Yes — I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to negate your comment, just to expand on it … I’m always happy when someone brings up that wonderful word 
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Just finished Masquerade by Terry Pratchett (which was nice, though I am not a big fan of his witches series) and now, finally the last book of the Stormlight Archive has arrived. But, I’d have to re-read the previous book first in order to get back into the plot.
Hello 1100+1200 pages 
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Finally, this:
A collection of SF stories and science essays, issued by the European Astrobiology Institute:
How would first contact—on earth, in space, on another
planet—transform our understandings of technology, philosophy, and
what it means to be human? What kind of cognitive dissonance would
society experience, if we discovered a previously unrecognized
sentience on Earth?What would life be like if it originated in a frigid ocean beneath an
impenetrable shell of ice? Or on a world whose haze obscures any view
of the universe beyond? Or on an unfathomable scale in the depths of
space? Or . . .Life—beyond us.
Dive in as the European Astrobiology Institute presents fifty-four
original SF Stories and Science Essays on life, from microbial to
macro, from automatic to sagacious. Each speculative story is followed
by a professional essay illuminating the scientific underpinnings of
the story and providing a new window into the cutting-edge knowledge
about exploration for life in the universe.
Reading this in parallel with Avi Loeb’s book “Interstellar” (I’ve also read his previous book, “Extraterrestrial”, about his speculation that the Oumuamua asteroid could have been an artifact from an extraterrestrial civilization).
Loeb’s ideas are controversial, of course, and there are many who criticise him, but I believe that it is not only legitimate but also important to speculate about that which we do not (yet!) know.
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https://forums.online-go.com/t/how-was-your-day-regular-part-ii/46165/5019?u=samraku
I’ve now just finished volume 2 of the Light Novel “I may be a guild receptionist, but I’ll solo any boss to clock out on time”
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A few weeks ago I dipped into my kids’ Christmas tsundoku* and read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. I can highly recommend it! Almost as engaging as The Martian and while physics is certainly violated, it’s refreshing to have a book about interstellar travel in which the rockets themselves are vaguely plausible (just not the method of refueling.)
* to be honest I just wanted to use that word. My kid did read the book first.
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I read that one after liking The Martian. I agree it was pretty good, though the assumption that aliens would default to 12 edo did keep grating on me, lol
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I didn’t notice that detail! Was it exactly the same? But there aren’t a lot of great coincidences like 27/12 ≈ 3/2, are there? So it’s a good choice for anything with normal harmonics.
19-edo, 31-edo, 41-edo, and 53-edo are all well known for increasingly better approximations of 5-limit intervals. Then there’s pure just intonation, which I would expect to be more likely to naturally occur. Then you have non-octave equivalence intervals such as 3/2 in one common approximation of Wendy Carlos’ alpha, beta, and gamma scales, or 3/1 in Bohlen-Pierce
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I’ve now finished all 4 LN volumes on Bookwalker, now on to the manga!
EDIT: finished the 3 manga volumes that are out so far
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I’m now reading Matthew J. Kirby’s Star Splitter (a “young adult” book simply because the protagonist is 16 years old). I’m super hooked on the story’s innovative treatment of teleportation, which is rationalized as a form of additive manufacturing.
Teleportation, you may be surprised to hear, has rarely appeared in SF as a main element or theme, but almost always as a mere gimmick of convenience (its popularity as such kicked off by Star Trek, I think). The only great SF stories I can think of that treat it more deeply are Larry Niven’s amazingly prescient novella “Flash Crowd” (1973) and John Brunner’s novel Web of Everywhere (1974).
This book also features an engaging dramatic situation expressed with great narrative skill (details would be a spoiler). Trouble is, I need to bear down hard to finish this by Saturday, when my SF book group meets.
Addendum: I barely finished it in time. I had mixed feelings in the end, as did several others in the group. The book has several flaws. Someone pointed out that the movie, The Fifth Element, which I hated, also combines teleportation and additive manufacturing, but no one could think of a literary example.
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I finished Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930) a couple weeks ago and wanted to say something more about it. I am always inhibited by great books, however, because I feel that my comments can never do the book justice. This is a tremendous coming-of-age story about a Black boy’s life from age eight to sixteen in a small Kansas town (c. 1910-1918). It is substantially autobiographical, although Hughes shifted the setting to a lower-class family rather than his own middle-class family. It is told in simple language, lightly dialectical, in a series of vignettes. As in his short stories, Hughes has a mysterious power in his story-telling, which I think derives in large part from his acute observations. In this, he reminds me of Jack London and De Maupassant, who also had terrific powers of observation. Although this is an historically famous book, it doesn’t seem to be widely known today. This is a pity, as I think it should probably be curriculum in upper high school classes.
The book has two more bits of folklore that fascinated me. Both are recognized in the Shorter Oxford and in the Dictionary of American Regional English. First is a game, “Duck on a Rock,” which I had never heard of. The Duck is a smaller rock placed on a larger rock, and the object is to hit the duck with a rock and knock it off the larger rock. We had no large rocks in the woods where I grew up, but we did practice rock-throwing using trees (and sometimes squirrels) as targets.
The other, a piece of linguistic folklore, is the dozens or Dirty Dozens, used in “to shoot” or “play” the dozens. This is explicitly a Black cultural usage, referring primarily to an insult “game” (sometimes serious and sometimes playful between friends), especially involving “momma” jokes. This migrated to Whites probably in the 1950s and was commonplace when I was growing up. You can see it in films such as Stand by Me (1986). Weirdly, the academic attribution is to “boxcars” in craps. This is a ridiculous piece of folk etymology IMHO—perhaps due to psychological denial—as the obvious derivation is from slavery: a dozen lashes.
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Finally started this one. Makes great reading.
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I’m now half done with my 15th Travis McGee mystery/thriller, Cinnamon Skin (1982), the penultimate (#20) in John D. MacDonald’s famous series. It regains the earlier excellence that was lost in the previous volume. The plot follows McGee and his friend and sidekick Meyer as they try to track down an elusive con man and Bluebeard who killed Meyer’s niece. It is a detective procedural with no action so far, other than a large explosion at the start. However, the characterization is exceptionally fine, as McGee and Meyer encounter a series of distinctive people whose individual stories have tremendous emotional impact. Like the previous volume, this has a kind of swan-song quality, because an aging McGee reflects on his life and feels some regret for remaining a bachelor.
I now have no more TM books on hand, and I’m sorely tempted to fill in the rest with online purchases, something I have never done before. I’m also tempted, if I ever finish the series, to begin all over and read it in chronological order.
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Somewhere above I wrote that the following was next on my reading list …but as it is, a few other books snuck in in between.
But now I’m reading it:
Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law & Susan Forest (eds.): “Life Beyond Us – An Original Anthology of SF Stories And Science Essays”
See also:
“… an anthology of 27 science fiction stories centered around astrobiology, each paired with a popular science essay tackling the topic present in the preceding story (such as planetary protection, habitability of water worlds, spectroscopy, evolution, interspecies communication …)”
An AMAZING book, and I can’t exaggerate enough about how much I appreciate this format that combines speculation with actual science.
<Spock> Fascinating! </Spock>
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On a recent trip to my favorite used-book store, I came away with several prizes. One is another collection of Cornell Woolrich stories, Darkness at Dawn (ed. Francis M. Nevins, Jr., and Martin H. Greenberg). It contains Woolrich’s first 13 published stories. I’m amazed by how accomplished his writing already is at this time (1934-35). He had already had three mainstream novels published, but two were flops and the third only mildly successful. He had also just failed at a brief attempt to establish himself as a screenwriter in Hollywood. This is hugely ironic since he would ultimately have 96 movie and TV adaptations of his stories. So he returned to New York City and began writing for the mystery pulps, immediately achieving success. The plots are already ingenious and highly suspenseful, and his style has considerable irony and dry wit characteristic of the Algonquin circle and Hollywood at the time.
Here is one example from “Red Liberty” (1935). A lowly police detective, bullied by his wife to improve himself so he can get ahead, visits the Statue of Liberty. There he stumbles into a mystery: A fat man seems to disappear, leaving behind a hat. The detective is rudely rebuffed by a woman whom he had deduced was the wife, and he tells himself, “This was enough to sour a saint…First there’s a fat man and his wife. Then there’s no fat man. And now it seems there’s no wife either. Only a hat.” I love the perfunctory quality of that summary.
I can’t help but suspect that this story influenced the ending of Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), which concludes with a chase and battle in and on the Statue of Liberty.
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I suppose it may also have inspired the Mount Rushmore scene in North by Northwest.
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Yes, it’s as if Hitchcock said to himself, ‘I need something bigger.’ Fun fact: Hitchcock requested permission to shoot on the real Mount Rushmore, but the government turned him down, so he built a slightly smaller scale model.
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A film crew would probably get permission nowadays, with Tom Cruise doing his own climbing. Oy vey!
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Maybe this week, but certainly next week I will start reading this book by Dick Harrison about empires / superpowers /civilisations who fell into decline.
He starts his narrative with the Acadian Empire (prehistory) and ends with the USA. I am tempted to read the last chapter first 
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I’m re-reading Wool, the first book in the Silo series.
It’s a great read - a page turner. It’s giving me fresh respect for the books, and new respect for how the TV series has handled the material (so far, in the series we’re just approaching the end of season 2).
Amusingly, in the book shop there were two books side by side: “Wool” and “Silo”.
They are the same book 
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