Flashback to 2020, early July (spoilers for The Expanse)

Always a definite possibility of spoilers!

Wednesday, July 8
I'm not sure I'm enjoying The Expanse books as much as I did before. We'll see if that holds as we go along. It might just be that I'm really still in the early setup phase of this book, and once it really starts rolling I'll feel less jumpy. In the first book the setup stage was like one chapter. This one takes quite a bit longer.

Thursday
I'm now to the part of the book where they're traipsing around Ganymede and people keep getting shot (or presumably attacked by the protomolecule monster, but they don't know about that yet) and it's all pretty unpleasant. I'm looking forward to the part where they're back on the ship and at least shooting people from a distance.

Friday
OK, a day later, everybody - or well, Holden and Prax and the whole gang other than Alex - is still on Ganymede, but they're about to get off as soon as Alex gets there with the ship. And Bobbie and Avasarala have now hooked up (metaphorically speaking). So the pace is picking up, which is what I wanted. I don't know how much more reading I'll work in tonight, though. It's early-ish by my standards and I'm already sleepy.

Saturday
I was talking before about how I visualize characters. I just realized that I now hear what Bobbie says with TV-Bobbie's accent. And her hair, mostly! Before I saw TV-Bobbie, I was visualizing her wrong and I knew it - which is to say I was visualizing her as white, even though I knew intellectually she wasn't. It's still hard to tell the back of your brain that it's wrong. So thank goodness for TV-Bobbie, I guess.

Sunday
I finished Caliban's War just now and am starting Abaddon's Gate. All of these books are so good - there's not a dud among them - as I predicted, I whizzed through the second half of Caliban. That's pretty much the only criticism I can come up with for these books, is that there are a few sections like the beginning of Caliban that are slow to get going. (Well, ok, the very beginning is Bobbie's platoon getting killed, that isn't slow. It's after that that it lags.) But also they keep throwing all these new characters in and it takes you a while to get used to them - Bobbie & Prax & Avasarala in the last book, Bull and Clarissa in this one.

Flashback to 2020, mid-July (spoilers for The Expanse)

Always a definite possibility of spoilers!

Monday, July 13 (still on Expanse #3)
It occurs to me that I really like the character of Anna, even though she's a preacher and I'm an agnostic. I never have any problem with people from middle-of-the-road religions. It's the zealots I have a problem with. (I was thinking of this more generally but it's also why I hate Ashford so much. Zealotry doesn't have to be about religion.)

Tuesday
I wrote down the quote from Melba about how everybody's bags of meat, there's no souls, and all that matters is your story and your name. (The authors have versions of the "bags of meat" bit scattered around the books - that one and that we're monkeys playing with microwaves. I wonder which story and which name Ms Koh/Mao means, since she has multiples. Or maybe she means Holden.)

Wednesday
I like a lot of what this book says about how people react to tragedy. I think they must have talked to psychologists or something. I think that's why these books work so well - these people are in (almost) unimaginable circumstances but they're just people, & they act the way normal people react. It's very grounded.

Thursday
It's funny how some violent things don't upset me at all, but others really do. I hate the counter-coup bit where they're going around shooting people execution-style. Somehow I find that particularly upsetting. I really, really hate book Ashford. (TV-Ashford is David Strathairn in particularly insane mode, yes, but still, he's somebody that I have difficulty hating.) (Casting is everything.)