction done, call in the does. 

Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie  –  great, the sequel is waiting on my Kindle

Raven Tower by Anne Leckie –  Hamlet as retold from the perspective of a thoughtful lithic deity, good

Fatal Legacy by Lindsey Davies – felt a bit by-the-numbers with too many characters impeding pacing and atmosphere; still liked it, and interesting to contrast it with the Falco books; my feeling is that her Flavia Albia novels are a bit darker and are less a tongue-in-cheek take on ancient-Rome-meets-Raymond-Chandler than they are a take on a Roman informer just doing her stuff (but with a happy family life, thankfully) 

Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge  –  as mentioned, fantastic 

The Warm Hands of Ghosts  by  Katherine Arden – readable but very tropey 

Demon Daughter  by LM Bujold  – small-scale domestic novella; not one of Bujold's greatest, but this is one of those series where I'm glad to check in with the characters and see that they're okay 

House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky –  84 pages in; am entertained so far

Lev Grossman has a piece of Arthuriana due out this summer. If I pre-ordered things, I'd be pre-ordering hard. 


Watched 


Just ultra pure fluffy escapism. Largely watched right before bed. 

Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra – viewed from my sickbed at the start of the month 

Lockwood and Co – young adult Netflix show; an agency of three teenagers hunt ghosts which are now a widespread and dangerous nightime threat in an alternative Britain following a mysterious 'Event' decades previous ; very much of its genre, but I liked it enough to be annoyed to learn there'll be no season 2, and looked up the fate of the talking skull in the local public library 

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina– fun first season, baggy inferior second season –  mainly worth watching for Michelle Gomez (undercover antagonist), Miranda Otto (eccentric aunt 1) and Lucy Davies (eccentric aunt 2). It annoys me that with no brothers or sisters, I will never have a chance to graduate to eccentric aunthood. I would've been so damn good at it, dammit. 

Star Trek: Prodigy –  Likeable and unsurprising so far. It's the kind of show that the word 'nice' may have been invented to describe. I'm still in the middle of season one. And while I'm talking about Star Trek, Paramount, what were you thinking! Cancelling Lower Decks, how could you! 

RL

I've applied for a job (again) and got an interview (again, this is the fourth one this year). I want to up the pace on my job applications to get away from my current situation, but also don't want to jump from the frying pan into the fire. I've also just realised that I can't remember how much the latest possible job pays because I didn't write it down. Somewhere between figure x and figure y with a couple of thousand pounds in between is the best I can do. Eh. 

ETA: snippet of interesting/good news just spotted Plato's final hours recounted in scroll found in Vesuvius ash. I've been hearing for a couple of decades now about how technological advances will allow more of the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum to be deciphered wholly or in part. I'm sure there have been successes before this one – I just haven't heard about them. At a guess, they involved no big names from history. 

In this instance, the reporting isn't that great. [understatement] I've only had a quick look, but couldn't see a link to the research/source. Also it took me way too long to find out that the new information apparently comes from the work of one Philodemus of Gadara (1st century BC Epicurean philosopher).