november 2024
some big news: i bought a house! it’s 104 years old and needs a fair amount of work. if you notice the number of books i’ve managed to read in a month falling sharply, that’s why! i am likely staring at the ceiling instead, visions of repaired foundations dancing in my head.
read: The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel (2022). i came across a used copy of this in my local bookshop and snatched it up on vibes alone (this is why having a local shop you can trust is so wonderful—i’d never even heard of this book and it’s so very up my alley). set post-world war II on an isolated scottish island, the wild hunt follows leigh, an islander who returns for her father’s funeral only to find the island, which was already a strange, sometimes brutal place, even stranger and more brutal. this is a kind of fantasy that i quite enjoy—the kind that shades rather than remakes the world. the book is set in and is about the month of october—a very autumnal read. there’s a romance too, if you enjoy that sort of thing (i do).
game: Alan Wake II: the Lake House (2024). this is the final expansion for alan wake ii, and it’s SCARY. i had a good time but at what cost (my sleep schedule). it follows the federal bureau of control officer who shows up near the end of the game, kiran estevez, and as such feels much more like a follow up to control (2019) than alan wake. which i’m pretty sure is deliberate.
encounters: birds of prey. a fun side effect of taking up bird watching is that now i notice birds more even when i’m not looking for them. recently i saw a red-shouldered hawk on the ground from my car and pulled over immediately. it had just caught a squirrel. not long after that, i was walking my dog and heard a cooper’s hawk. it was sitting on a low branch in a nearby tree. two very fun encounters!
game: Dragon Age: the Veilguard (2024). this is the big one. i liked it! i’m already on my second play-through of it and i had a good time on the first one. if you’re a fan of role-playing games in general or dragon age games specifically and you want to play this game, i think you should! (just maybe don’t go in expecting to see a lot of familiar dragon age lore.) that said, veilguard has a lot of flaws, some relating to the fact that it’s the fourth game in a long-running series, and some which i think are a pretty damning reflection of worrying trends in genre fiction on the whole. i wrote about it here (mild spoilers).
dog & cat:
