rone | Reading

When I retired in May 2024 one of the things I was hoping would happen is that I would start reading more books. When I was a kid I could easily get through 4 books a week (4 books was the most the local library would lend at a time).

As I became an adult I had less time to read. Getting up at 6:30am to catch a train to go to London to work, then drinking with co-workers and getting home gone midnight... yeah, not much reading time there!

And, of course, books got larger. A 1960s Asimov story.. oh, let's say "The End Of Eternity" (a book I loved as a kid) was 72,000 words long. A modern SciFi book starts at 100,000 words and can easily be 120,000 or more. Peter Hamilton books, maybe 170,000 words :-)

And, bluntly, stories became more sluggish. You can sprint through an Asimov story because they're pretty shallow; they have one point of view, they have a singular story vector... it's easy to read. I would get a Discworld book for Christmas and consume it in 3 hours. Something to do after Christmas dinner when people would fall asleep in front of James Bond :-)

Compare that to, say, Alastair Reynolds; we have multiple points of view, the story might be sluggish by design, to emphasize the struggle of the viewpoint character; the world might be dirty and slimey and it doesn't really encourage you to be there. Is it a more textured story? Definitely! Is it something I can read as quickly; no. Is it something I might reread? Possibly not.

Since 2008 I've been tracking the number of books I've read each year. I kinda tried to normalize the numbers ("2 Peter Hamilton Books is the same as 3 Charlie Stross books" just based on word count). Yeah, it's not a real number. But a good estimate.

And this year, I finally broke my record in that time period. I'm at 56 books and climbing. Now part of that might be because I'm re-reading the Simon R Green books (Nightside and Secret Histories). Green's writing is "quick and easy" to read.

But part of it is because I've stretched out on my sofa, put on some background music (maybe Tubular Bells, maybe Jean-Michel Jarre) and then just read for a few hours. And then gone to bed and read some more.

I think I'm getting the hang of this "retirement" lark!

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Last night I hosted the annual Murdoch University Alumni meeting for Melbourne at the Arts Centre with plenty of excellent and intelligent conversation, as would be expected at such an event (well-catered too, I must add). As part of the formal proceedings, we held a panel discussion on what Murdoch University meant and how it changed us. Our panel, quite remarkably, had graduates from every decade of the university's existence, including a foundation student, Dr. Trevor Hogan, and the remarkable story from Lem Bagout, who came to Australia as a refugee from Sudan; he now teaches physics.

For my own part (representing the 1990s graduates), I made the point that the radical parts of Murdoch's original educational objectives ("the Murdoch ethos") are now accepted and mainstream: encouraging mature-aged students and lifelong learning, allowing for part-time and external studies, encouraging interdisciplinary studies, and alternative entry based on experience. I also made a point of mentioning Bruce Tapper, who died a year ago on the day; not just because he was such a huge influence on my life, but in particular, because he was such a fierce advocate for Murdoch University's progressive education and egalitarian access.

In many ways, my alma mater sometimes stands in stark contrast with my employer, the University of Melbourne. Prestigious and conservative, the UniMelb is recognised as the top university in the country, which is really due to the excellent and well-funded research sector, standing on the shoulders of giants past. At UniMelb in the past fortnight, there have been two social occasions of note: an end-of-year potluck lunch for Research Computing Services (I brought along the Polish duck soup (Czernina), and an end-of-year social event for all of Business Services, this year held on campus at the Ernie Cropley Pavilion, a better location, and superior catering to previous years.

As another example of contrast, last Saturday I attended the Thangka Art Exhibition on Tibetan Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Development hosted by the Australian ReTeng Charity Foundation, associated with the Buddhist ReTeng Monastery in Donvale. I was somewhat surprised and impressed by the sheer number of dignitaries from the Melbourne Chinese community in attendance, and extremely impressed by the artworks on display. There was some juxtaposition of this aesthetic event, and the one attended in the evening, with Carla BL, at a little bar in Fitzroy to see a group of post-punk musicians (including my favourite local coldwave artists, Cold Regards) perform. For reasons of international travel, this is the end of EoY Melbourne activities - next stop, Santiago!

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: The Rookery

sweh

New blog post in which I discuss how to configure TLS in 2025 to get an A+ score, along with some security header settings to get an A score, and a small bit on CAA (to restrict what CAs can be used) and HTTP/2. https://www.sweharris.org/post/2025-12-02-ssl-redux/

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A kind friend once introduced me as "This is Lev, he's one of those people who holds society together". A former partner, when I was juggling time and tasks, reminded me that every one of the tasks I was trying to arrange in some order was a voluntary role. This has been an approach for most of my life; even in my teenage years, I would take up volunteer roles, and at university, I helped start and organise some notable clubs. In my mature adulthood, this has continued over the decades, with several bodies of note (UniMelb PGSA, Linux Users of Victoria, Prosper Australia (Henry George League), the Melbourne Unitarian Church, all come to mind, for example). Currently, I'm the (volunteer) president of three non-profit incorporated associations, and that means being responsible for those groups, along with other voluntary roles, of course. "Responsibility" is a key term here; although the commitment is voluntary, once it is made, it is effectively a promise to others, and one that must be honoured.

Last weekend, for example, was the Annual General Meeting of the Australia-China Friendship Society. It was well-attended with excellent discussion, and we have three major projects in the near year: a concert with Shu Cheen Yu and the Lotus Wind Choir, an anti-racism survey, and an incredible trip to Guizhou and Sichuan is being organised. Another example is that next week there is (again) a contested election for the executive of the local ALP branch, entirely from the enthusiasm of members. As the Returning Officer, I have to arrange ballots and engage in the task of counting up the votes using the multi-member proportional representation with the affirmative action method. But that's not all; I'm also the convener of the Murdoch University Melbourne alumni chapter, and we have an end-of-year social event at the Arts Centre arranged as well, which will included a panel discussion of how Murdoch's educational objectives ("the Murdoch ethos", as it was called) transformed our lives.

In each of these activities, I find myself supported by excellent committee members and other volunteers. People of a like mind and disposition who see the worth of freely working together with others on matters of a shared interest. The Ancient Stoics called this "sympatheia" (συμπάθεια), the connectedness of individual parts to the whole community ("The universe made rational creatures for the sake of each other, with an eye toward mutual benefit based on true value and never for harm", as Marcus wrote), and even beyond as the Stoics saw their ethics as a subset of their physics; the interconnecting logos touches all things. In a more modern and less metaphysical sense, Hannah Arendt waxed lyrically about what she called "action", when a public would engage in activities together that went beyond the satisfaction of necessities ("labour") or the economic incentives of exchange ("work"), but rather with the motivation of shared understanding, which she interpreted as freedom in its fullest sense.

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Albinoni, 12 Concertos, Op 9

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https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/9798590259663.html

Review: Forever and a Day, by Haley Cass

Series:	Those Who Wait #1.5
Publisher:	Haley Cass
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	979-8-5902-5966-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	101

Forever and a Day is a coda to Haley Cass's self-published sapphic romance novel Those Who Wait. There is no point in reading it unless you have already read and enjoyed the full book and wanted more of a denouement.

Given that Those Who Wait is a romance novel, it is definitionally not a spoiler to reveal that Sutton and Charlotte ended up together. This novella is seven scenes sketching out the next few years of their lives, interspersed with press clippings and social media commentary. These tie up loose ends, give the characters a bit more time together, throw in one more conflict and resolution, add one more sex scene, and stick a few exclamation points after the happily ever after.

I am the sort of person who likes long denouements in stories, so I'm the target audience for this sort of sequel that's essentially additional chapters to the book. (The funniest version of this I've read is Jacqueline Carey's Saints Astray.) They are usually not great literature, since there are good reasons for not including these chapters in the book. That is exactly what this is: a few more chapters of the characters being happy, entirely forgettable, and of interest only to people who want that.

Cass does try to introduce a bit of a plot via some light family conflict, which was sweet and mostly worked, and some conflict over having children, which was very stereotyped and which I did not enjoy as much. I thought the earlier chapters of this novella were the stronger ones, although I do have to give the characters credit in the later chapters for working through conflict in a mature and fairly reasonable way. It does help, though, when the conflict is entirely resolved by one character being right and the other character being happily wrong. That's character conflict on easy mode.

I was happy to see that Sutton got a career, although as in the novel I wish Cass had put some more effort into describing Sutton's efforts in building that career. The details are maddeningly vague, which admittedly matches the maddeningly vague description of Charlotte's politics but which left me unsatisfied.

Charlotte's political career continues to be pure wish fulfillment in the most utterly superficial and trivialized way, and it bothered me even more in the novella than it did in the novel. We still have absolutely no idea what she stands for, what she wants to accomplish, and why anyone would vote for her, and yet we get endless soft-focus paeans to how wonderful she will be for the country. Her opponents are similarly vague to the point that the stereotypes Cass uses to signal their inferiority to Charlotte are a little suspect.

I'm more critical of this in 2025 than I would have been in 2015 because the last ten years have made clear the amount of damage an absolute refusal to stand for anything except hazy bromides causes, and I probably shouldn't be this annoyed that Cass chose to vaguely gesture towards progressive liberalism without muddying her romance denouement with a concrete political debate. But, just, gah. I found the last chapter intensely annoying, in part because the narrative of that chapter was too cliched and trite to sufficiently distract me from the bad taste of the cotton-candy politics.

Other than that, this was minor, sweet, and forgettable. If you want another few chapters of an already long novel, this delivers exactly what you would expect. If the novel was plenty, nothing about this novella is going to change your mind and you can safely skip it. I really liked the scene between Charlotte and Sutton's mom, though, and I'm glad I read the novella just for that.

Rating: 6 out of 10

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/9798590259663.html

denise posting in

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Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means

karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

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https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-30404-2.html

Review: The Last Soul Among Wolves, by Melissa Caruso

Series:	The Echo Archives #2
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	August 2025
ISBN:	0-316-30404-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	355

The Last Soul Among Wolves is urban high fantasy with strong mystery vibes. It is a direct sequel to The Last Hour Between Worlds. You need the previous book for some character setup (and this book would spoil it badly), but you don't have to remember the first book in detail. Only the main plot outcomes are directly relevant and the characters will remind you of those.

Kembrel Thorne is a Hound, the equivalent of a police detective in the medieval-inspired city setting of this series, but this book does not open with an official assignment. Instead, she has been dragged by her childhood friend Jaycel Morningrey as company for a reading of the will of old lady Lovegrace, reclusive owner of a gothic mansion on an island connected to the city by an intermittent sandbar. A surprise reunion with her gang of childhood friends ensues, followed by the revelation that they are all in serious trouble.

Shortly after Kem left the group to become a Hound, the remaining four, plus several other apparently random people, got entangled with a powerful Echo artifact. Now that Lovegrace has died, one of them will inherit the artifact and the ability to make a wish, but only one. The rest will be killed at decreasing intervals until only the winner is left alive.

The Last Hour Between Worlds was fae fantasy built around a problem that was more of a puzzle than a mystery. The Last Soul Among Wolves is closer to a classic mystery: A cast of characters are brought together and semi-isolated in a rural house, they start dying, and it's up to the detective to solve the mystery of their death before it's too late. In this case, the initial mechanism of death is supernatural and not in doubt — the challenge instead is how to stop it from happening again — but Kem's problems quickly become more complicated.

As mystery plots go, this is more thriller than classical despite the setting. There are a few scenes of analyzing clues, but Kem is more likely to use the time-honored protagonist technique of throwing herself into danger and learning what's going on via the villain monologues. As readers of the previous book would expect, Rika Nonesuch is here too, hired by another of Kem's old friends, and the two navigate their personal feelings and the rivalry between their guilds in much the way that they did in the Last Hour Between Worlds. As in the first book, there is a sapphic romance subplot, but it's a very slow burn asexual romance.

The best part of this series continues to be the world-building. The previous book introduced the idea of the Echoes and sent the characters exploring into stranger and stranger depths. This book fleshes out the rules in more detail, creating something that feels partly like a fae realm and partly like high fantasy involving gods, but diverges from both into a logic of its own. The ending satisfyingly passes my test of fantasy mysteries: Resolving the mystery requires understanding and applying the rules of the setting, which are sufficiently strange to create interesting outcomes but coherent enough that the reader doesn't feel like the author is cheating.

There are some hissable villains here, but my favorite part of this book was the way Caruso added a lot of nuance and poignancy to the Echoes rather than showing them only as an uncanny threat. That choice made the world feel deeper and richer. It's not yet clear whether that element is setup for a longer-term series plot, but I hope Caruso will develop the story in that direction.

It felt to me like Caruso is aiming for an ongoing series rather than a multi-volume story with a definite ending. She avoids a full episodic reset — Rika, in particular, gets considerable character development and new complications that bode well for future volumes — but it doesn't feel like the series is building towards an imminent climax. This is not a complaint. I enjoy these characters and this world and will happily keep devouring each new series entry.

If you liked The Last Hour Between Worlds, I think you will like this. It doesn't have the same delight of initial discovery of the great world-building, but the plot is satisfying and a bit more complex and the supporting characters are even better than those in the first book. Once again, Caruso kept me turning the pages, and I'm now looking forward to a third volume. Recommended.

The third book in the series has not yet been announced, but there are indications on social media that it is coming.

Rating: 7 out of 10

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-30404-2.html