Testimony of Mute Things, Lois McMaster Bujold. Another Penric! This should have gone in last week's book post, but I forgot, which says something about how much of an impression it made on me. I was looking forward to "Penric and Des solve a murder", but wasn't as excited by the book as I'd hoped. On the plus side, we got more princess-archdivine, who is the best archdivine, and not just because I like saying "princess-archdivine".
Much Ado About Numbers, Rob Eastaway. A book about the ways math is used in Shakespeare that provides relevant historical context, this lands smack in the intersection of my special interests Venn diagram. I thought it might be gimmicky, and it does have some trivia, but I really liked it, and it has helpful tables of things like units of measurement used in Shakespeare and how they compare. Unfortunately I only got about 70 pages into it because it was an overdue book that my mom needed to return to the library. Will be picking up for the rest, though.
Unabridged, Stefan Fatsis. A book about dictionaries, past, present, and future, seen from the perspective of Merriam-Webster, where Fatsis worked part-time proposing new words and definitions while researching that book. Very readable, I learned some things and enjoyed the inside peek at Merriam-Webster (which reminded me in some ways of my own workplace). However I found Fatsis's "I'm a sports bro, not one of these nerds" narrative posture a bit distracting (I think I felt the same way about his book
Word Freak on tournament Scrabble when I read it over 20 years ago).
Lucky Few, Kathryn Ormsbee.
lannamichaels reviewed this author's autobiographical-ish middle grade graphic novel
Turning Twelve, and since I've been whining for decades now about the lack of books about homeschoolers that have plots other than "homeschooler goes to school for the first time", I was intrigued. (I'm pretty sure there are now a lot of millenial writer homeschool alumni who would happily write what they know, and the challenge is figuring out how to sell it; Kristyn Miller's
Given Our History did it by having the homeschool bits be flashbacks in a second-chance romance, and I enjoyed the flashbacks but felt that the present-day romance suffered from being less grounded in reality.)
I picked this up because I was more interested in reading a YA book than a middle grade graphic novel, and I needed an airplane book; however I suspect that
Turning Twelve is a much better book.
Lucky Few did do its job of entertaining me during an extended travel delay, it had some good banter and I liked the protagonist's super nerdy BFF. I'm not going to get into a detailed critique of the book (though I could, and if you set me off in the comemnts I might), but this managed to make homeschooling come across as entirely unappealing. Now, not every book can be
Libby on Wednesday with the awesome house and extended family. But the homeschooling here was pretty heavily on the school-at-home end of things, and had pretty much all the same drawbacks as school in terms of social life, as well as background toxic homeschool group parent dynamics, while not seeming to come with any real advantages.