Book completed

Silver Nitrate, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The latest from one of my favorite authors. In 1993, film sound editor Montserrat and her lifelong best friend Tristán, an actor, love horror movies, and Tristán discovers his new neighbor was the director of three obscure films they particularly admire. They make friends with this lonely old man, but doing so brings the two of them into the strange world of Nazi occultism – a creepy guy who considered himself a sorcerer had been using a special kind of film to cast a spell, but the spell was never finished and created a curse that’s still going, and now Montserrat and Tristán have to try to fix things.

Book completed

An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon. This book is excellent, although brutal. It's a science fiction novel about a generation ship that's set up like an antebellum Southern plantation. Our main character, Aster, is a Black physician/scientist/slave, and she has three people she's very close to: Theo, the ship's Surgeon; Giselle, her bunkmate who is somewhat insane from the tortures of their lives; and Aint Melusine, who raised her. Although all sorts of tragic things happened, the ending was satisfying. It was all much, much more readable than I'd expect, given the subject matter. I liked it very much.

Let's see, what else about today? I'm getting further along in collecting the references I need for my bibliography. Around 8:30 pm I went out to see if I could hear the owl again (which is surely a great horned owl, given its call), but I shouldn't have been surprised that there's a whole lot more human sound in my neighborhood at that time on a Friday night compared with a Thursday. And poor J. remains sick - he's been sick with this cold for 17 days now, and as of yesterday seems to have developed tonsillitis.