Snowflake Challenge: Post The Third

Challenge #3: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

In your own space, tell us who, from one of your fandoms, would you most want to have dinner with (or tea, or a random afternoon visit), And why? This could be a creator, an actor, a costumer, a set designer, a director, a character, a composer, anybody! What would you talk about? What are you dying to know? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Easy. I choose the Concrete Rose, AEW's Sonny Kiss. I love his talent, attitude, and optimism. I'd love to geek out with him for hours over dance and blending perfume oils and 90s pop culture. (Because, dance! And perfume oils! And 90s pop culture!) It would also be ton of fun to dream up sequels for last year's extended What's Next? promo.

To further liven things up, I'm adding Aubrey Edwards and Tony Schiavone into the mix, to duplicate the configuration from this podcast, because they are also fascinating and delightful human beings who have great rapport with each other and would be a blast to talk to about anything.

これで以上です。

What Am I Reading Wednesday - January 6

Welp. It's been nonstop sirens since about 11:30 today. In more pleasant matters, here's:

What I Just Finished Reading

Mongolia – Michael Dillon
This is a poorly written book: disorganized, redundant, sloppily composed, and filled with grammatical, typographical, transliteration, and spelling errors. I strongly suspect Dillon signed a contract for a 200-page book; otherwise, it’s hard to explain the existence of these 194 pages of passive-voice, run-on sentences that nonsensically repeat the same bits of—frequently trivial and irrelevant—information, often half a dozen times or more throughout the volume. Get rid of the redundancies and the book would shrink from 194 pages to about 90. Rewrite the remainder in direct, active-voice sentences and you’d have a roughly 65-page manuscript that would actually be worth reading.

To illustrate, ( here’s a random paragraph. )

( Skipping forward to the promised elaboration in chapter 10, we have: )

It’s too bad Bloomsbury Publishing didn’t see fit to give this one a more thorough edit.

The Bass Rock – Evie Wyld
This is an excellent book. (And boy, I’m glad I waited to read it until after the holidays, as it’s also a delightfully creepy gothic and incisive commentary on men’s mistreatment of women through the centuries.)

Wyld’s language is beautiful. I frequently paused to reread and savor individual sentences. Again, it’s also eerie, brilliantly conjuring an atmosphere of creeping dread lurking just out of sight behind the next corner. Forget the holidays; I had to stop reading this one after dark. It’s ingeniously structured as well, and while some of that structure is admittedly entirely stylistic, I enjoyed figuring it out as I went along. The rest is ( cut for spoilers. )

Again, Wyld lets the plot speak for itself on these points, and boy is it effective. To be sure, there are a few points where the narrative is a little too neatly resolved, but they did very little to decrease my enjoyment of this damn good book.


What I Am Currently Reading

Mythos – Stephen Fry
I’ve only dipped into the Forward and first chapter so far, but am enjoying it.

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London – Garth Nix
I'm only a few chapters into this one, but so far the creativity and worldbuilding are as good as I've come to expect from Nix.

Secret Agent 666 – Richard Spence
I’m enjoying this book as well, although I find Spence’s style much easier to follow in an audio recording than on paper.

Cul De Sac – Richard Thompson
The best cartoon since Calvin and Hobbes; Thompson was a gem and he is sorely missed.

欲しがりな君と不束な僕 – 直野儚羅 (Hoshigarina Kimi to Futsutsuna Boku – Naona Bohra)
This week, I went back and read the first yomikiri, an over-the-top but cute yarn in which ( cut for spoilers. )

片づける 禅の作法 – 枡野俊明 (Katazukeru Zen no Houhou – Makino Shunmyo)
I enjoy Makino's simple, clear prose.


What I'm Reading Next

I picked up T.J. Kingfisher’s The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, because why not, for 99 cents, and two iffy-looking freebies from our everything store overlords.


これで以上です。