Does it feel better in that cold Boston weather?
WHRB was on fire when
spatch picked me up from South Station, blessedly with roast beef sandwiches which we ate parked in the blowing rain beside the Fort Point Channel. I enjoyed the Backfires' "Dressed for a Funeral" (2024), Kingfisher (MI)'s "Reichenbach Falls" (2022), and 22° Halo's "Bird Sanctuary" (2024), but Diet Cig's "Harvard" (2017) is one of the funniest choices the station could have made short of Tom Lehrer's "Subway Song" (1944).
The catch of compiling that hundred books meme is that my library remains overwhelmingly in storage, meaning that I am waiting to find out which books of formative importance to the inside of my head got left off the list. [edit: Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (1955), for one. Andre Norton's The Zero Stone (1968), for another. Clare Bell's Ratha's Creature (1983). Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard (1975). Maybe I should make another list.] I excluded plays, poetry, most nonfiction, and confined myself to one book per author even in cases where I read shelves of them and hunted their work through new and used book stores for years. It's heavily biased toward childhood and adolescence and even then I had to prune in order to be able to reach college before running out of slots. I feel bad about sidelining Wilkie Collins, I figure Tolkien can take it. Please feel free to ask me about any books which you do not see on this list, or any which you do, for that matter.
Hestia sniffed my hands all over and then pressed her head against my fingers in such a fashion as to self-scritch, her recognized and imperious demand for petting which I granted, glad she had forgiven the scent of strange cats and a whole lot of train. My seatmate from New York to Boston asked if I would be more comfortable if he masked and then did so for the remainder of the trip, making him the first person since I started cautiously traveling again even to ask the question. He seemed very surprised when I told him so. It was just human.
The catch of compiling that hundred books meme is that my library remains overwhelmingly in storage, meaning that I am waiting to find out which books of formative importance to the inside of my head got left off the list. [edit: Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (1955), for one. Andre Norton's The Zero Stone (1968), for another. Clare Bell's Ratha's Creature (1983). Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard (1975). Maybe I should make another list.] I excluded plays, poetry, most nonfiction, and confined myself to one book per author even in cases where I read shelves of them and hunted their work through new and used book stores for years. It's heavily biased toward childhood and adolescence and even then I had to prune in order to be able to reach college before running out of slots. I feel bad about sidelining Wilkie Collins, I figure Tolkien can take it. Please feel free to ask me about any books which you do not see on this list, or any which you do, for that matter.
Hestia sniffed my hands all over and then pressed her head against my fingers in such a fashion as to self-scritch, her recognized and imperious demand for petting which I granted, glad she had forgiven the scent of strange cats and a whole lot of train. My seatmate from New York to Boston asked if I would be more comfortable if he masked and then did so for the remainder of the trip, making him the first person since I started cautiously traveling again even to ask the question. He seemed very surprised when I told him so. It was just human.

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I know the first of those, but not the second! Tell me about it?
Devil on My Back was almost certainly my introduction to its assorted tropes of computerized dystopia: I read it for the first time in sixth grade and then not again for decades until Chaz Brenchley sent me a copy from the UK. I read the Isis trilogy about a year later when I discovered it in my middle school library, but it never stuck the same way.
Also I really should read Two Bit Heroes; I loved City of Diamond and wish she’d done more in that universe but I guess being a famous scriptwriter was significantly more lucrative.
I believe she also had publishing difficulties: Two-Bit Heroes is the second of a three-book series that was not intended to be a trilogy, even though it was collected as such at least once. It's my favorite of the three, but I recommend the set. I just wish there had been at least a fourth in it!
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