What’s this? Two “not a review” posts in a row? Inconceivable! But true. You see, some may remember that a couple of years ago my wife got hooked on crystal meth “Breaking Bad“, AKA “The Best Show Ever“. It took a while for us to get through all the episodes, after which I was charged with finding my wife another show to watch. Not surprisingly, this turned out to be a pretty tall order. Aside from the six-episode “Happy Valley“, I didn’t have much luck coming up with anything that held her interest.
2015 isn’t quite over yet, but I already received this interesting set of statistics for the year from Goodreads. They unfortunately don’t seem to have provided a way to easily share it to WordPress (because, you know, everything only goes to Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest these days), so I copy-and-pasted it into a post. The nice formatting didn’t carry over, but you get the gist of it — most of what I read this year was, it seems, pretty average. And I didn’t quite make it to 5 books a month in 2015. I will have to try to do better next year!
So far I would characterize this book as steampunk, but it’s steampunk that’s sort of been filtered through a Hayao Miyazaki “Kiki’s Delivery Service” meets “Howl’s Moving Castle” kind of sensibility. It’s cute, but don’t go in expecting something like The Difference Engine.
Lucretia was pulling some monster-like weeds that held a death grip on a pretty climbing rose when Mr. Trotters came belching and bellowing steam in her direction.
She sat back on her heels and regarded the steam-pig.
The steam-pig regarded her back.
“Lost your pipe again, Mr. Trotters?”
The steam-pig burped smoke and she sighed. “Come along then, we had better find it before you blow up.”
Mr. Trotters is, literally, a steam-powered mechanical pig. There’s also a miniature clockwork animal orchestra, a lemur (pictured on the cover), an owl (also pictured on the cover). It’s a veritable menagerie of natural and artificial creatures! And speaking of menageries, our old friend Bob seems to have encountered one, over in the world of Television Man …
Once Bob fired the shotgun, it was pretty much pandemonium. A half-dozen of the little monsters went down, but the rest of them rushed him in a mass. He blasted them again, sending black blood and umber fragments flying in every direction, but the next time he pulled the trigger it just clicked. Empty. He hadn’t even thought to look and see how many shells the gun could hold, let alone how many it contained.
So having finished up Queen of the Tearling, which was about as good as the scathing reviews suggested it would be, though it was just like The Hunger Games insofar as the heroine’s name started with a “K”, and it was just like Game of Thrones insofar as … um … oh! There’s a “red” sorceress in it.
So I have way more books on my e-reader than I can keep track of these days, thanks mostly to BookBub, which means that after I finish one book I have to decide which one to read next. I could do something normal like have them in a first-in-first-out queue, but that would be too easy. So instead I use Calibre to help me pick a new book after I finish one. Because I’m random that way.
Viscosity 