Derek > Recent Status Updates

...and of course it's already brutal.

"At least it wasn't a prison ... Faller thought, eyeing the ... ornate wooden door locked from the outside."

Ah, so it's not a prison, it's a room-with-no-exit-except-a-locked-door. I usually call that a prison. This sort of thing is really annoying me.

"It seemed impossible that they were having this conversation. Peter wouldn't kill innocent people, not for any reason."

Really? He's already killed two. Sure one was not intentional, but I wouldn't call it pure accident, either. He's at least guilty of manslaughter, probably negligent homicide. The second was definitely premeditated murder. So, not at all true.

Wolfe says to Santi: "In bocca al lupo" Apparently that really is Italian for "Good luck", but how on earth does a language develop an idiom where "into the mouth of the wolf" becomes "good luck"? English would never do anything so ridiculous! :-)

Finally back to this.

Dario comes back to the room and keeps Jess awake with his snoring, and I think "half of the students are gone—why are they still sharing rooms?" Half a page later, Jess is deciding to move into one of the empty rooms! I like it when an author times things that well (after all, Jess could have moved earlier, but he hadn't thought to, either).

any alternate history that wants to convince me that a Berliner finds the idea of a Welsh-English war difficult is going to have to give me a lot more back story.

already it's not making sense. why would smugglers draw attention to themselves like this?

I officially give up. I can't see that I'm ever going to get around to finishing this.

Lee child doesn't make mistakes. so why was this guy murdered in Ukraine instead of Afghanistan?

Goodreads notes that I only read 75 of the hundred books I said I'd read in 2016, and says "Better luck next year."

What's luck got to do with it?

"Guided as he was by a rigid intellectual honesty, that one faculty which makes the scientist differ from any other calling,..."

I laughed out loud. And then I spent ages trying to decide whether they were serious or deliberately ironic. I've worked with scientists for decades, and sure there are plenty who are intellectually honest. But they're just as likely to be venal as the rest of humanity!

New Dalek Avatar for the season. No more "Bah, Humbug"!

R.I.P. Sherry S. Tepper; died October 22nd and none of my usual news feeds considered it worth mentioning...

Is it OK for an author to add quotes of their own work? I don't think so. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7857820

Oh, dear. I got well into this, then I acquired books 3 & 4 of Gladstone's Craft sequence, and (20 books later...) I must get back to it.