Books Received, April 26 — May 1
May. 3rd, 2026 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicoll
Yesterday was a very long work day so I didn't have time to post this. Two books new to me. One I wanted in paper.One non-fiction about an--no, THE SF game, and two fantasy. Both fantasies are series.
Books Received, April 26 — May 1
Sunday Word: Heresiarch
May. 3rd, 2026 01:35 pmsallymn posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
1word1dayheresiarch [huh-ree-zee-ahrk, -see-, her-uh-see-]
noun:
a leader in heresy; the leader of a heretical sect.
Examples:
His son labels him a 'Heresiarch,' though this particular heresy is an attack not on religion but on the banality of life. (Ruth Franklin, The Lost, The New Yorker, December 2002)
The Waldenses are so called from their heresiarch, Waldus, who, of his own will (suo spiritu ductus), not sent by God, started a new sect, presuming forsooth to preach without the authority of a Bishop, without the inspiration of God, without learning. (Alan de Insulis, quoted in Henry James Warner, The Albigensian Heresy)
When he discusses Nestorius, the great episcopal heresiarch condemned at Ephesus, he says that his error was to think of himself as "the first and only one to understand Scripture (Thomas Guarino, 'St Vincent of Lerins and the development of Christian doctrine' Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, June 2014)
At first I skipped to the second volume, containing the "Philosophy of Abélard," and, after reading that with the greatest interest, I returned to the first, to the life of the great heresiarch. (Prosper Mérimée, Abbé Aubain and Mosaics)
He is constantly provocative of adverse, even of severe criticism; of half the heresies from which he has suffered - not only that of impressionism - he was himself the unconscious heresiarch. (George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature)
Origin:
'arch-heretic; leader in heresy,' 1620s, from Church Latin haeresiarcha, from Late Greek hairesiarkhes 'leader of a school;' in classical use chiefly a medical school; in ecclesiastical writers, leader of a sect or heresy (see heresy + arch-)(Online Etymology Dictionary)
May Day Full Flower Moon.
May. 2nd, 2026 03:10 pmfull_metal_ox posting in common_natureTaken at 22:25 Eastern US Daylight Time over the parking lot joining Winn-Dixie and a local hotel, the latter outlined by its lights.
Once again, the photo doesn’t reflect what my corrective-lensed eyes actually saw—a serenely luminous disc the pale yellow of Muenster cheese—but the image is stark and dramatic. The lens flare on my cheap-ass burner phone made it resemble a black star sapphire (or, to read the image as suitably floral and local, a spider lily):
(I wasn’t the only one prowling this clear moonlit tropical night in search of food; two of the Burrowing Owls at my apartment complex were out hunting on the side lawn, as a third stood perched at the nest; this represents a full year of continuous occupancy and breeding, reflecting how safe they must feel here. They squawked at my approach, but did not hiss.)
Once again, the photo doesn’t reflect what my corrective-lensed eyes actually saw—a serenely luminous disc the pale yellow of Muenster cheese—but the image is stark and dramatic. The lens flare on my cheap-ass burner phone made it resemble a black star sapphire (or, to read the image as suitably floral and local, a spider lily):
(I wasn’t the only one prowling this clear moonlit tropical night in search of food; two of the Burrowing Owls at my apartment complex were out hunting on the side lawn, as a third stood perched at the nest; this represents a full year of continuous occupancy and breeding, reflecting how safe they must feel here. They squawked at my approach, but did not hiss.)
A Set of Sequels: Sovereign, by April Daniels & Prison of Sleep, by Tim Pratt
May. 2nd, 2026 12:04 pmrachelmanija
This picks up when Danny's been Dreadnought for a while, and is getting a bit too into the violent aspects of the job. This aspect is quite well done - you understand what's going on with her, but it actually is a bit unsettling. Also, Valkyrja reappears, sort of; an evil techbro wreaks havoc; a TERF is threatening the world; and Danny works on her relationships.
I liked this more than the first book. Danny developed as a character and spent a lot less time being abused by transphobes. I'll grab the third book when it comes out.
The sequel isn't as good as the first book, unfortunately. I'd have been happy with more of Zax, Minna, and Vicky exploring the multiverse, but this book is much more plot-driven and Minna and Vicky only show up three-quarters of the way through. Half or more of the book is narrated by a new character whose identity I'll leave out as it's spoilery for the first book. She was fine as a character but her storyline was less interesting. Zax gets a new companion, and I did quite enjoy his adventures with her. I also enjoyed Minna and Vicky when they finally appeared.
But the plot-driven parts were less interesting, and the structure was really odd and not in a way that benefited the book. Instead of picking up where the first book left off, we get a retrospective summary of what happened some time after that point, then we get the entire backstory of the non-Zax narrator bringing her up to the point where she meets Zax in the first book, then it jumps forward and we get what's happening to her now, then we catch up with what Zax is doing now, and then, about three quarters of the way in, we finally get the story of what happened immediately after the first book left off. I think it would have worked better to tell the story more linearly. And also, to have much more Minna.
It's not a bad book and it does have some really good parts, but there are some baffling choices made.
Birdfeeding
May. 2nd, 2026 10:59 amysabetwordsmith posting in birdfeedingToday is sunny and chilly.
I fed the birds. I've seen a large flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, and a fox squirrel.
EDIT 5/2/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
EDIT 5/2/26 -- I did more work around the patio.
I am done for the night.
I fed the birds. I've seen a large flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, and a fox squirrel.
EDIT 5/2/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
EDIT 5/2/26 -- I did more work around the patio.
I am done for the night.
Reproductive matters
May. 2nd, 2026 04:28 pmoursinApparently this is Still A Thing: Woman denied permanent birth control on NHS wins case with ombudsman. I.e. she was asking for sterilisation, and significant barriers are still being put in the way when women ask for this, compared to men asking for vasectomy.
Conceding that
Female sterilisation, or tubal ligation, is a surgical procedure that involves sealing, cutting or blocking the fallopian tubes to prevent eggs from reaching the uterus. It is usually performed under general anaesthetic via keyhole surgery and requires a few weeks of recovery. In contrast, a vasectomy is a minor outpatient procedure, typically carried out under local anaesthetic in under 30 minutes.
While both procedures serve the same purpose, permanent contraception, the ombudsman’s investigation found that the NHS was in effect treating them as different tiers of care, placing significant barriers in front of women while offering men a more straightforward pathway.
The investigation found that the ICB had denied women NHS funding based on the risk of “regret”, a criterion not applied to men seeking vasectomies.
Critics say women face unequal treatment but others say tighter controls reflect legitimate medical concerns.
While some of this is about its being a more serious operation, a lot of it comes down to 'maybe she will regret it'. Sigh. Not all women are happy with the various forms of long-term contraception which one 'emeritus professor' (it is not stated of what) says are equivalent and leave options open.
This is a different, and very strange, story about reproduction: ‘It’s super weird, super odd, super rare’: meet the twins who have different dads.
I think there may have been some potentially similar phenomena collected by the sort of docs who collected Weird Medical Phenomena - come on down, Gould and Pyle and their Anomalies and curiosities of medicine : being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day (1901), which includes 'twins of different colour' which before DNA testing was presumably the only means by which one might even suspect a case of this sort.
Have also looked up papers of doc who also did this kind of thing and see reference to blood grouping in twins, which might also have been a clue to this? or not - would fraternal twins necessarily have same blood group.
Friday Word: Chronomancy
May. 1st, 2026 08:29 amcalzephyr posting in 1word1dayChronomancy - noun.
My apologies--I was at the comic expo last week and still recovering! Thanks to the magic of chronomancy, I can at least backdate my post :-D
Chronomancy is a fantasy word yet at the same time, yet legit enough for Merriam-Webster!. That's because it has been around a long time, and not just in modern usage. Sometimes called hemerology, the practice of using calendar astrology or divination to determine lucky (or unlucky) days has long been used since ancient times.
My apologies--I was at the comic expo last week and still recovering! Thanks to the magic of chronomancy, I can at least backdate my post :-D
Chronomancy is a fantasy word yet at the same time, yet legit enough for Merriam-Webster!. That's because it has been around a long time, and not just in modern usage. Sometimes called hemerology, the practice of using calendar astrology or divination to determine lucky (or unlucky) days has long been used since ancient times.
Just Think About How Many Clams You Could Scoop Up With These Things!
May. 2nd, 2026 11:40 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
daily_otter_feed
Via MTSOfan - the ladles have fish “hidden” in them as an enrichment activity!
Video
May. 1st, 2026 11:49 pmysabetwordsmith posting in birdfeeding10 Tricks To Attract Owls To Your Backyard!
The owl is the ultimate "silent guardian" of the backyard, providing natural pest control and a sense of wilderness to even the most suburban settings. 🦉🌙 While they are notoriously elusive, attracting them to your property in 2026 isn't about luck—it's about creating a specific "dark-sky" habitat that caters to their unique hunting and nesting needs.
In this video, we’re counting down 10 ways to attract owls to your backyard that will turn your property into a prime destination for these nocturnal raptors.
The owl is the ultimate "silent guardian" of the backyard, providing natural pest control and a sense of wilderness to even the most suburban settings. 🦉🌙 While they are notoriously elusive, attracting them to your property in 2026 isn't about luck—it's about creating a specific "dark-sky" habitat that caters to their unique hunting and nesting needs.
In this video, we’re counting down 10 ways to attract owls to your backyard that will turn your property into a prime destination for these nocturnal raptors.
Book review: The Last Hour Between Worlds
May. 1st, 2026 07:47 pmrocky41_7 posting in fffridayYesterday on a lovely walk through then neighborhood I reached the end of The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso. This is fantasy/action novel, set in a world in “prime” reality, beneath which sits ever-descending “echo” layers of reality. The further down you go, the stranger and more dangerous things get. At a New Year’s party, things get unexpectedly tricky when the entire party is pulled down through the echoes.
Our protagonist is Kembral Thorne, a “hound” whose job is to retrieve people, animals, and other things that are pulled or “fall” into the echoes. This party is Kem’s first step back into society after having her first baby two months earlier.
Of course, when things start going wrong, Kem can’t help but get involved. It’s her job.
I’ll say again, I do love queer lit with adults. YA is great and I’m so happy that teens today have access to so much queer lit, but online queer book recs can skew very YA. Here, Kem is very much someone at least in her thirties—she’s got a baby, she’s reached a senior role in her career, and her concerns reflect this position in her life. While she and her quasi-rival Rika have the sort of skittish interactions you might expect from people who are into each other and unwilling to admit they are into each other, they don’t reach the level of comic avoidance or overwrought drama of teens or young adults.
I liked the ebb and flow of Kem and Rika’s relationship. These are two people who already have history and have kind of already had their big, relationship-ending squabble before we even get to this party, which is fun to unravel over the course of the evening. They have some cute moments, some artificially-amplified angst, but are generally enjoyable.
The worldbuilding here is fine. It’s serviceable for what the novel is doing, but we don’t really get a look at much else outside of the party except when Kem ventures out into the echoes, which becomes increasingly less frequent as they descend. There’s some fun stuff, some spooky stuff, some aesthetic stuff.
The book pushes a little hard on maintaining the status quo when the status quo isn’t that great (I think it could have made this more believable with more discussion, but the book is really more about the action than the political debate) and I did think one character’s fate was a cop-out, especially given the former. Violent change to the system is wrong but we’ll all shrug and smile when this criminal we couldn’t nail down conveniently dies without a trial.
On the whole, I enjoyed this one, but it’s nothing earth-shattering. I put the next book on my TBR though because I do want to see what Rika and Kem get up to next.
Turbulence, by David Szalay
May. 1st, 2026 03:12 pmrachelmanija
A modern take on La Ronde: a novel in the form of twelve short stories linked by airplane trips. Each has a main character who meets the main character of the next story. A pilot has a brief fling with a journalist in Brazil; the journalist flies to Toronto to interview a writer; the writer flies to Seattle where she meets two of her fans; one of the fans flies to Hong Kong, and so forth.
The blurb says each meeting causes a ripple effect as they change each other's lives, but that's not actually what happens in many of them. Some are minor chance encounters, some are present at a crucial moment in someone else's life but don't directly affect it, and some are important encounters but those are the ones where the people have pre-existing relationships. Most of the characters are disconnected, discontented, and lonely, despite the literal connections they have in a six degrees of separation way; the only character who seems happy and is focused on the people they love is about to get hit with a terrible tragedy that's someone else's traffic delay.
As we go from person to person, we get to see the characters from different angles, and understand things about them that others don't. The pilot, who in his story was wondering what would have happened if his younger sister hadn't died in a childhood accent, asks his one night stand how old she is. She says 33, which is the age his sister would have been. But she has no idea of any of this, and when he doesn't reply she thinks he's fallen asleep.
There's an impressively diverse set of locales and characters, sketched-in but real-feeling; I knew we were in Delhi before it was stated just from the description of the air. The emotional tenor is a bit distanced and chilly. Overall it reminded me of Raymond Carver, but with less striking prose.
Szalay won last year's Booker Prize for Flesh, a novel which sounds really unappealing.
Books read, May 2026
May. 1st, 2026 02:54 pmbrithistorian- 1 May 2026
- *The Monster in the Manor (Lyonne Riley)
- 5 May 2026
- Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 36 (Tomohito Oda)
- Library Wars: Love & War, vol. 14 (Kiiro Yumi)