. At board game club, we played Lanterns, Exploding Kittens, Drop It, and Carcassonne. I haven't played Carcassonne in ages, but it turns out I'm still good at it (and, just as importantly, enjoy playing it). I also enjoyed playing Lanterns, which I'm not as good at, and Drop It was okay. I don't remember what the gameplay of Exploding Kittens was like because everything else about it was crowded out by how repulsive the artwork was.

The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic Legacy: Season One with got together on Friday and we played through to the end of the season. I'm kind of glad we're done with it; it was an interesting experience seeing how the game changed over the course of the season, but the story parts continued to be familiar and predictable right to the end. We'd also started to lose track of some of the rule changes, which contributed to us finishing the season on a more successful note than if we'd remembered all the new rules that were added to make the climax of the season more challenging, but I think that even if we had kept perfect track of all the rules we still would have achieved a respectable outcome.

We also played a game called The Isle of Cats.


. Years ago, when we were studying Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in high school, the official text we had to use was an omnibus edition that also included An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan, and A Woman of No Importance. I read An Ideal Husband at some point in the intervening decades, but I never got around to reading Lady Windermere's Fan until last month and it was only this week that I read A Woman of No Importance. Wikipedia says it's generally considered the least successful of the four, and that makes sense to me; unlike, say, Earnest, which is clearly and coherently a comedy, A Woman of No Importance is a bunch of witty dialogue crammed into a drama revolving around a subject that is not in the least funny, and I don't think it all fits together quite satisfactorily.


. There's a new podcast called DC High Volume, which is doing official audio adaptations of classic comic book storylines. They've just finished Batman: Year One (which was not bad, although there were a few scenes, including the climactic action moment, that I don't think quite worked without the visuals), and are following it up with The Long Halloween.


. I've either been having more vivid dreams lately, or just remembering them more clearly when I wake up. It might be something to do with catching up on my sleep debt, or possibly because the weather's turned cold and I've started sleeping with the winter covers on.

. I've been making a few changes to my daily routine, having identified a couple of factors that were messing with my ability to go to bed at a sensible hour. It's been working pretty well so far; I've been in bed within half an hour of my target time most days this week. There were even a strange couple of days where I was all ready to go to bed at least an hour earlier than the time I've been aiming at – only to find my brain insisting that it wasn't time for bed yet and finding things to do until I reached the target time.


. After we finished up our production of Guys and Dolls, I decided to read some of the Damon Runyon short stories that inspired it, to see how much had been changed in the process. "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown", which was the basis of the main plot thread, is recognisably the same story, albeit with a twist that the musical chose not to use (and without a whole bunch of complications the musical added to stretch it out to two acts). After that, things get more distant; "Pick the Winner" has a familiar set-up but a very different ending, while "Blood Pressure" has a familiar scene or two set in a completely unrelated plot, and by the time I got down to "The Hottest Guy in the World" and "The Snatching of Bookie Bob", the only things they really had in common with the musical were some of the character names. (And there are some things in the stories that I'm glad the musical doesn't have in common; it's been a long while since I read a story with as much casual antisemitism and misogyny as "Blood Pressure", and I hope it's a long while before I read another.)


. In other reading, I decided I should make some progress on some of the other reading challenges I've been neglecting since I started doing the book chain, so I read The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne, which was a March pick for the Random challenge and also let me check off the April prompt ("animals") in the themed challenge. I got The Purloined Poodle as part of an ebook bundle that included something else I wanted; it's apparently a spin-off from an urban fantasy series I haven't read. (And, based on this sample, probably won't read; the main characters were fairly entertaining in a small dose but I think I've had enough of them now.) The spin-off sees two of the characters deciding to take it upon themselves to solve a mystery – which got us off to a bad start, because when it comes to stories about complete amateurs playing detective, I prefer the ones where the character has to turn detective because they have a personal stake in the solution of the mystery over the ones where the character is just being a busybody, and this falls too much toward the busybody end of the scale for my liking. I enjoyed it more once they'd located the culprit and the story shifted from amateur mystery-solving to a more straightforward sort of adventure story as they resolve the situation (which I suppose might be a sign that I'd like the main series more than the spin-off, but I'm still not interested enough in the characters to really want to find out). I did laugh out loud at least once, at the bit where Oberon the talking dog reviews The Great Gatsby on the criteria of things interesting to dogs.


. At board game club this week, we played Winter Rabbit again, having determined that we may have misunderstood how an important mechanic of the game worked when we played it the first time. I'm not sure we've got it right yet; on our second game, we won the scenario in half the time the game allowed for the attempt, which seems unlikely to be the intended experience.


. Went to the cinema again this week, to see an observational documentary, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.


. Every now and again, there's an announcement of a big Ingress meet-up somewhere in the world, and I stopped bothering to read the announcements ages ago because it was annoying reading about the fun people were going to have somewhere that's nowhere near me. ...which is how I came to miss the announcement, a few months ago, that the next meetup is going to be in Perth. I only found out this week when another player in my faction messaged me to ask if I was planning to go. I haven't definitely ruled it out, but I'm feeling reluctant; it would mean making travel plans, and getting time off work, and all that sort of thing, in order to go and be sociable with a crowd of people I don't know and might completely fail to get on with. (The prospect of collecting another month-long respiratory infection is also weighing in the scales somewhat.) I thought I might be able to encourage myself by finding something else I wanted to do in Perth around the same time, so I could be guaranteed to get something out of the trip, but everything else I might be tempted to go to Perth for that month is either two weeks earlier or two weeks later.

#8: If the previous book had a person on the cover, read a book without a person on the cover.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the first Poirot novel, but I haven’t been reading them in any kind of systematic order, so I’ve read around half a dozen of the later novels already. It’s the second I’ve read that’s narrated by Arthur Hastings, and once again I found him an impediment to my enjoyment. People always unjustly think of Holmes and Watson as the prime example of the great detective and his slightly dim sidekick, but really it’s Poirot and Hastings; Hastings can be relied on to go after every red herring and bark up every wrong tree and ignore every hint from Poirot that he might be on the wrong track. Poirot keeps making little jokes about how slow on the uptake Hastings is, which Hastings is too slow on the uptake to notice. I get the feeling it’s supposed to be funny, but I don’t find it so, and anyway that just makes me annoyed at the author for setting him up to be laughed at. It’s certainly not the case that we’re being invited to laugh with him, because that would require that he be in on the joke.

Also, somebody gets murdered, I guess? The mystery is actually quite clever, I think; I’d almost be tempted to read it again to see how all the pieces fit together, except that would mean spending more time with Hastings.


#9: If the previous book’s title started with a consonant, read a book whose title starts with a vowel.

I picked up The African Queen in a library-discard sale years ago, with a vague idea about seeing how different it was from the movie. It’s broadly similar, though the movie has a significantly different ending (and doesn’t let the characters do any more than exchange suggestive banter and occasionally kiss, while the novel is less restrained). I didn’t quite warm to the main characters, partly because I got the impression that the author didn’t entirely like them; some of his explanations for their behaviour had a feeling of coming from a superior and somewhat cynical remove.

Interesting experience, probably won’t read it again.


#10: Read a book in a different format from the previous book.

I wasn’t entirely sure whether my copy of The African Queen was a native hardback or one of those cases where the library added a protective shell to a paperback, so I figured to be on the safe side I should go with an ebook - which provided a convenient opening to read Diviner’s Bow, the new Liaden Universe novel that came out this month.

I devoured Diviner’s Bow in a single day; after spending the past few months chipping away at the depths of my to-read pile, it was nice to have a reminder of what it can be like to read a book I really enjoy populated with characters I like spending time with.


#11: Read a book where the author’s name is not the same color on the cover as the previous book’s author’s name.

I’ve started reading A Choice of Calamities by Isaac Asimov, but I’m not sure yet if I’m going to make it my official pick for the prompt; it’s shaping up to be a read-a-chapter-every-now-and-again sort of book, and I might swap in something that will be done quicker.