📚 Books 2024, 3: The House at the End of the Sea by Victoria M. Adams

First, a disclaimer: the author of this book was on the same Creative Writing MA as me, and I read a prerelease PDF that she sent me.

That said, it’s a really good young-adult fantasy story set in the real world, present day.

Or I think ‘middle grade’ is the sort of level it’s marketed towards. The main character, Saffi, is about 12. Her younger brother is maybe eight or ten. Their mum has died tragically young and their dad takes them from London to live with their grandparents in a B&B by the sea in Yorkshire.

The titular house has been in the family for generations, and it has A History. The kids hate it at first, but Saffi tries to adjust and to keep her brother’s spirits up. She is helped by a slightly mysterious local boy they meet.

And then a group of guests arrive at the B&B. In the middle of the night. Without coming through the door.

Things get stranger after that. Will Saffi and Milo save the family’s legacy, themselves, and their new friend’s home, from the plans of these powerful figures out of myth and fairytale? Only by reading will you find out.

It’s great. Get it for your kids.

Well this is an exciting turnup: remember early in the pandemic, when there was an article in The New Yorker New York magazine about the inability to get a particular pasta shape? The pasta shape was equally mysterious over here. I wrote about it: Bucatini.

Well, at last, here it is.

A packet of pasta, with Spaghetti in large type, and under it in smaller type, bucatini.

Great, we’ve been paying billions for a nuclear ‘deterrent’ that nobody wants and that doesn’t even work.

🔗 Introducing Pkl, a programming language for configuration :: Pkl Docs

… delighted to announce the open source first release of Pkl (pronounced Pickle), a programming language for producing configuration.

If Apple needed a general-purpose language for configuration, why did they invent their own, rather than using Terraform, say?

But then, this Pkl (‘Pickle’) seems a lot more expressive than Terraform, and a lot more down-to-Earth and less cloudy.

Could be interesting. (H/T @danielpunkass.)

More evidence of comically early spring: daffodils dancing in the sun.

A group of daffodils growing in a flowerbed in late-winter sun, with a patio behind.

Pending the deal’s publication on Wednesday, it appears that Sunak has offered to keep Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) aligned with European standards if the DUP returned to Stormont.

Best news since Brexit, if true.

It’s still January. It’s the northern hemisphere. So why is this rose flowering? I’ll be wanting to prune it in about a month.

‘Oh rose thou art sick’… But the climate, not the rose.

Currently reading: Monument Maker by David Keenan 📚

I’ve read a few of his before, and they’re all strange. This one may be the strangest yet, but I’m only about 40 pages into a huge book.

I didn’t have China Miéville co-writing a novel with Keanu Reeves on my 2024 bingo card, but here we are.

Currently reading: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka 📚

My current book-club book. Shouldn’t be any trouble to finish it by the 18th.

This year I’m going to do my book posts Micro.blog-style, using its Bookshelves feature. We’ll see how they go.