Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Books finished:

Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance. the book covers a lot, with a focus on Machiavelli and on Florence--The idea of a Renaissance, as a goal, was invented in Florence, and tourism has been important to the economy of Florence for centuries. Recommended.

T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Faith. A reread of a romance set in the Temple of the White Rat universe.

Celia Lake, Claiming the Tower. Another romance set in her Albion fantasy history, this takes place during the Crimean War, and the relationship arc is a slowly-developing friendship and then romance between two wonen.

Jenn Lyons, The Sky on Fire. A fantasy novel, set in a world with dragons. The main viewpoint character wanted to be a dragon rider, and instead found herself living on the barely-habitable surface, after what was intended to be been a fatal fall. Politics on multiple levels, as well as relationships. I enjoyed this and am not sure what to say about it. Lyons does a good job of world-building, with a lot of what Jo Walton calls including to avoid the "as you know, Bob" problem of telling the reader things that the characters take for granted. This seems to be a stand-alone book, and I have another of Lyons's books on hold at the library.

Susan Kaye Quinn, editor, Bright Green Futures. An anthology of solarpunk stories. These are mostly near-future stories about living in a climate-changed future, and adapting to aspects of that.

I liked most of the stories. Serena Ulibarri’s “What Kind of Bat Is This?” is about people working on studying and restoring a bit of desert. Danielle Arostegui’s “A Merger in Corn Country” is about farming and finding community as the climate changes and people have to decide whether to relocate. Brightflame’s "Ancestors, Descendants,” is weird and interesting, depicting a few people finding a way to live within a fungally-linked network of plant life at the northeastern edge of the continent (I think North America). “Centipede Station” by T K Rex is set much further in the future, somewhere a long way from Earth. It's anti two people whose starship has crash-landed on some kind of space station. Recommended, though I apparently tried and gave up on one of the author's novels a few years ago.

Celia Lake, Distilling Sunlight. Another Albion book, a romance between a widower with two children, and a woman who has never married, because she never met anyone she wanted to marry, and because she thinks her distractability and tendency to lose track of time would interfere with any serious relationship.

Holly Day, Squirrel Circus. A romance between two "shifters," one a wolf shifter (with a lot more control over the transformation than the typical werewolf, and a squirrel shifter. The two men can smell that they are each other's destined mates, and both think it would be a very bad idea, because wolves tend to kill and eat squirrels. I enjoyed this, but have no immediate impulse to seek out more of Day's work. We never see the titular squirrel circus, but it's a minor plot point. (This book, the Celia Lake romances, and the Courtney Milan book discussed below all contain explicit sex, but this one has an "adults only" warning at the beginning.)

Lois McMaster Bujold, Knot of Shadows. Another Penric and Desdemona novella.

Courtney Milan, A Compendium of Ever-Increasing Mayhem. Romance, and I'm not sure I entirely believe the characters getting together after the man ruined the woman socially years earlier, largely to amuse himself and his friends. (He has changed, but she has trouble believing that.)

Current reading:

I am reading what seems to be the new Penric and Desdemona story, Darklight Dare, on the kindle.

Our current read-aloud book is Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, translated by someone who liked the book enough that he learned French in order to translate it. (We compared this to another translation, and agreed that we preferred this one.)