spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I had a chiropractic appointment this morning and got in a walk around the park.

I hand-washed dishes and emptied the dishwasher before I headed downtown. When I got home I tossed a load of laundry into the washer and changed kitty litter.

I got to mom’s ~10:30am and stayed until ~3pm. I stopped at the library on the way home to pick-up and return books and hit the bank drive-thru for mom. At home I grilled Kielbasa for Pip's supper (I had more tomato sandwiches), hand-washed more dishes, and tossed the laundry in the dryer.

I finished the Amelia Peabody book, DNF'd a Kindle cozy, and started and finished another Kindle cozy.

Temps started out at 61.5(F) and reached 93.6.


Mom Update:

Mom was doing pretty well today. more back here )

ETA: I forgot to mention, mom reminded me yesterday that it was the one year anniversary of the huge storm that took out all six of the large trees in her back yard. (The main reason her porch is so hot now is because there is zero shade when all she used to have was shade.)

Lake Lewisia #1278

Jul. 16th, 2025 05:13 pm
scrubjayspeaks: Town sign for (fictional) Lake Lewisia, showing icons of mountains and a lake with the letter L (Lake Lewisia)
[personal profile] scrubjayspeaks
However much the cars to the back of the line honked out their frustration, there was nothing to be done for the delay--not when trees were blocking the road. That message was passed from window to window, shouted back over idling engines, until someone with a truck full of landscaping tools got the idea to bring out the chainsaw. Instead of a felled tree, he found the road ahead blocked by a steady stream of saplings, ambling along on many squiggling roots, companion birds and squirrels clinging to their swaying branches, as they set out from the forests of their parents in search of sunlight and water of their own.

---

LL#1278

What I'm Doing Wednesday

Jul. 16th, 2025 03:52 pm
sage: A comic book drawing of a Black British man driving (Rivers of London)
[personal profile] sage
books (Aaronovitch, Greene & Sasportas, Erlewine, Billock, Wells, McCord, Kaufman, Odyssey, Oken, Hamaker-Zondag) )

healthcrap
Yay, I'm not anemic anymore, though I've still got another 3 months of iron supps ahead of me. I had a psych appt today to confirm my meds are still doing their thing. Boo, I'm temporarily off the rhodiola rosea and back on Adderall for the next month (because rhodiola hasn't been safety tested for long-term use). cut for mention of weight loss )

yay!
As has been posted everywhere, Murderbot is getting a Season 2! That means ART! \o/ I haven't yet caught up with the last few eps of S1, but I'll get there in due time. (Viewing, such a challenge when I'm on a reading kick. And when I'm NOT on a reading kick. Sigh.)

rl )

yarning
I went to yarn group Sunday and had a really nice time. Great turnout, and it's good for me to see human beings in person. Pain in the shoulder, though. I want my crochet arm back! But I met a few new people, including one young woman who also has Ehlers-Danlos. So cool to commiserate in person.

natural disaster: Texas floods
My parents were finally able to leave their ridgetop and run errands, though all the intact bridges are missing guardrails (at minimum). One of them was completely surrounded with gear and detritus from the kids camp upriver. So heartbreaking. Thankfully, their POA jumped right on finding engineers and requesting bids for repairing their main bridge & its banks, and the low water crossing is sound, now that it's clear of downed trees. I am still so sad about the catastrophe, even though I'm not directly affected. Camps were a safe space for me when I was a kid, and though they were in a different part of the state, it's all too easy to imagine the worst happening.

kitty
[youtube.com profile] KittenAcademy has moved to Pennsylvania and is searching for a new rescue/shelter to work with in the Bethlehem/Allentown general vicinity. If you know of one that is willing to provide pregnant momcats and manage adoption apps, please let me know so I can pass it along to them. ION, the family of black cats and kittens who had been living part time in my backyard are no longer around. I hope they got scooped up by a shelter and/or TNR'd somewhere safe.

#resist
July 17: Good Trouble Lives On protests/marches tomorrow. If you participate, please think of me & everyone else who would like to march but can't.

Note: Mercury stations retrograde tomorrow, July 17, at 15*34' Leo (and stays retrograde until August 11 at 4*14' Leo). I'm curious what that will mean for the protests. At least they're on a Thursday, so maybe that will help keep people safe amid the likely miscommunications.

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333

C.J. Cherryh bibliography

Jul. 16th, 2025 04:34 pm
coffeeandink: (me + nypl = otp)
[personal profile] coffeeandink

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

Cut for length )

The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread

Jul. 14th, 2025 10:48 pm
coffeeandink: (books!)
[personal profile] coffeeandink
Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.

Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Starting in the mid-70s, she has has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.

Notes towards an overview
  • It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won two Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)

  • Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.

  • Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.

  • Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)

  • I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.

Series and other groupings
I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:

  • The Union-Alliance universe
    Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.

    In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.

    The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)

    Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)

  • The atevi series
    In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.

    The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.

    The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.

    This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.

    The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)

  • Fantasies
    Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).

    Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, desperate, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.

  • Shared-world work
    The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.

    For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh resurrected her college major and Master's degree in Classics to focus on Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short stories, some of them also incorporated into two novel collaborations with Morris and a solo novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.

    Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.

Full disclosure
This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.

I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.

Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure about how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.

I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Nebula Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then present day, but I think that's it.)

Other Cherryh reading projects


Endnotes
1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]

2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]

Reading Wednesday

Jul. 16th, 2025 08:41 am
sabotabby: (books!)
[personal profile] sabotabby
Hi did you miss these?

Just finished: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. I ended up enjoying the shit out of this. Murder mystery/political palace intrigue set in a world where eldritch abominations threaten to break through the seawall and destroy entire cities every wet season, and magic is done through bioengineering. The brilliant Sherlock Holmes analogue is a mysterious and terrifying elderly woman and the Watson analogue is a dyslexic disaster bisexual kid who's been altered so that he remembers everything he experiences. It's very fun.

Currently reading: Bread and Stone by Allan Weiss. Look at me I'm reading CanLit! It's about the Winnipeg General Strike, though, so it's not off-brand for me. In the first section, William, a failure of a farm boy, goes off to the Great War against his family's wishes. It's immaculately researched; you get every detail of small town Alberta and the culture shock of moving to the big city of...1914 Calgary. William's father is a coal miner who describes in passionate terms the solidarity that comes from joining a union, but doesn't want his son to go down into the mines himself, so Williams seeks it first in the church, and then amongst his unit. I've gotten to the bit where he's finally being shipped out for France. Quite good so far.
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I hit CVS and Price Chopper while I was downtown (both in order to pick up things for mom), got in a walk around the park, and hit the farm stand on the way home. I’ve been thinking about tomato sandwiches with fresh tomatoes.

I folded last night’s load of laundry, got another washed, and hand-washed some dishes before I left the house this morning. When I got home from downtown I baked a berry cobbler to use some of those berries we’d picked (and put the rest in the freezer), tossed the laundry into the dryer and another load into the washer, hand-washed more dishes, and mixed up some tuna with a nice fresh cucumber (and mayo) for my lunch.

I got to mom’s ~11am and left ~3pm. On the way home I filled my gas tank. At home I put away a load of laundry and tossed the other into the dryer, scooped kitty litter, made an easy supper (Pip had leftover meatloaf I pulled out of the freezer and I made myself open-faced tomato and melted cheese sandwiches with the fresh tomatoes I purchased today), and showered.

I read more in Amelia Peabody and also started and finished another Kindle cozy.

Temps started out at 70.0(F) and reached 92.4.


Mom Update:

Mom was doing okay today. more back here )
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
What I Just Finished Reading: Since last Wednesday I have read/finished reading: Necessary as Blood (A Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James Mystery) by Deborah Crombie, Lantern in the Lighthouse & Hint in the Hashtag & Pawn in the Pumpkin Patch & Secret in the Santa (The Inn at Holiday Bay) by Kathi Daley, A Bitter Pill (The Bookshop Mysteries) by S.A. Reeves, and Grounds For Murder (Perfect Blend Mysteries) by Emily Brewster.


What I am Currently Reading: He Shall Thunder in the Sky (An Amelia Peabody Mystery) by Elizabeth Peters.


What I Plan to Read Next: The new Rivers of London.




Book 62 of 2025: Necessary as Blood (A Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James Mystery) (Deborah Crombie)

I enjoyed this book a lot! spoilers )

This book was really good and I can't wait to read the next. I'm giving it five hearts.

♥♥♥♥♥



Book 63 of 2025: Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (The Murderbot Diaries) (Martha Wells)

I enjoyed this! spoilers )

I really liked this novelette and am giving it five hearts.

♥♥♥♥♥

Repeating this info in case you missed it previously: If you haven't had a chance to read the new Murderbot novelette Rapport (which is one of those ‘takes place in the Murderbot Diaries ‘verse' stories) you can find it for free at Reactor Magazine or purchase it from Amazon (on Kindle for $1.99). Or both.



Book 64 of 2025: A Bitter Pill (The Bookshop Mysteries) (S.A. Reeves)

This book was just okay, which was disappointing because I really wanted to like it. spoilers )

This book was alright and I don't think I'll read more in the series. I'm giving this one three hearts.

♥♥♥



Book 65 of 2025: Grounds For Murder (Perfect Blend Mysteries) (Emily Brewster)

Another book that was just okay. I liked the main characters well enough, but seeming inconsistencies drove me nuts. spoilers )

This book was enjoyable enough, but I probably won't read more in the series. I'm giving it four hearts.

♥♥♥♥

Murderbot TV vid: I Lived

Jul. 15th, 2025 07:58 am
sholio: tv murderbot andrew skarsgard looking to the side (Murderbot-MB)
[personal profile] sholio posting in [community profile] vidding
Title: I Lived
Character/Relationship: Team as family, Team + Murderbot
TV Series: Murderbot TV
Music: I Lived by OneRepublic
Length: 3:57

AO3 | DW | Tumblr | Youtube

Contains some sci-fi violence as per the show (but generally not the most graphic scenes), flickering/flashing lights in a couple of scenes; also has the canon pairings in the background, but it's mostly focused on the team + Murderbot being Intrepid Galactic Explorers. Spoilers for all of season one.
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I went downtown as usual today and hit Walmart, Price Chopper and the Feedbag. (The first time I’ve been to the Feed Bag since before mom’s surgery! Pip has been having to do the bird seed run.) I also got in a walk around the park and picked up Chinese for lunch.

I was up an hour before Pip, so before I left the house I did a load of laundry, hand-washed dishes, and scooped kitty litter. After I got home I did another load of laundry (both loads got washed and dried, one got folded), hand-washed more dishes, baked chicken for the dogs’ meals, grilled country style pork ribs for Pip’s supper, ran a load in the dishwasher, and shaved.

I finished the Kindle cozy and read more in Amelia Peabody. Hold onto your hats, folks, because I also managed to write ~500 words on a new fic for [community profile] smallfandomfest!!

Temps started out at 70.7(F) and reached 93. We didn’t get the forecasted rain last night, so I didn’t mow the lawn today. It was hot. Hot. Pip wanted to show me where he’d found more berry bushes, so I went for a walk with him and the dogs after lunch. He hadn’t exaggerated, the bramble was huge! So many berries. We picked about two cups, but could’ve been there much longer just to get the ones we could reach. I was ready to die when we got back from that short walk. I had to splash my face with cold water and sit in the AC’d bedroom for a while to cool back down. So HOT. And that was just a short walk, including a bit through the shaded orchard.


4 photos I took on that walk )


Mom Update:

Mom had the appointment with her oncologist today. more back here )
morgandawn: (Default)
[personal profile] morgandawn
 Fandom History: Persian/Farsi Speakers Needed
In late 2019, TV, movie, anime, gaming, celebrity, music, and book fans assembled to save Yahoo Groups after Verizon decided to shut down the mailing list service. Approximately 300,000 fandom groups have been saved. The Yahoo Gedden project is working on identifying the fandoms of Persian language mailing lists and can use your help. We need people who can read Persian/Farsi natively* right now to help us identify the Unknown groups. You can work at your own pace and it is a low time commitment. Work is done on Discord, just reading the group description and a few messages and summarizing the messages in English, maybe answering a question of clarification ("is it talking about X or Y?"). No software or other tools needed besides your phone/computer and access to Discord.


*We're not certain if these mailing lists are using a specific dialect or standard modern Farsi 

Lake Lewisia #1277

Jul. 14th, 2025 04:43 pm
scrubjayspeaks: Town sign for (fictional) Lake Lewisia, showing icons of mountains and a lake with the letter L (Lake Lewisia)
[personal profile] scrubjayspeaks
The library will be holding a Rules Lawyering Contest as part of their civic knowledge program over the summer. Short, simple, inclusive qualifications have been posted at the library circulation desk, as well as on the website, outlining who can participate and what the various challenges will be, and everyone is invited to join in. Anyone who can successfully argue that they should nonetheless be disqualified from participating will advance to the next round.

---

LL#1277

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