Soliloquy and an interlude
A brief personal note. As I mentioned, I’m involved with a small-scale chamber opera production. Two musicians, four main roles (of which mine is definitely the smallest one) and a choir of… four? All in all, not really Met are we. However, it’s been fun.
Now, the last rehearsals are over. I know my lines, I have a grasp of how my music goes and what I should do while it all. All I have to do, is to click all these things together. Yup. Here comes the opera hero.
But, alas, that’s all just one piece in the larger puzzle of life. This has been a busy week, I’ve been working extra hours nearly every day and sleepy time has been a bit, shall we say, condensed. Havenät been able to read at all and I do have a few books in my to be read -shelf.
As a matter of fact, I do not have such shelf. Such shelf would be filled with far too many books from our library, for you see, I’m an accumulator. I collect books, but in reality, I accumulate books. A bought book is a good book. A book for free is also a good book. In fact, a book per se, is a good thing.
But I do read them, too. Recent reads have included Adam-Troy Castro’s Emissaries from the Dead (lovely little noir-sf that explores couple of interesting ideas, such as linked humans and – well – slavery), Jay Lake’s rollicking Mainspring (steampunk, or should one actually say gearpunk?), Mikko Karppi’s Unkarilainen taulu (Hungarian Painting, a somewhat X-Files’ish police procedural by an actual policeman), Eliot FIntushel’s Breakfast With The Ones You Love (brilliant, sad and at the same time funny urban fantasy), Jukka M. Heikkilä’s Germania (fresh take on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which my namesake handles the feelings and motivations of the era very well, while adding an element of modern view-point with a Finnish character, a solid historical novel) and – to nicely round this up – Paul Kearney’s Ten Thousand (yes, a fantasy take on Xenofon’s Anabasis, always a personal favourite as historical legends go, alongside with the Great Siege of Malta in 1565).
Been a while since I last read anything. *sigh* Maybe I’ll manage to fit in a book or two these following four days I have off from work? Recommendations?