It is entirely possible that I’ll finish another book tomorrow (I’m reading an interesting alt-history novel that’s told via letters, and depicts the failure of the Nazi regime in 1936), buuuut I wouldn’t bet on it given that I have class tomorrow and right now I’m mostly reading papers on library website UX design for an upcoming paper. Anyway, this was a fun month, though again dominated by fiction. Out of curiosity, I checked “Books — The Spreadsheet” on my onedrive, and fiction has completely turned the tables on nonfiction, flipping the usual 60/40 radio in its own favor. Honestly, I think summer (with no grad school) was nonfiction’s best hope at a comeback, but we shall see. I’ll remember September chiefly for my Pensacola trip, although today’s worship service saw me as the only choir member present, meaning that instead of doing one solo of “Dona Nobis Pacem“, I was a one-man choir for over an hour. Oof. Not in 13 years of attendance have I been the only person in the choir!

Favorite Quote/Highlight:

“You mean you ain’t going to drink no more?”
“I mean I’m taking it one day at a time.”
“But if you don’t drink no more, then how come you got beer in your refrigerator?” “Hard to say goodbye.”
“And you got a lot of whiskey under your kitchen sink too.”
“What are you, the Southern Baptist Convention?” (Kinfolk, Sean Dietrich)

Science Survey
DNA is Not Destiny: The Remarkable, Completely Misunderstood Relationship between You and Your Genes, Steven J Heine (Biology)

The Unreviewed:
The Practice of the Precense of God, Brother Lawrence. Just finished this Friday. May wait for a review as a friend of mine and I are re-reading it together.
Hitler’s Heralds: review to be posted in German interwar series.

SF Sweep
The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal
The Disposessed, Ursula le Guin
Flash Back, John Turiano
The Last App, Tom Alan

After learning of other bloggers doing a big SF push in November, I decided to ease up on my own and got distracted by zombies on the Titanic instead.

SF Book Bingo:
The Dispossessed (Buddy Read)
Flash Back, John Turiano. (Strange New Worlds: a book with less than a thousand ratings/reviews)

…the Publisher file I use to keep up with this is at work, so I’ll update this in….a few hours.

New Acquisitions:
The Confessions, St. Augustine. Translated Anthony Esolen. Will replace one instance of Plutarch on my Classics Club list.
Also, an Amy Winehouse magazine, but I don’t think that counts.

Coming up in October…
I usually do a nod to German history in early October, but this month I’m going to do a series — following German interwar history from the abortive revolution of 1919, to the creation of Weimar and all that followed, culminating in the rise of the Nazis. Expect one book on the socialist uprising of 1919, one book on the Freikorps, something on Weimar, and then something on the Nazi takeover. I found a book on Bismarck in a little free library recently, so I may throw that in just for fun. Ordinarily, this series would run in the first week of October (tied to October 3rd being the Tag der Deutschen Einheit, in which the GDR and DDR did the whole ‘reunited and it feels so gute‘ thing), but school work is competing for brainspace ATM.

Random funny!