No one ever said it was gonna be easy...
Mar. 12th, 2015 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
graculusWell, that's probably a slightly over-dramatic title but it's the one I have, so let's stick with that!
Still really enjoying my job, even when my lessons don't turn out quite as good as I hope they will - usually because I didn't figure out what I wanted to achieve, so I'm still very much learning on the hoof. My poor students are my guinea pigs, getting the first run of everything and seeing what works and what doesn't. It's very inconsiderate of folks out there that there isn't a resource I can just pick up and use for everything I want to teach. The internet is great for a lot of things, there are loads of resources, but sometimes I've still ended up writing my own because what's out there doesn't do quite what I want it to do. Or it's very centred on a particular culture and that just won't work for the bigger mix of nationalities and ages that make up my students.
I've had a really aggravating conversation with the college that offers the teaching qualification I want to do. I'm currently teaching 3 evenings a week and that course is one evening a week, so I need to confirm which evening so I can adjust the course I'm teaching to fit around it. Except that the other college haven't decided which night it's going to be and won't decide until some time in May. And it could be one of my currently committed evenings or it could be another one. Grrrr.
Anyway, let's change the subject and I'll tell you about the last 5 books I've read:
I just finished Kaleidoscope, which is a collection of diverse YA science fiction and fantasy short stories, edited by Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein. Published by an Australian press, I picked it up at WorldCon and have finally got around to reading it. There are some excellent stories in there but also a couple of real clunkers (imo) - the highlights for me were stories by Karen Healey and Amal El-Mohtar. I think the latter story has been nominated for a Nebula iirc and it's really good.
Before that I read Radiance by Grace Draven, which is an interesting take on arranged marriages, this time between representatives of two cultures who find each other physically quite off-putting and also live at opposite times of the day. One of them literally can't cope with direct sunlight so the human woman marrying into their world has to start sleeping during the day and living her life at night. It's pretty well done, with characters who are 3-dimensional, and I'll probably read the next one in the series.
Then there was A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan - this is the first in a series (when is that never not the case?) set in a time much like Victorian England. Except that dragons are real and our protagonist is fascinated with them, but being a woman is not really allowed to be a scientist and certainly not to get obsessed with anything! Again, it's well-written and I'll probably be picking up the later ones in the series.
I've also read God's War by Kameron Hurley, again kindly provided by my local library system. This is the first of a series featuring this particular protagonist and I can see why it was so lauded when it first came out. If you like the whole grimdark thing, then this is basically female-led grimdark, with bad things happening to people on a regular basis. For me I think it just edged over the line to be a little too dark and I found the (female) protagonist less interesting than the other (male) main character. It felt like the author had tried so hard to stop her lead being stereotypical that she became a caricature, while this male character had so much more going on in his head. Really haven't decided if I'll read anything more from this author.
And then we have The Humans by Matt Haig. I really liked this book and I admit my prejudices about the fact it was picked up by Richard and Judy (for our non-UK folks, this is equivalent of having your book picked up for discussion by Oprah). Our 'hero' is an alien who has taken over the body of a Cambridge mathematician who may or may not have cracked the Reimann hypothesis, which is going to make humanity a risk to these aliens in the future. He's sent to kill off anyone who the mathematician might have told about this and destroy the evidence, but ends up getting entangled in family drama and more, learning what it is to be human. A really interesting read, enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.
This writer has also just written a book I want to pick up at some point, though it's non-fiction, called Reasons to Stay Alive which is the result of his own experience with depression and anxiety.
I'm currently reading Blood and Mistletoe by Ronald Hutton - which is a history of the Druids in the UK, though he starts with a whole chapter about how we don't really know anything that we can prove. So it's more about what people think about the Druids and how that changes over time to the present day. I'm also reading The Machine God by MeiLin Miranda, which is one of a bunch of steampunk novels set in a shared universe, this one with a black protagonist in a very white University town.
Still really enjoying my job, even when my lessons don't turn out quite as good as I hope they will - usually because I didn't figure out what I wanted to achieve, so I'm still very much learning on the hoof. My poor students are my guinea pigs, getting the first run of everything and seeing what works and what doesn't. It's very inconsiderate of folks out there that there isn't a resource I can just pick up and use for everything I want to teach. The internet is great for a lot of things, there are loads of resources, but sometimes I've still ended up writing my own because what's out there doesn't do quite what I want it to do. Or it's very centred on a particular culture and that just won't work for the bigger mix of nationalities and ages that make up my students.
I've had a really aggravating conversation with the college that offers the teaching qualification I want to do. I'm currently teaching 3 evenings a week and that course is one evening a week, so I need to confirm which evening so I can adjust the course I'm teaching to fit around it. Except that the other college haven't decided which night it's going to be and won't decide until some time in May. And it could be one of my currently committed evenings or it could be another one. Grrrr.
Anyway, let's change the subject and I'll tell you about the last 5 books I've read:
I just finished Kaleidoscope, which is a collection of diverse YA science fiction and fantasy short stories, edited by Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein. Published by an Australian press, I picked it up at WorldCon and have finally got around to reading it. There are some excellent stories in there but also a couple of real clunkers (imo) - the highlights for me were stories by Karen Healey and Amal El-Mohtar. I think the latter story has been nominated for a Nebula iirc and it's really good.
Before that I read Radiance by Grace Draven, which is an interesting take on arranged marriages, this time between representatives of two cultures who find each other physically quite off-putting and also live at opposite times of the day. One of them literally can't cope with direct sunlight so the human woman marrying into their world has to start sleeping during the day and living her life at night. It's pretty well done, with characters who are 3-dimensional, and I'll probably read the next one in the series.
Then there was A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan - this is the first in a series (when is that never not the case?) set in a time much like Victorian England. Except that dragons are real and our protagonist is fascinated with them, but being a woman is not really allowed to be a scientist and certainly not to get obsessed with anything! Again, it's well-written and I'll probably be picking up the later ones in the series.
I've also read God's War by Kameron Hurley, again kindly provided by my local library system. This is the first of a series featuring this particular protagonist and I can see why it was so lauded when it first came out. If you like the whole grimdark thing, then this is basically female-led grimdark, with bad things happening to people on a regular basis. For me I think it just edged over the line to be a little too dark and I found the (female) protagonist less interesting than the other (male) main character. It felt like the author had tried so hard to stop her lead being stereotypical that she became a caricature, while this male character had so much more going on in his head. Really haven't decided if I'll read anything more from this author.
And then we have The Humans by Matt Haig. I really liked this book and I admit my prejudices about the fact it was picked up by Richard and Judy (for our non-UK folks, this is equivalent of having your book picked up for discussion by Oprah). Our 'hero' is an alien who has taken over the body of a Cambridge mathematician who may or may not have cracked the Reimann hypothesis, which is going to make humanity a risk to these aliens in the future. He's sent to kill off anyone who the mathematician might have told about this and destroy the evidence, but ends up getting entangled in family drama and more, learning what it is to be human. A really interesting read, enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.
This writer has also just written a book I want to pick up at some point, though it's non-fiction, called Reasons to Stay Alive which is the result of his own experience with depression and anxiety.
I'm currently reading Blood and Mistletoe by Ronald Hutton - which is a history of the Druids in the UK, though he starts with a whole chapter about how we don't really know anything that we can prove. So it's more about what people think about the Druids and how that changes over time to the present day. I'm also reading The Machine God by MeiLin Miranda, which is one of a bunch of steampunk novels set in a shared universe, this one with a black protagonist in a very white University town.
