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Continuing with the challenge

dreamersdare made, here are more top 10 series. This time I've gone for crime fiction books, and again in no particular order:

1. Malabar House series by Vaseem Khan
Set mostly in Bombay just after Independence, these are stories about Persis Wadia, the first female Indian detective, who's shunted off to Malabar House to keep her out of the way. Nevertheless she gets involved in a number of high profile cases and becomes better known. Vaseem Khan is a British writer, who spent 10 years in Mumbai. The series is ongoing and I'm currently reading the latest The Edge of Darkness which is set in the Naga Hills in north-east India. There's lots of details about the time, and gripping stories. I've also enjoyed the Baby Ganesh series, which sees an ex-detective inspector in Mumbai who is sent a baby elephant by an uncle, and the crimes he solves.

2. Maigret by Georges Simenon
There are about 75 Maigret novels. I started listening to them as audiobooks, bought a few hard copies, and am currently working my way through all the books available in our county library. The series starts in 1931 and while Maigret is based in Paris, he's fairly often in different parts of France, or visiting countries nearby. I enjoy the atmosphere and the strong sense of time and place, as well as the variety of crimes Maigret is faced with.

3. Bradecote & Catchpoll series by Sarah Hawkswood
Set in the 1140s and based in Worcester and the surrounding area, so a similar time period to Cadfael, Hugh Bradecote is the Under-sheriff and therefore a representative of the authorities in solving crimes, and he works with the vastly experience Catchpoll who is the Sheriff's Sergeant and Walkelin, the serjeanting apprentice. I like the main characters, who are very human and seek to do their best for those around them, in what can be very difficult times. The next book Act of Betrayal is out in September.

4. Jackman & Evans series by Joy Ellis
I listen to these on audiobooks. DI Rowan Jackman is a modern day detective in the Fenland of Lincolnshire (Joy Ellis' home territory) and is assisted by his sergeant, Sally Evans. There's a team of recurring characters and some interesting crimes, darker than some of what I read. Black Notice is the latest, which came at towards the end of last year.

5. Inspector MacDonald series by E C R Lorac
I've only read the books which have been republished in British Library Crime Classics, but have enjoyed those. The series begins in the early 1930s and runs through to the 1950s. I like MacDonald, who is competent and thoughtful. Most of the books are set in England, with a number in the Lake District. Once more the description of place is excellent - I'm not inclined to read through long descriptions, but these are written so that the reader feels themselves there, rather than simply admiring the view from a distance. They also give an incidental view of life as lived by most people at the time.

6. The Su Yin series by Ovidia Yu
Originally called the Crown Colony series, but with the passing of time this has become inappropriate. The first story is set in Singapore in 1936, when Singapore was under British rule, and the series moves through the Japanese occupation, and has now reached the late 1940s, with the strong demands for independence from the returning British. Su Yin isn't in the police force, but frequently (other than during the war years) works with Inspector Le Froy. The next book The Tembusu Tree Mystery is out in June.

7. The Dinner Lady Detectives by Hannah Hendy
Two late middle-aged school dinner ladies become unexpected amateur detectives in a series of cozy-ish mysteries. Lighter fare than most of the above, but I have a soft spot for the two, who are married to each other. Entertaining with plots relevant to the small town they live in. Implausible, but it all makes sense. A Curiously Convenient Device is out next month.

8. Follet Valley Mysteries by Ian Moore
These stories are not to be taken seriously, but are great fun. The murders happen in bizarre ways, and the main protagonist and foil is Richard Ainsworth, an English proprietor of a French guest house, who has pet hens who he has named after classic film stars. The latest in this series of books set in rural France is Death and Boules.

And lastly, two classics:

9. Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The original stories. Some are better than others, but the characters of Holmes and Watson are enduring.

10. Miss Marple by Agatha Christie
An overlooked older lady with a very sharp mind and a real knowledge of how people think and behave.

Finally, an honourable mention to Discworld by Terry Pratchett. Here, I shall simply quote the Librarian, "Ook!"

james_davis_nicoll

An assortment of (mostly) SF from just before Asimov's Sputnik-inspired hiatus from SF.

Nine Tomorrows by Isaac Asimov

dreamersdare

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

cmk418 posting in

halfamoon

Today's theme is Pet Peeves.

Here are some ideas to get you started: There are some things that really get under her skin. Maybe it's someone who shows up five minutes early to a meeting while she's still getting ready, maybe it's that the store doesn't stock her favorite guilty pleasure item, maybe it's that her significant other keeps beating her at checkers. Sometimes the little things needle away and she hits her breaking point. Show us what bugs her and how she deals with it.

Just go wherever the Muse takes you. If this prompt doesn't speak to you, feel free to share something that does. You can post in a separate entry or as a comment to this post.

Want to get a jump start on tomorrow's theme? Check out the prompt list in the pinned post at the top of the page. Please don't post until that day.

dolorosa_12

I mostly finished five TV shows in this past month, but left it until today to write everything up as the final episode of one show only aired on Friday. As is common with my TV viewing, it was a mixed bag of genres. The shows were:

The Lowdown, a tale of local political corruption starring Ethan Hawke as a local journalist and secondhand bookshop owner attempting, ineptly, to uncover the truth behind the suspicious death of one of the members of a wealthy, prominent family. It's run by the same showrunner behind my beloved Reservation Dogs, and written with the same blend of offbeat surrealism, slightly sentimental affection, and incisively sharp focus on the poverty, deprivation and racism festering in declining American cities and towns.

Season 2 of A Thousand Blows, Stephen Knight's take on the nineteenth-century East End. As with the previous season, it's a wild, lurid tale of audacious heists, rival criminal gangs battling for dominance, boxing matches offering opportunities for the show's impoverished characters to claw their way into financial security, and larger-than-life people with larger-than-life emotions, told with a comic book sensibility. As a standalone series, I would have enjoyed this, but as something following on from Season 1, I found it a bit lacking. It was as if all the previous season's character development was reset, and there was never any sense of real risk: characters felt protected by plot armour from suffering any consequences.

I Love LA, a comedy miniseries about a group of self-absorbed Gen Zers trying to make it in the entertainment industry (social media influencer, manager of said influencer, costume designer to pop stars, nepo baby daughter of successful actor), which was almost painful in its humour. It's brilliantly acted and written, but excruciating if you find secondhand embarrassment at the obliviousness of characters always on the brink of disaster hard to watch.

Season 2 of The Night Manager, which picks up close to a decade after the previous season (an updating of a Le Carré novel for the Arab Spring era) finished. This new tale of twenty-first-century spycraft deals with corruption, international arms dealing, and external attempts to meddle politically in Colombia, and is well written and well acted with its stellar cast, even if some elements strained credulity. It's a wild ride from start to finish — tense and engrossing, with some incredible and audacious twists. Bring on Season 3!

Spartacus: House of Ashur, a spinoff from the cult favourite Starz series about the revolt and subsequent crushing of enslaved gladiators in ancient Rome. I have to say I thought the concept was a bit far-fetched and ridiculous (a canon-divergence AU in which a secondary character — who died towards the end of Spartacus — gets offered a second lease of life in the afterlife, and lives again as a freedman, the client of Marcus Crassus, and the owner of the house of gladiators in which he, and Spartacus were previously enslaved), and I'm still not sure why the show exists, but I can't deny it was entertaining. It has the same wall-to-wall gratuitous violence (slow-motion, comic-book style punches and blows by sword and spear, rivers of blood spraying around the screen), nudity (equal opportunity) and sexposition, the same bizarre dialogue choices (all the characters speak without the use of definite and indefinite articles, and absent possessive pronouns, as if translating directly from Latin — I honestly wonder how the actors are able to speak such contorted lines without difficulty), and, underneath all the sex and violence, a serious story about the limits of respectability politics. (In other words, a marginalised person can expend all his energy adopting the trappings and values of those privileged in his society, swallow every insult, and do everything in his power to cater to their whims and give them what they want, and it will still never be enough for him to gain material comfort, safety, or their acceptance of him as their equal.) I assume it goes without saying that if you're looking for historical accuracy, or even a sense of internal narrative coherence, this is not a show I'd recommend: it's 90 per cent vibes, and you just have to go with that. In the show's final five minutes, it makes a narrative choice so wild and so left field that I was almost astonished by the audacity, making it clear that — if it does return for a new season — it will be operating not just in canon divergence, but in full blown alternate history.

I feel as if the common thread tying together all these shows is character who think they are very clever constantly worsening their own situations due to their inability to think more than one step ahead, and making poor, reactive decisions instead of pausing and trying to think more strategically beyond their immediate circumstances.

lauradi7dw

I am watching (live) the snowboard parallel slalom. I have learned about the stiffness of the boots (aren't snowboard boots usually stiff?). I have learned that the edges of the boards are extremely sharp. There are times that the racers are almost sideways, riding just on a blade-like edge, so they are allowed to put their hands down on the snow. The unfair thing is that they don't seem to be re-grooming the surface. It's almost 2 PM there. The air temp is in the 20s F but it is brightly sunny, which adds a little heat to the snow, and the sharp sides over time make ruts. The longer the day goes on, the more likely it is that someone will be snagged on a rut. I guess the fact that it is a knockout format means that the best people are the ones who are dealing with the later (and therefore more rutted) conditions. It seems from the commentators that the sides (red or blue lanes) are noticeably different.
A cool thing is that there is a 45 year old competitor from Italy. But he made a couple of errors in the quarter final and seems to be out. That doesn't count as unfair. Mistakes happen.

Doesn't Cuba have enough troubles without an earthquake too? At least it was smaller than the one a couple of years ago.

When the Washington Post fired people who were in position overseas, they were not given money to get home.
There is a gofundme, almost fully funded now. I expect that Jeff Bezos did not contribute.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-washington-post-international-employees

spryng

4yo is going to become 5yo this week, so yesterday we had his birthday party. February is peak strawberry season here, so when he was 2yo we celebrated by inviting friends/family to come strawberry picking with us. A lark became tradition, and now 4yo started asking about strawberry picking for his birthday back in October.

It helps that the farm we pick at is both just up the road and has a play area for the kids. For a fraction of what it would cost at any other play place, we can have them and their friends play all afternoon in the sand and sun. I hope he continues wanting to pick strawberries for his birthday because this is a way better tradition than going to a loud, overwhelming jump place.

I had to admit, what with all the cold and hard freezes, I wasn't even sure the strawberry place would be open. But their plants were healthy, even if some of the berries were clearly frost-bitten, and while the pickings were slimmer than usual for this time of year, there were still pickings. I think we got two pounds?

It was also just a perfectly nice day, one of those Florida winter days that almost make up for our summers. We haven't had a lot of those this winter, what with either the bitterly cold days or the cloudy ones, so it was nice to be out and be grateful.

The cold has really been a lot. I know the rest of the country is being hit hard, too, so I haven't been complaining, but (lol) I have had to de-ice the chicken water way more times than any other winter we've been here and most of our frost-sensitive plants are dead. Pour one out for our poor elephant ears. I'm waiting to see if the lemon tree pulls through, but it's not looking good. :/

Today we continue the birthday shenanigans with a dinosaur show. I'm not entirely sure what we're walking into, but it's put on by the university's Performing Arts and it looks like realistic dinosaur animatronics? IDK, but I'm 100% sure 4yo will enjoy it. I'm also reminded that I need to check out their showings more regularly, because I missed a lot of cool stuff last year.

And then later this week he'll be 5 and somehow we'll be half a decade into having two kids and living in this house in Florida and he'll start Kindergarten in the fall. We're finally transitioning out of the baby era, which lasted seemingly forever. A lot of the things he was struggling with earlier this year he's pretty much got the hang of now -- emotional regulation, for one; bedtime, for another. Even food, he's starting to open back up on. Is toddlerhood over?

I, for one, am just grateful to have two kids who sleep in past 5am, and no more middle of the night wake-ups. Solid sleep schedules are really the pinnacle of parenthood, and I know my mental health has been a lot more stable for it.

Here's to another five years and really getting to know who this little guy is. <3

princessofgeeks

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cosmolinguist

1 what's your favourite kitchen appliance?
I never really thought about ranking them. The kettle is probably my favorite because it gets used the most.

2 do you have a collection of anything?
Random things related to Stitch (from Lilo & Stitch)

3 what's the best job you've ever had?
Probably the one I have now.

4 what's the worst job you've ever had?
Temping for minimum wage in a team that chased people up for overdue loans. I was new to the UK, so my partner and I were ineligible for all benefits, and I had a lot more in common with the people on the other side of these phone calls I could hear all day long as I was becoming The One Who Could Make the Printer Work and learning to like bananas because we had free fruit in the office and I needed the calories.

5 what's your favourite piece of furniture and where did you get it?
The green couch I bought the WonderHouse is pretty good. I can't remember where it came from; V sorted it out online of course.

6 what's your go-to recipe when you want to make something that requires minimal effort?
"Minimal effort" to me is taking something out of the freezer and putting it in the oven, which isn't a recipe. I guess in terms of things that I'd call a recipe that aren't difficult (and really pay off in how delicious it is, there's always the broccoli halloumi thing.

7 are you married or do you intend to get married?
I am not. I wouldn't say I intend to but I didn't intend to the other time either and it ended up being useful for geopolitical reasons so I wouldn't rule that out again in the future.

8 do you have kids? do you want them?
No and...I do not want to have them in terms of from my own body, and I'm fine that my life doesn't seem to have brought me any, but also if it had I think that would've been fine too.

9 are you on good terms with your parents?
...yes? This kinda came up at transgym yesterday: on the spectrum between good parents and shit parents mine are kinda...shit in practice but also... I talk to them every Sunday evening, which a lot of people would consider being pretty close and my parents consider less than the minimum to be happy.

10 do you have siblings? do you hang out with them?
ahahaha I have never found a good answer to this question. Do I have siblings in that I do and he turns up in anecdotes and suchlike? Or do I not in that if I say I do people ask stuff like "do you hang out with him?" and I can never hang out with him.

11 do you vote?
I vote in two countries! I just applied for a postal vote for the upcoming by election, because I can't remember if I'd done that since I got the notifications about it expiring.

12 what's the biggest purchase you've ever made?
Technically the mortgage on my old house but that didn't feel like a purchase. Next up is my Indefinite Leave to Remain which cost me I think I calculated about £7500 -- at the time. Using the Bank of England's inflation calculator, that'd be £12,828.24, and that's not counting that the Home Office has more-than-doubled the costs of those visas and applications since.

13 what are your hobbies?
Listening to podcasts, watching baseball.

14 what's a hobby you'd like to get into?
Hiking.

15 do you collect anything?
Aches, cynicism, grudges... wait, is this a question about knickknacks?

16 how long have you known your oldest friend?
I'm not really in very good touch with anyone I knew before I moved here, so probaby 18 or 19 years (despite being partners and good friends before that, neither D or I can remember what year we actually met but it was either 18 or 19 years ago).

17 are you a member of any clubs or associations?
local Queer Club. I have a gym membership lol. I don't think anything else?

18 have you ever changed fields in your career or education?
I'm a millennial, we don't get fields and careers. Not the disabled ones among us especially.

19 how many wisdom teeth do you have and have you had any removed?
I had them all taken out at 18, I didn't want to, my dentist said I had to, they'd be causing me loads of pain. They never did. I'm still convinced he did it to get money out of my parents.

20 what's your favourite beverage?
Coffee

21 do you have any living grandparents?
I did until a year ago.

22 do you have nieces/nephews/godchildren/other kids in your life that aren't yours?
D's niblings, his sister's two kids. They are great. They're also tweens/young teens now so increasingly absent/mysterious/incomprehensible, but still such good fun when we do get to hang out.

23 what's the coolest place you've visited?
There are so many, and it's hard to compare them. At the moment my first thought is the Atomium in Brussels.

24 what's your most recent degree and has it been useful to you?
BA (Hons) Linguistics. It has been very useful to me: not in an employment sense (beyond the fact that I think having a degree made it easier to get my job), but it has been so helpful to me to be able to approach my life and the world through this lens.

25 would you rather own a dishwasher or a washing machine if you could only have one or the other?
Oh the times in my life when I haven't owned a (working) washing machine have been absolutely miserable. It's much easier to wash dishes by hand than to wash clothes by hand (or go to the laundromat even if there is one closer now than there used to be because it's where my barber was!).

26 do you make a list before going to the grocery store or just wing it?
We mostly shop online. D has a kind of master list that we just tick off what we need each week(ish) when we do the order.

27 what's your favourite household chore?
Mowing the lawn.

28 what chore do you hate the most?
Cleaning things I don't know how to clean/never feel like I get it clean.

29 do you have houseplants and how are you at keeping them alive?
We have so many, I'm so lucky. V looks after them; this is something else I would be shit at noticing in time. But I love living surrounded by them.

30 what's your living arrangement? (who do you live with, in what kind of building, do you own or rent or other?
I live with my boyfriend and his partner, in a suburban semi-detached house that I think was social housing? Sold in the 80s to a builder who...did things to it himself, many of which have consequences we're still living with. Technically the mortgage is D's and I'm a lodger but in practice all three of us contribute to the bills/food/household stuff.

cyberghostface posting in

scans_daily

"The only comments that have ever bothered me were the ones from people who assumed we were just trying to be gratuitous without any deeper purpose. The very nature of the comic medium requires a lot of investment on the part of the reader and I can understand how some readers might not look deeper than the surface but that certainly doesn't mean there isn't a lot under there." -- Jacen Burrows

( Scans under the cut... )

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Stuff I Love: Top Ten Edition - Challenge 2 (series)

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things that are not fair

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