The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book started off in a very hard to read place because the author had to deal with the aftermath of the first book. It made everything Rin goes through feel earned. Nothing comes too easily. But it did mean that it was a while before I reached a point where I couldn’t stop reading.

It works very well as the second book in a trilogy. There are lots of twists and turns that mirror the chaos of war. Rin struggles with many internal questions - who to trust, are soldiers responsible for their actions in war, who are your friends, and more. But there’s also lots of well-written action.

Uncanny Magazine Issue 26: January/February 2019 by Lynne M. Thomas

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This issue started off unevenly for me, but I ended up liking most of the stories and non-fiction essays.

A Catalog of Storms (Fran Wilde): A fantasy world in which weather becomes sentient. I failed to gel with the premise or consequences of the world. I think maybe part of it was me being unable to figure out at first if it was supposed to be a SF or fantasy world and whether what was happening was metaphorical or physical.

As you know, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for a while now. I like how they continue to innovate in the browser space while Firefox and Chrome as just standing still. (Which, to be fair to the other two, makes sense given their general purpose audiences) The latest Vivaldi update has some nice theme updates for folks that like to customize their browsers, but what I really like is their addition of Workspaces. Similar to the way that many of us use Virtual Desktops (or the Windows and Mac equivalents) to organize our open windows, Workspaces allow for organizing your tabs. Combine that with tab groups and you get the kind of 2-dimensional organization that I like with KDE Plasma and their use of both Activities and Virtual Desktops.

In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.

Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.

Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading the book. Dropped the rating from 5/5 stars to 3/5 stars.

On this second time reading through the Discworld books, I’ve come to realize that I really prefer the Witch books to the Rincewind/Wizard books. Usually (or at least up to this point), the Witch books have been parodies or retellings of Shakespeare or Fairy Tale stories. This one is used by Pratchett to formally introduce Uberwald. It will play a larger and larger role in future Discworld books (including City Watch books). Uberwald is where horror creatures like vampires and werewolves come from. It also includes Igors (although within this book we only know of one family line of Igors).

Nightmare Magazine, Issue 126, March 2023 by Wendy N. Wagner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A great selection of stories this month! Here are my reviews per story:

The Dizzy Room (Kristina Ten): While I didn’t have the ESL issues the main character has, I definitely got my first computer around the same time. I remember playing all these edutainment games like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and (of course) Oregon Trail while my brothers played Reading Rabbit. I really enjoyed the twist - since it was in a horror magazine, I knew it was coming, but it was great seeing it gradually emerge.

Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 103, December 2018 by John Joseph Adams

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was an awesome issue of Lightspeed magazine where I really enjoyed every story. I was especially happy to find out that I started out my Lightspeed magazine subscription with this issue because for the next 5 issues they had stories by Ashok K Banker that all take place in the same universe and I loved the story in this issue. Here are my reviews per story:

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book along with the Sword and Laser group on Goodreads as the April 2023 book pick. I’m glad this ended up being the pick. That said, this is probably going to be a very divisive book. It’s a book in which, to some degree, “nothing” happens. Our main character is an Orc member of a fantasy adventuring party (think RPGs or Lord of the Rings). She wants to retire to start a coffee shop in a fantasy world where coffee is new (and unknown in the city she chooses).

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I got this book for free from the Tor.com ebook club

Once again Vo creates a novella from The Singing Hills Cycle that I had so much trouble putting down. Vo expands the world a little more as Chih ends up in the north this time, traveling with the mammoth corps.

Vo finds another way for Chih to end up in story telling and recording mode without feeling repetitive with the first book. This time the names are mostly (from what I can tell) Vietnamese so I wonder if this is a retelling/remix of a Vietnamese legend. What I loved was mixing this with a (view spoiler)[Thousand and One Nights (hide spoiler)] situation to create a greater sense of tension.

The Story Behind: The Extraordinary History Behind Ordinary Objects by Emily Prokop

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve always liked books, articles, and podcasts about little trivia like this. There are so many objects in our world and they each have a history! We often gloss over those things that have existed since we were born. For me that includes all the items on the cover (like the traffic lights and the slinky). What separates this book from others in the same genre is that the author isn’t afraid to say when the true story is unknown or when there are multiple claims to the creation of a particular object.