Find That Book

Only a 'what has actually changed' set of notes today, rather than a reflection on where I am on the goals.

• craft - the middle of the year 100 days goal to have fewer WIPs is moving along steadily. I have a document and it has a lot of information / ideas in it. I have found yet another list that is to be reconciled into the main list (this one is in trello).
• reading - ahead 26 'books' and 59 pages (this has not been much of a reading week).
• music - Malle Symon now mostly doable at what might be a performance speed. Found a recording of someone else playing it, on a much larger recorder than I use, so the last practice I did on the alto rather than the soprano. I'm not sure if that is what made it a better run through, or maybe just I'm nearly dealing with that speed.
• organisation The three boxes of fabric and yarn have been taken away; two empty boxes have been returned; it is possible some of the fabric will come back but at the moment I'm calling that specific goal complete.
• writing I have spent some time poking at the neocities site. I have more text in it. I still haven't worked out how I want to handle some stuff. I also now have an airtable base with many Untapped books (it is intensely frustrating that there isn't just a list of them readily accessible, but needs must, and I'm poking at several different sources - I have a search in trove open, it has slightly more books than I've identified already).

So, I've been off poking at recorder playing websites, in an attempt to do some upskilling. At the moment, I'm thinking about experimenting with learning circular breathing, because it looks like fun.

Most of what I've been reading is fine. And then I got to this piece on mouthpieces which was going just fine when talking about two breathing styles.

Then it gets into specifying which playing characteristics go with which breathing style, which had me making that 'what are you talking about' face, because I really don't believe that ones breathing style is going to affect how one positions one's fingers, and I *really* don't believe it goes with footedness.

Then it jumped the shark.

Apparently you can tell which breathing style a person is going to be, based on the ratio of sun energy to moon energy on the day they are born. There are two links to look further in to this, and determine which side of the binary you are, but both are in German, and I decided I'd read enough.

Also: I believe that both breathing styles are useful, and it does rather depend on the type of music you are playing.

Also Also: I'm not convinced that these are all the options.

From [Book Jockey Alex’s] blog:

• Notable Young Adult Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror of 2024 - while the original post was at the blog, the actual list is at ReacTor Mag.
• YA Book Bundles – Science Fiction & Fantasy, Part 1
• YA Book Bundles – Science Fiction & Fantasy, Part 2

general thought: Look, I get that the USA has a stranglehold on some aspects of publishing, and that someone writing from North America about books published in English is going to get a lot more options set in the USA. But for me to pick something set there to spend my precious reading time, the summary has to be spectacular. Ditto ‘class warfare (near) future dystopia’. I’m here for the escapism, dammit. In the Reactor article there were books more relevant to my interests later on, but I nearly noped out when the first five or so were so dire.

Overall - I didn’t quite make it through these lists. I found it near impossible to focus on the descriptions to see if there was something I was going to like; then I just skimmed to see if there was anything jumped out at me. Also, two of these are from 2020, so there were several I’ve either got on the wishlist, or have read. Of the ~80, I added four to the wishlist, but only one is a ‘really want to read’, and that’s because it is one of my must read authors.

The Spinoff’s best NZ books of 2024 - I found the summaries much more readable than the previous, and yet I added zero books to the reading wishlist.

The Best Books We Read in 2024—And What We’re Looking Forward to in 2025 by Words without Borders - books in translation. Another one where the summaries/reviews were interesting reading, but none sparked an interest in actually reading the books.

Read Palestinian Speculative Fiction Reading List by Sonia Sulaiman - to be fair here, I’ve read five booklists already, and I’m starting to flag. But this is the last one, and then I can close the window, and I’m very invested in that. So, I’m expecting to be unmotivated by any of the books, and that is not actually a commentary on what is written. … and then I started reading and discovered it is a stack of links. For now, I’ve shoved it into the ‘reading plans’ tab group, which is where anything online short fiction gets put until I have the oomph to read it.