Reading Wednesday is checking in on Thursday

A few other people's posts that include "I am posting even though it feels like not much is going on" remind me that it's been ten days since I posted anything. The freelance stuff continues, today's most exciting moment was querying the kind of nail polish used (for a paper on medical applications of nanotech).

Recent reading, two books that are second in series where reading order does matter:

Prairie Fire, by E. K. Johnston. If I say more than "read this unless you need your dragons to be sympathetic, but read The Story of Owen first," there will be spoilers for that book, so have a cut tag.
( Read more... )

The Philosopher Kings, by Jo Walton. This starts ten years after the end of The Just City, and a lot of the chapters are from the viewpoint of Apollo's now-15-year-old daughter Arete. I recommend it highly, but read The Just City first. ( I think this needs a cut tag, too )

Having waited several weeks after it was published to buy this, I am now impatient for the third volume.

Odd linguistic bit

At physical therapy this afternoon, while showing me a stretch, the therapist said a couple of words of Spanish. I did what I thought she was asking for and asked "¿Como si?" which got me spread hands and "no hablo." I'm nothing like fluent in Spanish, but the code-switching just happened. So I went back to English, and then commented that the bit of Spanish had come out without particular thought, just as if I'd said "like this?" in English.