sarren

From [Book Jockey Alex’s] blog:

• Notable Young Adult Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror of 2024 - while the original post was at the blog, the actual list is at ReacTor Mag.
• YA Book Bundles – Science Fiction & Fantasy, Part 1
• YA Book Bundles – Science Fiction & Fantasy, Part 2

general thought: Look, I get that the USA has a stranglehold on some aspects of publishing, and that someone writing from North America about books published in English is going to get a lot more options set in the USA. But for me to pick something set there to spend my precious reading time, the summary has to be spectacular. Ditto ‘class warfare (near) future dystopia’. I’m here for the escapism, dammit. In the Reactor article there were books more relevant to my interests later on, but I nearly noped out when the first five or so were so dire.

Overall - I didn’t quite make it through these lists. I found it near impossible to focus on the descriptions to see if there was something I was going to like; then I just skimmed to see if there was anything jumped out at me. Also, two of these are from 2020, so there were several I’ve either got on the wishlist, or have read. Of the ~80, I added four to the wishlist, but only one is a ‘really want to read’, and that’s because it is one of my must read authors.

The Spinoff’s best NZ books of 2024 - I found the summaries much more readable than the previous, and yet I added zero books to the reading wishlist.

The Best Books We Read in 2024—And What We’re Looking Forward to in 2025 by Words without Borders - books in translation. Another one where the summaries/reviews were interesting reading, but none sparked an interest in actually reading the books.

Read Palestinian Speculative Fiction Reading List by Sonia Sulaiman - to be fair here, I’ve read five booklists already, and I’m starting to flag. But this is the last one, and then I can close the window, and I’m very invested in that. So, I’m expecting to be unmotivated by any of the books, and that is not actually a commentary on what is written. … and then I started reading and discovered it is a stack of links. For now, I’ve shoved it into the ‘reading plans’ tab group, which is where anything online short fiction gets put until I have the oomph to read it.

Last year I captured all book acquisitions in storygraph and made a list of books I own to prioritise reading in librarything. And then I confused matters by creating two other storygraph tags: 2024-aquisitions---read and 2024-aquisitions---dnf. I had allowed for adding acquired books to the librarything list by only putting ~50 books on at the beginning of the year.

At the start of writing this post, there were books in the storygraph 'acquired' list that had been read, so I needed to transfer those; I also decided that renaming it was useful because it wasn't grouping properly. Now, in storygraph, I have 78 unread books (including 11 that are in progress at various levels of abandoned forgotten about), 2 DNF and 17 read for a total of 97.

The librarything list ended up with 98 books, 36 of them with 2024 entry dates, and thus theoretically new to me in 2024. I've put reviews/ratings on 13. I've finished Passing Strange in the last week, but haven't reviewed it yet, and have 7 in the wilderness of 'in progress'.

There is obviously a significant overlap between these two lists. I didn't put everything acquired in the librarything tag, because I was capturing that in storygraph.

I was going to look at these in some detail and make commentary on my reading habits and so on and so forth, but actually, I don't think I care to. The numbers are interesting, but not really a surprise, because I know that I rarely keep to a plan and I also have a dreadful track record of reading books I own.

Going forward: I intend to do the same data capture in storygraph; I have not done the same thing in librarything. Instead, I have a tag for thestoryinside and I pick a set of books each month that meet the current selected categories, and that is causing me to read some of the books languishing on my shelves (I'm trying to remember not to put recent acquisitions on that list).

Over on tumblr, someone shared some lovely pictures of red tailed black cockatoos. To which the response was 'what lovely parrots'. Hmmph said I, those are cockatoos.

So I asked that most helpful (if sometimes inaccurate and regularly overly didactic) of sources, wikipedia. Which told me there are three superfamilies of parrots, being cockatoos, true parrots, and New Zealand parrots.

Hmmph said I. Not reeeeally parrots then are they.

(Yes, I have a basic understanding of taxonomy, this is absolutely me being a grump)

I had ideas above my energy for today. I have done no sewing because the machine is having a snit and I can't find the manual to look up why; I got the shakes early in the day so no baking. Something else planned got not done for similar reasons, and I've spent the day flaked on the couch (I am winning on goal 'do not spend all day in bed').

I did find the bass recorder book I'd misplaced, and a patchwork book that I knew was in the sewing space Somewhere, so have poked at both of those. Also found bits of Eldest's quilt so have brought those out to be looked at. Have poked at a few other bits of craft.

Last night I pulled the basket of 'need to sew the ends in' down and watched youtube videos while doing so. Today I've done a tiny bit of making squares to use up yarn scraps. I've found a pile of squares, and need to work out what to do with them (stick them in the assorted squares box is easy, but not necessarily optimal)

I've read week 1 of the artist's way, grumbled at some of the stuff, and set up a log for the exercises, because they are lots of writing. I'm not yet doing the bits about affirmations, maybe that can be tomorrow's task. I did at least go and sit in the sun while reading, so got a bit of outdoor time.

I started cutting pieces for the borders of chaosmanor's quilt yesterday. I did an amount of math, and concluded that yes, I could do 18 pieces at the shorter length, rather than 9 pieces at the longer length. (each piece costs 1/4" of fabric for seams)

I have no idea where those numbers came from now, because I have four sides, and therefore however many I have has to be a multiple of four. Which I think means I need 24 pieces of each colour and I may have stuffed myself up right royally.

Off to look through my notes and see where the numbers went squirrelly. Also, because I needed 2 3/4" but there was an issue with the cutting mechanism, I cut the first two colours at 3", which means that I have a fair bit of extra, if I need it. Also, I was doing the math for slightly longer than needed in the hope that that would mean that if my seams were too wide I'd be fine, so possibly I just have to do very scant 1/4" seams.

ETA: worked it out. 24 pieces of each colour across the four sides, but three colours * 6 sets -> 18 pieces on a side, all three colours combined, so six pieces on a side.