Aron 2 Blue

John Green is really startling sometimes. He describes his work as a chaplain in a children's hospital, and that his work was not about questioning or communicating beliefs, but listening, and acknowledging other peoples' pain, without being able to offer a solution. "Don't just do something, stand there."

Hmm, read back in Jan and didn't finish a review. Lovely book, with lots of potential sub-text, but I think it's mostly about starting again with good people around you - and giving people who don't fit the mold a chance. An orc with a violent past starts a coffee shop, which is unheard of in this city. A succubus joins as a partner, who doesn't want to be judged by their species. And then there's the ratkin cook with extraordinary talents. Magic that helps and hurts, and a final redemption due to just being good people. The dire cat is an added bonus!

 "The Fault In Our Stars" by John Green. This is the book that launched John Green. And I get it - it is hard and touching and romantic and realistic and optimistic and depressing. Hazel Grace and Augustus both have cancer, are snarky teenagers, and they fall in love. "I don't want to be a grenade" hit me really hard.  And then Hank Green got cancer! Thankfully, his treatment was successful and he's back to normal health, because I like all-the-things that Hank and John have done, and I hope they keep doing for a long while.

Space empire, anyone? Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy, by Anne Leckie. Imperial Radch series . I picked the first one up for a book club I couldn't attend, and highly recommend it. It explores a number of deep themes, and I can see why it won all three major sci-fi awards. *** Spoilers *** Multiple minds, multiple viewpoints, single consciousness. The main character is a ship and most of it's crew, made up of "ancillaries". These humans are integrated into the ship's consciousness as additional brains/bodies. The author noted the difficulty of portraying a being with many viewpoints available to it, but I think they did an admirable job. Surveillance - what is a relationship like when the ship can sense everything about her crew except their thoughts? Gender - the main language does not have gendered pronouns, so all characters use she/her until specifically proven otherwise, and often the main character forgets. Imperialism - beings are not c...

I'm never sure how these things make it into production - did someone test it? They must have relied solely on automated tests, I guess. I had a FedEx delivery coming, and I wanted to add delivery instructions. There's a link as part of the tracking page, but it makes me set up an account. If I have to, sigh. The delivery instructions page is dead simple - a drop-down for preferred location to leave a package, and a text entry for notes.  However, the "submit" button at the bottom of the page is not enabled, and won't become enabled no matter what I type in the text field. I had to find the "try our new design" checkbox at the top of the page and flip to the new design for it to work. Strike 1: didn't test the old form, which is the default. I tried to type in a front door code for my building, but when I typed #, I got an error "No special characters permitted". Somehow all punctuation is disallowed, including comma, period and apostrophe....