Very recommended.
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I’m in the middle of a beta read for Farilane the second book in a trilogy by Michael J. Sullivan. He is my favorite author, and if you are a fantasy fan and haven’t read Theft of Swords yet, I highly recommend you give it a try.
So far Farilane is not letting me down at all. Classic MJS.
I’m also finishing up the first book in the Wheel of Time series, Eye of the World, which has been fine, but feels a little bit too much Lord of the Rings lite to me.** ******
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This is really interesting about the way nature is reclaiming environments abandoned by humans. From mining spoil heaps in Scotland where there’s now a massive amount of biodiversity to Bikini Atoll, where the lack of human disturbance post the nuclear test have led to unimpeded regeneration of the coral reefs in the area. It’s pleasingly hopeful in the wake of so much doom and gloom about our destruction of our own environment.
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Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life
My wife got it for me as a stocking stuffer. I’ve gotten halfway through it. So far, so good.
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Anthony Burgess - Tremor of Intent.
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Don’t you worry. It’ll eventually morph to Game of Thrones lite with a dash of Dune knock-off.
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My biannual reread of Banner in the Sky. Read it in elementary school and it kicked off a fascination with mountaineering. Oh, and convinced me I could never climb a mountain! 
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Did you ever read Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void? That could really put you off mountaineering!
Joe used be a local in one of our favourite pubs.
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So those episodes were your faves?
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Lost Continent is absolutely one of my faves. The climbing sequence leaves me howling every time!
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You’re like, “they shoulda read the book!”
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Karlsson, Finnish: An Essential Grammar
Not really “reading,” but now I’m hooked on seeing if there’s any way to have a future pluperfect, and I don’t feel like trotting out some Latin textbooks just now. I suspect the closest is going to be some partly-collapsed participial form, but I’m easily distracted.
I must find a way!
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I knew a dishonest landlord who knew a dishonest constable. She hadn’t yet served a deadbeat tenant with legal notice, but she said “don’t worry, I will had done it!”
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I wouldn’t yet had done it well were it to have been had in the pocket, I should have had got to be doing it.
I think that’s got the subjunctive mood and the future with the passive perfective aspect, and uses the pluperfect.
No surprise, even though Karlsson is a Swede (although a native of Finland), there’s not much help there. Nor in my basic latin/Gk textbooks.
TBH, I really do think there is a way to do it. I’ve only got maybe ¼ of a bottle of Teeling Single Grain left, but I have a hard copy of Grévisse, Le bon usage, 8è edition, and I’m going to go to town on it.
If it isn’t in Grévisse, it doesn’t exiss…te.
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Started Star Trek Coda book 1. So far pretty good.
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The other place to check is time-travel stories. I know I’ve read of stuff like this in some classic SF.
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Those Angry Days, an account of American politics in the years leading up to the U.S. entry in World War II. Almost as rancorous as today.
A very interesting book.
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Grévisse, Good Usage. The photograph is the “after” picture, illustrating why one shouldn’t drink down a bottle of 92 proof and combine it with reading an authoritative, super-meticulously organized, but ultimately tedious book.
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I went through a list of “greatest novels” and marked down some I’ve never read. Going to start with Flaubert, which has a troublesome translation history (for a writer who had some technique quirks which contribute to that). But Lynda Davis’ translation came highly recommended, so I’m trying that one.
Note to self… one day I’ll have to muster the courage to tackle Zola’s Rougon-Macquart Cycle (20 novels, reading order in dispute - do you read them by publication, or generational order)
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Lydia Davis is the bomb! I still haven’t looked at her translation of the first book of Proust’s Recherche (a few pages some years ago), but I have seen her translation of some of Blanchot’s essays (Maurice Blanchot was, in part, the topic of my undergraduate thesis).
She wrote a kind of autobiographical tale (maybe it was pseudo-auto-bio) that I really liked as well.
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I should conform to the topic at some point: I’m having a quick read of an essay by a guy named Daniel Anderson called “Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM): An Introduction to Key Concepts Within Cross-Sectional and Growth Modeling Frameworks.”
It’s somewhat interesting and whatever I knew about statistics and regression, I’ve mostly forgotten. So a good refresher, as well as a new topic for me (HLM).
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