Weekend reading

Oct. 20th, 2025 09:02 pm
troisoiseaux: (reading 8)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
I hadn't planned on reading Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, both because I hadn't really clicked with any of her previous books and because I've seen mostly negative reviews of Katabasis specifically, but it was available as a short-term/lucky/skip-the-line loan on Libby and who am I to look a gift book in the mouth. I'm really enjoying it! Two rival graduate students of Analytical Magick descend to the underworld to rescue their dissertation advisor so they can graduate with his valuable recommendation; it's great for spooky season, with vivid descriptions of the very nasty ways one can die from doing magick wrong and something darkly whimsical about the version of Hell that they navigate with the ambiguous aid of the different accounts of underworld journeys (Orpheus, Dante, etc.) as filtered through alternate translations and theories of interpretation and academic technobabble. ... )

Back to the theme of Bad Times on Boats with Into the Raging Sea by Rachel Slade, a nonfiction account of the 2015 sinking of an American cargo ship after capitalism led it to sail directly into a hurricane. Technically focused on unfolding the narrative of a specific event (the loss of the El Faro in Hurricane Joaquin) but throws in a bunch of stuff for context, such as how hurricanes are formed and measured, the history of U.S. shipbuilding and shipping industries, etc.

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
troisoiseaux: (reading 7)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
Finished The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian, which I started back in July and have been periodically returning to— it turned out to be a good book for piecemeal reading, actually, because like many of O'Brian's novels it is less of a beginning-to-end narrative and more a handful of fairly short plot arcs and set pieces in a trenchcoat (affectionate), and the running theme of whalers/the whaling industry was especially interesting after reading Moby Dick earlier this year. Technically a re-read, but I had apparently forgotten everything that happens in it?? Not for a lack of memorable incidents, though, including a rescue at sea by the all-women crew of a Polynesian pahi and a below-decks love triangle with a 133% fatality rate. ... )

It's already Wednesday somewhere

Oct. 14th, 2025 11:31 pm
troisoiseaux: (reading 6)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
Read Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto*, a bite-sized memoir from a (new to me) Japanese social media personality about working as, literally, a rental person who does nothing: accompanying people to things they're nervous about or would just rather not do alone; simply being in the room while someone tackles something they've been putting off or talks about something they feel like they can't share with anyone else; holding down a picnic spot at an outdoor festival (as long as the client picks the spot— choosing where to sit would, by definition, be doing something). Fascinating read! It's a mix of anecdotes about the different requests he's gotten and musings on what motivated him to start this "business"**, the ways he does and doesn't craft a persona in his online and IRL presence as "Rental Person", what his clients get out of their interactions, etc.

Footnotes )

I've been re-reading Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series more or less on a loop since 2021, albeit with longer and longer gaps both during and between books, and to this point recently picked back up on where I left off in Nona the Ninth at some point earlier this year, or possibly late last year. I appear to have last read Gideon in 2023 and Harrow in 2024, so now my goal is to finish Nona this year and then maybe we will get Alecto in 2026...? Have also picked back up on another neglected re-read, The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian.

Currently listening to the audiobook of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, read by Chiwetel Ejiofor— I've been meaning to revisit this since reading it when it first came out in 2020, and it makes a really good audiobook. On re-reading, it's even more obvious that anyone familiar with the book Clarke quoted as an epigraph would immediately know what's up with Piranesi and the Other, although in my defense, I've still never actually read that book ) and so Piranesi reminds me, more than anything, of The Tempest.

Recent reading

Oct. 11th, 2025 12:54 am
troisoiseaux: (reading 4)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
Re-read Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, primarily to reset my brain by reading something for which I had zero expectations, although maybe it was the inevitable next step of this year's not-quite-project of re-reading 2000s YA. (I was in middle school during the Twilight era; I was never really into it, but I did read the first two or three books and declared myself to be on Team Jacob solely out of a sense of preteen contrarianism.) I ended up basically live-blogging this to a couple of friends, and the key takeaways from those conversations were:

In which I give this book way more thought than necessary )

Anyway, I somehow ended up agreeing to read Midnight Sun, Meyer's cash-grab rewrite of Twilight from Edward's POV, for science, so stay tuned for that, possibly.

Profile

feedeslilas: (Default)
feedeslilas

July 2019

S M T W T F S
 123456
789 10111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031   

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Oct. 22nd, 2025 11:42 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios