mdlbear: (river)
mdlbear ([personal profile] mdlbear) wrote2025-12-31 12:29 pm

River: Done With 2025

I'd be a lot happier to see the ass-end of 2025 if I wasn't pretty sure that 2026 is going to be worse -- for the US, anyway. Maybe not so much for me; I fled that country a year ago. But my kids are still stuck there.

The details -- goals from last New Year's Day )

I make that 680/11 = 61%. Last year was 68%, so only a little worse. Considering how bad it could have been, I'll take it.

dolorosa_12: (ocean)
a million times a trillion more ([personal profile] dolorosa_12) wrote2025-12-31 10:08 am

Much is taken, much abides: the 2025 meme

The last day of 2025 dawned clear, freezing, and frosty. I've spent the morning curled up in the living room, watching the sun rise, drinking Christmas spiced coffee, and reflecting on the year that was. I've been enjoying seeing everyone else's thoughts on their own 2025; mine are behind the cut.

And the only sound is the broken sea )
flamebyrd: (Default)
flamebyrd ([personal profile] flamebyrd) wrote2025-12-31 07:58 pm
Entry tags:

What I Did in 2025

Reading
The Spellshop - Sarah Beth Durst
Lady Eve's Last Con - Rebecca Fraimow
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Sword Crossed - Freya Marske
Murder by Memory - Olivia Waite
Can't Spell Treason Without Tea - Rebecca Thorne
A Pirate's Life for Tea - Rebecca Thorne
Tea You at the Altar - Rebecca Thorne
The Kamogawa Food Detectives - Hisashi Kashiwa (translated by Jesse Kirkwood)
The Restaurant of Lost Recipes - Hisashi Kashiwa (translated by Jesse Kirkwood)
A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers
The Archive Undying - Emma Mieko Candon
Alchemy and a Cup of Tea - Rebecca Thorne
Death in the Cloisters - Valentina Morelli (translated by Edward Maltby)
Skysong - C. A. Wright
Queen Demon - Martha Wells
The Enchanted Greenhouse - Sarah Beth Durst
Menu of Happiness - Hisashi Kashiwa (translated by Jesse Kirkwood)
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers
Death at Noon - Valentina Morelli
The Tainted Cup - Robert Jackson Bennett
A Drop of Corruption - Robert Jackson Bennett
Brigands and Breadknives - Travis Baldree

I got all of these from my libraries, so yay! Also I was catching the bus a lot and I turned mobile data off for all social media so I was motivated to read more.

Watching
Murderbot (Apple TV+)
Lots of YouTube

Playing
Farm RPG
Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket
Cats and Soup

Projects
A little more work on my static site generator.
oursin: hedgehog in santa hat saying bah humbug (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-12-31 09:36 am
luzula: a Luzula pilosa, or hairy wood-rush (Default)
luzula ([personal profile] luzula) wrote2025-12-31 09:47 am
Entry tags:

Write every day: final post of December

Oops, forgot to make a check-in post for the 30th. *facepalm* Since various people have already checked in for the 30th, let's just make this the final check-in post for both the 30th and the 31st. [personal profile] trobadora will be taking over in January, so head over there after this. It's been an honor to host you! And I will endeavour to write SOMETHING on this last day of the year. I'll make a final tally post tomorrow.

Tally:
Read more... )
Day 29: [personal profile] luzula, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] garonne, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] ysilme, [personal profile] the_siobhan, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] ysilme, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] chestnut_pod,

Day 30: [personal profile] ysilme, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] sanguinity,
siderea: (Default)
Siderea ([personal profile] siderea) wrote2025-12-31 02:02 am
Entry tags:

"I initially planned to build a small storm shelter..." [civ eng]

"...but it turns out, mining is fun."

2025 Dec 26: Engineer Everything (user Engineer.Everything-i5g) on YT: Shall I go still deeper? #engineering #Minecraft #tunnel #mining #constr...

sholio: (B5-station)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2025-12-30 09:27 pm

Babylon 5 script books

I ended up getting a bunch of these for myself as a pre-Christmas gift, which ended up being a post-Christmas gift, but I have been having an amazing time going through them. I'll post more detailed reactions and scans as I go back through the books from the start - right now I'm just skimming - but here are a few interesting little tidbits so far!

Spoilers for the whole B5 series, obvs )
sonia: Quilted wall-hanging (Default)
Sonia Connolly ([personal profile] sonia) wrote2025-12-30 10:03 pm

What I've been reading this year

Links go to my book blog, Curious, Healing.

Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Somebody I used to Know by Wendy Mitchell
If the Buddha Married by Charlotte Kasl
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Weaving Hope by Celia Lake
Alexandra's Riddle by Elisa Keyston
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
Surviving Domestic Violence by Elaine Weiss
Seaward by Susan Cooper
Very Far Away From Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin
Kitchens of Hope by Linda S. Svitak and Christin Jaye Eaton with Lee Svitak Dean
What It Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill
The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst
How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong

Currently reading "Hospicing Modernity" by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, which is a down-to-earth, practical manual on how to expand past the limitations that modernity puts on our thoughts, imagination, and experiences. The author talks directly about how difficult it is to address people's frozen assumptions without triggering defensiveness, while encouraging the reader to open up, side-step defensiveness, and explore wider possibilities.

I just got past the introductory exercises, which feel similar to the trauma-healing work I've been doing all this time. I always feel like I'm behind, trying to catch up to people who had more ordinary and loving childhoods but maybe those aren't so ordinary, and maybe all that work leaves me in a more flexible place.

Highly recommended! You can read a couple of sample chapters at decolonialfutures.net/hospicingmodernity
gingicat: the hands of Doctor Who #10, Martha Jones, and Jack Harkness clasped together with the caption "All for One" (all for one)
The Ginger Tiger Cat ([personal profile] gingicat) wrote in [community profile] yuletide2025-12-30 11:16 pm

many Yuletide recs

Many Yuletide recs in many fandoms, getting them in before reveals tomorrow!
https://gingicat.dreamwidth.org/1872341.html

<3, tigerbright
gullyfoyle: (Default)
gullyfoyle ([personal profile] gullyfoyle) wrote2025-12-30 10:43 pm
Entry tags:

concrete wormhole

Light and shadows and lines that caught my eye today at work. I may drop by on New Year's Day if it's sunny and try this again when hopefully the blue car won't be there. perspective shot of vacant parking garage
nnozomi: (Default)
nnozomi ([personal profile] nnozomi) wrote2025-12-31 10:49 am

良いお年を!

Mostly an ordinary post, I didn’t mean to make it the last one of the year. I am very grateful to all my DW friends for companionship and interaction over this year as well; wishing everyone good health and good fortune all the way around in 2026, with much love.

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 少女, a cover in Chinese of an OST song from a slice-of-life Korean drama called Reply 1988, new to me but apparently very good. The song itself is sweet and gentle and sits really nicely in his voice.

Tickled that there’s a Chinese song called 夏日漱石; it took me much longer than it should have to figure out that it’s not actually named after the venerated Japanese author (whose name is 夏目漱石; spot the difference). Cheeky!

Listening to the Dvorak 8th Symphony, an old favorite which I have played more than once and listened to a zillion times. This one conductor mentioned in passing once that the development of the fourth movement feels like a war, and ever since there has been a detailed story in my head for it (timestamps for this recording, which has a score). The movement begins at 26:14, with a trumpet fanfare hinting at martial events to come; at 26:40 is the pastoral cello melody, the innocent young shepherd from the village. Happy village life continues until 29:12, when you can hear the army on the march, and from there the war begins, with more and more violent clashes until the victorious brass sounds at 30:37. At 31:08 the original cello melody returns, but it’s more wistful now, looking back on what was before things changed, especially so from 32:30 and 33:39. At 33:58 there’s a kind of coming to terms with how things are now. In the coda at 34:30 the village is happy again, but it never feels quite genuine again, especially with the frenzied trombone slide in the last few bars reminding us of what the brass can mean. …I’m sure Dvorak had nothing of the sort in mind, I don’t know where any of this comes from, it just works that way in my head!

I have slightly fallen for this Japanese professor called Ito Tsukusu (or Tsukushi, except I think that was an error, or Jinn) whom I’ve never met and probably never will; he supervised the various elvish languages for the Japanese subtitles on all the Lord of the Rings movies, and studies philology and Norse sagas and other things Tolkien would have approved of, and talks (in this very long and fascinating National Geographic article, which I won’t link here because it’s in Japanese) about getting a C.S. Lewis-esque sense of “Northernness” from the Grieg Piano Concerto as a child, and reading the Anne of Green Gables series in the original English as a sixth-grader with limited English skills and being fascinated by the language as much as the story (quoting from Anne of Ingleside, “’Transubstantiationalist,’ said Jem proudly. ‘Walter found it in the dictionary last week...you know he likes great big full words, Susan...’”) and then becoming devoted to everything Tolkien-related (and spending a year in Iceland to learn Icelandic: “…when I came back to Japan I was speaking English with an Icelandic accent and Icelandic grammar”), and now researching how Norse myths show up in manga and anime, as well as the triangulations of Tolkien in WWI with Wagner’s Ring in Japan and…I’m tempted to write to him just because.

I was rereading some of the Chalet School books online, as one does, and ran across a character quoting from their idea of a quaint old book, called Barbara Bellamy, Schoolgirl; out of curiosity I looked it up and it exists and is certainly quaint. May Baldwin, the author, wrote many other things including A Schoolgirl of Moscow, which I found on openlibrary.org and adored. Published in 1911, it describes Nina Hamilton’s eventful few months living in Russia with her businessman father, her aunt Penelope, and her maid Anna. It only kind of has a plot, which is enough to make it clear that even in 1911 it was possible to see 1917 coming on the horizon; in between conspiracies (the conspirators are young and attractive if rather obsessive), there are bits reminiscent of those interwar children’s books where Jane and Jim tour somewhere in Europe with their erudite Uncle David and learn all about the relevant history and geography (I will say that the description of Russian Orthodox Easter is genuinely moving). I like it that Nina (who starts out speaking French with all her classmates because she doesn’t know Russian and they don’t know English) takes the language seriously and learns fast (…Nina protesting against an alphabet which contained thirty-six letters and three ways of writing them, and the ‘class-lady’ insisting that it was not so bad as a word spelt one way and pronounced in two different ways, acccording to meaning, such as ‘tear,’ or spelt different ways and pronounced the same, such as ‘way,’ ‘weigh,’ ‘wae.’ I’m not sure what “wae” is doing in there.) Anna is the comic relief but also has a lot of interesting points to make for herself (demanding to have her profession changed on her passport from “maid” to “gouvernante”), and Aunt Penelope is a triumph, a classic maiden aunt but also one with her own unique opinions and, when she decides to take action, remarkable boldness and originality. “I like a woman who is ready to die for her country!” announced Miss Hamilton.

Reading Pericles with yaaurens and company; typically I got distracted by a character who literally never appears on stage and is mentioned about twice, Philoten, the daughter of hapless Cleon and villainous Dionyza, who constitutes an excuse for her foster sister Marina to be murdered because she’s not as pretty or as good at anything as Marina is. Now I want to know what Philoten thought about the whole thing! I want an AU where she and Marina get wind of Dionyza’s plans and run away together like Celia and Rosalind!

I saw a signboard the other day offering “Gee Pie hot sandwiches” and only got it when I read the extra text saying “Taiwanese-style fried chicken!” Gee Pie i.e. 鸡排 i.e. jīpái, duh. A-Pei thought this was hilarious. I tested her on the classic Japanese “G-pan” and “Y-shatsu” and confused her completely: she came back with “G胖 [G-páng/G-fat]? Y虾子 [Y-xiāzi/Y-shrimp]???” G-pan are in fact jeans (ジーンズ・パンツ [jeans pants] to ジーパン jiipan to G-pan; Y-shatsu are men’s dress shirts, ワイトシャツ [white shirt] to ワイシャツ waishatsu to Y-shatsu (and you can have a Y-shirt in any color, the “white” is no longer a meaningful descriptor). A-Pei and I decided that G胖 are the jeans we buy when we need to go up a size!

Photos: Bionic cat (no, just me being a bad photographer), kumquats and…grapefruits? pomelos? in various stages of ripening, canal trees, and seasonal reds.



Be safe and well.
luthien: (Xmas: Yuletide)
luthien ([personal profile] luthien) wrote in [community profile] yuletide2025-12-31 12:19 pm
Entry tags:

Yuletide Recs

Recs for my two gifts for Bookish (TV) and Murderbot (TV), plus recs for Dungeon Crawler Carl – Matt Dinniman, Soulmate Goose of Enforcement, Galaxy Quest, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams, Hornblower (TV), Knives Out (Movies), Princess Bride, Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch, Slow Horses (TV) at my journal.
muccamukk: Elyanna singing, surrounded by emanata and hearts. (Music: Elyanna Hearts)
Muccamukk ([personal profile] muccamukk) wrote2025-12-30 04:45 pm
Entry tags:

Music Tuesday


Fully sat for this album. I'm really loving her last three singles.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
kaberett ([personal profile] kaberett) wrote2025-12-30 11:59 pm

some things make a post

  1. The paragraph from one of the pain books about Soup continues excellent for dramatic readings. I appear to have not quoted it here? I shall have to remedy that in the morning.
  2. My Shit Beard Hairs (I think I'm up to... 10ish of them, fairly reliably?) are increasingly white, which makes them increasingly hard to remove in targeted fashion (which I care about solely because the sensory experience of Isolated Hairs is Bad, Actually). I am amused by all of this.
  3. I am nearly up to halfway through December in my DW catch-up. Will I manage to be actually up to date by the end of the calendar year? PROBABLY NOT, because I am about to hit Year In Review season, when for some reason you all get very talkative!
  4. Absolutely have not set up my notebook for next year yet, and indeed am several days behind on physio log (augh). Executive Function Is Hard, Actually. This is the other factor that is likely to derail getting caught up on DW tomorrow...
  5. Successfully offloaded some leftovers at a Boardgames And (Fake) Leftovers gathering (with air purifier, and carrageenan nose spray). Tragically, left behind the tea strainer that we'd been using to fix the problem of Cork In The Port...
juushika: Drawing of a sleeping orange cat (I should have been born a cat)
juushika ([personal profile] juushika) wrote2025-12-30 03:50 pm

Book Reviews: The Scorpion Rules and The Swan Riders (Prisoners of Peace series) by Erin Bow

Title: The Scorpion Rules (Prisoners of Peace book 1)
Author: Erin Bow
Narrator: Madeleine Maby
Published: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2015
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 390
Total Page Count: 555,850
Text Number: 2085
Read Because: [personal profile] ambyr's post, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The children of peace are hostages of the world nations, held by the governing AI, doomed to die if their home nation goes to war. Our protagonist is prepared to face that death with dignity—until the newest hostage, from a rival nation, bucks all convention. I don't get on with YA as a rule, and so avoid it; I don't want to spend this review bitching about a genre that's just not for me, but when a book so perfectly executes what I wish the genre would do, my success with it speaks equally to text and its relationship with genre conventions.

The tropes are still here: snarky antagonist, love triangle, dystopia. But it's quality writing, and those tropes are balanced in, grounded by, a thoughtful consideration of worldbuilding and an unrelenting commitment to character and psychology. The scale is horrifying, the specificities localized and intimate; the romance(s) both indicative of and wholly overshadowed by the world; the depiction of torture, trauma, and PTSD thoughtful and realized with a fantastic use of repetition. This remains as iddy as the genre can & should be, but frankly it's better quality than most of the genre is, and so takes a great premise and actually does something with it.


Title: The Swan Riders (Prisoners of Peace book 2)
Author: Erin Bow
Narrator: Madeleine Maby
Published: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2016
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 380
Total Page Count: 556,230
Text Number: 2086
Read Because: [personal profile] ambyr's post, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Despite that this is a different book than the first—changed setting, much-changed protagonist—my reactions are quite similar, finding and appreciating the same strengths. High-concept, speculative premise, and in the background-moving-foreground is an inconceivable scale; and, in the foreground, a focus on intimate social bonds, symbolic of and felt in the larger cultural context, grounded in a minute, exhausting focus on physical and mental trauma. It's iddy, with hurt/comfort vibes, but consistently well-written. I read these on audio, and look forward to revisiting them in print for a more considered experience. What a pleasant surprise it was to give this series a try.
pauraque: butterfly trailing a rainbow through the sky from the Reading Rainbow TV show opening (butterfly in the sky)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-12-30 05:23 pm

2025 book roundup

In 2025 I posted reviews of 47 books, of which 7 were re-reads, 5 were revisions of old reviews, and 35 were books I read for the first time this year.

and here they are )

This brought me up to 11 novels and two short story collections in my chronological Le Guin project. Have I made much of a dent? Well, her website says she produced "23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation" so I have certainly taken a big bite out of the novels even though I'm only up to 1976. I don't think I realized how novel-heavy her early career was. I am not planning to read all the poetry (I'll probably do some) and the only translation I'll be looking at is her Tao Te Ching. And yet, even when I sketch out a planned posting schedule that assumes I'll be grouping some of the picture books together, it still comes out as three more years and I don't know how that's possible. Stay tuned to find out if she really wrote as many things as I think she did, or if I just can't read a calendar.

At the end of last year my TBR list had 180 books on it, and my goal was for that number to go down. Which it did. By three. It's not that I wasn't reading things from the list, it's that I kept adding more. I decided to do a big cull, mostly of books that had been on there for way too long and I couldn't honestly say I was interested anymore. Now it's down to 140.

Of the books I read for the first time this year, my favorites include: The Backyard Bird Chronicles, The Spear Cuts Through Water, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Only Good Indians, and Convenience Store Woman.
sholio: glittery Christmas ornaments (Christmas ornament 2)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2025-12-30 02:14 pm

Fandom year in review

I used to do these more regularly, back in the LJ and early DW days when a lot of people used to do end-of-year lists of their fic in case you'd missed anything, before so much of it was consolidated on AO3. I never really was that organized about it, but over time my (slightly chaotic) end-of-year fandom posts were taken over by my origfic roundup posts, and I stopped doing them entirely. But as this is my 20th (or so) year in LJ/DW fandom, perhaps this is a good time to start doing them again, especially since this was a very exciting and interesting year for me! (I also did a year-end roundup meme over on Tumblr, which is where some of this was originally consolidated.)

I'm still in Biggles, but I also got into three, count 'em, 3 new fandoms, although none of them were entirely new to me:

  • MASH: rewatch of a show I watched a lot as a kid, but hadn't actually seen again as an adult (except a scattered episode here and there). I didn't expect it to grab me fannishly, but that's what I get for guessing. I've drifted out again now, I think, but it was a good time and a really delightful nostalgia rush.

  • Babylon 5: watched about two and a half seasons back in the 90s, always meant to go back and finish it before I got completely spoiled, fell as hard as I always suspected I would.

  • Murderbot: read the first book years ago, didn't really vibe with it, turned out to love the show.

I posted 215,777 words of fic on AO3 according to their stats. (My personal accounting is 296,200, which includes all the promptfic and unfinished fics.) This is way up from the last couple of years, and I'm also starting to write longer fic again - everything I posted in 2023-24 was under 10K.

I started making vids again, and posted 3 (2 MASH as treats for last year's Festivids, 1 for Murderbot).

In general, I started being able to "do" visual media again last winter. I hadn't really been watching anything for the past couple of years, or watching vids, or really doing much of anything in a visual medium. Last winter I bought a tablet (Black Friday sale) that I planned to use for media watching, and it did in fact work out very well for that! I wanted it at least partly as a distraction from IRL, which has really been A Lot - not even speaking about world events, but just me personally. My stepdad died in January, and I've spent this past year traveling back and forth between my mom's place and here, helping her adjust. And then I got back into actual travel this fall, with a trip to England and then most recently Hawaii for the holidays. So it's been nice to have visual media as a kind of touchstone to anchor me by. I also read a lot.

I'm coming off a bad couple of years, in fandom and overall - I burned out, I lost some friends, I was kind of hard to deal with in general, I think. But this year has felt much better to me. I've been having an amazing time with my new shiny things, I'm creatively active and excited about writing in a way that I haven't really felt in years, and I really like a lot of what I wrote this year. There have still been ups and downs even with that, of course - I have *got* to get back in the habit of editing more before I post things, I know I'll be happier with it. But all in all, I like where things are for me now.

I honestly kind of hope I don't get into anything new in 2026, at least not right away, because I'm really happy with my current fandoms and I have lots more to "say" about them in fic, I feel!
juushika: Photo of a cat in motion, blurred in such a way that it looks like a monster (Cryptid cat)
juushika ([personal profile] juushika) wrote2025-12-30 02:55 pm

Book Review: The Complete Web of Horror edited by Dana Marie Andra

Title: The Complete Web of Horror
Editor: Dana Marie Andra
Published: 2024
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 555,460
Text Number: 2084
Read Because: seduced by the new books section, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: Web of Horror was a short-running horror fiction comic anthology, published in 1969-70, collected here in its entirety, including prospective issues that went unpublished when it folded.

"Strangers!" by Syd Shores (volume three, page thirty) is about a twink and a bear struggling to survive after crashlanding on a desert island. The twink is useless, and growing weaker every day, but the bear looks after him, feeding him wild game. Because! the bear is a vampire! and preserving the twink as a food source, feeding on him each night! After the twink finally fights back, rescue comes—but it's too late, the twink has become a bear/vampire, himself! (You can find this here on Archive.org.)

I highlight this story because it's delightful; the subtext really is that close to the text, the art reflects the innuendo, and it's well-paced and -plotted. But it's telling that I'd rather talk about one piece than the mammoth collection. The other standout is "Eye of Newt, Toe of Frog" by Frank Brunner (art) and Gerald Conway (story), unpublished in the original run, here in Volume 4, about a rebellious wife reverse psychology'd into dark magic invocations. And that's it. Plenty of the pieces are fine, most are tolerable, but this is more interesting as an artifact of its time than in the individual stories; a forerunner in horror comics, it has all the prejudices expected from the time period and speculative plots that are more spectacle than psychological, a Twilight Zone-y "wouldn't it be fucked if...?". I'm grateful for archival efforts like this one, but would only recommend this to ultra fans; I appreciate genre history but not Western comics, and I think you need to be big into both to get much from this.
juushika: watercolor of a paraselene (cold)
juushika ([personal profile] juushika) wrote2025-12-30 02:25 pm

Book Review: The Heart of the Antarctic by Earnest Shackleton

Title: The Heart of the Antarctic: Being the Story of the British Antarctic Expedition 1907-9
Author: Earnest Shackleton
Published: 1909
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 1310 (670+640)
Total Page Count: 555,165
Text Number: 2082-3
Read Because: cold boys, haters edition; where to find, for nerds )
Review:
The Nimrod expedition was the first Shackleton led, 1907-9, placing it directly between Scott's Discovery (on which Shackleton was a member) and infamous Terra Nova, and later overshadowed by Shackleton's also-infamous Endurance. Hate to say it, because I'm certain I'd find Shackleton, the man, super obnoxious, but he knows what the people want. This is some of the best curated, most satisfying expedition writing I've read, intentionally accessible to the layreader, incredibly corporeal and crunchy in detail, right down to descriptions of sleeping arrangements and food poisoning, to photos of people in their bunks or in drag, while still willing to skim elements that might be repetitive recounted in full. Kudos, I think, to his editor, as Shackleton's letters imply much of that curation and directness comes from an outside influence; and it's utterly absent in Dr. David's extensive sections, which make for a slow end to what's already a mammoth text. The various appendixes are skippable, although whenever these guys write about penguins it's always a delight. I read this immediately after Riffenburgh's Shackleton's Forgotten Expedition and appreciate the larger context, specifically re: social frictions that Shackleton understandably elides despite their significant impact on the expedition.

This expedition exists in intimate conversation with Scott's, and the tension between them is both petty and amiable. But what fascinates me is that Shackleton, too, almost died in his effort at the Pole; in fact, almost anyone who did significant man-hauling in Antarctica almost died, cutting corners and overextending themselves in this supremely inhospitable climate. The more I read, the more the death of Scott et al. feels not like bad luck but simply an inevitability: some sledging party was bound to freeze out there, and it was nearly this one.