2023 in Reading

I've logged 61 titles in my spreadsheet for 2023 so far, way up over the mid-40's of the last few years.  What drove the increase?  Last Christmas I got a tablet sized for comic books (mentioned at the end of last year's post) and have read a bunch of graphic novels from my library through Hoopla.  Once again I was part of a Hugo awards reading group and read all the short story, novelette, novella, and novel finalists.

What stood out this year?

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.  Especially during Erica Henderson's run as the artist.  The whole run showcases Ryan North's talent for irreverant + relevant story and dialogue, and paired with Henderson's character designs, layout, spacing... it's a beautiful thing.  

The Goblin Emperor.  Sarah Monette's first novel published under the pseudonym Katherine Addison is a story of court intrigue that could have taken place in any setting, but I enjoyed this slightly new look at what Faerieland could be like.

Bea Wolf. Beautiful art and a faithful retelling of the Beowulf story for kids.  

Hild. As mentioned in last year's post, I had been avoiding Hild because it's a big, big, book.  Then I read Spear last year and finally tackled Hild, and it is formidably rich and dense and worth every minute.  As an extra benefit, Nicola Griffith published Menewood, the sequel to Hild, this year, and I have it queued up to read early in 2024.  

Babel: or the necessity of violence : an arcane history of the Oxford Translators' Revolution.  The winner of the Nebula award for Best Novel this year.  Be prepared to spend a lot of time with it.  Over the first half of the novel, it lays its groundwork very carefully, but also effeciently, spending time on certain moments that drive its points home with no passages wasted.  There's a great short bit with the daguerrotype (p171-172) where Robin thinks of how the photograph is similar to their own work of translation, and a nice in-world aphorism: "Silver accrues where it's already in use" (p175) like how any kind of wealth gets funneled to the top, and great efforts are needed to unseat it.  The style changes in the second half of the novel, which becomes more action-packed (we get to the stage of "the necessity of violence").  

Even Though I Knew the End.  There was a strong slate of novellas this year, and C.L. Polk's magical detective noir hits all the right notes as an homage and alternative to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.  The title comes from a moment when our protagonist is re-reading some F. Scott Fitzgerald, which made me want to re-read The Great Gatsby.  I was in luck, because while looking for Nghi Vo's Into the Riverlands (another Hugo novella finalist), I discovered...   

The Chosen and the Beautiful.  Nghi Vo's first novel is a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the POV of Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, instead of Nick Caraway.  In this version, Jordan was adopted from Tonkin by the Bakers.  Loved this.  Vo does a wonderful job of feeling authentically roaring 20's while doing some things stylistically that would be a no-go in publishing in the 20's.  It feels like how people might actually talk and act, rather than filtered through the publishing industry of the era.  I also loved the title playing on The Beautiful and the Damned.

Nettle & Bone.  There was also a strong slate of novels, and Ursula Vernon (writing as T. Kingfisher) took home the rocketship.  Marra has such a strong internal dialogue, and her "team" are such decent people, each struggling with their own problems but willing to work together, that it was impossible not to be charmed.  It's true I took lots more notes while reading (honorable mention) Nona the Ninth, and Nettle & Bone has a more straightforward plot, but both have a great mix of laugh-out-loud moments and human drama.

Sesame Street Christmases: Vinyl and Video

Been so happy to be able to listen to the Merry Christmas from Sesame Street album again since finding it on Spotify a couple years ago. I had it on vinyl as a kid, and it predates the Christmas Eve on Sesame Street special (which has its own associated album). It has one of my favorite renditions of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" because the gifts have been changed to be more appropriate for each of the singers... perhaps with the exception of Hard Head Henry Harris, who is the recipient of "two baby frogs" and then editorializes "what kind of jive Christmas present is that, man?"

I love that, aside from Bert & Ernie's "Gift of the Magi" story and "Keep Christmas With You", the content is different between Merry Christmas from Sesame Street and Christmas Eve on Sesame Street.

The special brings us an all-time great original Christmas song in "True Blue Miracle", as well as an all-time great running gag with Cookie Monster trying to send a letter to Santa just to set up a "Cookie Monster needs to set out cookies for Santa in the hopes of getting cookies from Santa" joke.  There's not a minute wasted, it's great from start to finish.

Watching the special and thinking about the album based on the special, I'm once again struck by how well they translated from video to vinyl: adding a narrator to clarify action that is obvious when you can see it on the screen.

When the Odds Are Ever Not in Your Favor, Wordscapes Edition

I was introduced to Wordscapes in late 2019, and still lightly compete for crowns on the weekends while getting steps.  During the week, there is a daily puzzle, but it otherwise feels like it's turned into a Tamagotchi game to give you rewards in the form of jeweled hearts (to get you more pets -- you can have one pet "active" at a time), cocoons (to hatch butterflies for a variety of settings), and binoculars (to find pieces of portraits that you can use).

For the month of October, there is a set of 12 portraits you can collect, and in order to get a portrait, you need to find 3 "pieces" of that portrait.  At this stage, where I'd collected 8 out of the 12 portraits, if the probability of finding each piece is roughly equal, I'd expect to get a new piece about 1/3 of the time.  Instead, I found 111 duplicate pieces before getting another pumpkin piece.  The probability of that happening is on the order of 10^-20, so that strongly suggests the probability of getting each piece is not equal.  Unfortunately, there's no indication of this in the interface.

Charterstone

After Risk Legacy, we tried Charterstone.

The legacy story of Charterstone is that the players have been given a charter by the Forever King to "build me a village worthy of Greengully" ... or something like that.  Players assign their meeples to buildings in order to gather resources, construct buildings, and complete various tasks.  Conceptually, it's not that radically different from Lords of Waterdeep, I guess, which is well-liked by the family, so looking good?

The pieces are nice and the boxes for keeping your pieces from one game to the next are well-designed.

The board is charming and well-organized:

Zooming in on the upper left of the map, there's the Cloud Port, which is a shared spot for all players.  Shipping goods out via the Cloud Port scores you points.  There's also my territory.  Since I won the first game, the rest of my family got to name it.  Hence, I am the proud leader of "Noobland".  

Noobland focuses on clay as a resource, so my personas' names are all about clay.  You choose a persona to play at the start of each game, and it gives you a special ability.  You eventually get a companion who stays with you across all the games, and because mine once tried to kill the Forever King, she naturally had to be named Celaena Sardothien...  Guests can also visit your territory, and while you can keep some of them from one game to the next, they are more temporary.  

Zooming in on the upper right of the map, there's the reputation track, which is another way to score points.  I really like it when there are multiple ways to win, and you work with what chance brings you.  The upper right is also the home of "Sylvania".

Sylvania is all about harvesting wood from the forests (hence Lilah's "the Destroyer" moniker???). Lilah's companion is Lulu, and they're so adorable with their similar names that they're now a couple.

Zooming in on the lower left of the map, there's the progress track that marks when the game ends.  It's also the home of "Totally Poland", a territory that was not actively run by someone in our family of 4 (you can have up to 6 players in Charterstone).

The lower right of the map has "Champs", another territory not actively run by a player.  It's been long enough that I forget how we began to be able to develop these territories.  It's possible that we misunderstood something in the rules (a common issue we've had in legacy games; it's a challenge because the rules change as the game evolves).

The bottom center of the map has the "Soviet Cat Union".

They're all coal miner's daughters here, and suspicious of outsiders like Comrade Jeb and his outlandish stories. Back to the mines with you, Jeb!

The top center of the map has "The Empire". It's all about farming. You can also see the top part of "The Commons", which has a number of spaces for scoring victory points.

The leader of The Empire truly is an evil mastermind who can't trust anyone, especially not a companion who has been spying on them.

It turned out that while I like a cozy, resource-gathering, town-building game, the rest of my family does not; or at least they didn't enjoy this variant on that style of game.  We got through 8 games before The Empire broke the campaign with some economy gremlining and we quit. 

Disruptive Flyovers in the NNE

The outgoing mayor wants to extend VTANG's lease at the Burlington International airport for another 25 years.  The current lease is set to expire in just under 25 years; however, the DoD apparently will not release funding for construction projects at the base unless there are more than 25 years left on the lease.  Capital expenditures are only planned out 5 years in advance,but $50M is on the line.  That said, it might be nice to renegotiate VTANG's mission.  

A sore spot for some residents over the last few years has been the introduction of the F-35 planes at the base.  I've been a resident of the NNE, and worked remotely from my home, for 22 years.  For the first 18 years, a few times a year the F-16s would fly overhead and I'd think, "Wow!  That's loud," and go on about my day.  With the arrival of the F-35s, this changed, and in April of 2020, I started to keep track of the number of flyovers that disrupted normal life -- not "I can hear them in the distance", but "I have difficulty having a normal conversation inside my home because the planes are so loud."  The table and chart below are summaries of that dataset.  What is striking is not only the number of minutes of disruption, but that 2023 is showing a significant increase over previous years. 

Below are charts showing:

• Flyovers by day of the week; they are mostly in the middle of the week.
• Flyovers by time of day; they are typically during the first two hours of the workday and then again after a noon lunch 
• Flyovers by time of day and date; this shows the consistency of when the disruptions typically occur over time

In my dataset, I record the date and time of the disruption; if the disruptive noise continues for several minutes, I record each minute, which helps to differentiate between a relatively brief flyover versus an extended one.  An important caveat is that I don't run outside to check whether the aircraft causing the disruption is an F-35; I simply record the timestamp.  July 2022, for example, stands out because VTANG's F-35s were deployed overseas at that time.  I don't know what other aircraft might have been flying during that month; again, I simply record the timestamp and try to get back to work.

Obviously, this is my personal experience and not everyone is adversely affected by the noise.

I don't know whether the issue is that the F-35s are significantly louder than the F-16s, or whether they've changed the flight patterns so they fly over my neighborhood more often.  What I do know is that this is a drastic change from my experience with the F-16s; if they had been this disruptive when I arrived in 2001, I likely would have relocated.  

Annals of Bad Editing, The Witness for the Dead edition

I greatly enjoyed The Witness for the Dead, which follows the story of a minor character from The Goblin Emperor after the events of that novel.  

All of it, that is, but page 45 of the Solaris paperback edition:

Maps ... covered the walls, and there were filing cabinets full of written directions on how to get from the Prince Zhaicava building to every major landmark in Amalo.  I had overheard an argument one day about changing the starting point to the Amal'theileian, as being "more suitable", but ... the master mapmaker ... said sharply, "All that would accomplish is that we'd have to add directions from here to the Amal'theileian to the start of every script."  And there the matter ended. 

Of course, it's the other way around.  They have directions starting from the Prince Zhaicava building.  If they changed the starting point to the Amal'theileian, then they would add directions from the Amal'theileian to the Prince Zhaicava building to the start of every script; otherwise, they would need to completely rewrite all the filing cabinets full of scripts.

It's possible that something else is intended here, but if so, it's not at all clear.  

Gardner Dozois really disliked Return of the Jedi

The stories in The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection were published 40 years ago, so I decided to read the collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.  The biggest omission has to be Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds", but by and large I enjoyed it.

As interesting as the stories to me (since, by and large, I was already familiar with some of the work of nearly all the authors represented) was the forward to the edition, which begins with a short history leading up to the current state of the business of SFF publishing.  The forward wanders on from here and into a variety of other topics, until Dozois starts in on the film industry.

The SF movies of 1983 were generally lackluster at best.  Return of the Jedi brought the famous Star Wars saga to a disappointing end**.  Jedi is ineptly directed, poorly paced and edited, filled with energyless wooden performances (Harrison Ford in particular stumbling through the film like one of the living dead), and marred by an impactless anticlimax which simply rehashes the big Death Star scene from Star Wars.  At the end the Good Ghosts all go to a party and sing campfire songs with the teddy bears, and everyone looks relieved that it's over.

I'm not going to argue with most of this, except to note that RotJ had three separate threads in the climax.  One is a bit of rehash of the raid on the Death Star from the first movie, and another sadly takes place on Endor instead of Kashyyyk, but the scenes in the throne room between Luke, Vader, and the Emperor did have an impact, and were a worthy conclusion to Luke's journey.

** LOL the joke was on all of us.  Dozois lived to see the next end of the saga in 2005, but died before The Rise of Skywalker.

There Is Life After College; Jeffrey J. Selingo (2016)

 I read this from the perspective of a parent whose children will need to navigate life after college, since things are very different now from when I graduated; for that matter, from when this book was published in 2016.  There are some good notes in here about the need to do internships, starting your job search relatively early in your senior year (in much the same way your college applications went out early in your HS senior year), and in your first decade out of college, move around from role to role, and company to company, in order to learn about how organizations work and what interests you most.  

There is some talk about the "7 competencies companies are looking for" that is both helpful and concerning.  For example, the author notes that students/future employees need to be able to "take tough feedback", but there is no discussion of how to recognize "tough but fair" from "harsh and abusive."  Similarly, in a discussion of one of the post-graduate "finishing schools", he quotes some of the participants talking about how they "often worked late into the night" on their projects, but there is no discussion of how to (or the need to) rest and recharge.  

There is an important question of how you do good work and have a satisfying career without being taken advantage of.  This was true in 2016, but in the light of the recent mass layoffs at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, et al, it seems an especially important conversation to have.

Life with Fast Lane

Some time ago, they began to automate toll collection on toll roads.  VT had no toll roads (still has none), so we could sign up for another state's plan.  NY/NJ had EZ-Pass, but MA had its own system called Fast Lane, which was cheaper for us to sign up for, so we did it, and it has worked very well.

In 2011, we switched vehicles, and at that time, transponders weren't associated with a particular vehicle, so we just moved the transponder to the new car and there was nothing to update in the system.

In 2016, MA changed its system so that transponders had to be associated with a particular vehicle, and they associated it with our old vehicle without notifying us.  The transponder continued to work in NY/NJ for five years.

In 2021, we finally went on a toll road in MA for the first time since MA changed their system in 2016.  The cameras on the highway noted that the transponder was not in the vehicle on file, so they disabled the transponder and mailed us an invoice.

Unfortunately, this meant that the transponder no longer worked on the NY/NJ toll roads, but we didn't know this, and our first inkling was an invoice from NJ with $80 worth of "admin fees".  We got it all resolved (back in 2021), but it required a phone call, because there was nowhere in the online form to say you were a customer of Fast Lane... except that Fast Lane is now owned by EZ-Pass, so when I finally got a hold of a customer service rep, they were able to fix it.  (yay)

In 2022, our original near 20-year-old transponder died during another trip through NY/NJ.  With a few more mailed invoices and a few more calls, that's been settled and we now have a new EZ-Pass transponder, and a fond farewell to Fast Lane.