2018 science fiction, ninth in the Chronicles of St Mary's series (time travel). More adventures in history!
1946 glurge, dir. Frank Capra, James Stewart, Lionel Barrymore: IMDb / allmovie. You can't win, you can't break even, and God won't let you get out of the game.
2010 romance, last of its loose tetralogy. Parker Brown and three of her childhood friends run a wedding business, everything from engagement photos to the Big Day; she does the overall organisation and client-wrangling. She isn't looking for romance…
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved splitting strings and sorting rows. (Note that this ends today.)
2016 Korean horror, dir. Yeon Sang-ho; Gong Yoo, Kim Su-an; IMDb / allmovie. There's an extra passenger aboard the express. (Vtt Busanhaeng or 부산행.)
2018 alternate-world fantasy, fifth of its series. The Fae and the Dragons have been brought to an alternate Paris to negotiate a peace treaty. But one of the negotiators has been assassinated, and not-Sherlock-Holmes Lord Peregrine Vale is the obvious person to solve it.
2007 Spanish found-footage horror, stylised as "[•REC]"; dir. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza; Manuela Velasco: IMDb / allmovie. Making a documentary about the night shift at the fire station is not going to end well.
1999 mystery, nineteenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private investigator in San Francisco. Or, this time, in Kauai, as her office neighbour Glenna Stanleigh asks for extra security on a troubled documentary film project.
1920 surreal horror, dir. Robert Wiene, Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt; IMDb / allmovie. The mysterious Caligari sets up at the town fair, with his somnambulistic subject, and people start to die…
2022 SF/romance novelette, prequel to a trilogy. Captain Octavia Zarola is a bounty hunter with a heart of gold.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list filtering and sequence generation. (Note that this ends today.)
This Meetup-based boardgames group continues at the Marlow Donkey.
2017 fantasy anthology in two parts, commentaries on fairy stories and a few original ones.
Back again, playing with three and four. No photos this time; I was too involved!
1991 SF, twelfth and last of its series. After three Observers go missing, the Time Corps protagonists travel to Tombstone, Arizona in 1881.
2011 interstitial collection of letters, in the Fergusson-Van Alstyne series. Various people write to friends and family on deployment.
Here are the answers to last year's quiz.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved decomposing sequences and searching for limit values. (Note that this ends today.)
1993 mystery, nineteenth and last in the series about Superintendent Henry Tibbett. Susan Gardiner unexpectedly inherits a run-down country pub and, since she's trained in restaurant management, decides to refurbish it and open it as a restaurant. Then one of her customers dies from mushroom poisoning…
2013 fantasy, first of a series. There are magical worlds beyond our own… and most of the people who live there are horrible.
1986 SF, second of its trilogy. Silence Leigh, already a hyperspace pilot, has now had some training as a magus, and is ready to have another try at travelling to lost Earth.
Back to the Masonic Hall on a cold, but dry, weekend of boardgaming.
1925… thriller, I suppose. Prince Séliman works as secretary to Lady Diana Wynham, a scandalous woman. Original title La Madone des sleepings. Banned in Boston!
2023 SF novella. Years before the events of Firebreak, the twelve-year-old cyber-enhanced SecOps 06 and 22 run away from the Company for the first time…
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved searching sequences and parsing strings. (Note that this ends today.)
1991 historical naval fiction. In 1915, Linienschiffsleutnant Otto Prohaska of the Austro-Hungarian Navy takes command of a submarine…
Boxing Day Boardgames had to be cancelled after an extremely tiring incident a few days earlier, but I was able to get out for boardgames at a friend's place on New Year's Day.
2023 space-operatic SF. Earth was destroyed in the great war, and its survivors scrape by on Gaea Station, an asteroid powered by the last salvaged warships. Kyr, a genetically enhanced "warbreed", has spent her life training for a chance to avenge the fourteen billion dead… "While Earth's children live, the enemy shall fear us."
In 2023 my boardgaming life was more at conventions than in local groups.
In 2023 I read 204 books, the most of any year since the pandemic began.
A friend likes to sum up his year in a set number of words, and I copy this fine idea. "Think of it as a short and un-boastful summary of the year, which nobody is expected to understand all of."