. I have a book in mind for the next link of the Book Chain challenge, but I'm waiting for it to come in at the library, so instead I've been tackling the backlog of the monthly Random Book challenge.

For September, I read A Tremble in the Air by James D. Macdonald. It's a mystery novella, in which a psychic investigator is called in to investigate a ghostly apparition, and uncovers a murder. ( Read more... )

For August, I read A Moment of Silence by Anna Dean. This is also a murder mystery; this time the gimmick is that it's set in Regency times - the Kirkus review features the phrase "if Jane Austen had written Miss Marple", which gives a fair idea of what it's aiming for. ( Read more... )

For July, I'm reading Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, which is an interesting experience because every other time I've read a Dickens novel I've gone in basically knowing the story already, but this time I had no idea what to expect. ( Read more... )

Little Dorrit would also work as the next link in the Book Chain, but I have a feeling I'm going to be a while getting through it, so I'm keeping it in mind as a fallback but if something quicker comes along I'll use that instead.


. Unrelated to any of the book challenges I'm doing, I'm also participating in Around the World in Eighty Emails, an online book club that's doing Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days in sections attached to the dates on which the novel's events take place, starting on 2 October and finishing eighty days later in mid-December. I wasn't sure before I started if I'd ever read an unabridged version of the novel before, but I'm thinking I hadn't; the general outline of events is familiar, but a lot of the details are new to me.


. I finished the jigsaw puzzle early in the week, and what with one thing and another I haven't got around to packing it away and starting a new one yet.


. At Monday Knights, we had a long weekend session that started in the early afternoon. We began with The Mind as a warm-up, spent several hours playing Arkham Horror, and finished up with a few rounds of Concept. ( Read more... )


. I was listening to music on my earbuds while I did something in the yard, and I wanted to skip to the next music track but I'd left my phone (which was acting as the music player) inside. I had a vague memory that the earbuds had a way of signalling the phone to skip to the next track by pressing one of the volume buttons the right way, so I started randomly pressing buttons to see if I could find it. ( Read more... )


. I've added a new category to my monthly fiction log. ( Read more... )


. Another thing I've been doing to take my mind off things is playing a computer game called Squeakross, in which you solve picross puzzles in order to earn clothing and furniture items to decorate a cartoon mouse and its habitat. ( Read more... )


. Some years ago, I agreed to store some stuff for someone I knew, on the understanding that they'd come and pick it up next time they were in town. What with one thing and another (including, to be fair, several actual family crises), it never seemed to be the right time for them to come, so the stuff's been sitting in my storage unit for years, but this week finally they arranged for somebody to come and get it. I'm hoping to ride the momentum and take the opportunity to reassess my own stuff that's been sitting in the storage unit, and see what can be disposed of or shifted to somewhere less expensive.


. Yesterday I went to the pool and swam laps for the first time in quite a while. I enjoyed it, though unsurprisingly I don't have the stamina I used to have when I was doing it more regularly. Afterward, I got an interesting foot cramp that may or may not have been related.


. Another for the Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down and Thought I Knew How to Pronounce file: prions, the biochemical whatsits responsible for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and mad cow disease, are correctly pronounced pree-on. The way I've been pronouncing it for the last thirty-odd years, with the same first syllable as "pry bar", is apparently common enough that I may well have heard it pronounced that way in the wild, but is not the original pronunciation and is not officially considered correct.