2019-12-31 08:20
New Year's Eve is here and it's hard not to be a bit reflective about the past year, but I kind of did that on my birthday, so also... not much new. It was a good year on the whole personally speaking (nationally and globally one can hardly say the same). The main downside I can think of was putting our cat Zoe to sleep. I still think about her sometimes.
I was rereading Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, but I think after reaching about halfway I'm giving up. The book has a lot of parody in it, and Sorrentino is very good at it, so much of it is parodying bad writing that in the skill he puts to it, it is hard to read. At times it is funny, but not always to me, and it is not getting beyond the parody and humour to something more as many of his later books do.
I don't think I've mentioned it before, but earlier in the year I subscribed to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. My new issue arrived yesterday before I had finished the previous one (not the first time that's happened), so now I'm also more consistently reading last issue. Since it's short stories and novellas, I tend to read the issues in bits and bursts, often depending on how much a story catches my attention. Some of the issues are more engaging to me as a whole, than others. The one I'm reading now (November/December 2019) has been pretty good. Charlotte Ashley's "A Joy in Wounding" is a ancient greek fantasy story that was quite enjoyable. Matthew Hughes' "A Geas of the Purple School" has a fun sword & sorcery vibe to it (as does all the stories I've read by him).