mafief

7 books read this month, so 38 for the year and I'm on target!

A Frightfully Fatal Affair by Hannah Hendy
I normally listen to these on audiobook, but for a change I borrowed it from the library. The next in the Dinner Lady Detectives series. Entertaining, slightly implausible, but the two dinner ladies are appealing characters, so I enjoyed reading it.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
A look at how Mr Rochester might have found his 'mad' wife in Jane Eyre. Worth reading, but I didn't feel for Antoinette (Bertha) as I had expected to.

The Dead Witness edited by Michael Sims
A collection of short detection stories for the nineteenth century. Very few of the stories appealed, and I was left grateful for Sherlock Holmes!

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
The next Murderbot story, which was fun and continued to prove that Murderbot was far better equipped to deal with most things than anyone else.

The Rose Apple Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu
The next in the Su Lin series (which was the Crown Colony series, although the name is no longer accurate), this one is set not in Singapore but in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia. As always, it's an interesting look at the region in 1947 and I enjoyed the mystery. I had guessed part of it, but I imagine the reader was supposed to have their suspicions.

Cyanide in the Sun edited by Martin Edwards
Another of the British Library Crime Classics short story collections. Not as good as previous books, it may be that the pool of such stories is being drained.

CWA Anthology of Short Stories: Mystery Tour edited by Martin Edwards
Another short story collection, but this time modern short stories. I enjoyed the majority - in any collection there are going to be some which I don't like, for various reasons, but it was a good batch.

Also, I had a go at the Goodreads Seasonal Challenge for May and June and achieved 5 of the 7 categories:

And here is my book bingo card - I may even finish it next month!

smallhobbit

Word count for the month 11,500, bringing my total for the half year to just over 62K, so marginally ahead of my goal so far - always good to have a few words in hand!

I've written two squares for

whatif_au Bingo: for Air Travel You Don't Have To Be Nuts to Work Here which is Hamlet/The Hobbit and a follow up to the last time I wrote for the air travel theme, Thank You for Flying Elsinore Airways and the second for the High/Low fantasy square, which is written but needs another readthrough before posting.

The major word production went for my

caseficexchange story, which won't be revealed until next month.

My other major achievement this month was to complete my 11 year streak for

fan_flashworks with Support Your Local Baby Bank , a Spooks (MI5) ficlet.

FanFlashworks badge: The Outstanding.

sanguinity

Pursuant to yesterday's (locked) post where I discussed federal public health funding:

'Where's our money?' CDC grant funding is moving so slowly layoffs are happening (NPR)

God, that's eerie, to see NPR saying the same thing I was saying.

The grants mentioned in the article are all national in scope, btw: it's everybody who's not getting these grants, not just Texas or North Carolina. These grants aren't flashy or sexy, but they absolutely save lives.