Kindle haul

Happy winder holiday of choice to all and sundry! Enough new Kindle books have accumulated that it seems time for another post so that I can remember what I bought.

Elizabeth Bear — Garrett Investigates (sff)
eluki bes shahar — Hellflower (sff)
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell — Cranford (mainstream)
John Scalzi — Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle (sff)

Cranford was free since it was written in the 1800s. I picked it up because of Jo Walton's review on Tor.com. The eluki bes shahar novel is from Daniel Moran's e-book site FS&, an impulse buy from browsing through his catalog while picking up the Long Run bundle for my mother. The Scalzi super-bundle is a collection of five separately-published novellas and chapbooks plus one non-fiction essay, only one of which I already owned (The God Engines), which seemed like a fairly good deal.

In a separate note, the problem with watching interesting lectures on YouTube (apart from the fact that it's very easy to lose a day doing so) is that I usually end up wanting to buy the book on the topic and then read that. That happened to me today: I finally got around to watching Philip Ball's lecture on the chemistry of painting, and now Bright Earth is in my non-fiction want list. And there are three more hour-long TVO programs linked off of related material that look interesting. I fear the day may disappear....

Well, I will be rescued at least partly by being called to help decorate Christmas cookies.

This is the beginning of by far my favorite two weeks of the year, although not for the reasons that people might suspect. Other than food (yum) my family doesn't do Christmas: no decorations, no huge family get-togethers, and we all give each other the freedom from guilt and stress of having to find presents. But I get two weeks of mandatory vacation from work, as does, importantly, everyone else. Which means there's nothing going on to suck me in from vacation and a very pleasant sense of resting and resetting for the new year. It's quiet, I can sit and read, I can focus on one thing at a time, and I can reorganize and order my life and revisit priorities and to-do lists with a lovely sense of perspective.

Any other mandatory or at least widespread holiday would work as well, so it's unrelated to the season. (I find the commercialism somewhat distracting rather than a positive part of the experience.) But this is the one that we get, and it happens to coincide nicely with the meaningless but psychologically significant change of the year number. And it's delightful every year.