Since I'm using my 'books and cats' icon, I should report first that Lucy has recovered from Moving Trauma and seems to have settled in, by which I mean that she is leaving nose-prints on the windows and stalking us across the living room and sitting in B's lap when we read in the evenings. Yay!
The next important order of business is to point you all to the
free books that are available now or soon. (Some of these may be country-restricted, sorry.)
World Book Day celebration at Amazon: Today only nine books from around the world, in English translation, are available for free in Kindle format. These are mostly literary fiction, historical fiction, and mystery.
Independent Bookstore Day celebration at Libro.fm: On Saturday April 27th, a small selection of audiobooks will be available for free. You need a Libro.fm account, and you need to use their (free) software to listen on your phone.
2019 summer SYNC season: Beginning tomorrow, two audiobooks (mostly YA fiction, usually in pairs of old/classic and a relatively newer title, but for example this year's selection includes a full-cast reading of
Othello and Mary Roach's microhistory
Gulp) will be free each week (Thursday-Wednesday) for fourteen weeks. These download as mp3 files with no DRM and can be listened to on any device.
Okay, now that that's out of the way:
What I've recently finished reading:Blood of Elves, the third book (and first novel) in Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher series. Oddly paced, with an abrupt ending, and if you haven't read the short story collections (and likely even if, like me, you have) some of the people, their backstories, and their relationships will confuse you. The translation does not do the prose any favors. On the other hand - this is solid backstory for Ciri, who I loved in the videogame Witcher 3 (and the tutorial/prologue of that game clearly comes straight from this book!), and the first part of the book has a lot of Triss, who I loved in the Witcher 2 game (and if I had played that before the third game, I would have romanced her then instead of Yennefer). Plus, there's more politics than hack-and-slash going on, and I really like the fantasy politics, especially the background of prejudice and marginalization of the non-human races.
I've also been listening to podcasts in preparation for my book club next month; we actually only read a book qua book four times a year, the other months being devoted to podcasts, articles, and storytelling. May's theme is "memory", and our "assigned listening" was a two-parter from Malcolm Gladwell's
Revisionist History podcast series:
A Polite Word for Liar and
Free Brian Williams, followed by
Bringing Gamma Back from
Radiolab.
( My thoughts on these programs )I listened to a few more episodes of Revisionist History, just because I like Malcolm Gladwell. It's a lot of fun and I recommend it for interesting perspectives on random trivia.
What I'm reading now:The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondō, which I impulse-bought on Sunday when it was discounted as a Kindle Daily Deal, because the process of moving made me painfully aware of how much crap I own that I don't really use/need/care about. As some of you know, I lived on a 40' sailboat for over 3 years; we had five yard sales to get rid of most of our possessions, and when we sold the boat and returned to "normal" life, we swore we'd never get overburdened by "stuff" again. I mean, compared to the average American couple, we really don't have a lot of things, but it's undeniable that we have many things which are only taking up space and we really should get rid of.
I've only read the introduction and the first chapter, and so far I'm mostly just bemused by the idea of a little girl fantasy-tidying things and cleaning up
for fun.
In audio, I have just started listening to a book I got from last summer's SYNC program:
The Great War: Stories Inspired by Items from the First World War, which is an anthology of YA short stories by various authors. Each story riffs off an artifact from the war; in the text version, I imagine they are shown in photographs, but in the audiobook they are described after each story. So far I have listened to "Our Jacko" by Michael Morpurgo, which is about a helmet used as a toy by a family's children, who later discover its origin and the story of their great-great-grandfather; and "Another Kind of Missing" by A. L. Kennedy, about a young boy visiting his father in the veteran's hospital after the father was invalided out by taking shrapnel in the face.
ETA: I totally forgot, I was going to mention that I enjoyed the first story, but was sort-of-thrown out by the repeated mention of Ypres, which - <ugly-American> - I totally knew, as a place, but didn't realize it was pronounced (at least by the narrator) "eep", which to my ear is terribly odd! </ugly-American>
What I'm reading next:I need to start an eyeball-book soon. Maybe the next Witcher book, maybe one of my enormous backlog ha ha.
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