Good riddance to last week. It featured endless computer problems at work, thanks to an update that didn’t quite work out for us, and an inability to get things reset thanks to endless interruptions. Seriously. I needed two minutes to write an email to the tech guy, and it ended up taking half an hour.

Word to the wise: if you see someone who is two seconds from pulling their hair out, maybe let them finish what they’re doing before you interrupt them.

So thanks to all of that and other work craziness I did not get to spend my lunch hours reading. In fact, I hardly got my lunch hours.

And then Daylight Saving Time came around, and I lost an hour of my weekend. But I was able to spend most of last night reading, so I finished the two books I’d been working on this week. This means I’ll finally get to start on Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists, which I meant to read two weeks ago.

This week featured a few reviews and the return of Top Five Friday!

Reviews:

• Poetry Will Save Your Life by Jill Bialosky
• Now I Rise by Kiersten White
• A Treacherous Curse by Deanna Raybourn
• Top Five Friday: Favorite Fantasy Books

 

The books I finished last night:

• The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson, translated by Rod Bradbury
• Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea, translated by Marilyn Booth

 

I plan to have reviews up for these two later this week.

My current reads:

• Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold, narrated by Grover Gardner
• The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

 

That’s my literary week in a nutshell. I’m a little behind in my Read the World Challenge, so I’m going to make a concerted effort to work on that for the rest of this month, rather than falling back on old reading habits. I have a whole shelf of works in translation in my living room, staring me down. They’re not going anywhere fast, so I’d better get to reading them.

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I haven’t watched much television this week, though I did pick up the seventh season of Game of Thrones on DVD. I hope there’s commentary on the first episode, because the scene that opens up the season made me go, “What…..?” and then, “Holy s**t!!!”

Because I am as interested in the technical categories of the Oscars as I am the acting awards, I decided I’m going to listen to the Best Original Score Nominees this month. I’ve already listened to Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi by John Williams because Star Wars, and I scratched both The Phantom Thread‘s score (by Johnny Greenwood) and the winner, The Shape of Water by Alexandre Desplat off the list. I just have Hans Zimmer’s score for Dunkirk and Carter Burwell’s for Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri left. My favorite so far is either The Last Jedi or The Phantom Thread, though the music for The Shape of Water is wonderful, too.