YouKneeK’s 2021 SF&F Overdose Part 1

Happy New Year! I look forward to another year of reading, discussing, and piffling. :)

Here’s my usual introductory info:

• I read mostly science fiction and fantasy, with a heavier emphasis on fantasy.
  
• I tend to read slightly older books versus the newest releases.
  
• I hate spoilers. Any spoilers in my reviews should be safely hidden behind spoiler tags.
  
• I prefer to read a series after it’s complete, and I read all the books pretty close together.
  
• I’m 45, female, and live in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA in the U.S where I work as a programmer.
  
• My cat’s name is Ernest and he’s a freak.

For tentative reading plans and stats, click here. (More details about this in my upcoming third post.)

2021 Reading Index

Clicking on the Date Read will take you to the post containing the review.

   Date Read/
 # Review Link  Title                            Author(s)		
 1 2021-01-07   Kushiel's Mercy                  Jacqueline Carey
 2 2021-01-10   The Best of All Possible Worlds  Karen Lord
 3 2021-01-18   Naamah's Kiss                    Jacqueline Carey
 4 2021-01-29   Naamah's Curse                   Jacqueline Carey
 5 2021-02-03   Restoration                      Carol Berg
 6 2021-02-06   Naamah's Blessing                Jacqueline Carey
 7 2021-02-09   The Diary of a Young Girl        Anne Frank
 8 2021-02-13   Rosewater                        Tade Thompson
 9 2021-02-13   The Last Wish                    Andrzej Sapkowski
10 2021-02-20   The Sword-Edged Blonde           Alex Blesdoe
11 2021-02-21   The House of the Spirits         Isabel Allende

I usually like to post some of my tentative reading plans near the beginning of the year. I’m doing it a little differently this year. You can find them here. Over on Goodreads, somebody posted her reading challenges on this site and I’d never seen it before. It lets you add notes and lists and pictures and can be used for a variety of things. I don’t know that I’ll use it over the long term (more notes on that below), but it was fun to play with for a little bit and I thought I’d share in case anybody else was interested in playing with it.

From that link you can double click on “Tentative Reading Plans” to see the books I’m tentatively planning to try reading this year. I included lists of this year’s classic selections as well as the series I plan to read and some other possible-but-likely-to-change standalone choices. As always, I’d be very interested in any comments about my choices. Just please hide any spoilers.

I did want to add some comments here about my classic selections. I went with all easy choices for my classics this year. I really got burnt out with The Canterbury Tales in 2020, plus my reading speed has been slower lately, so I decided this year I’d keep it easy and give myself a break. I’m hopeful that by 2022 I’ll be ready to schedule at least one classic that I expect to be challenging, which is more in line with what I’ve done in previous years.

Some notes on my classic selections: I read The Diary of a Young Girl at least a couple times when I was a child and really enjoyed it, but it’s been probably more than 30 years. I’d like to read it again from an adult’s perspective. Believe it or not, I’ve never read To Kill a Mockingbird, and I always see people raving about it. I think I read one or two of the stories in Gulliver’s Travels in my teens, but never the whole thing. And The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was chosen so I could try out the writing of another Brontë sister after trying and having mixed feelings about Jane Eyre in 2020. I believe it was suggested that Tenant might work better for somebody like me who isn’t that crazy for romance in her books. The Shakespeare choices are the dreaded Romeo and Juliet, which I had intended to read in 2020 but never got to, and Merry Wives of Windsor which BookstoogeLT and BrokenTune had both recently mentioned favorably.

As far as the Milanote thing, I like it and I had fun messing with it, but I don’t know that it’s really practical for this purpose. Not for me, anyway. In our reading world, I could see it being more useful for somebody who doesn’t already have a tracking method for their reading plans. As for me, I’m very attached to the details and formulas and control I have through my spreadsheet and my database. Milanote could never replace those things and so I would only use it for presentation to others. I know very well that most people (myself included!) don’t usually click links in a thread unless something is of particular interest. Even if people do click on it, it’s not like they would be avidly checking it every day – they might look at it once or twice a year, so it isn’t worth spending much time on it. Keeping it up would be pretty easy though – mostly just a matter of checking off the checkboxes. It didn’t even take long to do the initial setup. So we’ll see. I like learning about new tools, even if I don’t end up using them.

The main issues I saw with Milanote in the short time I used it were:

1. Your boards can have up to a total of 100 cards with the free version. A card would consist of one note, one list, one graphic, etc. To get unlimited cards, you have to pay something like $10 a month. The simple stuff I did used up 42 out of 100 cards, but most of that was in the stats. I had 5 graphics per year from 2014-2020, so that’s 35 cards right there. The reading plans page took only 5 cards – one for the notes, one for each of my 3 lists, and one for the picture. For the stats, I could probably cheat by combining the 5 charts into one big image if I wanted to and reduce my # of cards by 28, although that wouldn’t look great on mobile devices.

2. The cards get reordered a bit if it’s viewed on mobile, which is partly good and partly bad. I designed it on my desktop, so I expected it would probably look horrible on mobile. I tried opening it on my phone to see how it looked and it actually didn’t look that bad. It rearranged the cards to be more readable on a smaller screen, which was nice. The problem was that it didn’t rearrange them the way I would have wanted. I didn’t see a way to specify a precise display order; it just seems to determine it based on the way the cards are positioned. My reading plan page came out ok, but my stats page was a mess with the years listed out of order and the header in the middle of it all. I had to put the years inside a column, which is less compact than the way I’d originally designed it, but works ok.

I’d be curious if anybody has used this before and/or what they think of it if they’ve tried it. I might keep this in mind for work, as I could see it having some suitable business applications. You can give multiple people access to edit a page, so it could be good for collaborating on projects.

I heartily approve the choice to include Codex Alera & To Kill a Mockingbird. Mockingbird was especially fantastic.

I did give up on the Culture books by Banks but that was more grounded in our differing philosophy than because of a huge dislike. Do be aware, if you're not already, that the main character in Lawrence's book is a rapist and an all around evil person.

I have not read any of the Highly Tentative choices, so I can't comment on what I think of them (besides the fact that I haven't read them).

Happy new year!

>4 BookstoogeLT: I thought you might approve of Codex Alera! Thanks for the warning about the Lawrence books. I have occasionally enjoyed books despite hating the main character, so I’ll have to see how that one goes.

At least 5 of those highly tentative books were on my 2020 schedule, and some of them have been on the schedule even longer, so it’s anybody’s guess whether I’ll actually get to them this year. Whenever I decide to participate in one of the group reads on GR, one of those books usually gets swapped out to make room.

>5 quondame: Thank you, happy new year to you too!

Happy new year to you and Ernest! I hope it is a great one for you. I'm looking forward to following your reading again.

I had to study Romeo and Juliet in high school and hated it! I hope it will be better when read of your own free will, rather than forced on you by a teacher.

I've read the first two Wormwood books and loved them. I must get to book 3 this year.

Happy New Year and good reading!

Happy new year!

I read To Kill a Mockingbird back in high school which is so long ago now that I don't remember the story at all. I don't even remember if I liked it or not and have absolutely no desire to try again at this time. I hope you enjoy your Shakespeare picks. I loved The Ten Thousand Doors of January last year and hope you enjoy it too. Ones I've had on my radar and haven't pulled the trigger on are Diary of a Young Girl, Codex Alera (which is just a matter of time for me I think) and To Ride Hell's Chasm - looking forward to reviews of all of these if you get to them.

Your post reminds me that I need to pick out a classic to read at some point this year.

>3 YouKneeK: Thank you for the comments on milanote. It looks alot like Trello (which my office colleagues have adopted with a vengeance.) but I can see where it would work well for project management in a number of ways.

I look forward to hearing your comments on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, because that's one I keep meaning to get around to reading for myself.

Happy New Year and New Thread!

>10 jillmwo: It does look like Trello! I had to close milanote before it reminded me of work.

>7 Sakerfalcon:, >8 mattries37315:, >9 Narilka:, >10 jillmwo:, >11 majkia: Thank you all, and I hope all of you have a wonderful new year!

>7 Sakerfalcon: Although I read several Shakespeare plays in school, most of which I considered torturous, Romeo and Juliet somehow wasn’t one of them. I believe I pretty much know the whole story anyway, and it doesn’t appeal to me, but I figure I ought to have the experience since it has been so influential. Contrary to my reaction in school, as an adult I’ve found the Shakespeare plays to be fast and easy reads, so at least it should be only light torture. :) I’m also holding out some faint hope that I don’t know it as well as I think and it will have some surprises in store.

>9 Narilka: That seems to be how I feel about a lot of the books I had to read for school. I’ve noticed a lot of praise for Ten Thousand Doors of January so I’m looking forward to trying that one! That's one I plan to try to keep on the list even if I swap most of the others out.

>10 jillmwo: I haven’t heard of Trello, either. These sorts of collaborative design tools seem to have passed my team by, although I imagine there are probably other departments in our company that do use them. In truth I’m not sure if it would be very useful for the types of projects we do, or not enough so to justify trying to get people to buy into yet another tool. It’s something I’ll be keeping in mind though, in case I see a situation where it might save a lot of time and trouble.

>12 Karlstar: LOL, sorry for the traumatic work flashbacks!

>7 Sakerfalcon: Romeo and Juliet was our set Shakespeare for my 'O' Levels - we were offered the choice of that or Julius Caesar, and being a girl-only school, 90% of the class voted for R&J. I wasn't one of them - I thought the whole premise very soppy, and nothing changed my opinion while we were studying it. I do recall the class was taken to a screening of Franco Zeffirelli's film version (https://www.librarything.com/work/532592) which wasn't bad.

>13 YouKneeK: We use Trello boards at work for managing internal QA checks, various longer running projects, and I use it to manage our team's Freedom of Information requests, and use it for recurring pieces of work.

I do a major statutory return every year, with various bits of interdependency between various proformas, and it's a way of keeping track of what has to be done in what order...

>15 Maddz: Very similar, we use it to keep track of high/medium/low priority projects at a high level per quarter, though people sometimes use it as a 'list everything we do' board, which it isn't supposed to be.

>14 Maddz: Although I have often tried to watch an adaptation of the Shakespeare plays after reading them, Romeo and Juliet is one play where I will most definitely skip that part of the process.

>15 Maddz:, >16 Karlstar: I took a quick peek and it looks like Trello is more heavily geared toward project management than design, based on just reading the intro page and not actually trying it for myself yet. My team currently does most of our project management either through Microsoft Teams or SharePoint. Teams has a task list functionality that looks very similar to Trello in that you create cards for different tasks. Each task can then be given a status (in progress, complete, etc.), can be assigned to one or more people, and can be assigned to categories so that you can focus on tasks for whichever category matters the most to you at the moment. There’s dynamic filtering and grouping to change how you look at the tasks, and the cards can have notes and such added to them.

We haven't used that feature very much though. My team tends to prefer using shared spreadsheets for managing major projects. I like seeing more detail at once in a more compact tabular format whereas the card-based format, at least the way it’s presented in Teams, limits how much I can see at once. I also find editing and filtering easier in Excel, but that may in large part be just because it’s what I’m used to. Plus Excel has formulas! Formulas are very important. :)

Hi, and Happy New Year!

I looked at your tentative reading plans. On the HIGHLY tentative plans, I can personally recommend The House of the Spirits, which was brilliant and started me on an Isabel Allende reading binge. I also read and mostly enjoyed Seveneves. There was one part that I wasn't thrilled with (I forget why), but overall it was a good book and parts of it were exceptional and continue to resonate with me.

Happy New Thread & Year! May the book gods smile upon you this year!

Starred!

>18 Storeetllr: and >19 clamairy: Thank you, and happy new year to both of you!

>18 Storeetllr: Oh, that’s good to hear you liked The House of Spirits so much. I haven’t really noticed many comments on it, either good or bad, so it’s one of the ones I keep swapping out in favor of other priorities. I’ll try to keep it in the schedule this year. :) I haven’t had the greatest success with Neal Stephenson so far, so I’m not very enthusiastic about getting to Seveneves, but I’m hopeful I might be pleasantly surprised. I’ve had it on my Kindle for years and would like to get it done this year so it can stop haunting me.

>20 fuzzi: Thanks!

Seveneves is my only Stephenson. It was kind of long, and I was hesitant to try it, but it hooked me pretty much from the start. I think I tried another of his after - um, was it Anathem? Yes, I think so - but couldn't seem to get into it so DNF.

>22 Storeetllr: At least you have DNF skills! This is something I lack, even while acknowledging that it’s far more logical to not waste time on something one isn’t enjoying.

I haven’t tried Anathem. I have read his Zodiac, Snow Crash, and Diamond Age books and felt pretty lukewarm on all of them. I didn’t hate them, but didn’t enjoy them that much either. Diamond Age was the one I liked best of the three.

Has anybody here read Grass by Sheri Tepper? I purchased the Kindle edition on sale a couple years ago, and it’s been sitting on my Kindle presenting me with a dilemma ever since.

I knew it was the first book in a trilogy when I bought it. My plan was to try Grass and then, if I liked it, I’d get the next book straight away. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the second book, Raising the Stones, is difficult to find in the US. It isn’t available on Kindle, and my library system doesn’t have it in any format. I prefer not to purchase physical books, and I don't expect I'll want to make an exception in this case.

I haven’t wanted to research too deeply for fear of encountering spoilers, but I’m curious if Grass can be read as a standalone or if it’s only part of a larger story that’s likely to leave me unsatisfied by itself? I don't know that I'll be able to fit it in this year, but if I could treat it as a standalone I would probably schedule it next year.

>24 YouKneeK: Grass is a pretty powerful read. It's part of a shared universe set of books but I don't recall that there are strong character or narrative connections. Nor do the other two books in the series come up to it for impact, though Sideshow leaves its own mark.

>25 quondame: That's a huge help, thank you!

>24 YouKneeK: I heard really good reviews about Grass, but haven't picked up a copy yet.

Happy new year!

re: Romeo and Juliet, I think it's a play that reads better when one is older. I think that's because the truest tragedy, for me, is that they aren't old enough to realize they can wait.

Happy new year! I seldom manage to dip in and out of your thread it fills with posts so rapidly! But I'm sure you'll have many great reads ahead!

To Kill a Mockingbird is wonderful, one fo the few classics that everybody should read. Don't bother with the 'sequel' the was released a couple of years back it has nowhere near the magic.

We've had a few Stephenson discussions among pub residents here and there, I too greatly enjoyed Diamond Age, and Seveneves is not as good. Far from as bad as the worst of his works, but too long too many plot holes, and just not quite there, despite being clever in concept.

>28 libraryperilous: and >29 reading_fox: Thank you and happy new year to both of you!

>27 fuzzi: I had really been looking forward to trying it. At the time I bought it, I had some extra room on my reading schedule and I immediately went to fill that space in with Grass and its sequels, then became discouraged when I realized book 2 wasn’t easily available. I should have asked this group about it back then.

>28 libraryperilous: The part in your spoiler tag is an aspect of the story that’s always annoyed me a bit, actually. But maybe I’ll feel differently when I read it in context of the whole story. This for the record is a sign of how unsurprised I expect to be by this story because I would normally never, ever, ever click on a spoiler tagged comment for a story I haven’t read yet if I intend to read it. :)

>29 reading_fox: No worries, I know how difficult it can be to keep up with threads with limited time in the day. The Green Dragon is usually just about the right activity level for me, but I get overwhelmed if I try to fit in other LT groups. The main thing that keeps me coming back to the Green Dragon each year is all the comments, though. I love having so many people with whom to discuss what I’m reading! I’m looking forward to trying To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve seen so many people complain about Go Set a Watchman since it was released that I’m pretty determined not to try reading it, so I'm happy to see you're keeping that trend alive. :) The Stephenson conversations in this group are always fun because the opinions vary so much, with everybody having their favorites and least favorites.

>24 YouKneeK: I have not read Grass but I did read 2 books by Tepper. I believe it was North Shore and South Shore? Anyway, I swore off Tepper after them....

>24 YouKneeK: I agree with >25 quondame: Grass stands alone very well. Raising the stones wasn't that easy to find in the UK either, and I read it last of the three with no problems.

We had a group read of To ride Hell's chasm some years ago, I think the threads may be linked on the book's main page. As I recall, Janny herself may have dropped in too!

>29 reading_fox: another book that everyone should read aside from To Kill a Mockingbird is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. To me it was a city version though not an imitation of Lee's masterpiece. I read it several years ago and was blown away. Marvelous, just marvelous.

>31 BookstoogeLT: Haha, so you really liked them and didn't want to overwhelm yourself with too much of a good thing? :) I haven't read anything by Tepper yet, so Grass will probably be my first.

>32 Sakerfalcon: Wonderful, thanks for the confirmation on Grass! And I’ve made myself a note to check out the To Ride Hell’s Chasm group read here if/when I get to it.

>33 fuzzi: I haven’t read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn either, although I have of course heard of it. I’ll have to keep that one on my radar for a future classic selection.

>34 YouKneeK: Yes, exactly. I'm glad you caught my meaning instead of the obvious ;-)

>35 BookstoogeLT: Your self control astounds and amazes me! ;)

>30 YouKneeK: It's so hard to avoid spoilers of popular classics. Some editions even spoil the plots on the back covers. I'm looking forward to your review of R&J!

>23 YouKneeK: I'm too old NOT to DNF books if they aren't hooking me in one way or another, though sometimes I've DNFd a book only to pick it up and read and enjoy it some time later.

>24 YouKneeK: Grass is, as Susan said, powerful and can be read as a standalone.

>31 BookstoogeLT: I've read a lot of Tepper but had never heard of Northshore or Southshore before. If I'd read Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore first, I'd never have picked up another Tepper. If you ever want to try her again, I'd suggest Gate to Women's Country or Grass, or even Beauty.

>29 reading_fox: Even the best Stephenson is rife with plot holes. But they are pretty raw in Seveneves.

>38 Storeetllr: Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore is among my favorite Sheri Tepper books, and Gate to Women's Country I find ho-hum and shallow, too on message. Marianne really does show the interior of some OC behaviors in the points system, but really I just love it, and rather like the second and third books too, but for different reasons. North Shore and sequel are less typical Tepper in either her fantasy or her evils of maleness modes.

>39 quondame: Susan - Just goes to show how diverse we all are in our reading taste!

>37 libraryperilous: It is. I think people forget there are new people being born every day who haven't had the chance to read them yet. :) Or that there are people like me who avoided them for decades after finishing school! Although when it comes to book blurbs, I avoid them for all books. I find they often spoil more modern books too, or at least make a large portion of the story too easy to predict. My ideal situation is to go into a book completely clueless as to what it's about, aside from whatever I might have guessed from the title and cover.

>38 Storeetllr: Great, I’m very much looking forward to trying Grass! If I find myself with extra holes to fill in my reading schedule, which happens sometimes if I dislike a series and abandon it, this will probably be at the top of my list to help fill the gap.

Happy New Year!

I enjoyed the Codex Alera series, and am currently working through audiobooks of it. Also really liked the Ten Thousand Doors of January.

>38 Storeetllr: The Gate to Women's Country is amazing. I have read all three Arbai books and agree with others that Grass can be read as a stand-alone. It was the first Tepper I ever read and, at the time, I didn't even realize it was book #1 in a trilogy. Sideshow was my favorite Arbai book but the other two are also quite good. I don't recommend The Fresco. That one was a let-down for me. Six Moon Dance is another amazing stand-alone. Tepper was very good at expanding the scope of her stories as the narrative progresses. Six Moon Dance, The Arbai Trilogy, and The Gate to Women's Country are all excellent examples of that.

(Edited to fix touchstone)

>42 NorthernStar: Thank you, and happy new year to you too! I’m glad to read you enjoyed the Codex Alera series. I’ve been hearing good things about it lately and am looking forward to trying it. The first book has been sitting on my Kindle for 3.5 years, so it's past time.

>43 ScoLgo: It sounds like I might end up with several other books to try to fit in “someday” if I end up enjoying Grass. :)

>41 YouKneeK: so I'm not the only one who avoids the back covers and reviews of books that I plan to read someday? And I also don't click on the spoilers in posts if it's for something I think I will read, eventually.

I'm enjoying your thread. :)

>38 Storeetllr: >43 ScoLgo: Uhoh... You might have gotten me points blank between the eyes with a couple of bullets for The Gate to Women's Country...

>14 Maddz:
I am surprised that so many people seem to think of Romeo and Juliet as romantic. I have always seen it as an attack on the foolishness of "puppy love", and the wickedness of those who encourage it, out of political motives. And yes, I think it is brilliant.

And I too studied it at an all girls' school (in the 4th form. We did Julius Caesar the year before and Macbeth for the 'O'-level.)

To Kill a Mockingbird is another book I studied at school (also in the 4th, I think - maybe 3rd.) I concur that it is excellent.

Those are both works that I am glad to have covered in school. The weekly debates on them added a lot.

>47 -pilgrim-: I seem to recall we did Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, MacBeth and one other (probably one of the histories), and Romeo and Juliet at 'O' level. It's, what, nearly 50 years ago now?

The Merchant of Venice sticks in my mind because we acted out various scenes, and I recall the classmate who was playing Shylock 'honing' 2 rulers in the courtroom scene...

Our set books were less memorable apart from Pride and Prejudice at 'O' level. I think we did a Dickens one year - probably A Tale of Two Cities, and I vaguely remember Tess of the D'Urbervilles but I may have read my mother's copy. I have a better memory of my Latin texts - The Aeneid, The Consolation of Philosophy, and a text of Erasmus.

Jane Eyre was my sister's 'O' level text. She also read The History of Mr Polly.

>45 fuzzi: Woo hoo, another fellow spoilerphobe! Same here on not reading reviews. And thanks, I'm glad you're here. :)

>48 Maddz:
To be precise:
1st form: A Midsummer Night's Dream
2nd: The Merchant of Venice
3rd: Julius Caesar
4th: Romeo and Juliet
5th: Macbeth (this being the only one on the 'O'-level paper, of course)
A-level: Othello (I didn't actually take this, since I was doing science A-levels, but I joined the trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Donald Sinden chew the scenery as the Moor.)

But you lucked out on the novels, I think. We only ever covered 20th century texts, and the one for 'O'-level was Brighton Rock - which I loathed passionately.

And we had "war poetry" as the third paper.

Unfortunately I did not get to study Latin until much later. But my Greek texts were Herodotus' The Histories and Oedipus Tyrannos by Sophocles. Interesting that your Latin went so far into the mediaeval era; by contrast, my Greek covered Attic and Ionian, but never even went near Koinē.

I am guessing that we are much the same era, since we are both thinking in terms of 'O'-levels, rather than GCSEs. So it is interesting to see how much variation there was between curricula, at different schools.

>50 -pilgrim-: I was the Oxford examinations board, and I did my 'O' levels in 1973...

The Convent didn't offer Greek, just Greek Literature in Translation which the B stream took instead of Latin - hence the Aristophanes in my library. I was interested enough to read it - I hated Erasmus. I suspect we got the Erasmus because Catholic school - I seem to recall our text was one of his Apologias. I do recall the weird medieval constructions.

We didn't get a trip to Stratford on Avon - just trips to various local cinemas for Shakespeare screenings - we got The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Henry V, and Romeo and Juliet.

Happy New Year!

Good luck with Romeo and Juliet and The Merry Wives. I read R&J in high school (in the German translation) and I found it interesting but overrated. It's not become a favourite since even tho I have fond memories of watching an RSC production of it in Stratford o.A.

>52 BrokenTune: Thanks, and happy new year to you too! I figure worst case, the Shakespeare plays will at least be relatively fast reads. If I don't like them, it won't be an unending experience like a certain other book was last year. ;)

>49 YouKneeK: glad to be here!

I love my dh, but he has a tendency to spoil movie plots. When he tells me too much about a movie he wants me to watch, I just say "Fine, I won't watch that now..."

>54 fuzzi: Haha, has that tactic taught him any lessons or is he incurable?

>54 fuzzi: hahahaa. I mis-read DH as "Designated Husband" (mixing my sports and online acronyms) and had a good chuckle :-D

Happy new year! Back in the previous century, I took a course on Eliot and the Brontes, which included Tenant. I found it not terribly inspiring but much more agreeable than Wuthering Heights. But then I loved Jane Eyre, so our tastes in these things might not match.

>33 fuzzi: I've not yet read A tree grows in Brooklyn, but I do own a copy and when I find it again I will make reading it a priority.

>38 Storeetllr:, >39 quondame:, >43 ScoLgo: The Marianne books are among my favourites too! Isn't it funny how tastes vary! Makes for good discussion though. Northshore and Southshore have also been published in one volume as The Awakeners. Tepper is one of my favourite authors, despite the attacks on organised religion and unsubtle soapboxing in her books. It's great to find other readers of her work!

>50 -pilgrim-: Brighton Rock was still on the syllabus when I took GCSE English in 1990. I loathed it but we did get a day out to Brighton on the back of it! We were given a list of locations from the book and left to our own devices while the teachers went to the pub (at least, that's where we found them at the end of the day)!

>58 Sakerfalcon: That's incredible longevity for a modern set text! I have happy memories of my English teacher's set text choices. Brighton Rock was the only one that I did not enjoy; and for that I have the London Examination Board, not her, to blame.

Luckily my father had already given me The Power and the Glory to read; otherwise I could have been put off Graham Greene for life.

I still remember Pinkie describing sex with a woman as "like ordure on the hands". Charming!

ETA: And I have never been to Brighton.

>51 Maddz: We also got a trip to Stratford to see the 'O'-level text - Macbeth. It was a rather bizarre interpretation with the entire cast in tracksuits, with their allegiance as badges on the chest (which got rather confusing when minor rôles were taken in by "other members of the cast") and Macbeth himself played by the lead actor from the TV series Survivors (seventies' version).

Of all the performances of Shakespeare that I have seen, that still stands out on my mind as the worst.

>60 -pilgrim-: The weirdest Shakespeare I saw was a 1979 production at the Bristol Old Vic, starring John Shrapnel and Peter Postlethwaite.

When Timon goes forth from Athens naked, he strips off on stage. I was with my mother and I recall we turned to each other and raised our eyebrows...

>61 Maddz: Actor/directors are very fond of metaphorical interpretations of Shakespeare. Interesting the parts that they decide to interpret literally!

>62 -pilgrim-: Also the shock value and guaranteed publicity of Nudity! On Stage!

>61 Maddz: Postlethwaite was such a wonderful actor.

>60 -pilgrim-: The Shakespeare performance I recall most was a 1969-70 techno modern A Midsummer Night's Dream when my party was held up by the ushers and admitted just in time to be mocked from the stage. It weren't fair, it wasn't.

>55 YouKneeK: incurable...but I'm happy to be stuck with him anyway. 😁

>65 fuzzi: LOL :)

>63 libraryperilous: I think the most bizarre gratuitous nudity performance that I saw was a production of Malory's Morte d'Arthur, adapted for the stage as a series of short tableaux, multiple being performed simultaneously, in a church.

>61 Maddz:, >64 quondame:, >60 -pilgrim-:
Isn't it strange that it is the awful performances that have stuck in our minds, from forty years ago or more?

Maybe we should mention some outstandingly good productions of Shakespeare, to redress the balance?

Review: Kushiel’s Mercy by Jacqueline Carey



Kushiel’s Mercy is the last book in the second of three trilogies in the Kushiel’s Universe books. Three more books to go. I enjoyed the first trilogy quite a lot, but overall I enjoyed this second trilogy more. The main character worked a bit better for me, plus I think the author’s writing improved, especially compared to the first book which was her first published novel.

I really enjoyed the storyline in this book. It had some fun tropes that I haven’t run into much lately and I often had trouble putting the book down. There were a couple niggling logic issues I had trouble buying into, but they weren’t enough to pull me out of the story or dampen the fun. I think the whole trilogy had a little more humor than the first one did. At least, I found myself laughing a little more while I read it. There’s still a lot of dark stuff though, so this isn’t a humorous series overall. If there’s one big complaint I have, particularly the last two books, it’s that there are so many repetitive sex scenes and re-re-re-re-re-re-affirmations that the characters in question love each other. There’s usually some plot-driving discussion during those scenes to help keep them from being a complete bore, but it still got tedious.

I look forward to finding out what the last trilogy is about, after a short non-Kushiel break.

Next Book
The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord. This is the January science fiction group read for the group I’m in on Goodreads. I don’t know anything about either the book or the author, so this will be the best of all possible worlds for me as I go into it completely blind. ;)

>67 -pilgrim-: Sounds like a TV production of Carmina Burana I recall from years ago. The cast was dancing round an on-stage maypole, picked it up, and put it on the backdrop at an angle that most definitely failed the Mull of Kintyre test... I seem to recall it was broadcast very much post-watershed.

>69 Maddz: Given what I remember of the lyrics in Carmina Burana that is not actually very surprising:

♪♪Io! Io! Io!
Totus floreo!
Iam amore virginali
Totus ardeo!
Novus novus amor est...quod pereo! Quod pereo!♪♪

Review: The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord



This is a standalone science fiction book about finding appropriate wives for a group of Vulc… I mean, a group of Sadiri, after their planet has been destroyed and most of their women killed.

Ok, it’s really about more than that, but that’s the main plot that drives the story from beginning to end. The book is set on a planet where refugees from many different human cultures over the centuries have come, living in small and mostly insular communities where they maintain their own culture. The Sadiri are the most recent arrivals. Most of the story is told from the first-person perspective of Grace, a scientist assigned to help the Sadiri sort out their procreation issues.

It was interesting, and it held my attention pretty strongly after a slow start. My problem was that it started to tell a lot of interesting stories but didn’t finish them because those weren’t the stories the author wanted to tell. We meet different cultures, see hints of problems and mysteries and interesting histories at different settlements, learn just enough to want to know more about what’s going on there, and then we leave them to their own problems and move on to the next settlement. The transition from the first settlement was so abrupt that I assumed events there would somehow play a larger role in the story later, but nope.

I sometimes felt like I was reading some sort of story sampler, where we were given bits and pieces of different stories but never a full story, or at least not any of the full stories I wanted to read. The book was more about relationships than plot, I think. Not just romantic relationships, although there is some of that, but friends, colleagues, family members, relating to different cultures, etc. The main romance worked pretty well for me. I buy into them more easily when they build very slowly over time, growing first into friendship and then into something stronger like this one did, as long as they’re written well. This romance was written pretty well, but I would have been more interested in some of the partial stories if they had been fully fleshed out.

This is a hard one to rate. I enjoyed it, but it also frustrated me several times. I’m going to give it 3.5 stars and round down to 3 on Goodreads.

Next Book
Naamah’s Kiss, starting the last trilogy in Kushiel’s Universe.

>58 Sakerfalcon: and >33 fuzzi: May I put in a good word for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as well? I read it initially when I was in 8th grade and it made a tremendous impression on me. Great characters, recognizable situations and struggles. A truly wonderful book.

>72 jillmwo: I have that on my list to try to get to as one of my classic selections, maybe in 2022. It sounds interesting!

>73 YouKneeK: The film is charming as well.

>74 libraryperilous: Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind. I rarely find time for movies or tv shows, but most of my exceptions in the past few years have been adaptations of some of the classics I’ve read.

Review: Naamah’s Kiss by Jacqueline Carey



Naamah’s Kiss is the beginning of the third and final trilogy in the Kushiel’s Universe series. The second trilogy had taken place shortly after the first trilogy and followed a character we’d already met. This one, on the other hand, is set about 100 years later and introduces us to a brand new character, Moirin. Early in the book we learn that she’s the great, great granddaughter of Alais.

I spent the first couple of pages mourning all my favorite characters from the previous two trilogies, but then I became wrapped up in this new character’s story. I think the author’s writing continually improves throughout these books. For the most part I was engrossed, and that was despite not always liking Moirin’s decisions and also finding some of the secondary characters to be a bit annoying. I still liked Moirin herself and cared about what happened to her, and there were other secondary characters that I did like. The story was good, and it made me smile or laugh several times.

I did think Moirin adapted to the changes in her life too easily to be believable considering her past, so that sometimes pulled me out of the story to scoff, but I was mostly able to overlook it. I also like how the author has made each trilogy's main character and story distinct, with different types of magic and different types of problems. Sometimes things start to feel repetitive or recycled in a long series, especially if it has subseries that each focus on later generations, but I haven’t had that feeling with this one.

I’m giving this 4.5 stars and rounding up to 5 on Goodreads.

Next Book
Naamah’s Curse, the next book in this trilogy and the second-to-last book in the entire series.

Wow, I'm happy to see how much you've been enjoying those Jacqueline Carey books. I need to get to that first one, though I have to admit the thought of diving into a trilogy of trilogies is overwhelming.

>77 clamairy: Thanks, I'd love to read what you think if you try the first one. They’re a little different than the type of thing I would normally enjoy in some ways, particularly all the romance and sex, but the epic fantasy aspects are right up my alley.

If it helps, each book mostly tells a complete story. Within a trilogy there are some plot threads that carry across the trilogy, but each book has a main story that is resolved by the end and the author repeats the relevant plot points in the subsequent books. They are some pretty long books, though! They’re not the longest epic fantasy books out there, but they add up to about 6640 pages for all 9 books, averaging to 738 pages per book.

Review: Naamah’s Curse by Jacqueline Carey



Naamah’s Curse is the second book in the third and final trilogy of Kushiel’s Universe. One more book to go!

This one didn’t hold my interest as well as the previous book, nor as well as some of the other books in the series. I had a lot of work distractions while I was reading it, so I suspect that’s partly to blame. I never seem to enjoy books as well if I’m constantly distracted while reading; I need some uninterrupted time to get my head more involved in the story.

I still enjoyed the characters and the writing, and I enjoyed the story in general, but there were times I felt like things were being dragged out excessively long and I wanted the author to get on with it. Thinking back over the other two trilogies, the middle books were my least favorites in each of those, although I did enjoy them. Maybe that will prove to be the case with this trilogy also.

I don’t have a lot to say beyond that, or at least nothing I haven’t already written in previous reviews. I’ll save up my words for the upcoming final book when I’ll likely have more comments about the series in general. I think this is a world I’ll miss once I’ve finished the whole series.

Next Book
Naamah’s Blessing, the very last book in this series.

Late last year I mentioned that I had taken back up my old cross-stitching hobby, for the first time in several years. I posted a picture of my “normal project” and said I would post a picture of the “crazy project” at some later date. That date is here, mainly just because I reached a meterpebble (I can’t rightly call it a milestone) and so it seemed like a good time to share a picture.

This is the project I work on nearly every day, whereas the normal project is mostly only done on weekends or holidays. The below picture may appear like only a tiny indistinguishable sliver of work, but that’s actually 15,266 tiny little cross-stitches (one stitch is an x stitched over a square) and it’s taken me almost four months to do them. I’m 4.15% done with the project so I should be done soon! ;) My original goal was to average 100 stitches per day and finish it in about 10 years. I started it on October 1 and my current average is actually 126 stitches per day so I might finish it in a mere 8 years!

This one is stitched 1 over 1 on 28 count even weave. I think you can’t tell unless you look at it closely in person, but the stitches in the top-left corner are less neat and uniform. I was using a different method when I started the project. When I wasn’t happy with how it was looking, I tried going about it a different way and was happier with that. That’s why the left side, unlike the rest of the project, has some stitches without any stitches directly above them yet, and fewer parked threads dangling down. I’m still working my way past those early stitches and then that side will look more like the rest. The top-left stitches will always look yucky to me, but even I can’t really tell unless I look at it closely under a magnifying glass, so I’m not going to try to redo it because it would take many hours and I’d likely end up messing up the fabric or the neighboring stitches.

So here's the picture of what I've done so far. Rocking chair for scale. ;) As of yesterday evening, I’ve completed 20 full rows (out of 525), which was what I considered a “meterpebble”. I realize this looks like absolutely nothing at all. If you’d like to see what this blob of red, green, brown, and pink is eventually supposed to look like, here’s a full picture. The title is “Everything So Beautiful”, the original artist is Alana Giana, and the pattern designer is Heaven and Earth Designs.

>80 YouKneeK: How many scalps did you have to take to get that much hair? ;-)

>80 YouKneeK: Wow. Just wow. I am in awe.

>80 YouKneeK: What MrsLee said! That's impressive.

>81 BookstoogeLT: Haha, the only hair involved in this project is cat hair, and not for lack of trying to keep it off!

>82 MrsLee:, >83 Karlstar: Thanks. :) At this point I think it’s more ambitious than impressive. Impressive will come in 8 years or so if I can post a picture of the thing actually completed! I always did well in the past with sticking with a large project until it was complete and never really getting bored with it, but this one is about 6 times larger than my previous largest project and a lot can happen in 8-10 years.

>80 YouKneeK: It's going to be beautiful! Goals are great.

>80 YouKneeK: Impressive. That's going to be beautiful when you finish.

>85 quondame:, >86 Narilka: Thanks. :)

>80 YouKneeK: I too am in awe.

>88 -pilgrim-: I guess my reference to it as the “crazy project” makes sense now. :)

>80 YouKneeK: Holy shirt! That's going to be incredible when it's completed. Do you really expect it to take almost a decade?

>90 clamairy: I think it’s likely, since I’m really only spending an hour or so on it most days. I can’t see myself ever being willing to devote more time than that on a typical day. There’s too little free time and too many different things I want to do with that time. :)

That’s one reason I have the “normal project” going – even though I work on that one less, I can see progress more clearly when I do work on it plus it’s just a very different type of cross-stitch pattern so it gives me some variety. I’m enjoying the crazy project more, though. Despite its size and fairly frequent color changes, it’s an easier pattern to stitch. The other one takes more concentration. I’ve been listening to an audiobook some while stitching over the past month, but I usually can’t listen to it while working on the normal project.

I’m about 3 hours away from finishing a 22-hour audiobook that I stalled out on twice a couple years or so ago, so there’s been some progress on that too. :)

>80 YouKneeK: Wow! That will be fantastic when it's finished. It will be worth all your time and effort when you can hang it on the wall.

>80 YouKneeK: I cannot conceive of spending 8 years on a project. More power to you!

What >93 fuzzi: said. I'd check out at about week two. Congrats, and I'm sure it will be gorgeous!

May this project bring you years of quiet contentment, satisfaction and joy.

Yesterday I cleaned out a cupboard and decided to give away the last of my embroidery projects, along with the hoops that went with. Also some other crafty items, including a pine needle basket woven by my great-grandmother in which were her tatting tools. I had always planned to learn to tat lace. My hands won't allow me that type of fine work anymore.

>92 Sakerfalcon:, >93 fuzzi:, >94 libraryperilous:, >95 MrsLee: Thank you all. :)

>95 MrsLee: That must have been a difficult decision to give away, especially your great grandmother’s basket! Did you have any family members interested that you were able to give it to? Whether something goes to family or not, I do very much prefer the idea of things being give to somebody who will appreciate them rather than sitting unused in my closets.

Regarding the length of time spent on the project... Even in the past, my cross-stitch projects tended to be multi-year projects due to a combination of their size and the limited time I spent on them. Just looking back at my notes on the last large cross-stitch I did, it took me nearly 4 years and was quite a bit smaller than the big one I’m working on now. And that was back in my 20’s when I actually had spare time! People who devote more time to them could get them done much faster, but for me cross-stitch is just one of many activities that I enjoy, but not enough to give up other activities so I can spend more time on it.

>96 YouKneeK: Yes my sister-in-law loves things like that and her daughters are appreciative also. I am fortunate to have quite a few family members who like heirlooms, even if my own children don't!

>97 MrsLee: Oh good, I'm glad!

Audiobook Review: Restoration by Carol Berg



I have once again resumed my determined effort to learn to properly appreciate audiobooks! I read this trilogy in print about 10 years ago and loved it. A couple years ago, I decided to listen to it in audio. The narrator is Kevin Stillwell and I found his reading style works well for me, plus I already had an attachment to the characters and the story, so I did better with them than I usually do. However, I stalled out on this third audiobook twice despite enjoying it for the most part, and gave up. After picking cross-stitching back up recently, I decided to try it again while doing that. I’m still a bad audiobook listener, but I think listening while cross-stitching works a little better for me than listening while commuting in Atlanta traffic.

I enjoyed this whole trilogy, but I think the first book was my favorite and this last book, while good, was my least favorite. Seyonne’s decisions in this book became particularly frustrating to me. I always hate it when a favorite character goes darkside, even if it’s temporary. In the end his actions redeemed him pretty well, but he wasn’t fun to read about for a large portion of the story. I don’t remember what I thought when I first read it in print, I just remember inhaling them quickly and enjoying them all. The story from the first book was the only one I remembered very clearly though, so I think it must have been my favorite the first time around too. Despite some of my complaints, I did enjoy this overall and there were some great moments. I also think I would have enjoyed this even more had I re-read it in print rather than listening to it as an audio, but it’s hard to find time to re-read print books when there are so many new books I want to try.

One thing I’ve always loved about Carol Berg’s writing is that, at least in the books I’ve read so far, she starts out with a seemingly simple story that slowly gets more complex as she continuously reveals new layers that make you reconsider everything that happened before. She also does a great job of writing characters I care about and writes some really enjoyable character friendships. I consider her one of my favorite authors.

This series was my first introduction to Carol Berg and I loved it, but now that I’ve re-read them after reading some of her other books, I think I would recommend her Lighthouse duet as the better starting point, and also the related Sanctuary duet.

Next Audiobook
Now I’m going to try doing what I wrote about before and pick audiobooks that are the first book in a series I am interested in but don’t plan to read anytime soon. I’ll use this as a way to determine which of those series I should still plan to read in print someday, and which ones I should cross off the list. If I can tell I’d probably enjoy it in print (even if I don’t do great with the audio), then I’ll keep it on my list and re-read the first book in print once I’m ready to read the whole series.

So, I’m going to try The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski as my first attempt. It’s short at only 10 hours (for comparison, the one I just finished was 22 hours) so I’m hoping it will be easy to get through. I think I’ve read that this particular book is a collection of short stories, which might work well for me in audio. I’ve wanted to read The Witcher books for a very long time. My understanding is that the author is still writing in the world even though he has finished the main story, so that makes this series a lower priority for me as compared to the many series I’m also interested in for which the authors appear to have finished writing in those worlds. I expect this to be something I enjoy, so we’ll see if the audio proves me wrong. If it does, then at least I can stop trying to periodically make sense out of the latest series status in Polish. :)

I can conform The Last Wish is a series of interconnected short stories. I'm not sure if he's still writing in the series or if more of it just needs to be translated to English. The author is Polish.

>99 YouKneeK: I find the Lighthouse Duet and The Sanctuary Duet are my favorite Carol Berg books, my only complaint that I want more in that world! I've read everything of hers I can get my hands on which is all the novels on LT.

>99 YouKneeK:, >100 Narilka:
I read The Last Wish many years ago (ETA: event it was first published in English). I don't know whether it was the translation - which is certainly somewhat clunky - or what, but I found it hard to put the vignettes from Geralt's life together and get a coherent character, or feel for the world and its (complex) politics.

Reading Blood of Elves (and also playing some of the first computer game) was a much better experience for getting into the world, even if it takes place chronologically after the stories in The Last Wish.

I am whaling on the translation because I found the language repetitive and simplistic, whilst everyone I know who has read the original says that Sapkowski is known his poetic prose, and its subtle nuances!

Not trying to dampen your enthusiasm, but if the short stories don't work for you, please bear in mind that I didn't find them the best place to start.

>100 Narilka: I believe the main story has been translated and published in English, with Lady of the Lake being the final book. However, there’s another trilogy set in the world that was finished in Poland in 2006 but we’re still waiting on books 2 and 3 in the U.S. There was also a video I watched of him from 2018-ish indicating he planned to write “sidequel” stories. He said he promised his fans the main saga was complete and that he intends to keep his word, so anything new he writes won’t be directly related to that main saga. I remember the video as being very funny with lots of potato analogies. :) But yeah, the fact the books are published in Poland first can make it difficult for those of us who don't speak Polish to find details about its current series status since the most recent info is typically in Polish and the English translations are way behind.

>101 quondame: I definitely wouldn’t mind more in that world either! :) I haven’t read nearly as much of her work as I ought to considering how much I enjoy it. I’ve read those two duets, the Rai-Kirah trilogy, and Song of the Beast, but that’s it – only those 8 books.

>102 -pilgrim-: That’s good to know, thanks. I did play the first Witcher game in full and maybe a chapter or two of the second game. I enjoyed those a lot, so maybe having some familiarity with the character and the setting already will help a little.

>101 quondame: I totally agree with you! It is such an interesting world with so many potential stories.

>103 YouKneeK: I recommend the first 2/3 of the Collegia Magica trilogy. They were both 4.5 * reads for me. The third book I hated, but fortunately the main plot rounds off quite well after book 2.

>104 Sakerfalcon: Thanks, I've make a note of that as my possible next choice when I get back to her. Although knowing me, even being forewarned, I won't be able to resist reading the third book if I liked the first two. :)

>101 quondame: >103 YouKneeK: >104 Sakerfalcon: I just finished An Illusion of Thieves by Cate Glass. Cate Glass is the new(ish) byline of Carol Berg.

>106 quondame: I had heard she was publishing under a new name, but hadn’t heard too many details. I went and checked your review and I’m glad to see you enjoyed it!

Review: Naamah’s Blessing by Jacqueline Carey



This was the very last book in the trilogy of trilogies that makes up Kushiel’s Universe. This last book had a good story that mostly held my attention straight through, and I was satisfied with how everything wrapped up. It’s often difficult for me to say much about the last book in a long series, so the rest of this review is more about the series as a whole.

This was a good series. Not perfect, but enjoyable to read. I occasionally felt mildly impatient when I thought things were being dragged out overly long, but mostly it held my attention well and I always looked forward to sitting down to read more. The characters are fleshed out well, and the stories are mostly interesting. They’re the sort of epic fantasy stories where you spend a lot of time growing up with each new main character, and there’s a lot of political issues and maneuvering and quite a bit of introspection, so that won’t appeal to everybody, but those things usually appeal to me. There’s also a fair bit of adventure. There’s very little magic in the earlier books, but that increases in the second and especially third trilogies.

Each trilogy is told from the first-person perspective of a different character and has an overarching storyline, but each book within that trilogy tells a full story with just a few threads that are carried through to the other books. The first two trilogies are more closely related to each other. They take place closely together in the timeline and characters from the first trilogy are often seen in the second. The third trilogy takes place quite a bit later and features an entirely new cast of characters. The middle trilogy was my favorite. Its stories appealed to me the most, and I adored the main character.

As I’ve mentioned in some of my previous reviews, these books have quite a lot of sex. Additionally, each trilogy has a romantic storyline running through it. I would have been happier with less of both things, but it was mostly done well. There were some sections that were too angsty for me, but aside from that the author didn’t use any of the romance tropes that annoy me the most, and she did write the relationships convincingly. I liked that she didn’t drag things out forever and allowed the characters to settle into more secure relationships with each other. I enjoyed it more when the characters were confident in their relationship and were working together to achieve common goals.

Aside from the romance, the stories feature relationships of all sorts, and I thought they were written very well. Characters and character relationships are definitely where the author excels most, but the stories and world-building were good too. At some point, not in the near future, but eventually, I would like to check out some of her other work.

Next Book
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. This is my first quarter classic selection for 2021, my year of shorter and easier classics. I think this will be my first classic selection over the past few years where I actually know the story pretty well. I read this at least a couple times as a child and liked it a lot. Usually I pick classics that are either brand new to me, or that I read in school but don’t remember.

The edition I’ll be reading apparently has some additional content that was excluded from earlier editions. I’m doubtful that I’ll recognize what’s new. Although I do remember parts of this book pretty well, it has probably been more than 30 years since I read it so there are a lot of things I don’t remember.

I’m posting these pictures to follow up on a discussion -pilgrim- and I were having on her thread about one-handed tablet use. This is the “Flippy” (although there are other brands) that I often use when reading in bed at night. I like to read while lying on my right side, and this helps me keep my Kindle or tablet stable. Without it, sometimes when I was poking at it to turn a page or select something on the screen, my precariously propped-up device would tumble over. This was especially a problem with the tablet as the stand on the cover isn’t very stable in a sideways position.

Some people use it while sitting, reclining, or laying on their back, so they don’t have to hold their device. I’ve done that a few times, but in that position I usually prefer to just hold it myself. The Flippy is very light and stable, but I tend to be wiggly and shifting position too much will jostle things. Ernest also doesn’t much appreciate having to share my lap with it, and it’s more awkward to pet him with it between us.

The first picture has my Kindle Oasis on it. You can’t really tell in the picture, but it’s propped on its side with the words still in the normal portrait orientation so that when I’m lying on my side the words are oriented in the same direction as my head. I usually have my phone propped up in the space to the left, but since I used the phone to take this picture, I couldn’t put it there. :) The second picture is a closer-up picture of it with my 8" Kindle Fire on it. Ignore the poor, beat-up cover. I put the tablet in a portrait orientation and then turn off the auto-rotation so the screen will stay put the way I want it. I probably should have made the less beat-up Oasis the close-up, but I was too lazy to re-do it! There would be room for a larger tablet, and it can always hang off the edge. I usually push the Fire further to the right so that it’s hanging slightly off the edge to make room for my phone on the left. I’m maybe overly attached to having the phone within eyeshot. This Flippy has 3 angles depending on which way you have it flipped (hence the name) and I have it on the angle that's closest to vertical because that works best for me.

The one I have has a little cubby hole inside that can hold small things, lip balm, glasses, lotion, whatever. Putting too much in there will of course increase the weight. I find the drawstring is a little awkward/stiff to open and close securely, at least when I’m lying on my side, but the cat enjoys playing with the cord. I do find it handy to keep some lip balm inside; one can never have lip balm in too many places. I have to be careful to close the drawstring tightly enough to keep the lip balm from flying out when I fling the Flippy around, though.

>109 YouKneeK: What a cool thing. I also read on my right side, and I think it's because I tend to make a tent shape out of the open Kindle case. It isn't all that stable though, and my animals (and I) knock it down constantly. I may look for a slightly smaller version of that Flippy. I would love to be able to switch my reading position more easily. Sometimes my neck gets stiff and I will put a small decorative pillow or wad up a sweatshirt to prop up the Kindle so I can lay on my left side. It's not terribly effective.

>110 clamairy: I hope you can find something that will work well! I used to bunch up the blankets to try to prop up my Fire at closer to a 90-degree angle (and keep it from falling over all the time) because the stand by itself had an angle that I found too shallow to read comfortably with. Like you, I didn’t find it very effective.

yes! I have one too. I used to have a pyramid shaped one for propping up big hardcover books, but ended up liking the 'pillow pad' better (I got the generic one at the pharmacy). The three sides are different angles and I use them all, for different things.

>107 YouKneeK: I've read the first two and really enjoyed them. The third title just published. They're less grim than Berg's regular tales, and I like the heist team elements. Sakerfalcon was a bit lukewarm on the series, I believe.

I found a two-fer 'kids size' pack on Amazon. I may go that route and give one to my daughter. The regular one looks very large, like it's built for a 10 inch tablet. (I do have a tablet that size, but I don't ever use it bed.)

>112 Darth-Heather: These device propper-uppers are really quite useful! I’ve only had mine for a few months but wish I’d thought to get one a long time ago.

>113 libraryperilous: That's interesting about them being less grim. I was wondering how (or if) her style under the Glass name might differ. Heist team elements sound appealing.

>114 clamairy: I hope the kids size works out well if you do get that! You’re right, the regular one I think is intended to fit 10” tablets and it is pretty large. I like having the extra room to prop up the phone too, but it’s a bit like having a wall in front of my face if I use it on top of me while reclined. :)

>80 YouKneeK: I’m a little late to the game, but that’s going to be incredible when you get it done! I used to cross stitch all the time. I’ve been doing more crocheting and quilting lately. I’ve never tackled a project like yours! Enjoy the quiet time working on it.

>116 catzteach: Thanks, I’ve never attempted either crocheting or quilting myself but love seeing the end products other people manage to create!

Review: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank



The Diary of a Young Girl is composed of diary entries from a Jewish girl, Anne Frank, living in Holland during World War II. Her diary entries take place between the ages of 13 and 15 in 1942-1944. Except in the very early entries, she and her family are living in hiding with another family on the upper floors of an office and warehouse. There are a total of 8 of them cooped up in a relatively small space, unable to go outside and needing to be very quiet for long portions of the day. They suffer from food shortages and lack many other necessities, and they’re living in constant fear from break-ins, bombardments, and just the general fear of being discovered and imprisoned or killed. If anybody is struggling with our social distancing and quarantines of 2020-2021 and would feel better to read about people who have it way worse, this is the book for you.

This is an easy book to read in terms of its words and writing style, but some of the content makes it a difficult read in other ways. It’s hard to read about what the Jews suffered in general. It’s hard to read about a young girl suffering through the experience and the direct impact it had on her. I’ve read many fantasy books which often start off with a young person suffering great injustices and other difficulties, but it’s of course different when you’re reading the actual (translated) words of a real teenager who lived through those real world events. When you already know how things end, that also makes everything that much more difficult to read. Even the happy passages can feel sad.

It was also really difficult to read about the interpersonal relationships in the “annex” where they were hiding. The two families didn’t get along with each other or even with the other members of their own families. Anne is a full-fledged “nobody understands me” teenager, especially in the first year or so. I found her a true unreliable narrator, with her words so colored by teenage angst that I couldn’t tell what was real and what was overdramatized. Her mood swings were clearly seen through her writings, and it was a bit like being on a rollercoaster. When she was happy, her writing was (sometimes) more rational and reasonable. When she was angry or sad, the whole world hated her and nobody understood her and everybody was selfish and horrible. I imagine her situation, cooped up with the same 7 people day after day, unable to get proper privacy or hang out with friends or enjoy the outdoors, living in constant fear for her life, made the typical teenage mood swings a lot more dramatic. From her diary entries, it seemed like the adults weren’t much better. It was understandable from an objective standpoint, but it was frustrating and sometimes tiresome to read so much of it.

I read this book at least a couple times as a child. I can’t remember how old I was, but I surely wasn’t older than 8 the first time I read it and I’m pretty sure I never read it in junior high or later so I doubt I was older than 11 when I last read it. I remember understanding the horror of what Anne and the other Jews experienced, but I think when I was a kid I took Anne’s writings more at face value in regard to what she wrote about the people she was living with and how they treated her. I still sympathized with her reading this as an adult of course, but it was a different sort of sympathy and occasionally mixed with exasperation. I found myself wishing the adults had written diaries also so I could compare and contrast! The edition I read this time reportedly has much more content than the originally published version, but the added material isn’t highlighted throughout the diary entries. Some of the additions dealing with Anne’s body were pretty obviously new, but for the rest I wasn’t too sure. I could only guess that, based on the context provided in the introduction, some of Anne’s harsher and more direct complaints about the people in the annex were part of the added material.

Regardless of its fluctuating levels of maturity, Anne’s writing and some of her thoughts did show a lot of promise. There were some things she wrote that I really liked, and a couple things that resonated with me so much that I wonder if this book was partly responsible for influencing my beliefs in those areas as a child. It’s sad that we never got to see what she would have written and done with her life if she’d had the chance to grow up. Anne sometimes wrote of her experience in hiding as something that was helping her to mature more quickly and develop a greater depth of character that would impact the rest of her life, but she never got to experience the rest of her life. From some of the things she wrote though, it’s clear she would have been happy and amazed to know how many people her words would eventually reach.

Next Book
Rosewater by Tade Thompson, the first book in The Wormwood Trilogy. I know nothing about this, but I have a couple GR friends who loved it, and another one whose tastes usually align more closely with mine whose feelings were more mixed about it, so I’m curious to try it.

I read Rosewater a while back. I enjoyed it, but haven't felt the need to get the rest of the series until they're in a sale.

>118 YouKneeK: After I read Corrie Tenboom's book in highschool, The Hiding Place, I stayed away from this kind of book. It was too much :-(

>119 Maddz: I'm glad you enjoyed it reasonably well, at least. I’ve snuck in the first chapter (only 12 pages) to get a feel for what I'm getting into. It was enough to prick my interest, but not enough to tell me if I’m going to enjoy it or not.

>120 BookstoogeLT: I have vague memories of reading that one as a child also. I remember a couple scenes from it, and the general subject matter, but it didn’t stick in my memory quite as strongly.

>118 YouKneeK:, >119 Maddz: I loved Rosewater and the next volume too. I must pick up the final part. The narrator of Rosewater is obnoxious in his attitudes to women (which is obviously not the author's own attitude) but despite that I found the setting and the nature of the aliens fascinating.

>122 Sakerfalcon: I’ll come back and check your spoiler after I’ve finished – is that a spoiler for the first book or the second?

I’m about 75 pages into Rosewater now. The story and setting are interesting, and it gets more interesting as I learn more, but I’m somehow not feeling completely hooked by it.

I’m also working my way through the audiobook of The Last Wish as mentioned previously. I have about 4.5 hours to go. The narrator (Peter Kenny) is not a favorite. Looking at the Audible page, I’m apparently in the minority because his performance rating is 4.8 out of 5 with almost 30,000 ratings. I usually have complaints about narrators though, so I’m hoping to improve at being able to listen to narrators that don’t really work for me or else my listening options will be very limited.

For those of you who have read more of the Witcher series, I’m wondering if the other books are this heavily based on fairy tales?

?124 I've read two of the Witcher novels, Last Wish and Blood of Elves. I actually liked Last Wish better. My impression of The Last Wish was that it felt like a bunch of short stories and not a well connected novel. The monster hunter theme did remind me of a lot of fairy tales.

>123 YouKneeK: The first. Really more of a general comment than a plot spoiler, but I thought it best to hide it.

>125 Karlstar: The Last Wish IS a collection of short stories. They were originally published separately in Polish.

>125 Karlstar: I can’t speak for Blood of Elves, but The Last Wish seems heavily based on fairy tales so far. I'm just listing the fairy tales in the spoiler tags, no plot details for The Last Wish, but figured I should hide them in case any passers-by don’t want that much detail. The most obvious ones for me were Beauty and the Beast and Snow White, plus a brief reference to Cinderella. The story I finished last night seemed intended to play off a common fairy tale concept, although I didn’t recognize it as being based on a specific story. I think the framing story is the only one that hasn’t seemed fairy-tale-based to me so far. I’m not terribly well-versed in fairy tales, so some things are probably going over my head.

>126 Sakerfalcon: Thanks!

>127 -pilgrim-: That was one reason why I went on to reading Blood of Elves, which I did not like as much. How are the rest of the series?

>129 Karlstar: I don't know, I have yet to venture further myself.

I think we have a problem. I found them Ok, but fairly standard, and written in rather simplistic language.

However, I have friends who leap up and down in enthusiasm for the series, extolling is subtlety, its allusions, and the poetry of its language. It feels like another book. And it is - because they read it in Polish, or in a Russian translation.

So I think the question is whether the translation improves. The two books that we have tried were translated before Sapkowski really got known in the Anglophone world, and I am wondering if that affected the quality of translator used.

I read The Last Wish a very long time ago, before I ever met the video game, and am meaning to give it another try some time, now that I am more familiar with the lore.

I do have copies of the complete series in Russian somewhere - courtesy of the same friend who gave me Blood of Elves - but they are somewhat overestimating my fluency. (I do read in Russian occasionally, if there is no translation available, but far too slowly for an entire fantasy series to be something I am prepared to tackle!) I picked up the next in English in a Kindle sale, and it is sitting somewhere in my TBR list...

>129 Karlstar: & >130 -pilgrim-: I follow a couple of big Witcher fans and they're polish. They say the english translations are pretty "meh" at best. Mostly in terms of the beauty of the language, ie, it got lost in translation or was just dumped so as to get the story out as quick as possible :-(

>130 -pilgrim-: From what I'm seeing, it looks like there was a different translator for The Last Wish and Blood of Elves (Danusia Stok) than for the rest of them (David French). Of course, that doesn't mean the other books will prove to be better, but it will be something to watch for I guess.

>132 YouKneeK: That suggests that the translations are either going to improve, or get worse (if someone decided that English-speaking readers didn't care about anything except the plot, and hired someone cheaper, for example).

But it does make me more inclined to continue the series, and give his versions a try.

My son told me just yesterday that he has begun reading "The Witcher" series, having been a big fan of the game. I will mention to him about the translation issues. His comment was that "It's a little flowery writing is the best way I know to describe it. Like the flowers swayed and bristled and smelled of lilac, the breeze wisped slowly but breezily etc. etc." :)

>134 MrsLee: Interesting. That's pretty much what I would have expected from the descriptions of Sapkowski's style, but the opposite of what I actually remember if reading them, which seemed to have a rather limited vocabulary.

Which book did he start with?

>134 MrsLee: Haha, I don’t remember anything quite like that in the book I’m listening to, aside from mentions of lilac (and gooseberries). But I think the audio narration is throwing off my sense of the book’s actual tone with the narrator's own reading of the text. I also tend not to remember specific phrases as well from an audiobook as I would from reading the text myself, with the exception of certain phrases repeated frequently. Like “Lilac and gooseberries. Lilac… and.. gooseberries.”

Review: Rosewater by Tade Thompson



This is kind of an odd book. It’s not really cyberpunk, but it has a very strong cyberpunk vibe nonetheless. It’s just that the virtual-ish world that connects everything is created by alien fungi or whatever instead of computers. It started off really interesting. The main character has the ability to read minds and he works for a government agency, but he isn't happy about it. It’s difficult to say more than that because the plot unravels slowly, from multiple time periods, and some of the key plot elements aren’t introduced until quite a ways into the story.

For the first half, I was interested in learning about the setting, and wanted to know more about what happened in both the past sections and what would happen in the current sections and how they would all tie together. It didn’t hold me riveted, and I didn’t have much interest in the characters, but I wasn’t bored by the story. For some reason I can’t explain, I started to lose interest in the second half and did start feeling bored at times. If I’d enjoyed the main character more, that might have help me maintain my interest, but he didn’t do much for me. He’s kind of wishy-washy and pretty scummy, not the kind of personality that can carry a book for me if I’m not otherwise enjoying the story. I also didn’t think the other characters were fleshed out very well, but I think this was intentional because the story is told from the first person perspective of Kaaro and he can be pretty egocentric. There were hints to the reader that some of these other characters had their own interesting stories and lives, we just didn’t see much of that in Kaaro’s head.

I feel kind of like I should have enjoyed this more than I did, because I usually enjoy non-linear storylines where pieces of a story are slowly revealed and need to be put together in their proper order. I did enjoy that aspect in the first half. On the other hand, I tend to have a bad track record with cyberpunk and, like I said, this book felt very cyberpunkish to me despite the fact that it isn’t really. Now that I think about it, those elements did become more pronounced in the second half so that might partly explain my lost interest.

This is the first book in a trilogy. The story is mostly complete, but with a new problem revealed near the end that I imagine will drive the second book. Despite a tiny bit of curiosity to see where things would go with that plot line, I didn’t enjoy this enough to keep reading so I’m going to stop here.

Next Book
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende.

>137 YouKneeK: Ah, I dislike cyberpunk or anything even approaching it. Will skip this one!

>138 libraryperilous: Hopefully I’ve helped you avoid an unpleasant read rather than accidentally steering you away from what would have been your favorite book ever! ;)

>122 Sakerfalcon: Now that I've read your spoiler tagged section, I definitely agree with that. :)

>139 YouKneeK: I tend to embrace my pickiness and DNF liberally, so I expect you did! :)

Audiobook Review: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski



I listened to the audiobook of this, as part of my new strategy of sampling various long or incomplete series to see if I might want to read the entire series in print someday, without eating into my limited print reading time. I’m picky about narrators. With most audiobooks I’ve tried in the past, I’ve ended up turning them off to make an annoying narrator shut up and never turned them back on again. As part of this process, I hope to get better at listening to audiobooks, even when I don’t care for the narrator. The narration will inevitably impact my rating and my attitude toward a book, so I may sometimes have a lot to say about it. I’m therefore going to split my audiobook reviews into two sections so people can skip the narration section if they’re not interested.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Peter Kenny. Before I give my own opinions, I’d like to offset them by saying most people seem to like him. On Audible, his performance rating for this book is 4.8 out of 5 with almost 30,000 ratings, so keep in mind that my opinions are those of a maniac who has trouble listening to audiobooks in general and is easily annoyed by narrators.

The narrator absolutely did not work for me. After listening to the first 5 minutes, I had to pause it so I could just sit and laugh for a minute and mimic certain phrases and then laugh some more. Then I had to rewind it and listen again because I had been so distracted by the narration that I didn’t register anything from the story itself. There were a few different issues. The one that hit me first was that he has a tendency to emphasize nouns oddly when they’re followed by an article. For example, “the girl” and “the Witcher”. When there’s a lot of this in the text, it really stands out in the narration. I then noticed that there was just an odd cadence to his reading altogether. When he wasn’t doing dialogue, he rushed through the words in a sort of sing-song, almost taunting manner. Often there was also a whispery quality to his reading, as if he were moments away from revealing a shocking secret, which might have been effective if it were used sparingly and at appropriate moments, but it wasn’t. I felt like he was trying to influence me into believing things were more exciting than they were, which may have actually had the opposite effect.

I also had some issues with the way he read the dialogue. His dialogue for secondary characters wasn’t bad actually, but he didn’t enunciate clearly when he voiced monsters, especially if they were excited monsters, and sometimes I couldn’t figure out what he was saying. The narration for other human characters was usually fine, but the main character of Geralt was a big problem for me. I can’t put my finger on how he made Geralt sound, but sometimes I thought he sounded like a dopey vampire with a hint of U.S. southern drawl and other times I thought he sounded like a cartoonish talking dog. I already had some familiarity with Geralt from the video games, although it’s been several years, and this voice didn’t work for me at all.

For my first few listening sessions, I kept losing my focus due to distractions caused by the narration, especially during the beginning of a new listening session. I kept having to rewind several minutes and force myself to pay better attention. Also, this isn’t the narrator’s fault because he said it correctly, but I had to relisten to a few minutes of one of the stories because I kept mishearing “mare” as “mayor”. Let me tell you, that story made less and less sense as it went on when I thought the mare was a mayor!

I did eventually get more used to the narration, though. I think I was about halfway through the 10-hour audiobook when I realized I wasn’t really being bothered by it anymore and I was rewinding less. I guess one can get used to anything if they persevere long enough! Hopefully that will be a lesson that will work for me with future audiobooks.

Story
This is a collection of short stories, connected by a framing story. Geralt is a witcher, and witchers hunt monsters in exchange for payment, so there are a lot of different monsters and other sorts of threats throughout the story. The first story with the striga is what the introductory video in the first Witcher video game was based on, and a good chunk of that story was basically a longer version of what the video showed, so that one was a little tiresome for me. There’s a lot of blatant moralizing, particularly in the earlier stories, about “who’s really the monster” which I thought was done a little too obviously. There’s also a pretty heavy “fairy tale with a twist” foundation to some of the stories which I would have preferred less of. Geralt of course has sex with nearly every woman he meets which is eye-roll-inducing, but not at all unexpected if one has played any of the video games.

I’m rating this at 3.5 stars and rounding down to 3 on Goodreads. It was interesting enough to hold my attention, but I didn’t think it was anything amazing either. I laughed a few times at some of the humor, and I liked the stories more toward the second half when they weren’t quite so strongly based on fairy tales, or at least not on tales I recognized. Getting accustomed to the narrator probably helped too. I think there’s a lot of promise in the setting and some of the characters, so I’m hopeful the later books will be more engrossing. I’m keeping this on my list as something I want to try in print someday in the future.

Next Audiobook
The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe. I don't know about the story, but I have high hopes for the narrator, Stefan Rudnicki. He narrated part of Ender’s Game which was one of the first audiobooks I ever listened to, maybe 15 years ago, not counting some abridged Star Trek audiobooks which I’d already read in print. I loved that audiobook, and it’s one of the reasons I still keep trying to get over my audiobook struggles – because I know they can be an awesome way to consume books while getting other things done when they work out.

>142 YouKneeK: I still haven't figured out what all the fuss is about. I read The Last Wish because my nephew asked me to and I gave it a 3 star rating. Good, but nothing special. Maybe they made this a TV series because of the video games?

I do not recommend you listen to the audiobook version of Blood of Elves, at least not by the same narrator!

>143 Karlstar: The books were very popular in Poland prior to the video game, from my understanding. The video game just gained it more world-wide notice.

Haha, yeah, I definitely won’t be listening to any more audios of this series. I’m just sampling first books in series via audio to see if I want to read them in print someday, so I probably wouldn’t have listened to more anyway even if I’d liked the narrator.

>143 Karlstar: Sapkowski was awarded the Silver Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis by the Polish Ministry of Culture in 2014. So it seems that in Poland he is considered as having written great literature.

Watch out for the Sword Edged Blonde. edited/

It is deliberately anachronistic and it destroyed my enjoyment :-(

>146 BookstoogeLT: Thanks for the warning. I listened to the first hour of it today. So far I’ve had some issues with overly coincidental happenings and the story comes across as being set later than it is, but it did hold my attention very well for an audiobook and made me chuckle a bit. I don’t know if I’d be having more trouble with it in print, but I think it may work well as something to listen to while cross-stitching. For another 7.5 hours anyway. It’s pretty short, which was another reason I chose it.

>142 YouKneeK: Glad you were able to get past the narration and at least sort of appreciate the book!

>148 clamairy: Thanks! Sometimes the narration provided its own different sort of entertainment. :)

>135 -pilgrim-: Not sure which book he read, I assume the first because he likes to read like that. His roommate is Polish but hasn't read the books, played the games or watched the shows. My son is on a mission to get him involved.

>136 YouKneeK: He might not have been giving an exact quote, just his impression.

>150 MrsLee:
The first in internal chronology?
The first book to be published in English?
The first that was published in Polish?
The first full novel or the first short story collection?

"The first" is not exactly a clear concept.

I am not clear myself where is the best place to start.

>151 -pilgrim-: Yeah, the “first book” for The Witcher series is less clear and there's different info in different places. But it's not surprising that MrsLee didn't interrogate her son to find out exactly which book he read if she's not immediately interested in the series herself and didn't expect to be interrogated herself on LT. ;)

For me, I prefer to experience things as the author developed them and see the world-building evolve naturally. It feels too jarring to me to start with something more fully-developed and then go back to earlier-written books, especially if they fail to make obvious use of certain story elements I've already read about because the author hasn’t invented them yet. Based on that, I would prefer the Polish publication order.

But in that case, it looks like Sword of Destiny (another set of short stories) should have been first, then The Last Wish, because it looks like they were originally published in 1992 and 1993 respectively. The main reason I started with The Last Wish was because I was only going to listen to one audiobook no matter how much I liked it, and that was the one on the list I take most of my reading selections from and I wanted to cross it off. I think it probably won’t matter so much with short stories, but if I go back to read them all in print as planned, I’ll probably read Sword of Destiny first.

>152 YouKneeK: That was just intended as a warning that she might be getting a different reaction because he is talking about a different book!

I am with you on going for publication order though. When an author inserts books earlier in the time sequence they still tend to assume that the reader knows the character s well as they do "by now".

Interpolations can also have strange effects
In Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe sequence, Richard Sharpe fluctuates between being a small, dark Londoner and a 6' fair Yorkshireman, depending on whether Sean Bean had been cast in the rôle at the time that the book was written!

>153 -pilgrim-: Ha, that would be a jarring experience! It seems like a weird choice. I think a book series should maintain internal consistency regardless of what other adaptations have done.

>137 YouKneeK: Sorry that Rosewater didn't hit the spot for you. Your analogy to cyberpunk is a good one, and I found the biological aspects of the networking fascinating. It sounds like you've made the right decision to stop after the first book, although the second one is improved by being told from several different viewpoints, which helps with a couple of the issues you raise. I hope you enjoy The house of the spirits, I loved it when I encountered it at university.

>142 YouKneeK: I only read these because I'd played the game. Which was annoying because the game is very Geralt focussed whereas the stories aren't really, and I kept expecting him to have more of a plot. There are at least 7 of them translated into english, although I believe more are written and not yet translated. I enjoyed them, I like the moral considerations around who is a monster and I've always like clever playing with traditional forms. Blood of Elves is actually the first novel, and possibly the source material for the game.

>155 Sakerfalcon: I’m still kind of surprised Rosewater didn’t appeal to me more. So far I’m enjoying The House of the Spirits quite a bit more, though. I think I’ll end up with some complaints about it, although I’m reserving my current complaints to see where things go, but the story and the characters are both interesting to read about.

>156 reading_fox: Oh, that’s really good info about the book series not being as focused on Geralt, thanks! I would have expected the same based on the game and The Last Wish and might have been disappointed. From what I read during my research, the game series takes place after the book series. It does look like they borrowed from the books somewhat though, so maybe they borrowed material from Blood of Elves too? The introductory video for the first Witcher game, where Geralt cures the princess of her striga curse, is taken straight from one of the short stories in The Last Wish.

>157 YouKneeK: I was already a fan of House of the spirits when we came to discuss it in my Latin American literature in Translation class. Our lecturer had very interesting comments on it, which I won't share until you've finished.

>158 Sakerfalcon: I look forward to that!

This is a non-book-related post.

hfglen and Haydninvienna have been posting cool pictures of their home (or past home) environments in their threads and blaming it on me, all because I mentioned how fun it was to see other people’s home environments when -pilgrim- posted hers. So I thought I would reciprocate, although mine is nowhere near as interesting. I hope some other people might join in if they feel like it! I know we’ve seen some lovely gardens and other pictures from members over the years since I’ve been here. If you don’t have a thread of your own, we have this languishing thread for people who don’t have their own threads.

I live in the Atlanta suburbs, so my home is in the middle of lots of other homes. No wide open spaces here! And I live in a townhome, so I really don't have much in the way of a yard. We have a lot of strategically placed trees to help hide the signs of civilization in every direction you look. I grew up in similar types of areas, so for me this is normal and it's the type of environment where I'm most comfortable.

These first two pictures are a view out of my office windows, toward the front of my home. I took these today, and it’s winter here, so the trees are bare. They’re very close to the windows, so you can’t see too far when they have leaves. Out of the corner of my eye, I sometimes see squirrels flying between the two trees right in front of my window which never fails to distract me. That first picture is angled toward the right, where the back gate into my subdivision is. The second picture is angled toward the left, so you can see some of the other townhomes in my neighborhood. Mine looks similar. Each home has two garage doors and their own driveway -- sometimes people see the two garage doors and get confused about where one home ends and the other begins. It's just two separate doors that open into the same garage. I have no idea why. These aren’t the clearest pictures because the windows have screens and this endeavor did not in my opinion warrant opening both the windows and the screens!




This picture is from August 2016. On the back side of my home, I have a deck on both the lower and upper stories. I never use the lower-level one, but the upper-level one is accessed off the master bedroom suite and I use it quite a bit in the summer. I like to read there. The picture doesn’t really show it, but the sides of the houses block the view of any neighbors’ decks so it feels fairly private – as long as nobody is out on their own deck blabbing on their phone to remind me I have neighbors. :) There’s a thin sliver of trees separating us from some apartments next to our subdivision. In the summer they're almost but not quite hidden from view, if you don't peer too hard through the trees. I enjoy looking at the Crape Myrtle and we get some chipmunks and squirrels and birds in that area which can distract me if my book isn’t sufficiently engrossing.


This picture is of the same area as above, but from December 2017. We got enough snow that it toppled the poor Crape Myrtle over. Fortunately the HOA's landscapers were able to yank it back upright and give it some support, and it’s still doing well. I would have been sorry to lose it after reading together with it for the past 9 summers (6 at that time). The two of us have totally perfected the art of companionable silence and we roll our eyes at each other in mutual sympathy when the aforementioned neighbor starts blabbing incessantly on his phone. ;)

Very nice! That crape myrtle is gorgeous. They don't grow here.

>160 YouKneeK: Thank you. That is a fascinating reminder of how building styles and materials vary.

I have sometimes lived in regions of bricks-and-mortar, sometimes in limestone, and sometimes in granite, but I don't recognise what is being used there. Are those timber-built, or is it simply some sort of cladding?

Also, what is an "upper deck" (when not on a ship!)? Is it simply what I would call a balcony, of is there a difference?

>160 YouKneeK: Thanks for sharing! I love the crape myrtle and am envious of you having a reading deck. Your subdivision looks quite similar to the one where my friends in the Baltimore area live, though they don't have garages at all, let alone your strange arrangement! It's lovely to be able to see wildlife from your window even when you live in a relatively developed area.

>161 tardis: I think people in this area think I’m a little weird for liking Crape Myrtles so much because they’re *everywhere* here, not just in my neighborhood but all over the area, but I had spent the previous 17 years in Ohio where they didn't exist as far as I knew and I still love to look at them. Most of them tend to be pruned into a smaller and more contained-looking shapes, but I think the landscapers tend to forget about the few we have behind our section of the neighborhood because they don’t get pruned often.

>162 -pilgrim-: What’s visible is just cladding, if I understand the term correctly. I'm really clueless about construction materials, but underneath I’m pretty sure it’s made mostly of wood. I certainly saw a good portion of that wood when my master bathroom was being demolished after my water leak in late 2019/early 2020! The upper portion of the townhomes have siding, but I’m not sure what it’s made of. The bottom portions alternate between brick for one townhome and stone for the next, but that's just cladding and not all the way through. Mine has the stone look.

The upper deck could be considered similar to a balcony, but I think of a balcony as typically much smaller, maybe with room for a couple small upright chairs at the most, and most likely constructed out of metal and/or concrete. I’m not sure deck is really the best description for what I have, but that’s what the HOA calls them and I don’t know what else to call them so I go along with that. The lower one seems to me more like a fenced patio as it isn’t really raised from the ground, and it has concrete for the floor. There’s a wooden railing though. The upper deck is identical size-wise, but the flooring is made of wood. Mine aren’t as large as what I typically think of when I hear the word "deck", but they aren’t cramped either. At one point I had a double-seater glider plus another reclining chair plus a small table and it all fit comfortably with some room left over.

>163 Sakerfalcon: I grew up in Northern VA and we lived in a couple similar sorts of townhomes there, although ours didn’t have garages either. When I moved here I think it was the first time I’d lived in a home with a garage since I was in 6th grade. It was quite a novelty! I spent something like 17 years in Ohio scraping snow and ice off my car every morning in the winters and sometimes having trouble even prying my car door open. The snow and ice isn't usually much of a problem here anyway, but my first year in the area was spent renting a place without a garage and my car was always coated in bird poop. One thing I particularly appreciate about having the garage is being able to load up my car for a trip without announcing to anybody within eyeshot that I'm about to be leaving my home vacant.

>161 tardis: they are the South's version of the lilac. When the weather is hot and humid for months, the Myrtles thrive. And bloom.

>160 YouKneeK: thanks for sharing! I'm in a single owner house but I've lived in a townhouse before.

We're on a 'mixed' estate, in an area that was developed in the the 1970s. (Mixed = part social housing, part owner-occupier.) Our 'set' is owner-occupier, the next set is social housing and owner-occupier.

Our house is a 3-bed semi detached with an attached single garage - garage-house-house-garage, then a gap between the next pair. Some garages remain as garages (mostly extra storage space), others, like ours, have been converted into an extra room. (Our neighbour built a first floor extension over the garage instead, and others down the road have conservatories.)

Most people on this estate have decent-sized gardens to sit out in - although the birch tree in our back garden 'rains' greenfly so if I want shade, I have to sit elsewhere in the garden. I saw one of these in one of the local garden centres a while back, and want! Except I need to do the clearance and landscaping first... I know where I want it, it's getting at that section.

>160 YouKneeK: I'm just as interested in your home environment. Many thanks for the pictures! There are lots of crape myrtles in Johannesburg; here it's more Tibouchina. Two thoughts regarding the apparent wide open spaces here (although yes Durban is probably more spread out than it really needs to be). (1) But most of the city doesn't have municipal sewerage and so we rely on septic tanks, which puts an upper limit on the population density.
(2) When we moved in (2004) we could see (sugar)cane fields at the head of our valley; that's now all townhouses (the estate does its own waste treatment). The farmland I showed the other day is about 10 miles up the road.

>165 fuzzi: I remember seeing some lovely garden/pond pictures you posted a while back! When I was searching for a home to buy, I dithered a lot at first about whether I wanted a regular house or a townhome. I liked the idea of having a house, and even the idea of having an actual yard, but not the idea of having to keep up the exterior. I don’t even enjoy keeping house plants. I could probably hire help for most of it, but it would still be something I’d have to manage and make decisions about. At my townhome, the HOA covers all the exterior things – including things like the roof and the siding. I still imagine that someday “maybe” I’ll get a house, but I think in reality I’m not the kind of person who would be a good house owner.

My main concern when I decided to go with a townhome was that I would hear my neighbors all the time. The townhome I’d rented for a year before buying this place had pretty thin walls, and I had spent many years living in apartments where neighbors might as well have been living in my apartment with me for as well as I could hear them. This place has pretty good soundproofing, though. I hear noises from outside if people are walking by and talking or something like that, but I almost never hear my neighbors when they’re inside their own home.

>166 Maddz: Oh wow, that looks awesome! And enormous. I also want that deck (or platform or whatever it is) that appears to be up in the treetops! :) I had a relatively inexpensive glider on my upper deck for several years, but ended up getting rid of it. Even though my deck is covered by the roof, it still collected a ton of dirt and I found the material it was made of to be a pain to clean. Plus I never sat in it because I preferred to recline in my zero gravity chair, so I was wasting time cleaning the stupid thing and I never even used it.

>167 hfglen: That makes sense. I guess things slowly get built up everywhere. In my city, sometimes I pass new apartments or townhomes going up and I ask myself, “Wait, was there even room for that there? What was there before? Is the earth stretching?”

I Googled the Tibouchina and those are gorgeous! I especially liked the purple one I saw which appears to be just about my favorite shade of my favorite color. I’d like one of these to hang out next to my Crape Myrtle, please! I think they would get along well together. ;) I’m linking to a photo on some random person’s WordPress page to show what I saw that I liked so much. I have no idea who they are, and I didn’t read anything on their page, but I feel like I should link to their blog if I’m going to also link to their picture. So here's the link.

>168 YouKneeK: this is our first house. There is work involved that requires know-how and time, or money to hire someone with know-how and time 😉

I like gardening, but can't handle the heat and humidity anymore, so I'm mainly growing easy maintenance perennials, potted annuals, and water gardens.

At the end of our street there was a "belt" of hardwoods and pines. A couple years ago the farmer who owned the land sold his fields and the belt of trees...there's now at least a hundred single family houses on tiny lots filling the fields, and the belt of trees is almost completely torn down. I wonder where the deer went, the ones who lived there, that we'd see grazing at night as we'd drive home? 😢

>169 fuzzi: Oh no, I’m sorry about your belt of hardwoods and pines and the deer that came with them. :(

Review: The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe



This was one of my audiobook series-sampling listens, to see if I might want to pursue this series in print someday.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Stefan Rudnicki. Listening to him was a relief after the narrator of the last audiobook I listened to! Rudnicki reads with what I would consider a normal pace. His tone is matter-of-fact and not overly dramatized. He has a distinctively deep voice that’s pleasant to listen to, but I did think that negatively affected his ability to do different character voices. His male voices were ok, but his female voices were a little painful. They sounded too pouty, angry, and/or flirty, more so than I thought was intended by the text. Even so, I liked him better than many narrators I’ve listened to, and I would happily listen to another book he had narrated.

Story
The story centers around a detective named Eddie LaCrosse. We start off with a mission that has little relevance to the main story, I guess mostly to provide an introduction to the character and the world he lives in. The main story picks up shortly after that and involves Eddie investigating a murder for his best friend, the King of the city where he grew up. Apparently the Queen has (I’m putting it in spoiler tags for excessive grossness more than for spoilerishness; it’s revealed relatively early) murdered, cooked, and eaten their infant son.

This feels like urban fantasy. The word choices, the expressions, and the attitudes all feel much more modern than the setting actually is, but the world’s inhabitants ride horses and fight with swords. It was a little jarring at first, but I got used to it. Eddie has what I would consider the stereotypical detective’s tragic past, but at least he isn’t an alcoholic, so that was something. There isn’t a lot of magic in the book. There is some, but I can’t explain it without spoiling the story.

I chuckled several times at the humor, but this book can't stand too much logical scrutiny. Things tend to happen too coincidentally and/or conveniently. The main character does things that hardly seem like the best way to go about solving the mystery, yet his actions lead him to one tenuous clue after another until he eventually finds the answers. Meanwhile, he fails to predict some obvious things and gets into trouble I would have considered avoidable.

Although this is the first book in a series, it tells a complete story. It worked well for me as an audio, holding my attention but not demanding too much of it so that I could easily cross-stitch while I listened. I don’t think I’ll keep this series on my list to follow up on in print someday, but I wouldn’t be afraid to try the author’s work again either.

Next Audiobook
Hounded by Kevin Hearne. I’m mainly picking this one because it’s the next shortest choice on my list and these shorter listens seem to work pretty well for me. I’m assuming this is urban fantasy, but I don’t know much about it.

>171 YouKneeK: Yes, I guess parts of the Iron Druid chronicles are set in cities, but most of it isn't. A druid version of John Wick? I'm kidding, but now I can see the parallels.

>172 Karlstar: Ah, ok. I guess I was misinterpreting the use of "Iron" in the series title.

>171 YouKneeK: Well, you enjoyed this more than me, so I guess that's good? I also chose not to continue with the series and there are no regrets about that.

As for the Iron Druid. Prepare yourself for a 2000 year old perpetually 20 something and you'll probably love it. The spoiler isn't really spoilerish, but since I know how people get about that kind of thing, I figured I'd play it safe. and yes, it is very urban fantasy.

>174 BookstoogeLT: Part of it might have been the format. I don’t expect to get much out of my audio listens to begin with, so I’m mostly content if it just holds my attention and isn’t torturous to listen to, with bonus points for making me laugh.

Thanks, I’ll come back and read your spoiler tagged note after I’ve listened to the audiobook, or at least a few hours of it, and then decide if I wish I’d been prepared. ;) I do like being surprised by what I get, even though sometimes those surprises are unpleasant. So... one vote for urban fantasy and one vote against, if I interpreted >172 Karlstar: correctly. Hmmm! I haven't started it yet, but I expect to by this evening at the latest.

I'll probably fit more urban fantasy in via audio than what I normally manage in print. A lot of UF series (or at least, the ones I’m assuming are UF based on title and/or cover) are the ones I’ve been avoiding because they’re either long or incomplete or both. That makes them good candidates for my new audio series-sampling plans.

>175 YouKneeK: For me, Urban Fantasy is more about the ideas and thought processes engendered from living in an urban environment than actually happening in an urban environment.

>176 BookstoogeLT: I’ve never put enough thought into UF to decide how I would define it, but I could buy into that definition.

>164 YouKneeK:
Thank you for the explanation. That you commonly have houses that are structurally wooden us fascinating; here, when you see wood, it is usually decorative, unless the building goes back a century or more.

You also seen to have a more specific meaning for townhouse than I am familiar with; it is to do with the land ownership?
Here it seems simply to be used for any house that has more than two storeys.

About the only wooden house commonly available over here are garden structures - sheds and summer houses typically. Part of the reason is that historically our timber was earmarked for shipbuilding (wooden ships, iron men) so vernacular building materials range from cob construction up to brick or stone built. Timber was used for the framing but not really the cladding. We don't even have the roofing shingle here - it's tile, slate or thatch (wheat straw or reed).

Townhouses here, as Pilgrim says, are 3 or 4 storey houses typically found in terraces in towns, like the archetypal Regency terrace:
This is Park Crescent in London. The units are about 3 windows wide. These would be 5 storeys - there's a basement for the kitchen and utility, ground & first floor would be reception rooms, 2nd floor family quarters, 3rd floor attics and servant's rooms.

>175 YouKneeK: I don't know what the formal definition of 'urban fantasy' is, maybe you guys can explain it. To me, an example of an urban fantasy is City of Bones by Cassandra Clarke. It takes place almost entirely in a city or indoors; modern conveniences either are factors or just assumed (taxis, buses, electricity); it is set in what we'd recognize as a city, as opposed to a setting more than 1000 years old. Maybe I'm being too literal. Also, maybe it doesn't matter! :)

Also, according to my wife and a friend, the audiobook versions of the Hearne novels are the way to go!

>178 -pilgrim-:, >179 Maddz: To me, a townhouse is anything with more than one level which is attached to other homes in a row. A house on the other hand would be anything physically separate from its neighbors, no matter how small that separating space is. If it only has a single level per home, then it would more likely be called an apartment or a condo.

An apartment or condo might have multiple levels in the structure itself, but each individual home would usually only be on one level and there would probably be multiple homes per level also – more like what you call at flat in the UK I think? I think there are some multi-level condos, but I’m not familiar with how that’s structured, or if it's just referring to an included basement or loft or something like that. Apartments and condos are similar, but I think the main difference is that you always rent apartments from somebody who owns the entire complex whereas condos are owned by separate individuals.

I would also recognize something like the picture in >179 Maddz: as townhouses, although that’s quite a bit different from what I personally have ever seen in the U.S. The ones I’ve seen tend to be a little more clear where one ends and the other begins. They’re usually physically offset in some manner, like how in my subdivision the main entryways are recessed from the garages, as opposed to being all one smooth piece like in that picture, and may (or may not) have different colored paint and/or different cladding for each unit.

>180 Karlstar: I’ve read so little urban fantasy that I would be the world’s worst person to try to explain it, so I’ll leave that for somebody else. :) I’m sure there’s a formal definition out there to be found on Google, but I expect each individual interprets it somewhat differently anyway. It’s great to hear that the audiobook may be a good format for this!

>181 YouKneeK: Yes, here a flat is what you would call an apartment - accommodation in a single level in a block with a communal entrance (although each flat has it's own door). We also get maisonettes - these are multi-level apartments in a block, but unlike a flat or apartment, each has it's own entrance rather than a communal entrance.

Flats here tend to be leasehold, especially when it's a purpose-built block, whereas houses tend to be freehold. Leaseholders pay ground rent to the landlord, and frequently maintenance charges for the upkeep of the communal areas and external repairs affecting the whole block. The landlord also has final say on things like satellite dishes and fibre.

We also get conversions of larger house into flats - these are typically older houses designed for a large family with multiple servants (quite impractical to run nowadays unless you're filthy rich).

What I have is what you would call a townhouse - 2 storeys, but I have a decent sized garden. We're freehold, so within the constraints of the UK planning system, we're at liberty to make what changes we like as long as it doesn't annoy the neighbours. (We can get a fast track application for anything that's within 15% of the building size as long as it fits within certain dimensions - otherwise we have to make a full planning application which costs more and goes through committee at the district council.)

If you want an urban fantasy series with added discussions on architecture, try the Rivers of London series, especially book 4 Broken Homes.

>182 Maddz: That’s very interesting, thank you! I wouldn’t know what to do with a garden if I had one, but it would be nice to have a bit of a yard. One of the townhomes we lived in when I was in my teens had a very small yard, with a tiny area for a garden. I can’t even remember if my parents planted anything there. I think they did, but I can’t remember what. My grandma probably doesn't know what to make of her strange granddaughter who has trouble even keeping a houseplant alive. She used to have a large yard with an extensive garden, as well as fruit trees, in the house where she lived when I was growing up. It seemed like there was always some sort of major canning event going on in her house whenever I visited.

That Rivers of London series is actually high on my list for series to sample in audio. For some reason I’ve gotten it into my head that this is something I would enjoy, even though I don’t know anything about it. Maybe that’s from forgotten impressions I had while reading other people’s reviews. I doubt I’ll get to book 4 anytime soon, but I’ll have to keep my ear out for mentions of London architecture when I listen to the first book.

Review: The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende



I had mixed feelings about this one. I liked it best in the first half, when the magical realism elements were more at the forefront and the setting was still new and interesting. It’s set in Chile, I believe mostly in the 20th century. We follow one particular family, starting off with the youngest generation at the beginning of the story and following the family through until what was originally the youngest generation has become the oldest and is at the end of its lifespan.

I think the political backdrop is the real story here. That’s the only part that has a strong thread that runs from beginning to end. The rest of the book was more of a “slice of life” portrayal of the family rather than a specific story being told. My ignorance of Chilean history is appalling, so I learned a lot of appalling things from this story. If nothing else, I would have been glad I read this book for that reason, even though a lot of it was pretty unpleasant (and appalling) to read about.

I didn’t really understand until the second half of the book that this was the main point of the story. I started off really interested in this odd family where its children might be born with green hair, or with the ability to tell the future and see spirits. I was disappointed when that fizzled out. It was still present to some extent through the end, but it grew less as the story progressed and was really just set dressing rather than anything that affected the story.

I never really had trouble pushing through it, but I did sometimes feel impatient with the meandering that didn’t really go anywhere, while at the same time I still remained moderately interested in the political events and how it affected the family I was reading about. By that point though, I was starting to wish it were being told more concisely. I have a lot of patience with and even enjoy meandering stories when I’m really invested in the characters and/or the main story, as I think my recent completion of all 9 of the Kushiel’s Universe tomes would prove, but that wasn’t the case for me here.

Although we go into detail on several characters’ lives, the story always comes back to Esteban, who is a horrible, creepy, violent, pig-headed, self-absorbed, delusional, despicable character. Aside from that, I guess I should also mention that I didn’t care for him very much. :p

Spoiler for the end: I wasn’t sure if the reader was expected to feel some forgiveness and/or sympathy for Esteban toward the end, just because he loved his granddaughter and finally realized some of his beliefs had been wrong. In his younger years he sometimes regretted his extreme behavior after he’d done horrible things, but he didn’t change the attitudes and beliefs that led to that behavior and so he soon went back to committing similar atrocities. I see no reason to believe the same wouldn’t have happened again at the end of the story if he hadn’t been elderly and near the end of his life. In the portions of the story that Alba included from his first-person perspective, which we learned at the end were written near the end of his life after Alba had been rescued, he still seemed to be trying to justify most of his behaviors and/or relayed them matter-of-factly as if he’d done nothing wrong.

Next Book
Furies of Calderon, the first book in the six-book Codex of Alera series by Jim Butcher.

Usually what's called urban fantasy takes place pretty much in contemporary time among working people. That has been extended with steampunk to 19th century as well. And if the action doesn't actually take place within a city, the people are usually mobile enough to get to cities and or get stuff from cities. Widely available technological communications are also pretty much a given.

>180 Karlstar: UF to me is what I call "Elves in New York." Perhaps not the best description but hopefully it gets the idea across. It's when the fantastical happens on our planet or an alternate version of earth (Dresden Files, Kate Daniels, Iron Druid and tons of others). It doesn't mean "city based fantasy" to me. I think that's just Narilka's Definition of UF though :)

Wikipedia, more formal than my definition, states: Urban fantasy is a genre of fiction,1 a subgenre of fantasy in which the narrative uses supernatural elements in a 19th-century to 21st-century (or equivalent) urban society. It usually takes place in the present day (or the equivalent of the "present day"). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_fantasy

Your mileage may vary.

I’ve now listened to the first hour of Hounded. The audio narrator is great, and the story is funny. Sometimes the jokes fall flat for me when there are too many of them in too short a span, like the author was trying a little too hard to keep the jokes rolling in lest he lose the attention of his audience. It's mostly funny, though. We’ll see if I’m sick of it by the end of 8 hours. Based on the 12.5% I’ve listened to, I personally would agree that it’s UF.

>174 BookstoogeLT: I went ahead and read your spoiler -- you're right, it's not much of a spoiler since it's revealed in like the first minute or two if I remember correctly. :)

If anybody’s curious what audiobooks I have on my list of future possibilities, I added my list to my growing collection of milanote boards. I’ve also added a board for cross-stitch pictures. Every week or so, usually on Sundays, I’ve been posting pictures of my latest progress on my two projects. I’ve also posted a few pictures of some of my favorite previously-completed projects. Here’s the link.

>185 quondame: >186 Narilka: >187 YouKneeK: My wife agrees with you folks, I was being way too literal and limiting, its UF.

Hearne is very fond of his jokes and pop culture references.

Has Earnest been giving lessons on Zoom? My cat just turned on our Roomba. Almost scared my husband out of his skin. Of course I was in the bathroom, and all hell broke out. I think my husband is more nervous of Rosie than the cat is.

>189 MrsLee: Another reason not to get a cat! I guess she was playing with it, going pat-pat and managed to hit the button.

Sleer currently lives at the foot of what is now Paul's desk, given our elderly house guest (we didn't what her getting tripped up and breaking something else). I think he'd be annoyed if she was switched on unexpectedly, especially during a meeting.

I switched her on at the weekend, and she managed to get stuck on the rim of the shower. My fault - I'd omitted to take up the bathmat which meant she's just raised up enough to start trying to get over.

>188 Karlstar: I find subgenre designations frustrating sometimes because there’s so much room for interpretation and sometimes they seem to have contradictory definitions. I think the worst for me is “High Fantasy” and “Low Fantasy”. Some people say it’s a reference to how much magic there is in the story while other people say it defines whether the story is set on a fake world (high) or our real world (low). Even if one of those definitions is "officially" correct, the fact that they're both used means I have no clue which one people mean when they use them.

>189 MrsLee: LOL, that’s hilarious! I try very hard to keep Ernest way from Zoom so that he doesn’t spread his terror across the world, but I apologize if I failed in my vigilance. ;) If your cat is anything like mine, receiving such an exciting reaction may guarantee many repeat performances. I can’t remember which model you bought, but if it’s the kind with a removable dust bin, keeping the dust bin removed would keep the cat from turning it on if it becomes a problem. Otherwise, the “put a blanket on top of it” tactic is still working in my household!

>186 Narilka: FWIW, your definition pretty much matches mine.

For me UF is any fantasy that takes place mostly in our world, in the modern era (roughly 20th century onwards).

>191 YouKneeK: That's interesting. My understanding of "high" versus "low" fantasy is completely different - that it is a matter of scope.

"High fantasy" deals with the grand scale: wars, ideals, prophecies, quests etc.

"Low fantasy" deals with the nitty-gritty. It therefore tends to be rather darker. Characters on quests stop to relieve themselves, and so on.

If the writer tells you how the plumbing works in their fantasy world - it's probably low fantasy!

>193 -pilgrim-: Wonderful, another potential definition to keep in mind, thank you. ;) That does also sound vaguely familiar now that you mention it, so I think I've probably heard it before.

>182 Maddz:, >183 YouKneeK:
To complicate Maddz's excellent summary a little: not all flats are single storey. It is possible to have, in Scotland at least, a "double-upper", for example. The difference between that and a maisonette is that a maisonette always has a separate street door, whilst a multiple floor accommodation whose front door is within the building, in a shared access area, is always a flat.

Thank you for your explanation of the difference between apartment and condominium: it has been one of those things that I had always wondered.

A further warning: I think we may also differ in the meaning of the term "yard". For me a yard is an area, paved in some way (whether cobbles, tarmac, flagstones or other), enclosed by buildings.

But I have the impression that for Americans "yard work" can mean gardening?

>195 -pilgrim-: I’m finding all these different definitions and explanations for our different terms very interesting!

You’re right, we definitely do differ in the meaning of “yard”. I’ll really have to keep that one in mind in my future multi-cultural conversations because we mean entirely different things! When I hear “yard”, my first thought is of a grassy area, although I don’t think grass is necessarily a requirement for a yard. Probably the simplest definition of a yard is that it’s the part of the property that doesn’t have a structure (house, garage, shed) built on it. The yard might contain grass, trees, bushes, a paved patio area close to the house, a garden (which is the actual area in which things are planted), a swingset for the kids, etc. A townhome may or may not have a small yard, although my current home doesn’t. A bottom-floor apartment/flat wouldn’t normally have anything more than a patio, if that, but just a patio by itself wouldn't be considered a yard.

The area in front of the house is called the “front yard” and the area in back of the house is called the “back yard”. They aren’t necessarily enclosed areas. The back yard may be fenced, either with a low fence or a high fence, and the fence may or may not be something you can see through. The front yard and the sides of the yard typically are not fenced. In the US, “yard work” refers to any work done to any part of the yard. That could be anything from gardening to pruning trees or bushes to mowing the lawn. I think typically if one is just going to work on their garden and not the rest of the yard, they would just say they’re “gardening” rather than “doing yard work”. If all they’re going to do is cut their grass, they’ll say they’re going to “mow”. “Yard work” is usually used as more of an generic term when there’s more than one specific activity being described.

>195 -pilgrim-:, >196 YouKneeK: To me 'yard' implies it's a work area that is (usually) paved - courtyard, farmyard, stable yard and so on. Yes to the open space, but usually an enclosed open area surrounded by buildings of one kind or another, with one or 2 access points to the wider area.

I deliberately haven’t bought into this debate because it would add yet another layer of complexity (several layers even, because some of the terms differ from State to State in Australia). No-one so far has mentioned “home unit” or just “unit”, which is Australian for a dwelling that normally has at least one common wall with another, and can be part of a multi-storey building. What distinguishes a home unit is that it normally has a strata title (also called unit title), which is kind of like US-ian “condo”. In a strata development there are separate land titles for the common areas (held by the strata corporation), and each of the units (owned by their separate owners). The form of the building doesn’t matter at all.

>184 YouKneeK: Good review of The house of the spirits! I agree with you that the first sections of the book are more enjoyable than the second half. I preferred the magical realism to the politics. In my final year at university I took a course on Latin American Literature in Translation. I was about the only person in the class who competed the reading each week and so was able to discuss the books. However, HoS was the one title that everyone read and was enthusiastic about. But the professor tore it to shreds, calling it a shallow and derivative imitation of One hundred years of solitude. He said it was on the reading list because he wanted to include a female author but those that he thought were the best writers hadn't been translated into English at that time. It was an interesting class!

>197 Maddz:
I agree. My instinctive interpretation of "yard work" would be something in the crafts line that is best done in the open air. (Shoeing horses maybe?)

Of course, it is possible to have a house that does not open onto a street at all, but only onto the yard; hence the possibility of No. X, Y Yard, Z Street as an address.

When you read in a British novel (usually from an earlier era) of children going "out in the yard to play", they are in the communal cobbled area between tenement buildings.

>184 YouKneeK: - Codex is Sword and Sorcery, and not good. I massively enjoyed pretty much all of Harry Dresden (which is classic UF), The first book of Codex is actually pretty good, with have a muggle living in world where people (other than him) can control sprites that live in all objects. He has to survive by his wits. It's very inventive and generally quite clever, there's some nice ambiguous moral and ethics to think through. The rest of the series is sadly predictable getting worse and worse, I was very disappointed by what he chose not to do with it.

Hounded I read the first three and decided there was more complex enjoyment available.

Interesting about the definition of "yard!" Also the scarcity of wooden homes elsewhere.

As for kitty vs. Roomba, I appreciate your suggestion of leaving the dust bin out a little. I don't think she did it on purpose this time. It sits under a window sill where she likes to be and I think she jumped down on it. The dustbin may be more effective than the blanket for that sort of chicanery.

Love the pics of your surroundings and views. And add my voice to those envious of the Crape Myrtle.

Just wanted to thank you for the Flippy recommendation. I love the smaller one for reading in bed, and it's perfect for my 8 inch tablet. I may end up getting the full sized one to use when I'm watching TV and I'm using the 10 inch tablet. The Jr. came in a two pack so I gave the second one to my daughter who seems pretty pleased with it as well.

>203 clamairy: I have been looking for a Flippy, but they don't seem to be sold over here. Lots of lookalikes, of course, but the reviews tend to suggest that they fall apart..

>204 -pilgrim-: There seem to be a ton of knock-offs on Amazon, and they didn't appear to be of the same quality.

>201 reading_fox: Codex is Sword and Sorcery, and not good.

Them's fighting words. You better back them up with some damned platinum gold!

And here I thought my home pictures would be of minimal interest, maybe get a few “that’s nice” reactions, and then everybody would move on. ;) This is reminiscent of the time we had our in-depth cookie/biscuit/muffin/crisp/scone/etc. discussion!

>197 Maddz:, >200 -pilgrim-: Haha, it’s a good thing I don’t do yard work and therefore never have any reason to claim I’m doing it, because who knows what people from outside the U.S. would have thought I was doing!

>198 haydninvienna: I’m happy to hear from Australia on this subject! ;) That’s very interesting, if I had heard the term “home unit” I would have thought of it as a generic term for one home of any sort rather than a specific type of home. It actually sounds similar to my townhome neighborhood – each of us owns our own townhome, but the common areas are owned by the HOA (Homeowner’s Association).

>199 Sakerfalcon: Thanks, haha, that would have been a very interesting experience. It sounds like a bit of a role reversal with the students appreciating the work and the professor not!

>201 reading_fox: Thanks, I’ll come back and check your spoiler after I’ve finished reading Furies of Calderon. I’ve been seeing a lot of positive comments on the series both here and on Goodreads lately, so I’m hopeful it will work better for me. But if not, I’ll abandon it rather than read all 6 books. I’ve had frustratingly little time to read it so far, but the beginning seemed interesting.

>202 MrsLee: Haha, in that case, if it wasn’t mischievous curiosity, maybe she won’t be so pleased by her accomplishment and will be more careful where she jumps in the future to avoid such hullaballoo.

>203 clamairy: Oh good, I’m glad the smaller Flippy is working out!

>206 BookstoogeLT: LOL, it’s a good thing this thread is probably just about done. It’s even loading a bit slow for me, probably thanks to all the pics. If you two get out of control I’ll just start a new thread and leave the two of you penned up here. ;)

>204 -pilgrim-: There's one on Ebay UK for £35, free postage. Otherwise it's more than that to import.

>201 reading_fox: I always assumed the series would go the way it did and enjoyed it for the adventure fantasy that it was.

>207 YouKneeK: I just assumed it was the pix slowing things down.
and no worries. Just because I'm a rabid fanboy of Codex Alera doesn't mean, oh wait, yes it does! hahahahaaa.

In the interest of furthering our discussion of the U.S. “yard” with some visual aids, and further clogging up my slowly-loading thread, here are a few pictures from my childhood. This is probably the closest you’ll ever get to seeing a picture of me on the internet. ;) I think I was 5 in the snowy picture and 7 in the other two. We did live in a house from the time I was 5 up until around 10 years old, the only house I’ve ever lived in, and we had a good-sized yard of the grassy variety. The pictures are of bad quality – first because they’re old pictures from the early 80’s and second because I just now “digitized” them by taking a picture of them with my cell phone.

This picture faces toward the back of our back yard. We had a tall wood fence in the back, I think because the neighbor on that side had a pool and so had a higher fence for safety and privacy. The side fence in the next picture was more standard in our neighborhood. My mom always claimed that I used to throw naked Barbie dolls over the fence and our neighbor would find them floating in his pool. We had a tiny hill which, not knowing any better, I thought was a great sledding hill.


This picture faces toward the left of our back yard so you can see the normal type of fence. I don’t know what that dilapidated thing is in the neighbor’s back yard. I don’t remember their house as falling apart? It looks too far out to be their house though, maybe some sort of shed. My dad built me that swingset, which gave me several years of fun and resulted in most of the neighborhood kids wanting to play at my house. In this picture, I was intently practicing the “keep your eye on the ball” routine. I played softball for about 3 years, and I think this was early on in my batting education. I'm standing on the edge of our patio which was what you stepped out onto when you walked out the back door from our house.


And this is our front yard in the foreground, then me on my bike on the sidewalk, then across the street you can see another house and their front yard.


(Edit: It would probably be of some use to say WHERE these photos were taken... this was in Northern Virginia.)

>211 YouKneeK: Cool pix. You look very focused on that ball. I hope you weren't hitting it into the glass door to the patio ;-) We lived in Alexandria when I was little, and that last shot looks a lot like what I remembered, although I'm not sure if we had a garage. We didn't have that great wooden play structure, just the standard metal swingset. We moved around to the MD side when I was five or so, and I remember that house a lot better.

>212 Jim53: We were in Fairfax, so not far from Alexandria! LOL, surprisingly, I never did break any windows or glass doors. I think we usually went out to a field to practice after I learned how to actually hit the ball. My mom and I broke a knick-knack or two playing catch with the softball in the house, though…

>201 reading_fox:, >206 BookstoogeLT: I'm another one who enjoyed the Codex Alera series.

>211 YouKneeK: I like your pictures, and the discussions they have generated. I always find it interesting how a common language still has some big differences from country to country.

>211 YouKneeK: "naked Barbie dolls ... our neighbor would find them floating in his pool" Face down?

>212 Jim53:, >213 YouKneeK: I spent a delightful day in Alexandria on 4th July 1998. IIRC the friend who arranged my stay at Smithsonian lives in Falls Church, so I have brief if happy memories of that area!

>214 NorthernStar: Thanks, and yes, the languages differences are very interesting! It’s especially interesting to uncover the ones people might use in conversation with each other, thinking they’re on the same page and never realizing they each mean something different.

>215 hfglen: Haha, I’m not sure if they were face down, but I don’t remember the event(s?) at all. I regret that I didn’t properly appreciate the museums and historic sights while we lived in the area. I’d like to go back as an adult someday. As a child, my reaction whenever we went to D.C. was usually “not again” because so many of our school field trips were there, and that was of course where family visitors from out of town wanted to go.

>211 YouKneeK: your post reminds me of a childhood friend, who also might have done what you supposedly did with your Barbies. And you have a striking resemblance to her as well.

My sisters have most of our childhood photos. Maybe one day they'll scan and send them to me on a CD...

>216 YouKneeK: I can't help thinking you were relatively lucky in your school field trips. The "high" point in my memory of the ones I endured was a careers week in either my final year or the year before that. I can only think that the teacher who arranged it hated the class with a perfect passion. Why else would he have arranged tours of the abattoir, the city cleansing department, Libanon Gold Mine and a paper factory? The problem with the gold mine was that even as a teenager I have had a fear of heights (my glasses have always skated around freely, and without them I am almost blind), and there was a good 3-foot gap between the hoist and the edge of the shaft. And it was 6000 feet Straight Down if anything fell off ....

>217 fuzzi: Having siblings to share photos with would make things difficult! I’m the only child, so I have all the albums. It’s nice to have them handy for those times when the mood strikes me to go find some specific photo or some other thing that I know is in one of the albums. At one point I had grand plans to scan them all, both so I could have them backed up safely and also so I could send out digital copies to family members who might be interested. I got through about 180 of them, up to my 2nd birthday, at which point I had only just turned 2 years old in the photos. The process was very tedious, but the main reason I stopped was because I wasn’t pleased with the scan quality, and I didn’t have the time or skill to touch them up to make them look better, so I got frustrated with it. This was 12 years ago, so maybe modern technology would make it easier. Or I just need to accept that they aren't going to be great but that something is better than nothing. I could just pay a professional to do it for me which might have better results, but I’m also reluctant to entrust them to anybody else.

>218 hfglen: Haha, those field trips actually sound pretty interesting to me, although I can see how the gold mine would have been a problem if you’re afraid of heights! I would have loved that, though! The abattoir might have been more of a problem for me…

>186 Narilka: I would also add that in many cases, the urban setting is almost a character in its own right.

Enjoyed the pics of your current and childhood homes! I may have to dig up some pics of my childhood home and post them too. Or maybe a pic of every place I ever lived, which would run the gamut from house (with/without pool) to apartment to condo to loft to basement (garden) apartment and Chicago, Los Angeles area, Colorado, and New York. Eh, or not. That might be a bit much.

It's been 13 years since I read House of Spirits, and mostly I just remember it being a fascinating read that I enjoyed (well, "enjoy" may not be the exactly right word for it). It was only the second magical realism/Latin American book I read (first was Love in the Time of Cholera), so everything was very new to me. I do have to say I like Allende's writing, at least the books of hers I've read, which include Ines of My Soul and Portrait in Sepia.

>221 Storeetllr: Thanks! LOL, I would love to see some or all of those pics.

The House of the Spirits might very well have been my first Latin American book, although it’s possible I’m just being forgetful. Allende’s writing style was interesting and rather distinctive. I don’t think I’d want a steady diet of it, but I’d be willing to try it again at some point.

>221 Storeetllr: Yes, I too would love to see those.

>211 YouKneeK: For further terminology discussion, a lawn such as in your last picture, with no visible flowerbeds or trees - from the regularity of the spacing, I am assuming that the trees are part of the public area - would probably be referred to just as "the front lawn", but otherwise "the front garden".

I was a little surprised to see only the chain link fence dividing off your back garden in picture 2. It is not a matter of fear of anyone coming over the fence, but such a garden here is, in estate agent's parlance, "overlooked", which tends to lower property values. Most houses that start with just a chain fence cultivate thick shrubbery to solve this. But that is due to houses generally bring closer together here; space is at a higher premium.

I empathise with the picture: I had a tennis-trainer in my name garden, replacing the swing, as I got older.

>218 hfglen: Were your school trips optional?

We had to pay for all ours, which probably prevented such edifying choices.

>224 -pilgrim-: The culture around fences in US and UK can be very different. I remember being shocked when friends bought a house in a development outside Philadelphia where it was forbidden for homeowners to erect any fences on their property. "But - but - what if you have a dog? Or you don't want your kids to wander off?" Such a rule was incomprehensible to me. Where I lived in the city, though, all the houses had fenced back gardens (yards).

>226 Sakerfalcon:
That is why I raised the subject; I was suspecting there might be differences.

I have met the "no fences" rule in the UK, but only for front gardens.

>224 -pilgrim-: It isn’t in the picture, but there was a small dirt strip close to the house with bushes, and we had flowers there too some years. It was a small area, though. Would that still turn it into a “front garden”? Everything up to the sidewalk was considered the homeowner’s property, including any trees. The sidewalk would have been considered public property, I think. I’m not sure about that strip of grass closest to the street, but I know we mowed it ourselves.

Privacy didn’t seem to be much of a concern in the neighborhood where I grew up, or maybe I was just oblivious to any concerns about it because I was young. Neighbors talked to each other over the fences and dogs sniffed noses at each other through the fence. Personally if I were to have a yard right now, I would prefer for it to be more private than that one was.

Is a tennis trainer something that shoots tennis balls for you to hit? My first thought was a cross between what the US calls “tennis shoes” and what the UK calls “trainers” (I believe) and I was picturing a shoe in your garden. :) We never played tennis growing up, although I think I would have enjoyed it. I enjoyed playing softball quite a bit.

>226 Sakerfalcon: I’ve heard of some neighborhoods like that also, with fences not permitted, and thought it was very strange! As you mentioned, it would seem like a huge inconvenience if one had a dog especially.

By the way, I do plan to start a new thread eventually. I was just waiting until I had a new review to post as otherwise any conversations are likely to just be an extension of what we’re already talking about and therefore make more sense over here. Maybe this weekend.

Those front yards look rather like the front gardens on my estate. We've got a line of leylandii demarcating the boundary between us and the other half of the semi, and there's a strip of grass between us and the next semi. No fences at the front, but some properties down the road have ankle-height trip-hazards (glorified bed edging) between the properties. Houses further down the road are either mostly driveway or have more in the way of flowerbeds than we do. We've got a minute bed between the edge of the drive and the house (under the sitting room window), but that's it.

>228 YouKneeK: Yes, that would definitely count as a front garden, then.

I am not actually sure what a "tennis shoe" is. In my childhood we usually used plimsolls for school sports, but I think nowadays trainers would be more common.
Plimsolls: canvas shoes, usually elasticated rather than having laces, with soft rubber soles - excellent grip, very light.
Trainers: leather, with laces and hard rubber soles, usually built up and cushioned at the side, so provide more ankle support

A tennis-trainer was basically a tennis ball on an strong elastic cord that you attached to a swing frame. Thus when you hit the ball hard, it came back at you hard and fast. But if you missed it, it just went past, then came back again. So a good way of perfecting shots, without the tedious running after missed balls.

How common is tennis in American schools? We had hockey and netball in the winter months, then rounders or tennis in the summer. (Other sports available of course, but those were the compulsory ones in our P.E lessons.)

>225 -pilgrim-: No. They were included in the school fees. I hope the adjective "edifying" was meant sarcastically.

>230 -pilgrim-: British Plimsolls = South African Takkies, which used to be the cheapest form of footwear available, and are now almost unobtainable. Back in the day they were the ideal footwear if you were going to Mozambique and intending to walk on coral at low tide (after the expedition one threw them away, as the soles were by then cut to ribbons).

>229 Maddz: Here the insurance companies sometimes insist on high boundary walls for security. Even the SPCA was inclined to be sniffy about our chain-link fences when we wanted to adopt a kitten.

So many differences!

I live in an older development of ranch-style single family houses. Most are situated on 1/3 acre (approximately 1215 sq meters) of land, many have fences that were erected by the owners.

Here is a view of the front of my house, from the driveway (where you park your car):



View of house from the back "yard":



Here's an older overhead view of my house, with approximate property lines added:



The woods to the left are growing on another lot that was never used, it's just sitting there.

Just to the right of the yellow boundary is the driveway of the house next door.

This is typical of many housing developments built in the 1970s that I've seen in suburban (not city, not farmland) USA.

>231 hfglen: Of course Hugh. I remember going to York (Viking history), Bath (Roman history) and Stratford-upon-Avon (complete with Shakespeare production) for my GCE year trips; I presume those would have made you happier?

I agree. Plimsolls are excellent for rock scrambling at the coast. I miss them.

>232 fuzzi: Firstly, that looks a lovely frontage!

Second, what does "ranch-style" actually mean - since I assume you are not keeping any form of livestock!

Secondly, that amount of unoccupied land around your property definitely precludes it counting as "suburban" in the UK.

We just do not have that much unused land.

ETA: Should I be assuming wooden construction here too?

A ranch house (sometimes referred to as a rancher) is a one story home, fairly simply laid out. It has 2-4 bedrooms, 1-2 bathrooms, and often does not have a basement/cellar. It generally has at least a 1/4 acre of land, often more.

https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/what-is-a-ranch-house/

They are site-built, usually with wood frames, though the outsides are often brick or stucco.

ETA: thank you! I took those pictures after we had the siding replaced, a couple years ago. We did not replace the faux shutters.

>235 fuzzi: Ah, thanks. The translation would be "bungalow" here (without the land requirement).

How common are basements and cellars? They are a really notable feature with a house here. Modern houses tend not to be built with them, and in older (by which I mean built in the 19th century or earlier) houses, they usually have been converted into separate flats.

Site-built as opposed to what?

II am finding this conversation fascinating. I was the kid who used her Lego as originally intended - to design different styles of houses. :-)

FYI: there is so much available land in the US, all one has to do is find a lot or acreage and buy.

I like to look at the realtor/housing markets, in case we want to downsize when we retire. Many houses are on 10 acres of land, or more. It just depends on what you are looking for, what you are willing/able to maintain, and how much money you have. Smaller, older houses are fairly cheap, and built much better than most of those that were constructed in the last 30 years or so. And they usually are on a decent-sized lot, 1/4 acre or more.

>236 -pilgrim-: basements and cellars are common in older communities, like New England, and in areas where severe storms are frequent, like the Midwest (Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma etc). Most houses in the southeastern US like the Carolinas and Georgia are built on a concrete slab or have a crawlspace, a dirt-covered area directly below the house that allows for air circulation and access to pipes, etc.

My house has a crawlspace, that is high enough for someone to be on their hands and knees. It's not very popular with those who have to do maintenance or inspections, especially since during the warm months all sorts of critters (including reptiles) frequent it in search of shelter and food (bugs, lizards).

Site-built is when the house is built directly where it will be located, as opposed to manufactured and transported, such as double-wide (trailer) mobile homes. Once on a foundation they are no longer "mobile"!

>233 -pilgrim-: Of course. On the other hand, this deplorable choice did mean that one was left to discover Sterkfontein Caves (early hominins), Pretoria Salt Pan (now Tswaing Crater; meteorite crater), the Wonderboom (1000-year-old wild fig that has layered into three rings of suckers and covers a vast area) and the Boer War fortifications on the hill above it, and the War Museum in one's own time, with one's own interest and at one's own pace. Me, I'd have swapped the war museum out in favour of the Bensusan Museum (photography, I still hear a lawyer of my acquaintance adding "... and a spectacular divorce case") any day, while admitting that both had unique exhibits.

>234 -pilgrim-:, >235 fuzzi: I have seen the term "ranch style" applied to houses like fuzzi's in this country, though local building codes mandate bricks and mortar, not timber frames.

>236 -pilgrim-: My father insisted on a tiny cellar (for his wine collection) under the main bedroom when the house I grew up in was built. It was and still is the only cellar under a house I've ever seen in this country.

Site-built as opposed to prefab?

>238 fuzzi:
Another misconception: for me, crawlspaces are under the eaves (and used for the same purposes). It never occurred to me to envisage them under the floor.

What proportion of American mobile homes are genuinely mobile?

We have mobile home parks too, and sometimes they do actually move on, and sometimes they have been deposited on brick foundations. They tend to be second homes, often with leases stipulating that they cannot be occupied all year round.

There is, unfortunately, a certain stigma to actually living in a mobile home here; probably because of its association with the Roma and traveller communities, who were often forcibly settled in such places during the seventies, and who still experience significant prejudice.

A third option we have are the unit-built "prefabs", which were constructed elsewhere then transported to site. They consist of standardised elements, but are usually two-storey homes. They were intended as a quick method of building, to cope with the reconstruction needed to provide homes for those bombed out during the War. There use was then continued during the slum clearances of the sixties (as an alternative to the tower blocks), but they were not built to last, so are not usually in fairly poor condition, as there are very few prefabs erected now.

>239 hfglen: Yes, I would really have enjoyed those explorations too.

It was my parents who introduced me, in detail, to the geological features of the English landscape.

No pictures of Bicester but how about this: https://www.google.com.qa/maps/@-35.398613,149.1200783,3a,75y,216.04h,94.03t/dat.... That should give you a Google Maps street view of the street I used to live in in Canberra. Look at that sky--I miss Canberra skies.

The houses are single story or split-level, brick veneer, and newer ones are generally pretty well insulated. They are normally built on a concrete slab poured on the subsoil with a heavy plastic sheet vapour barrier in between. Front yard and back yard. In Canberra the strip of public land between the front of your block and the street is called the "nature strip" and you are responsible for keeping it tidy. Fences no further forward than the house alignment, which used to be 6 metres from the front edge of the block.

>242 haydninvienna: Thank you for joining the housing construction information exchange!

You say "brick veneer"- what does that mean? Does that mean that the walls are not actually made of brick?

>243 -pilgrim-: brick veneer is a covering that might be made of brick material but is very thin, just to make the house look as if it's made of brick.

LOL - in Canada we mostly use the same terms as the British, but we understand the American ones too :)

There are huge differences in housing types, depending on where you are in Canada. We are enormous, and there is a couple of hundred years difference between when various parts were invaded by Europeans. Two or three hundred years is nothing in some parts of the world, but here it's forever.

Re: basements - they're very common unless you are building on bedrock, permafrost, or a high water table. Modern houses almost always have one, although it may be developed as a basement suite (rentable separate apartment). There's an infill house being built near us that appears to have a TWO level basement, which is very odd. I don't know if they want a bunker or just extra space.

Crawlspaces are any place you have to crawl to get into :). My mom's old house had them in the eaves, but I have friends who have one under their main floor (high water table near a lake, so no basement).

I find the differences and similarities so interesting :)

>239 hfglen: site built as opposed to prefab, yes.

>240 -pilgrim-: our mobile home parks are often referred to as "trailer parks" though few or no trailers (with a hitch, to be pulled behind a vehicle) are situated there. People who live in these modest dwellings are discriminated against as well, though not due to any association with Roma peoples. The term "trailer park trash" is bandied about and thrown at people one doesn't like, whether or not they deserve the epithet.

I lived in several mobile home neighborhoods before we were able to buy a house. Some of them are very nice, and the homes aren't cheap. And the sad thing is that mobile homes depreciate in value unlike site-built houses. They do tend to be more flimsy, though we bought one that was rated for areas prone to hurricanes.

>242 haydninvienna: that could be a housing development in the southwestern areas of the US.

We get a lot of rain where I live (about 48" a year) and our water table is very high, so a basement would be a disaster!

>245 tardis: I find the differences and similarities so interesting :)

Me too.

>232 fuzzi: As an American from Southern California I'd consider a property like that to be rural not suburban. Lots around here are much smaller than that.

>248 jjwilson61: understood. I've not been to California where real estate is expensive and the lots are small, but of the places I've lived at and driven in all over the eastern United States I've seen plenty of these types of houses.

My best friend's house is for sale in Connecticut, and is also typical of the older ranch style dwelling. It's on a little less than a 1/4 acre. If you look through the gallery and see the room with the "stained glass" window, that was her bedroom where she and I used to sit on the floor and play with Barbies:

https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/40-Nehantic-Trl_Old-Saybrook_C...

>243 -pilgrim-: >244 fuzzi: No, brick veneer is actual brick on the outside. Single outer layer of brick, tied to an inner timber frame that supports it*. AFAIK a standard Australian brick is the same size as a standard British brick. The brick provides the weatherproofing and the timber frame provides the structural strength. Solid brick (2 layers of brickwork without the timber frame) and cavity brick (2 layers of brick with an air gap between) are not unknown but cost a lot more.

The house I owned in Chataway Crescent had a steel roof (“Colorbond”—rolled galvanised steel sheet with a bonded coloured layer). That was one thing we absolutely got right. Much lighter and stronger than tile, and absolutely guaranteed weathertight.

I was going to post another street view of the house that Mrs H and I owned in Jerrabomberra just across the border in New South Wales, but you can’t see much of it from the street.

*I think US building practice calls this system a “balloon frame”. In one form or another it’s pretty universal in Australia for single dwellings.

Here's a video of a DIY brick veneer job:

https://youtu.be/cGRV7UzTH2Y?t=665

>228 YouKneeK: I'm sorry, we sort of took over your thread...

>251 fuzzi: Still nope. Here’s a page from an Australian government website which will tell you all you need to know plus a lot more: https://www.yourhome.gov.au/materials/brickwork-and-blockwork.

>252 fuzzi: These things do rather tend to get out of hand, don’t they?

>253 haydninvienna: I don't see where what you posted countered what I posted, we appear to be saying the same thing. Brick veneer is thin bricks attached to the outside of a house, so it's not a brick wall, it's not a brick house.

This is a brick house, under construction:



I think we agree.

>226 Sakerfalcon: I always imagined snow was the major issue for not having fences around homes in inland locations. My sister's New Haven CN home had fences and I never visited the back yard my brother's house in Cambridge MA, but his Georgetown house did have a relatively tiny fenced yard. My blessedly short stay in Eire PA was when I noticed fenceless housing developments.
So how do the fenceless let their dogs out?

>256 quondame: I have had 'Invisible fencing' for the last 15 years. I had it installed at the house in CT and then brought the main unit and had it installed here in NY as well. It's great at keeping the dogs in the yard, but it does not keep anything out.

>256 quondame: we have a fence, but it needs to be repaired where a couple falling trees took sections down. Since my current dog does NOT come when I call (bulldog/hound/GSD/? mix, has a mind of her own) she is walked ON a leash in the yard. My previous dog didn't need a leash, she obeyed my commands.

>257 clamairy: I had to put up a physical fence because our great dane is dangerous to other animals. He is adopted and came to us extremely damaged. The physical issues are long since healed but the mental ones are for life; if another dog wandered in, it would be a (literally) bloody disaster. It is 100% fear-driven aggression - but aggression nonetheless. Luckily, we have 2 wooded acres so he has plenty of room to securely wander around without feeling too threatened.

>229 Maddz: Ah yes, garden/yard-wise that looks very similar to what would be seen here in the US. Brick(?) driveways are not at all common, though. I really like the look of the brick houses.

>230 -pilgrim-: I think a US tennis shoe is pretty much the same as a UK trainer.

>232 fuzzi: Your home is beautiful! I’ve never lived in a ranch style home, although some of the houses on the street I grew up in were ranch style. I’m not sure when ours were built, but we had a mixture of different styles.

>242 haydninvienna: That is a lovely neighborhood, and I love that sky and the mountains in the distance!

>245 tardis: A two-level basement does seem very odd, I’ve never heard of that! I’m used to basements being common in modern constructions too, so I guess that’s a regional thing depending on things like whether flooding is common in the area. My townhome doesn’t have one, but some of the other townhomes in my neighborhood do.

>252 fuzzi: LOL, my jaw may have dropped open when I finished work for the day and flipped over to my work computer and saw how many new posts there were. :) I’ve enjoyed reading the conversation!

>260 YouKneeK:
Thanks for hosting this conversation.

Do you have an equivalent to what I would call a plimsoll, and Hugh calls a Takkie?

>261 -pilgrim-: I’m actually not sure. I don’t think I’ve ever worn anything like what you described. In truth I would probably call them tennis shoes too, but in my odd mental world shoes have only three categories: tennis shoes, dress shoes, and boots. Hopefully a US resident who’s a little more fashion conscious can weigh in!

Here are the post references to the descriptions for anybody who can't find them: >230 -pilgrim-:, >231 hfglen:

>262 YouKneeK: Tennis shoes were canvas with rubber-like soles. Then came running shoes - Nike, Adidas - with much more complex upper and lower construction. Then all sorts of jogging and walking shoes and sports-specific trainers which were riffs off running shoes. Then we have boating shoes, leather or canvas uppers slip on style with super grippy soles. Tennis shoes, Keds or PF flyers brand, were the first sports shoe to fashion shoe of my life lifetime and there were high tops too, called basket ball shoes. And then moccasins.
My goal was to ditch the saddle shoes and wear Capizios, which were the middle class status brand flats and heels for 1960s teenage girls.

>263 quondame: Haha, thank you, that’s waaaay more complex than anything I would ever manage! I do remember high tops in my youth, though. So maybe UK plimsolls are tennis shoes, and UK trainers are (more or less) running shoes?

Edited to correct post reference.

>264 YouKneeK: This points to what we called a tennis shoe and regularly wore for casual and school wear. White was the most common color, but red and blue were frequent choices.

This points to what we called a running shoe but that's been extended to all it's descendants, cousins and in-laws, as long as it's only occasionally called upon to support us while we are actually running.

Re plimsolls, tennis shoes and trainers.

I remember plimsolls from my school days - a laced shoe with a canvas upper and a thin rubber sole. The upper was usually white, occasionally coloured. They were used for school sports and as beach shoes. The elasticated slip-on type were for young children; by the time you went to school you were expected to be able to tie laces, although I remember some multi-coloured slip-on beach shoes as a teenager. School uniform plimsolls were lace-up.

Tennis shoes were similar, but had a much heavier sole - I recall my mother's tennis shoes had a high-grip sole. She was a keen tennis player in the 1950s and played at championship level when she lived in Cairo. The sole I recall looked like densely packed thin rubber strips set vertically. These were invariably white. ISTR my mother's tennis shoes were Dunlop-branded.

Tennis shoes and white plimsolls were regularly Blancoed. For those not familiar, Blanco was a white liquid paste (pipe-clay probably) which you painted onto anything you needed to keep brilliant white and allowed to dry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanco_(compound)). The version I recall was the liquid form that came in a bottle with a built-in sponge applicator; as you got down the bottle, you had to add water to dilute it as it slowly dried out.

In the UK, trainers didn't really come in until the 1980s, about the time basketball shoes became fashionable in the UK (I recall owning some branded black hi-tops in my early twenties). Both came in via the US market, and developed out of running and other sports shoes, but didn't have spiked or studded soles as they were for indoor use as well as outdoor. These were multi-coloured, included leather as well as fabric, and had a sturdy sole, and basically became a fashion item not a sports item.

Just wanted to chime in here that this has been an absolutely fantastic look into these subjects. While I don't give 2 figs for houses or shoes, having the personal touch made it interesting :-D

>266 Maddz: I had forgotten the Blanco! Yes, white and laced at high school, black and elasticated at juniors.

>265 quondame: Ah, I’ve probably been misusing the term “tennis shoes” all my life then. I blame my parents. ;) The running shoe is more along the lines of what I wear for everyday use. After all, you never know when you might need to make a quick getaway!

Edited to add: But my “running shoes” are not bright yellow as in that picture! Lest anybody imagining me walking around everywhere in something like that. ;) One pair is a solid black, and the other is mostly navy.

>267 BookstoogeLT: It has been a fun discussion! Way more fun than just Googling for the info.

>265 quondame: maybe it's a regional thing, but for us shoes like the pictured Keds were "sneakers". I was so happy when I graduated from the rubber-toed variety to grown up sneakers without them.


Running shoes came out in the running/jogging craze of the late 1970s. Jim Fixx was part of the reason, read a bit here about the fad he started that never went away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Fixx

I had Saddle shoes, too. And when I was 14 and there was a retro-1950s fashion going on, I found a pair of blue suede shoes at the local shoe store. My mother was kind enough to buy them for me and I loved them, wore them out.

>270 fuzzi: Those were sneakers for us too, didn't matter if they were the canvas or fake leather variety, basketball or running style.

>268 -pilgrim-: Messy stuff wasn't it! I also remember you had to Blanco your plimsolls the day before they were needed just to make sure the canvas had dried out properly...

>272 Maddz: It also had a number of off-label uses ...

ETA: Though calling it "blanco"would have been unbearably poncy. Here it was tekkie-white.

>273 hfglen: I am intrigued...

>274 -pilgrim-: I'm not sure I want to know about off-label uses for Blanco! The mind boggles...

>274 -pilgrim-: >275 Maddz: Making temporary signs and protest posters, obviously. Less obviously, Rhodesia Railways Magazine suggests in an article I've just read, that there's a way of using tekkie-white mixed with lemon juice to clean ivory ornaments, and mixed with methylated spirits to clean piano keys (the white ones).

When I played basketball in high school and college, I wore high-top canvas sneakers that were referred to as "Chucks": they were made by Converse and the proper name was Chuck Taylor All-Stars. I've noticed VP Kamala Harris in low-top black chucks in a couple of recent pictures; maybe she'll revive their popularity. I know that sales dropped tremendously when more serious athletic shoes were introduced (good thing, too; they offered very little meaningful support. I would wear them only as walking-around shoes; I've been quite sold on Brooks walking shoes for several years.

Another expression I recall from childhood is "tenny pumps." My grandmother, who was a second-generation American (her father came over from Ireland) and lived in Massachusetts, used to use it. Has anyone heard that one?

For a while in high school I wore wallabees.

>278 jjwilson61: Me, too! I loved them! In fact I took them to college with me in Potsdam, NY and promptly fell on my behind when the first ice patches appeared. There was zero traction with those shoes.

>277 Jim53: I’ve never heard of “tenny pumps” myself. I think of “pumps” as being women’s dress shoes with at least a little bit of a heel, so that seems like a contradiction of terms to me!

>230 -pilgrim-: And I’m sorry, Jim’s comment about playing basketball reminded me that I never did answer your question about how common tennis is in American schools. Things like that aren’t always consistent across states, but where I grew up, I don’t think we played tennis in school at all. Maybe once or twice? In high school, the most common sport was basketball (netball?) because our gym teacher was a basketball coach and so that’s all he wanted to do. However, he seemed more concerned about letting the team members in the class use that for extra practice rather than teaching the entire class, so he allowed those of us who weren’t good at basketball to sit out without it impacting our grade. I therefore spent that time talking with friends and/or doing my homework and I’m not sure if I actually participated in a single basketball game. I actually enjoyed trying different sports and would have had fun trying to join in if it were a more relaxed setting, but I was intimidated by the better players and by my impression that they didn’t want to waste time dealing with those of us who either didn’t know the game well or didn’t have the skill for it. We also did quite a bit of roller hockey (hockey played on roller skates) and I enjoyed that much more. I could take or leave the hockey part, but I was happy just being on roller skates. In earlier years there was a little more variety, but I don’t think tennis was ever in the mix.

>280 YouKneeK: Yes, probably regional--we had tennis in both middle school and high school in Massachusetts (1970s/early 1980s). My kids had it as well (also MA.)

Being severely short sighted and not diagnosed until I was 10, I was never good at any sport involving hand/eye coordination. Also, I was overweight as a child and disliked running around kicking or throwing balls. We did children's sport in primary school and organised sport in secondary school - that was netball (which isn't the same as basketball although there are similarities), rounders (which evolved into baseball in the US), hockey, and athletics and gymnastics.

We did a bit of tennis at secondary, but much to my mother's disappointment I had no talent whatsoever. My sister was the sporty person - I took after my father and had my nose in a book at every opportunity. Also like my father, I enjoyed sailing and was reasonably good at it.

Fortunately, the convent wasn't superior enough to play lacrosse (that was the stuck-up crowd at Tommy More). Hockey was bad enough; and I recall one girl having 10+ stitches as the result of a rounders game (the batter wallied the ball and omitted to retain the bat with predictable consequences to the back-stop).

In the UK, tennis was considered rather middle class, so it wasn't played at most schools; it was a summer sport at my school. If you've ever read any boarding school stories aimed at girls, you'll get the idea of the sort of school sports I endured. At least I wasn't subjected to rugby or football in the winter months like the boys at St Peters; and never being picked for hockey games had it's advantages - we'd knock around the playground for a while and then slope off to the library.

>270 fuzzi: >271 Karlstar: We used the tennis shoe and sneakers interchangeably.
As for Blanco we had Kiwi brand shoe products which, though pretty much part of each new shoe purchase were hardly ever applied. We had already begun the slide into the trow-it-away generation.

>281 Marissa_Doyle: Ah, I’m jealous then because I think I would have enjoyed tennis far more than basketball! I did play it a few times as an adult, but not enough to gain any skill at it. I could hit the ball if it came anywhere remotely near me, that was the easy part, but the odds of it ending up in the same court we were playing in was fairly low. :)

>282 Maddz: Ouch, we didn’t play baseball very often at school, but we did do it a few times. The catcher who was behind the batter always had a helmet with a cage over the face, although I can’t remember anybody actually getting hit with a bat in any case. Actually, I can’t remember if we used a baseball or a softball. Probably a softball. I always enjoyed those days since that was more up my alley from playing on a team when I was younger. Volleyball was another sport that we played semi-often that I enjoyed. The track (running) days were the worst. I did pretty well in sprints, but never developed the stamina for the longer runs.

I never particularly excelled at any sports, but I did do reasonably well with some of them and enjoyed trying, although I've never had the slightest interest in watching them as a spectator. I guess I was at somewhat of a disadvantage at school sports, particularly in the younger grades, because I was a year younger than my classmates, but I never really noticed any issues at the time.

>276 hfglen: What were advaantages of Blanco over white emulsion for that purpose? Was it simply innocuousness of purchase?

>280 YouKneeK: Most obvious differences between netball and basketball:
1. No dribbling - the ball should never hit the ground.
2. Each member of the team (GS, GA, WA, C, GD, WD, GK) has a different set of zones of the court that they are allowed to enter.
So, for example, only the GA (Goal Attack) and GS (shooter) of one team, and the GK (goalkeeper) and GD (goal defence) of the other can enter the area around the net.

Thus there is less mobbing, and so height is not as crucial as in basketball. (We tried basketball a couple of times at my school.) And yes, I had a netball hoop attached to the swing frame in my back garden.

>282 Maddz: I don't recall middle class connotations for tennis: all girls' schools in my area played it as the summer sport, along with rounders. (Netball and hockey for winter.)

Gymnastics were optional at senior school. Most athletics was (thankfully) optional, although not the cross-,country running, which replaced hockey when the pitch was too flooded.

The boys played hockey and rugby in the winter, tennis (and, I think, football) in summer.

In my junior school the terrifying sport was shinty. We played in mixed teams. It's like hockey, except with hooked sticks, and instead of "not above the waist" the rule is "not above the neck"! Seeing a classmate get hooked around the neck was disturbing. (It is a foul, of course, but also incredibly dangerous.)

But the worst sport injury I knew of took place at the boys' school. A lad was killed by a cricket ball. He was supposed to be watching, and waiting his turn, but he had turned to talk to a friend, and took the ball to the head, at the base of the skull. A truly horrifying freak accident.

>285 -pilgrim-: price.

>280 YouKneeK: I have to admit that my only contact with "pumps" as footwear was in the context of an extremely upmarket purveyor of Highland Dress in Johannesburg, who could supply "Ghillie Pumps" at an extortionate price. These were very soft, very black, very flat gents' shoes.

>281 Marissa_Doyle: My mother had a rush of blood to the head when I was in what I believe the USAnian contingent would call middle school. She decreed that I HAD to go to tennis lessons in order to Meet People. I think it took me about ten minutes and the coach about three weeks to realize that I only ever saw the ball after it had passed me, and there was no way this would change. Mother finally dropped the idea when I started muttering that all the girls I was supposed to Meet had a characteristic in common: if half of them stood with one ear in the sun their eyes lit up, and if you looked into the eyes of the other half you saw straight out through the back of their heads. And that, coupled with Mother's and (worse) Grandmother's fanaticism for the game, killed the last vestige of interest I might ever have had in the game.

>286 -pilgrim-: Netball sounds interesting! That’s awful about the cricket incident, and I can only imagine how the boy at the other end of the ball felt.

>287 hfglen: Note to self: In a multi-cultural environment, if a man says he wore pumps, do not assume he was wearing something like this:

>288 YouKneeK: You would call that a "pump"?!

I have only ever encountered "pumps" as girls' shoes, the defining characteristic being that they are flat, with rounded toes, since the leather (or other material) is soft, and not rigidly moulded. Although I shouldn't forget that men also wear ballet pumps.

My mental pictures of people wearing pumps to formal events has been that they were wearing "flatties" in order to dance. I assume I was wrong?

>287 hfglen:
Can you describe "ghillie pumps" a bit more please? I have only ever heard of or seen brogues being worn with Highland dress.

I think that the true brogue, made of a single piece of soft leather, laced over the foot, with the gaps (for walking on boggy terrain), is sometimes called a "ghillie brogue" to distinguish it from the style of gentleman's shoe that is ornamented with pierced tooling, that only penetrates an ornamental outer piece of leather.

>289 -pilgrim-: Apparently used in Highland dance, which I didn't know, and very similar to your "ghillie brogues"; here's the Wikipedia article, which has pictures.

>289 -pilgrim-: That image came directly from a company web site that was marketing that particular shoe as a “pump”. I had typically thought of pumps as having somewhat shorter heels than that, but never flat. I’m surely not an expert though so I'll rely on my more fashion-conscious fellow US residents to chime in. ;) Google has contradictory info on it, so I’m not going to share any of the results I found, but some links said they were the same as “high heels” and others said they had slightly shorter and wider heels. I wouldn’t consider the above image to be a wide heel at all!

>288 YouKneeK: I'd call that a court shoe (subspecies ankle-breaker), although most court shoes I'm familiar with have lower heels (less than 1") because of all the standing around at the functions they were originally worn to, plus the ability to dance in them.

Ballet pumps are to me ballet shoes or dancing shoes; the type I used for ballet (no pointe-work) had a soft sole that effectively covered your footprint (indoor use only), whereas a pump has a fuller more rigid sole with a very low heel (outdoor as well as indoor use).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballet_shoe vs



(You can see the type of sole on a ballet shoe here:

>290 hfglen: On what sort of occasion can Highland dress be worn in South Africa? Is it reserved for formal occasions, or can it be seen worn on the streets, at the rugby etc.?

>292 Maddz: I would with you completely, except that I would consider ballet shoes/pumps as a sub-class of pumps.

They are made in the same way - cloth (or whatever) turned under and a sole stuck onto the bottom. It is just that the sole needs to be a harder material if they are going to be worn outside.

>293 -pilgrim-: Caledonian Society gatherings, regimental events involving for example the Transvaal Scottish, so yes formal or semi-formal occasions. There are a few gents here in Durban who wear Highland dress to "important" meetings of the S.A. National Society -- one looks very grand, but the president of the society looks somewhat ridiculous.

>295 hfglen: I presume those meetings are the sort of occasion at which a suit would ordinarily be worn, rather than a black-tie event?

>291 YouKneeK: do you picture this for 'tenny pumps'?

>296 -pilgrim-: I don't know how many, if any, of my friends and associates actually own suits! I don't, for one. Nor have I worn a tie in the last ten years. I think one would describe the dress code for these events as "smart casual". Though if you turn up to watch the Pietermaritzburg Caledonian Society Pipe Band playing outdoors at Baynesfield, shorts would be perfectly acceptable in summer -- it gets hot and humid here!

>298 hfglen: Which begs the question of what constitutes "smart casual", a phrase that has evolved considerably over my lifetime. And does, as you say, depend a lot on climate.

I would have thought kilts even more uncomfortable in such weather though.

>279 clamairy: I took my Nike Cortez shoes to Potsdam, but in the winter I wore boots! Potsdam State or Clarkson?

>288 YouKneeK: >289 -pilgrim-: That's not a pump, that's a stiletto! But yes. I know men's pumps look like early 19th century ballroom shoes, what we call flats. I even got my husband a 11 (42) black pair for dancing, but he jettisoned them for black loafers.

>292 Maddz: Haha, ankle-breaker is a good term for it.

I guess we’ve all collectively uncovered another one of the less obvious word differences between our various counties. If one of us used the word “pump” in reference to a shoe, those of us from a different country might be imagining something entirely opposite from what’s intended! I never in a million years would have pictured a ballet shoe, and I hadn't been familiar with the term being associated with men's shoes either.

>297 Darth-Heather: LOL, that made me laugh very hard. That looks like a perfect match for the term! I almost want to wear something like that just to confuse people...

>301 quondame: Stiletto would seem the more accurate term to me for that picture too!

>278 jjwilson61: I had a pair of Desert boots in Jr. High...



Can't believe I found a picture of the style online!

ETA: pumps are high heel shoes, USA.

Pumps, as we know them today, originated after World War II. Shoe designer Roger Vivier, who worked for Christian Dior, designed the three-inch stiletto heel in 1954. This new style was much more glamorous than the practical court shoes that had reigned supreme over the last century.

Since then the pump has bounced in and out of the fashion spotlight, but it's always been a very enduring style.

>303 fuzzi: Since then the pump has bounced in and out of the fashion spotlight, but it's always been a very enduring style.

As in you have to have plenty of endurance to actually wear them for longer than 30 seconds...

>303 fuzzi: Wow, I never imagined you'd get vellies in America!

Here the most respected ones used to come from a mission station at the opposite end of the country from Durban, though they now have a factory and outlet in Clanwilliam, and are evidently sold through agricultural co-ops in all provinces except the one I live in.

>305 hfglen: I used to own a pair in the early 80s when they were fashionable in the UK. Mine were tan rather than buff, and were a fashion item so the upper was stitched to the sole. I think they got chucked when the sole got a hole.

I also owned (possibly still do) a pair of calf-length laced books with a faux fur lining in a similar style. I say I possibly still own them as I used them for LARP costume, and they would probably be lurking in the attic with the rest of the LARP gear.

>304 Maddz: I had one pair of 3" high heels, didn't like how they felt, so I didn't wear them out. Never bought another pair, either.

I finally have a review to post and so will be starting my new thread. The link will show up below in a few minutes, but feel free to continue posting here if you still have more to say about anything we've been talking about.

>307 fuzzi:
My feet are too small to wear 3" heels - the gradient is excessive!

But on terminology: I would consider stilettos as a subgroup of court shoes.

I am getting the impression that the UK classifies primarily by heel height, and the US by heel width.

>309 -pilgrim-: These days I'm too overweight to wear heels, especially of the court shoe variety. I can manage high platform soles or boots with a mid-height heel:



Both came from TK Maxx. (Yup, that's my desk complete with laptop stand, Infinite Book, SAD lamp and the foot of the external monitor.)

These have decent support along the whole of the foot. Courts and stiletto with high, narrow heels throw too much weight onto the toe area, and the narrow heel makes uncomfortable walking if you have 'soft' ankles.

I also wear Fit Flops and Rocket Dogs in the summer months, also Keen Bali slides, although it's expensive importing them now. When I used to cycle round Cambridge, I wore the latter almost exclusively because of the toe cap. I have a form of eczema on my feet which means I prefer not to wear nylons because my feet tend to sweat a lot and aggravate it; open sandals or cotton socks are much better for me.

I have oddly-shaped feet - normal width across the ball of the foot, tapering back to a narrow heel. That means most shoes that fit across the ball of the foot slop at the heel giving me blisters. I almost exclusively wear mules or laced shoes; these are better than a court style. The Chelsea boots in the picture are unusual for me in that they are snug enough not to slop if I'm not walking too far. Most of my winter bootees are of an Ugg style; I generally wear trousers. I have a couple of pairs of long boots for the rare occasions I feel obliged to wear a skirt in winter; standing around on drafty train station platforms is not conducive to wearing skirts. My main problem with long boots is finding one that are wide enough around the calf.

>310 Maddz:

You will not be surprised that I have "soft" ankles as well as hypermobile knees. These days I mainly wear pumps (British English), but it might surprise you to learn that I switch in court shoes with 2" heels from time to time. I find that changing the angle of my foot changes exactly how the ligaments of my knees are being stressed and this situation is one where "a change is as good as a rest" (or at least some way towards it).

I actually have rather narrow feet, but with high insteps, so the shape of preformed court shoes can be very difficult (as they try to slice off the top of my foot when my weight his forward).

I used to wear a lot of laced boots - both ankle and calf-length - because of the support they provide to my ankles. (Now trying to tie laces tightly is an issue.) Having done a lot of certain sports in my youth has given me calf muscles that do not fit into any other type of boot.

Our ballet days are catching up with us!

>311 -pilgrim-: Cycling on the flat is considered good for knees. While I was living in Cambridge and cycling a lot, my knees were in reasonable condition for my age, weight and stressors in my youth. The past 2 years I've had problems with both knees; my left 2 years ago, the right last year.

It got to the stage I bought an exercise bike just to try and improve matters. It's been something of a godsend in lock-down... Not that I use it above once a week.

It was a choice between getting an exercise bike or replacing my pedelec with the burnt-out motor - then I'd feel obliged to cycle to the station which is 6-7 miles away, and in foul weather in the dark, no thanks. The thought of cycling up Houghton Hill (main road, in the country, steep with angry drivers trying to pass) - urgh.

>312 Maddz: What sort of knee damage do you have? Worn joints and damaged ligaments are both miserable, but have quite different treatments.

My GP forbade all repetitive movements (such as cycling when my EDS was first diagnosed, decades ago).

Not quite sure - it's never got to the stage of requiring a consultant. Nearest I got was an X-ray 18 months ago on my left knee when I could barely walk. They reckoned it was age-related wear and tear; I'd pinged something going up a flight of steps after a 20 minute walk, then walked another 20 minutes back to the office. Whatever I did then was aggravated by standing for 20 minutes on the train going home...

At one point or another, I've basically sprained both knees. The right knee was from walking on frozen mushed up leaves - I slipped, but didn't fall because I wrenched my knee instead. The other knee was a similar accident.

When I moved to Cambridge, I had an initial consultation with my new surgery and turned up with 2 yards of elastic bandage wrapped round my right knee. The doctor asked what on earth had I done, and I said 'Cycled up Castle Hill'. He roared with laughter (it's the only hill in Cambridge) and said that they had a very good orthopaedic surgeon. My response was 'No thanks, it's a great excuse for getting out of 5-a-side workplace footie games'. He then commented on cycling on the flat being a great way to protect knees from damage.

Provided I didn't do anything silly like cycling up hills, I was fine. It's since virtually stopping my twice-daily 20 minutes between the office and home that my knees have started complaining.

My younger sister basically has virtually no cartilage left in either knee - she used to run a lot with her dogs. A couple of years ago she had a plica removed from one knee and the surgeon strictly forbade her to run anymore.

>314 Maddz: At one point or another, I've basically sprained both knees
The one where your joint bends crossways, at 90° to the direction in which it is supposed to hinge? Yeah, painful, isn't it?

>300 Karlstar: State! Graduated with a degree in Math & English in '81. Went to grad school there for English as well. My husband was a Clarkson grad.

What about you?

>316 clamairy: Clarkson!