Well. Last week was a weird week. I made plans. I intended to carry them out. Life had different plans– like a flat tire that wiped out my Monday evening. Fun. Also, I had Mina the Kitten spayed on Wednesday, and the vet told me to limit her activity for 7-10 days. Can someone tell me how to limit the activity of a four-month-old kitten who has enough energy to power half a city?

Suffice it to say that Mina is doing just fine, and I’m pulling my hair out trying to keep her from jumping on All The Things.

In other news, we’ve had a few storms roll through. The clouds were especially spectacular on Tuesday night, as they came in just before sunset and were lit by both the setting sun and by lightning.

What I Finished Reading Last Week:

• Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
• Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear, audiobook narrated by Nneka Okoye
• Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman, audiobook narrated by Neil Gaiman

Burial Rites is a stunning book. It is about the last person, Agnes Magnusdottir, to be publicly beheaded in Iceland. She was convicted of killing a man and sent to a farm in northern Iceland to work until her sentence was carried out. The family she lived with was forced to take her in and hated her at first, but the more they got to know her, the more they learned that the black and white story they had been told had many more shades of gray than they thought. This is a stark story that often mirrors Iceland’s bleak landscape.

Ancestral Night is a thought-provoking tale of identity, community, and how technology affects our lives and our perceptions of our lives. Haimey Dz is a woman who thinks she knows who she is, but as the story progresses, she discovers that there is more to her own tale than she thought. I highly recommend the audiobook, as Nneka Okoye is a wonderful narrator.

This is the second time I’ve read Norse Mythology. Once I finished Ancestral Night, I wanted something else to listen to while I edited photos from Iceland. Norse Mythology was just the thing, given that Gaiman’s sources were primarily Icelandic. His reading of his stories was excellent, and it’s easy to see why he’s won awards for his narration.

What I’m Currently Reading:

• Jade City (The Green Bone Saga #1) by Fonda Lee (177/495)
• Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) by Ann Leckie (41%)
• Bellman & Black: A Ghost Story by Diane Setterfield, audiobook narrated by Jack Davenport (40%)
• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, audiobook narrated by Kyle McCarley (41%)

Yup. Still reading Jade City. I had grand intentions of reading a large chunk of it earlier this week, but when I sat down with, I read a whole twenty pages before I fell asleep. I was a lot more tired than I thought I was that night. But I will get there. I plan to read a bunch of it later today. We’ll see how far I get.

Ancillary Justice is an intriguing SciFi story I’ve been reading over my lunch hours. I’m familiar with the idea of a ship-mind, that is, artificial intelligence that controls a spaceship. But Leckie adds Ancillaries to the notion of the ship-mind, wherein human bodies are infused with the ship-mind’s AI programs to become extensions of the ship. In this story, Breq is an Ancillary that has been reduced to a single body after her ship is destroyed. Now she is looking for vengeance.

Bellman & Black is a historical fiction story, as well as a ghost story. William Bellman has lived a charmed and successful life, but when tragedy strikes, a mysterious figure from his past appears again to give Bellman an opportunity he cannot refuse. The writing in this is not as beautiful as the writing in The Thirteenth Tale, another of Setterfield’s books, but the story is captivating and I’m looking forward to listening to the rest of it.

I checked out The Goblin Emperor on audiobook via Overdrive once I’d finished listening to Norse Mythology. I’ve been listening to them while editing my photographs from Iceland, and I have a lot of photos to edit. I began listening to The Goblin Emperor earlier this year but didn’t have a chance to listen to much of it before my check-out expired. I checked it out again and have been enjoying it, so I am sure I will get through the rest of it this time.

What I Plan to Start Reading This Week:

I haven’t completely settled on a TBR for October, so I’m not sure what I’ll start on this week. I have a lot of witchy and gothic tales on the docket, though. ‘Tis the season! I’ll settle for sure on my October TBR later today.

What I’ve Been Watching:

I got through a few episodes of the second half of season four of Vikings. Once again, I planned to watch more of this, but that didn’t end up happening. I’m going to try to finish up the season this week. I don’t think I have that many episodes left. So far, Lagertha is successful in her bid for power, Ragnar is launching a grand plan for power in England, and Bjorn seeks to explore father south than any Norseman has before, but he must strike a deal with his treacherous uncle, Rollo, to do so.

This is where the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok start coming into their own. History records that they were even more fearsome than their father, especially Ivar the Boneless.