Closing tabs

Pictures of chickens.

Goat Uber, a.k.a. Rent-a-Ruminant.

Julia Cheiffetz had a baby and cancer while working at Amazon.

Ten steps to PhD failure. (The book is 57 Ways to Screw up In Grad School: Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students, and I have already ordered a copy.)

Light reading round-up (as always, I seesaw between panic that I will never again find anything good to read and huge relief when I come upon mention of something appealing - have just downloaded a good new batch of stuff and feel relatively calm about it just now!):

John L. Parker, Jr., Once a Runner (not sure why I didn't come across this one sooner - it's very good fun - a bit melodramatic, but a nice companion for In Lane Three, Alex Archer!);

Chuck Wendig, Zeroes (good, but the premise and storyline are perhaps overly familiar by now);

Karin Slaughter, Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes (I find this "teaser" approach for new crime fiction woefully effective - now gnashing my teeth waiting for Pretty Girls - ditto the delectable Small Wars, teaser for the forthcoming Jack Reacher novel Make Me, which will be my reward after my first day of teaching - assuming I am not so greedy as to read it on the Tuesday night before my first lecture);

The first two books in Hakan Nesser's Inspector Van Vetteren series, a good tip from Jane Y.;

Ruth Ware, In a Dark, Dark Wood (I liked this quite a bit, but I wished it hadn't been told in flashback/memory loss mode - I think the story could have stood on its own);

Ellis Avery's second installment in her Family Tooth series, On Fear, about which my only complaint is that it's much too short, I want to read a whole book's worth of this;

Nick Holdstock, The Casualties (odd, appealing);

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (I really, really liked it, despite the way it's almost too much of the zeitgeist - shades of Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play! - I've had it on my Kindle for a while, and I guess I was holding out against it because I am suspicious of "literary" novels that get singled out for "genre" content/acclaim, but I should have read it sooner, I liked the earlier book of hers I read and this one is exceptionally good);

And my top pick from this batch, a really wonderful trilogy by Robin LaFevers (this was a recommendation from Sara Ryan), the His Fair Assassin trilogy. I love these! They have some of the appeal of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart series, only much less sex (for me this is a plus); really, really appealing historical fantasy.

The two other posts I am going to write now are more mournful (Oliver Sacks, Katrina).