williamjm

I finished Jodi Taylor's Symphony of Echoes, the second part of her Chronicles of St Mary's series of time travel stories. Like the first book it is a quick and fun read, but also frustrating at times. Although often quite light-hearted it does have some darker moments in it but because it is bouncing from one plotline to another so quickly the attempts at more serious dramatic moments often lack weight. For example, near the end of the book the main character has to grapple with the moral consequences of preserving the historical timeline and they are disturbed by what they are having to do but there's very little time spent reflecting on this. The increasingly contrived roadblocks to the relationship between the main character and her love interest are also very tedious. I've now started Ann Leckie's short collection, Well of Souls. So far, the title story's first contact tale is the highlight.

A great win for Lando Norris in Miami. He definitely got some luck with the timing of the safety car playing into his hands perfectly but he had good pace before that and afterwards managed to comfortably pull away from Verstappen. Newer tyres would have helped Norris, but it seems surprising that Verstappen wasn't able to threaten him at all. Piastri was also driving a strong race in the first stint so things seem to be looking good for McLaren.

It seems a bit unfair to blame George Lucas for a movie he had no involvement with.

It is usually their friend but the Tory vote has dropped enough that FPTP is really hurting them now. They have a lot more votes in total than the Lib Dems but because the Lib Dem vote is much more concentrated in particular areas they are getting more councillors. They also control twice the councils the Tories do now (out of those that were voting this year). A similar thing will likely happen in the General Election, probably not to the same extent but the Lib Dems can do a lot of damage to the Tories in seats where Labour aren't in contention. It also seems a bad set of results for the Reform party, for all the hype about them they only got two councillors, less even than George Galloway's party.

I finished Emily Tesh's space opera Some Desperate Glory, which I thought was a very good first novel. The protagonist has been raised on a space station populated by a few thousand humans where every moment of their lives is focused on preparing to fight against a galactic civilisation with a population in the trillions. Their education has been mostly indoctrination so that she will serve loyally in the military so it can be frustrating perspective to read at first because they initially find it very difficult to comprehend anything that doesn't fit with their training. Her understanding of the world she has been raised in and the wider world outside it does evolve through the course of the book, and as a result the book does become more enjoyable to read as it goes along. This is a standalone story and a lot happens in its 400+ pages, while some of the early plot developments might be predictable there are some big twists in the second half of the book. I thought the characterisation was good, there is one character who does seem to be an outright villain but other than that the other characters do have believable motivations even when they might sometimes be doing horrific things. I'm now reading Jodi Taylor's A Symphony of Echoes. Like the first book in the series the plot is progressing at a breakneck pace, the first subplot featuring an unwise use of time travel to investigate the Jack the Ripper murders was creepy and surprising but it's barely been resolved before the next subplot kicks off.

You would need even more if you drank every time someone mentioned 'The Hive'.

They were really committed to the bee metaphors. I think half Jason Statham's dialogue is talking about bees.

From your description I think it seems to have many of the elements typical of post-apocalyptic stories even if it's not been as dramatic as most apocalypses. If you are trying to find a way to sell the book then being pedantic about whether or not the background events count as an apocalypse maybe isn't the most important thing.

Last year we had a new feature on the authenticator app which would show you the approximate geographical location where the authentication request came from. The rationale for this was that it reduced the risk of people automatically approving authentication requests without realising they hadn't made the request. However, we quickly found that it would never give the correct location, most commonly it would think we were somewhere around San Francisco rather than in England. For some reason they seem to have recently dropped that feature.

I read Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. I thought it was an enjoyable book to read, it felt a bit more whimsical than most of Gaiman's work and the tone felt a bit reminiscent of Douglas Adams at times - I think Arthur Dent could probably have related to the way events always seemed to be conspiring against Fat Charlie. Since it is a loose sequel to American Gods it is tempting to compare the two, the events here are definitely smaller in scale and I think that does have some advantages since the story felt a lot more focused and I think the pacing was better. The characters were memorable and most of them did get quite a bit of development through the book, although the romantic pairings between people who had only met each other a handful of times felt a bit rushed. I'm not reading Emily Tesh's dystopian space opera Some Desperate Glory, which has been good so far.

My main memory of Dune Messiah is that there are a lot of people having meetings, I think it gets a bit less dull towards the end but it's still nowhere close to the original book. Children of Dune was better than Messiah but still not at the same level as Dune.

You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

I liked it, even if it felt slightly odd to have an underdog story where the underdog is the Ford Motor Company.

Presumably even before that arrives the Ukrainians might be able to use more of what they already have since they will know that there's less need to ration it if replacements are about to arrive.

I saw an article saying that Truss' advance for the book was £1500, which somehow seems both embarrassingly low and also unreasonably high.