Recent Reads: Starbridge

Recent Reads: Starbridge, AC Crispin (amazon affiliate) This is one of my favorite books. It’s a first contact story, led by a teenage girl, and I was the same age as the protagonist when I first read it, which probably helped cement its place near and dear to my heart. :) Mahree Burroughs (I only noticed the nod to Edgar Rice there in this reading!) is a human from an Earth colony, on her way to Earth for the first time to go to college. Their ship, captained by her…

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Recent Reads: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

This is one of many books I’ve bought because someone on Twitter (in this case, fantasy novelist Stephanie Burgis) recommended it. For a platform notorious for Not Selling Books, I gotta say, I’ve bought an awful lot of books because of it. RIP Twitter. Anyway. IRREGULAR WITCHES is a contemporary rrrrromantic fantasy, I guess, because there is a romance storyline of some importance, but it’s really about Found Family, and like a lot of what I’ve been reading lately, it was a balm to my weary soul. It’s the story…

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The 1980something cover of THE WESTING GAME, featuring chess pieces on a puzzle with missing sections, beneath one of which is Uncle Sam in a casket.

Recent Reads: The Westing Game

I first read Ellen Raskin’s THE WESTING GAME (affiliate link) when I was about eleven. It was the first, and I believe remains the only, book that I have ever finished reading, stared at a moment, and then gone back to the beginning to read again immediately. I then read it again many, many times in my tween and early teen years, but I don’t remember re-reading it for…well, a very long time. But it came up again recently, possibly in context of Ellen Raskin as a cover designer, and…

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prawn-fried noodles in a takeaway carton, with chopsticks sticking into them

NOODLES!!!!

oh my GOD the noodle place is back at the Temple Bar Market!!!! Honestly I can’t tell you how happy I am about this. It’s a little food booth at the Temple Bar Saturday market in Meeting House Square, and I always used to order prawn fried noodles even when they weren’t technically on the menu. (Prawn skewers were, and othermeat-fried noodles were, just not prawn fried noodles. BUT GUESS WHAT’S ON THE MENU NOW!!!!!) The guy always remembered my order, because it was different. He used to give me…

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Picoreview: The Blue Beetle

Picoreview: The Blue Beetle – Ted and I both really, really liked Blue Beetle & if you’re doing movies in cinemas these days and like superhero films a tall, we think you should see it ASAP bc here, at least, it’s only got 9 showings a day in the largest cineplex (as opposed to Barbie opening with 36 & Oppenheimer with like 16) & it feels like the studio’s way of making sure it fails, at least partially so they can justify having not released Batgirl, another superhero movie with…

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