ase

Jhegaala (Steven Brust) (2007): Vlad Taltos visits his homeland while on the run from the Organization. This wasn't the book I expected (road trip with personal development and witty Jhereg). If it developed the "transformation" theme associated with the title, it was the transformation of the village Vlad visits, which I wasn't as invested in. The window dressing was very nice - reasonably interesting secondary characters, plot that didn't completely implode when prodded with a logic-stick - but I built up some anticipation based on the time-line skip between Phoenix and Athyra which wasn't fulfilled here.

A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge) (1992): Reread. Space opera. The only countermeasure to a threat engulfing all high FTL civilizations is carried with a handful of sapients on one ship, the Out of Band II, and two children at the bottom of the FTL zone.

As usual, memory plays tricks. The "Net of a Thousand Lies" so strongly conjures usenet, my memory recalls more of it than is actually present ("hexapodia as key insight"), overlaying my subscriptions circa 199. I also forgot the horrific deaths of the Straumer children, what a brat Johanna was (in those circumstances? It was understandable brattiness), what a prick Pham Nuwen was, and how all of this came together in a riveting space opera. The "fun space opera" bit stuck. I think I had more thoughts on this, but they have been subsumed into...

The Children of the Sky (Vernor Vinge) (2011): Sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep; Tines' World after the Straumers and Out of Band II.

This book wins on raw entertainment. It's coherently written in clear prose about a fairly black and white moral dilemma. People are good or villains or misguided, and the misguided are redeemed. This is not a subtle novel. (One could argue that Nevil's wickedness is influenced by Recent Events, but that's not particularly subtle.)

( Spoiler-cut. )

Amdijefri was my favorite part of Fire; Joanna and Ravna got to be rock stars in Children. This is more about personal taste than writing quality, I think. I am not a fan of traveling circus troupes, but I'm a sucker for tough girls and politics.

A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge) (1999): Reread; Pham Nuwen's Adventures in the Slowness. The first time I read this I missed the setup for the translators' revolt, so this time I tried to read closely for those clues.

( Spoilers. )

At first, I hadn't planned to reread this, since I was pretty sure the library didn't have a paperback edition, and I had no plans to stuff a 700-page hardcover into my commute bag. (The commute bag is a Timbuk2 Classic Messenger, size small, awesome as long as the train reading is trade or mass market paperback.) So I was pleased to discover that Deepness benefited from being at the end of the alphabet during the last bookcase cull, and was on my shelf in paperback.

---

That was November. In December I started two nonfiction books, but didn't finish them; flipped through several Union-Alliance novels, and reread Heavy Time (1991) and Hellburner (1992) cover to cover. Heavy Time, about independent asteroid miners versus a large, corrupt, and bureaucratic corporation, has a resolution that is even more out of left field than most of Cherryh's novels, which is I guess what happens when your protagonists high cards are a salvaged miner-ship and Ben Pollard, part-time hacker and full-time pain in the neck. Hellburner is comfort reading for me. The rest of my December reading time was taken up with professional journals.

Numbers game: 6 total finished. 2 new, 4 reread; 6 fiction.

Please bear with the length of this delayed double feature.

AUGUST
Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara (Colleen Morton Busch) (2011): Nonfiction. During the California 2008 fire season, a Zen retreat was evacuated under threat of fire. Ultimately, five long-term residents remained to defend Tassajara from the Basin Complex fire.

( Better than nice. )

This was a quick, easy read: I picked it up Friday morning and finished it in Saturday afternoon. I felt like it added to my sense of Bay area community. Recommended if you're interested in Zen practice or fires.

Proust was a Neuroscientist (Jonah Lehrer) (2007): Nonfiction. Essays on the link between 19th and 20th C artists' insights and early 21st C scientific research. Walt Whitman, George Eliot, chef Auguste Escoffier Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne's paintings, Igor Stravinsky's "riot" of Spring, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and neurophysiology.

The first essay, on Whitman, was surprisingly entertaining. (Full disclosure, I loathe Whitman's writing. High school english inflicted "Song of Myself" on me during my period of vigorously rejecting all things transcendentalist.) This would have been better if I'd spaced out the essays; trying to read all of them without a break emphasized the collection's limited scope and Eurocentrism. It also suffered from trying to bridge science and the arts: with a foot stretching into each sphere, it did a very incomplete job rooting in either topic.

Fullmetal Alchemist, v.9-27 (Hiromu Arakawa) (2004 - 2010): EPIC WIN. I wanted something absorbing and fun for my train reading, and this fit the bill. My enjoyment makes it hard to write up: good entertainment is something I know when I see it. How do you pick out the components of pleasure when your brain is caplocking with happy reactions?

( Thumbs up for awesome female characters, complex plot, detailed and coherent worldbuilding, and shades of moral gray. )

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Jon Krakauer) (2003): Nonfiction. Interleaving of the 1984 murder of Brenda and Erica Lafferty by Brenda's brothers-in-law with a history of Mormon faith contributing to the environment that let men think God wanted them to commit murder.

( The book has a weird depth (or shallowness?) of focus on one murder and all the history of fundamental Mormonism. )

Under the Banner of Heaven is interesting, but deals with people's cruelty in the drive for power, which makes for stressful reading. It's also sharply dated by its references to 9/11 and the absence of references to Prop 8. Worth reading if you're interested in the intersections of organized religion, power, and violence, but pack a strong stomach.

When Gravity Fails (George Alec Effinger) (1987): Fiction. A 22nd century Arabic punk gets the noir treatment. I will save the cognitive dissonance of the shift from FLDS to erratic Islam and the hilariously long list of novels I thought I'd picked up for another time. (This wasn't hard SF, Jerusalem Poker, or Srs Lit Bzns. Moving on!) I enjoyed the setting and atmosphere of the novel, without any particular attraction to the plot or protagonist, Marîd. Marîd suffers from saying he is a loner, relying on his native cunning to survive, between scenes of Marîd interacting with his girlfriend, buddies, and wider social network, and adjusting to some heavy-duty cyberpunk wetware upgrades with barely a pang. (Well, the denouncement with Hassan and Okking may be the pangs.) If I have to question whether the character's words and actions are congruent, and the book is not going for an unreliable narrator schtik? You're doing something wrong.

On the other hand, Marîd's low-brow 22nd century is an entertaining mix of bypassed cyberpunk and predictive power. Everyone has something like a cell phone, and information is power. The fringe elements that make up Marîd's social circle include transsexuals for whom somatic alteration was not cheap, but was possible; the surprise isn't that a female stripper used to be a boy, it's that she was a rich boy. The cyberpunk elements - wetware modifications that allow users to utilize personality modifications and knowledge add-ons - are one of the coolest elements in the story, cleverly and maddeningly presented as so mundane no one really thinks about what this means for the human condition, even as doctors evolve more sophisticated variations on the "moddies and daddies" theme. Such mundanity leaves the sense of wonder entirely in the reader's hands and mind, for a mixed experience.

Numbers game: 23 total finished. 23 new, 0 rereads; 20 fiction, 3 nonfiction; 19 graphic novel-ish, 1 essay collection.

SEPTEMBER
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick) (1968): If PKD's purpose in writing this was to convince me Rick Deckard is Stanley Kowalski without the animal magnetism, it succeeded. If it is to set forth an argument that human beings will be petty and venal in most circumstances, it succeeded. If it's to envision a bleak postapocalyptic San Francisco, win. It's a venal story whose redeeming qualities are the local color (SF = love!) and curious reflections of 1968's nightmares. Robots are evil! In the future, Earth will be overrun by mechanical facsimiles of animals! And robots, too!

Every now and then, someone suggests PKD's fiction in my hearing, and I make the mistake of listening to them. PKD writes well-crafted stories I dislike, and I don't see a good reason to read any more of them at this time.

Fledgling (Octavia Butler) (2005): Octavia Butler writes a Mary Sue vampire novel. Seriously! Shori's an amnesiac genetic engineering experiment who can walk in the day, has the strength of grown vampire men, is 50 years old and looks like a 10-year old African-American human, and oh yes, survived the slaughter of her entire vampire family as well as all their human symbiotes.

As you may have gathered, this isn't my favorite Butler novel. It plays with power dynamics in Butler's usual mode, but in a "vampire novel!" context, exclamation point mandatory. Vampires are not my thing. Erotic relationships between adults and apparent children are really not my thing. Butler's usual writing talents couldn't overcome those handicaps to make this book interesting or memorably enjoyable for me.

The Outskirter's Secret (Rosemary Kirstein) (1992): Reread. If I won the lottery, there are two writers I could try to endow. Kirstein would be one of them. (Doris Egan is the other. Lois Bujold doesn't need my endowment; she regularly publishes in hardcover already.) I love the Steerswoman series for its worldbuiling, the protagonists, and general enjoyability. The Outskirter's Secret has my favorite worldbulding and a really fantastic Rowan-and-Bel travelogue.

A Fire in the Sun (George Alec Effinger) (1989): Sequel to When Gravity Fails. Marîd Audran, now one of underworld kingpin Freidlander Bey's lieutenants, visits his mother, investigates a murder, and foils a plot launched by Bey's major rival. Marîd continues to puzzle the reader with questionable characterization, grumbling about his lack of freedom while lapping the cream of servitude from his whiskers. The characterization seems inconsistent; it feels like Effinger had a Better Idea between When Gravity Fails and A Fire in the Sun, but didn't manage to completely integrate the retcon. The worst part for me was the giant brother-gun Effinger put on the mantlepiece early in the novel, which he never bothered to fire. Whether that was just sloppy writing or sequelitis in the works, it was poorly handled.

Numbers game: 4 total finished. 3 new, 1 rereads; 4 fiction, 0 nonfiction.

Anonymous comments on LJ have become almost entirely spam, so anon commenting's been blocked. If this is a problem, DW allows open ID comments, and dreamwidth invite codes frequently posted to dreamwidth and/or dw_codesharing. Finally, LJ is free all the time.

---

Last weekend I watched Cowboys and Aliens and Captain America at the theater, and tried to distract myself from self-indulgent manga with a Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life. The distraction ploy backfired; the paragraph of strong feelings has been deleted. Cowboys and Aliens lived up to one review that it's the sum of its parts and no more. Captain America tried to be a faithfully gung-ho WW2 movie and succeeded admirably. To my shock, the black guy and the Asian-American guy lived. I'm assuming Red Skull will be back too.

I also watched Bride and Prejudice before a last-minute library return. I thought I hadn't seen it before, but I recognized most of the movie. So apparently it made very little impression last time I watched it, unfortunately.

( Still reading Fullmetal Alchemist on the commute. )

Feminism is Queer: the Intimate Connection Between Queer and Feminist Theory (Mimi Marinucci) (2010): Gender theory and I do best in small doses, so I like to check in every few years to see if my strong feelings on the importance of activism and the incestuous tedium of theory have abated. (Short answer: no.) I'd hoped for a survey of the current state of the field, but most of this slim volume is focused on getting readers up to speed on feminism and queer theory, devoting only the final chapter to Marinucci's analysis of their contemporary intersection. I liked that chapter, and I found the "Feminism Expanded and Explored" chapter useful as well, again as a reminder of the current state of the field from the author's perspective. For example, the reminder that feminism and LGBT are not intrinsically the same movement (see especially p90, on second-wave feminism "the personal is political" vs LGBT "in the privacy of my own house", and '70s arguments on constructed vs essentialist homosexuality in radical feminism vs gay circles). The book also does the "all answers are wrong" theory thing I dislike, finding reasons both gender-neutral and gender inclusive language are wrong (see especially p74). Good primer for a 101 or 201 level, but not what I was looking for.

Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin) (1978): A novel about a woman who comes to San Francisco on vacation and calls her parents to say she's not coming home. Note this was published in 1978, or I might have to change my username to Mary_Ann_Singleton.

The story follows Mary Ann's vacation, job search, and forays into the City social scene, expanding through her social circle, doubling back and rebounding. Part of the entertainment is tracking the inter-relationships: Mary Ann's boss's wife sees gynecologist Jon Fielding on the sly, after an extramarital affair; Jon has an affair with the boss, and used to date one of Mary Ann's housemates; the ex-boyfriend moves in and recognizes Mary Ann as the girl who hit on Jon in a previous chapter. And the entire novel is like that, a sense that within the city, there's some very small circles. Compared to that rich web of interrelationships, the characters themselves are sometimes thinly fleshed out, and there's a distinct element of "plot? What plot?" for much of the book. It made Tales very easy to pick up and put down, as I struggled with my own San Francisco, 2011, sometimes marvelling at the differences of 30 years, sometimes mapping locations against my own experience.

The Shadow Speaker (Nnedi Okorafor) (2007): YA fiction. Teenage Ejii has already seen one small revolution, when Jaa the Red Queen beheaded Ejii's father before his wives, children, and the rest of the village of Kwàmfa. When the shadows tell psychically-gifted Ejii she must leave Kwàmfa with Jaa to prevent a greater war, she packs her veil and goes on an adventure.

This is expanded from an earlier short story, or the short story was excerpted from The Shadow Speaker Either way, it inspired me to pick up one of Okorafor's other novels, Zarah the Windseeker. I liked it, and expected a similar colorful and semi-serious YA novel. The Shadow Speaker delivered, raising questions about the ambiguous powers of violence while keeping me entertained with the story of life after a world-altering event. It develops Ejii's character plausibly, as well as the character of her travel companion Dikeogu. Ejii begins the novel working through the uncertainties of life after a nominally Muslim patriarchy has been violently removed by a woman with a sword, and struggling with her Shadow Speaker gift, as well as her father's death. Jaa removed a tyrant by killing Ejii's father, while Ejii's mother, the chief's ex-wife, urges nonviolence as a key to lasting peace. As Ejii travels she learns more about her gifts, who she is, and the world around her. And what a world! Ginen's plant-tech makes another appearance, as does the future world history shaping Ejii's Africa. Slightly less lighthearted than Zarah the Windseeker, and perhaps more engaging for the older crowd because of that.

Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam (Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund) (2005): Nonfiction account of - well, read the (painfully unwieldly) title and subtitles. Salbi's parents were upper middle class socialities drawn into Saddam Hussein's social circle in the '70s, and compelled to stay there as Hussein drew more power, violence and corruption to him. Salbi narrates her experiences of living in physical comfort and emotional abuse in the wake of the Iraqi dictator's social circus, who she made herself into on international soil, and how she reconciled her childhood and experiences as an adult working with women survivors of war.

This is compelling like watching a snake, waiting for the moments when the terrors whispered at the edge of on-demand parties uncoil on center stage. Salbi's experiences are narrated through the double lens of a teenager's immediate and self-centered understanding of the world, refocused by answers elicited as an adult. It's a form of introspection I can empathize with. If anything, that's my significant criticism of the book. I expected I would have to reach more to understand where Salbi was coming from, but the narration is pitched for an American audience, and didn't stretch me the way I was expecting. Maybe not the best book to read on a gray San Francisco weekend, but compelling: a demand to bear witness to human suffering caused by the selfishness and greed of a few. This was published in 2005, when there was greater hope the US invasion of Iraq would have a quick, positive outcome; the thought of the last six years' events on the women and men of Baghdad mentioned in this book weigh on my heart.

Komarr (Lois McMaster Bujold) (1998): Fiction, reread. I didn't intend to burn through the entire novel, but compulsive readability and old habits sucked me in. This time around, I paid more attention to Ekaterin and Tien's relationship than Miles' antics. Trivia: Komarr was the first Bujold I bought new in hardcover.

Cryoburn (Lois McMaster Bujold) (2010): Fiction, reread. Usually, when I read a new novel by a favorite writer, I finish it, and dip back in over the next days or weeks to reread my favorite parts. Cryoburn is the only Bujold novel which I have finished and shelved with no "favorite bits" flip-through. It's not bad - at least, I liked it no less than Diplomatic Immunity, and more than the Sharing Knife novels - but I think the series had several very, very strong novels in short sequence - Mirror Dance, Memory, A Civil Campaign - and after expecting the giant spoiler since, oh, 1998, I was and am in shock at my lack of catharsis.

( Spoiler time! )

This isn't the book I wanted, so Cryoburn suffers a great deal from misplaced expectations. On a second reading, I can sort of hear the thematic chord of frozen para-death, versus living to the max, but I still don't hear it clearly. On the one hand, I can see why the story is constructed that way: life happens, not when you expected it. On the other hand, I still feel the book's lighthearted, right until the shocking moment it's not, and the difference throws me badly.

Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region, Second Edition (Harold Gillam) (2002): Nonfiction. An overview of why SF weather does the wacky things it does. After passing this up more than once at the bookstores, I came to my senses and put it on hold at the library.

The short answer to the weather question still isn't that short, invoking global weather patterns, trends, and oscillations, Pacific ocean currents, and a heavy dose of local geography. Pitched at a teens-and-up lay audience, this gives a neat overview of a complex system, which I found an enticing appetizer. I'm hoping the "further reading" suggested at the end of the book is just as interesting.

My Fight for Birth Control (Margaret Sanger) (1931): Nonfiction memoir covering Sanger's crusade up to 1931. Technically finished on June 1, but I spent most of May slogging through this, I'm counting it. Single-minded, and not always good writing, sometimes listing a paragraph of supporters whose significance readers might guess from their inclusion. It's also tinged with a very pre-WW2 pro-eugenics agenda calling for "unfit" couples to avoid having children, as well as casual talk of "the races" fit to raise the hackles of modern activists. A pervasive reminder of the differences between eras. The memoir is as relentlessly focused as the title suggests; Sanger's personal experiences with marriage, motherhood, divorce (in 1913!) and remarriage are touched on only in the context of her drive for contraception. WW1 is primarily a barrier to easy travel on Sanger's trans-Atlantic American and European tours. The 1929 stock market crash and creeping Great Depression don't make the cut, even to impact fundraising.

Today I believe there are three great tests to character: sudden wealth, sudden power, and sudden publicity. (p197, 1967 Pergamon Press edition)

My Fight for Birth Control illuminates Sanger's professional agenda up to 1931, but any more personal insights must be imputed between the lines. For example, Sanger's divorce gets a page or two, and then there's no mention of romance until she remarries nine years later; at least one website claims she had intimate relations with several men, including H.G. Wells. In her memoir, Sanger goes out of her way to suggest otherwise, at least in Wells' case. It's a splendid reminder that memoirs usually have a purpose other than the perfect truth.

Biology trivia: Margaret Sanger isn't (directly) related to Frederick Sanger, the biochemisty who got a Nobel for dideoxy sequencing, the workhorse DNA sequencing method for a quarter of a century or so.

Numbers game: 8 total finished. 6 new, 2 reread; 5 fiction, 3 nonfiction.

Friday night I finished Tales of the City. Whoever suggested I was Mary Ann Singleton: good call!

If you're ever looking up lyrics, "Karma Killer" is Robbie Williams. "Karma Police" is Radiohead. Don't mix these up.

I have a verbal offer for a temp job with a commute that makes me question my sanity. I'm waiting for a written offer before emailing the hiring manager about where I can put the bicycle I don't own yet. Which will be coming with me to and from Caltrain. Seriously, sanity: where did you go?

(I have an excuse to buy the bike I've wanted since moving to San Francisco, that's where it went!)

With classes done, and being between FT work, I have entirely too much time on my hands.

For reasons likely related to all the above, I have been rereading MZB's Darkover novels. They're one of the candy bars of fiction: cheaply available and not high art. But sometimes, you need a Three Musketeers bar and The Forbidden Tower. (Cursory google suggests a fangirl generation imprinted on Regis and Danilo, who win the woobie award, but I fell hard for the OT4.) There's an entire separate post to be written about MZB's interactions with the fan community, and which books are best / worst / most historically interesting, but wow, I'm picking up currents and rivers and entire oceans of MZB's personal politics I didn't notice as a teen.

...now I really want a Three Musketeers bar. Drat.

My brain is fried; instead of studying, book log.

Bone Dance (Emma Bull / coffeeem): Sparrow, vodoun and the City. This came to my attention in a "gender in SF/F" context, an element which was played for characterization rather than questions of gender; or maybe for Sparrow's community identity rather than self identity. Eventually, I realized the vodoun elements weren't metaphorical; the metaphysical is real. It significantly changed how I was parsing the novel.

Bull's novels are well regarded by people whose reading tastes I broadly share, but I didn't love War for the Oaks, I've started Freedom and Necessity twice without making it past the first 30 pages, and I wasn't particularly taken with Bone Dance. Partly it was the mid-novel realization I was reading a story that wasn't in the book, but I may just not find much appeal in the writing strengths on display. I might reread Bone Dance again at some point, but I'm in no hurry.

Hestia (C. J. Cherryh): Sam Merritt, Earthborn engineer, builds a dam on colonial Hestia.

IIRC, this was a trunk novel, and it shows. ("Trunk novel": written and shoved in a trunk to be forgotten, usually for good reason.) Cherryh got much better at infusing depth into her writing and her fictional cultures, but in this novel the human-alien interactions are wincingly bad. Man meets exotic yet attractive cat-like alien woman and forges a cultural bridge. This reads like every Campbell-era short story ever - Merritt's an engineer! No one, not even the author, uses his first name, except the alien woman! - with a few surprises. Sam doesn't press forward with Campellian confidence, and the colonists win a place on Hestia by losing their civil engineering project. Adaptability, not aggression or applied technology, carries the day.

This is far weaker than most of Cherryh's novels, but prefigures a lot of the themes and characterization tools seen in later stories. The Jim-Sam-Meg relationship prefigures the "brother of chance"-protagonist-romantic love character-sets elsewhere, particularly the Rafe-Paul-Jillian triangle in Voyager in Night. Also, Jase-Bren-Jago, and Tristen-Cefwyn-Ninevrise, and I am deliberately skipping looser variations on the idea (cough Grant-Justin-Ari cough). The theme of single humans (especially men) as the bridge, and become more like the Other, crops up everywhere: Sten Duncan and the Mri; Elizabeth McGee and tower culture in 40,000 in Gehenna; the entire Foreigner series; Thorn in Cuckoo's Egg; to some degree Tully and the hani. I enjoyed playing the trope game, but I'd never hand it to someone without significant screening and warnings.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Isabel Wilkerson): One of the "NPR reads", books that get good press and 200 person waitlists for library copies. It's justified: The Warmth of Other Suns raises the profile of the movement of African-Americans from the rural South to Northern cities. It also frames the migration in terms of extra-American immigrants, asking about the psychology of the urban newcomers, as well as the different challenges, especially racism, faced by black American nationals. Engaging, easy read; Wilkerson sometimes repeats information, which I found irritating, but it's useful for re-orienting as she swaps between the three primary stories she follows. It's been overhyped a bit, but Wilkerson's writing is solid and worth reading. Seek out and enjoy.

Exile's Gate (C. J. Cherryh): The fourth book about Nhi Vanye i Chya, swordsman, and Morgaine the traveller and gate-closer. Reread.

It's interesting to reflect on changes of genre between the first book (published 1976) and Exile's Gate (published 1988), but I'm rereading Gate of Ivrel and want to finish it before digging into that topic. I would briefly like to note it's 400 pages to the earlier novels' 200 - 250 pages, and reads very obviously as an addition to a closed trilogy. ( Minor spoilers for all four books. )

Cherryh's bibliography suggests she's always been a prolific author, but her novels of the late '80s and early '90s are prolific and diverse: Exile's Gate has one foot on each side of the fantasy/epic and science fiction sides of the divide; Cyteen (science fiction) and The Paladin (historical fiction) were published the same year as Exile's Gate.

The irony of bookending the month with novels that include evil body-snatching Those Other Folks and The Scary Woman On Humanity's Side (Bull: Frances; Cherryh; Morgaine) is not lost on me.

Numbers game: 4 total finished. 3 new, 1 reread; 3 fiction, 1 nonfiction.

I finished finals for my two evening classes early Christmas week, and relaxed in the assumption that online classes wouldn't begin until late January. Fortunately, I checked the schedule before my mistaken assumption became a crisis.

Last semester's lessons on not getting emotional when presented with bad teaching are already getting a workout, thanks to an online lecturer's email that "I tried the powerpoint interface and it worked for me. . . call IT if it doesn't work for you." So there's an email in IT's inbox. I am disappointed that someone is stuck in the 20th century and optimized the ppt slideshow for IE (where it still won't print), but if IT can tell me how to extract a .ppt for PDF via some browser, I will cope.

My online classes use iTunes U for lecture distribution, so I am condemned to iTunes exposure. "Uninstalled" is too gentle a word for my high volume, high speed, highly negative reaction to iTunes' vile interface and file mis-organization "system". I'm treating it as an overgrown download manager, and plan to watch my lectures in VLC player.

I ignored all these problems today in favor of investigating Goodwill's scarf offerings and finishing The Privilege of the Sword. charlie_ego, did you have the problems with Katherine's lack of agency that I did? I think young Richard and Alec's short-sighted behavior as twentysomethings in their Swordspoint days makes a certain amount of sense, considering the characters. It may be realistic for Alec to continue to be fairly self-centered in Privilege (pun unintended but too appropriate to edit), but I was very annoyed Katherine didn't ask why her uncle the Mad Duke wanted her to be a swordsman, or what his plans for her might include. It was an extraordinarily distracting oversight.