Recent reading

The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson
Reread. This is one of his first books, and I know I've read it before, but I hardly remembered it and I don't think it made much of an impression on me the first time. I appreciated it much more this time around. It's the post-apocalyptic version of his California trilogy, but it's not immediate post-apocalypse; rather it's narrated by a teenager who grew up in that world. When you hear "teenage protagonist in a post-apocalyptic world" you might think YA, but it is not, or at least it's very far from most books in that genre. I so appreciate the solid, grounded feeling of KSR's SF; there's so much physicality in it, that sense of human beings being in an actual real world. There's a great passage where the main character has to swim ashore from a ship a long way out to sea, and the endurance of it is so well written! For a post-apocalyptic world it's not actually depressing (except for a glimpse of someone telling a story of the horrible time just post-apocalypse).

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
For fannish book club. This was one of those rare books that everyone in book club unreservedly really enjoyed! Very good fairy-tale based fantasy; I'd love to know more about the Russian fairy tale it was based on. And there will be a sequel, too! \o/

Fix things Friday (er, Saturday)

Oops, forgot this yesterday...anyway, in the last two weeks I have:

- Gone to a Kristallnacht memorial rally.
- Gone to a World Kobane Day rally (memorable for the Kurdish guy shouting "We need to kill the dominant man inside all of us! Long live the women's revolution!" in a really loud PA system so you could hear it all over the square. *g*)
- Organized a dinner for the elected officials in the union so we could get to know each other better.
- Held introductory meeting for new union members.
- Got an op-ed published about a current forest conflict, gave feedback on other texts about this issue, put up stuff on our website about it, and generally communicated a lot with other people about it.
- Gone to a weekend workshop about wood-living fungi (this is actually mostly for fun, but it's also for getting better at doing forest inventories, so I'm putting it here).
- Eeeemailed a lot, it never ends.