July 3, 2022 at 2:53 pm (Books, Recommended, Sundays, Surprises)
Tags: dystopia, horror, novel, reading lists, science fiction, science fiction series, summer, summer reading
RIP Roscoe. Very sad. His best friend locked him in a room and nailed plywood boards over the doors and windows. All Roscoe could do was watch as his friend worked, his face looking ghostly and sad.
Don’t every tell anyone that teenagers can’t make the hard decisions.
Now we’re in a forest, p. 253. That monster, Drake, who is really two teenagers in one (Brittney’s the other one — she keeps trying to kill Drake because she’s good, see? And Drake is bad. Only, they’re the same body. So Brittney hasn’t got it all figured out yet.) hears something approaching. Something big.
It was silver and bronze, dully reflective. It had an insect’s head with prominent, gnashing mouthparts that made Drake think of a Benihana chef flashing knives ceremonially. Its wickedly curved mandibles of black horn or bone protruded from the side of its mouth. It smelled like curry and ammonia.
— Plague, A Gone Novel, p. 253
Is that a giant cockroach? Self haaaates cockroaches!
She even hates spiders. Which is why Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time left her feeling a little, how shall we say, detached.
Not content with scaring the bejesus out of his readers with the above description, Michael Grant has to describe how they move:
They ran in a rush on six legs, stopping, starting, then skittering forward again at alarming speed. Their tarnished silver wings folded back against bronze carapaces, like beetles or cockroaches.
Stay tuned.
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July 3, 2022 at 2:00 pm (Links, Sundays, postaday)
Tags: summer, happiness, California, Garden, blogs, photo challenge, One Word Sunday
The prompt today for Travel with Intent’s One Word Sunday is MATCHING.
Much as self wishes she could find something other than flowers to post to the various challenges, this pair of blooms on her All Dressed Up rose was just too much to resist.
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July 3, 2022 at 12:10 am (Flowers, Links, postaday, Surprises)
Tags: backyard, California, Cee Neuner, Flower of the Day, Garden, photo challenge, Saturdays, summer
Today there are new blooms on her All Dressed Up rose. So pretty! Self is really glad she decided to move it from the front yard to the back — now she can gaze at it all day through the French doors, she doesn’t even have to step out of her house.
Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day Challenge.
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July 1, 2022 at 11:57 pm (Flowers, Links, postaday)
Tags: blogs, Cee Neuner, Flower of the Day, Fridays, Garden, photo challenge, porch, summer
Self looooves hydrangeas. She has about six potted hydrangeas, and two in the ground. The two in the ground are dying. The ones in the pots are thriving. Her soil is so bad.
Most of her hydrangea are white, except for one. She re-potted it last year, and it nearly died. But this year, it recovered. So here’s a shot of her blue hydrangea, on the front porch.
Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day Challenge.
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July 1, 2022 at 5:42 pm (Links, postaday, The Economist)
Tags: blogs, bushboy's world, causes, Fridays, grief, heroes, inspiration, Last on the Card, memorial, photo challenge, politics, summer, transitions, Ukraine
Self is participating in bushboy’s Last on the Card Challenge.
Her Last on the Card for June 2022 is a real heartbreaker: Roman Ratushny’s obituary in The Economist of 25 June 2022.
A Ukrainian activist, Roman Ratushny volunteered the first day of the Russian invasion. He was killed near Izyum on 9 June. He was 24.
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July 1, 2022 at 1:18 am (Books, Conversations, Surprises)
Tags: dystopia, horror, novel, reading lists, science fiction, science fiction series, summer, summer reading
- Edilio (one of the less self-absorbed characters): “You know, Albert, you want so bad to be the big man, the Donald Trump of Perdido Beach, why don’t you go deal with Drake?”
So Donald Trump is not beneath the notice of the ultra-cool American teens of Perdido Beach, California — ?! Who would have thought? (After reading the sentence, self looked up the book’s publication date: 2011)
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June 30, 2022 at 10:14 pm (Books, Conversations, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: California, dystopia, horror, novel, reading lists, science fiction series, summer, summer reading, suspense
Self has been reading Plague: A Gone Novel. She’s still less than a hundred pages in, but already she is grateful for the writing: when a book about southern California teen-agers trapped under an invisible dome and having to deal with urges and drinking and plague, not to mention insects that burrow inside them, turns out also to be well- written, she is all : Too much! First the Adrian Tchaikovsky space opera, then this! What are the odds? What has she done to deserve etc.?
The Gone books have two main protagonists: Sam and Caine. The two are twins who’ve been separated at birth: their single mother gave Caine up for adoption, but kept Sam. Caine, naturally, grows up to be a bad boy. Because of his malevolence, Caine has been exiled by the other kids to an island off Perdido Beach. He is accompanied in exile by a beautiful girl, Diana, who’s in love with him. On p. 70, Caine and Diana start making out and then they argue. Caine starts lifting boulders with his finger and flinging them around (so, magic powers!)
“Sometimes I hate you!” he yelled and with a flick of his wrist sent the boulder flying off the cliff and falling toward the water below.
“Just sometimes?” Diana raised one skeptical brow. “I hate you almost all the time.”
They glared at each other with a look that was hate but also something else, something so much more helpless than hatred.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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June 29, 2022 at 11:47 pm (Flowers, Links, postaday)
Tags: California, Cee Neuner, CMMC, Garden, photo challenge, porch, summer
The prompt for the last week of June 2022 is FLOWERS AND LEAVES.
Inspired by Cee’s close-up of a lotus flower, self tried doing some extreme close-ups of flowers around her garden. Here’s a scabiosa, it’s blooming on her front porch.
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June 29, 2022 at 8:55 pm (Artists and Writers, Recommended, Surprises, Books)
Tags: reading lists, summer, novel, science fiction, dystopia, favorites, summer reading, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shards of Earth, science fiction series
Self finished Shards of Earth after four days of staying-home-all-day and not-changing-out-of-pajamas, four days of asking herself HOLY COW is-this-the-best-space-opera-she-has-EVER-read–or-what and how–is-jug-eared-Idris-Telemmier-the-hottest-space-hero-of-all-time?
FIVE STARS!
Plague, self’s current read, is giving her plenty of reason to reflect on January 6 Committee Hearings drama.
How was it fair? Caine was a liar, a manipulator, a murderer. And Caine was probably lying in satin sheets with Diana eating actual food and watching a DVD. Clean sheets, candy bars, and a wonderful, willing girl.
Caine who had never done a single good or decent thing was living in luxury.
Sam, who had tried and tried and done everything he could, was sitting in his house with a raging headache, smelling vomit with a pair of ibuprofen burning a hole in his stomach lining.
— Plague, A Gone Novel, by Michael Grant, p. 39
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June 27, 2022 at 5:15 pm (Books, Conversations, Explorers, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: Adrian Tchaikovsky, British writers, favorites, Mondays, reading lists, science fiction, Shards of Earth, space fantasy, space opera, summer, summer reading, suspense
You’re barreling along on p. 380 of an Adrian Tchaikovsky novel and you’re feeling it, really feeling it, swept along by the dense prose and the unspace and the intense flashbacks to what happened on Berenhof, when . . .
OLLI: “Son of a bitch, I knew it!”
And Solace sends the message.
NOOOO! Airlock her now, Olli!
Self can’t even.
Stay tuned.
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