(Late) Fix Things Friday

Oops, forgot to post this yesterday. I have:

- Called new union members to say welcome, encourage them to come to an introductory meeting, and see if they have questions.
- Held the introductory meeting for new members. Not many people came, but those who did were engaged and one of them was already starting up a new section at her workplace.
- Worked on new introductory leaflet to send to new union members.
- Gave feedback on newspaper piece on climate stuff that alas was not picked up by the newspaper.
- Put together agenda points for next board meeting in environmental organization.
- Innumerable emails on various things. Organizational infrastructure, it requires communication.

Recent reading

Forty Thousand in Gehenna by C J Cherryh
For my fannish book club; my choice. Huh, this was unusual. You start reading and think it's going to be one thing, then it skips in time and becomes something else, and something else again. It is, among other things, about: colonizing a new planet, first contact with aliens, clones, gender, communicating and living with aliens, and anthropology and the question of whether or not to intervene in another culture. Also toward the end it's a take on the dragon-companion trope. The clone thing is different from most clone narratives: this one is about people who are perfectly happy to be brain-programmed clones, who end up giving birth to children who grow up without the brain-programming, and the clones being utterly bewildered when they parent their kids. A lot of the book is more driven by world-building and and the story of cultural change than by characters we connect to, but in the last half of the book I connected more to the characters (there is an anthropologist going native).

Mina drömmars stad by Per-Anders Fogelström (in English as City of My Dreams), audiobook
Recommended by a colleague. I guess this is part of the Swedish literary canon? It's set in 1860's-1880's working-class Stockholm. I liked the characters fine, but I also kind of got the feeling that they were a vehicle for the author to show you the historical setting. Which was fine, there was a lot of stuff I didn't know about the time period, and it was interesting. Will probably listen to more in the series, since I liked the reader.