Second Quarter Roundup

To mangle the old joke, “Blogging will continue until morale improves.”

This quarter saw more of the same, though it’s not clear that anyone is actually looking at my deathless prose.

Topics included the usual:  dinosaurs!  Robots!  Cryptocurrency!  Anthropocene.  The Future of Work. Solar Energy.

And book reviews.

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Band Names

Our regular Dave Barry Tribute Band Names, mostly ripped directly from scientific articles. For this quarter:

Hyperthermal Excursion
Impact Structure
Another #MuskTweet
Legally Tender
Tenderly Legal
Tyrannosaur’s Tail
Cactus Trafficking  (from a NYT headline)
Sauropod gastroliths

And, and actual suggestion in a scientific article:  Azimuthal Twist, from a post in April:

“The measurements of the spiral patterns indicates an “azimuthal twist”, which project leader Doeleman says would be “fine name for a cocktail.”.  Or, I would say, a band (or a retro dance craze).”

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Books Reviewed

Fiction

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians by H. G. Parry
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H. G. Parry
Joan Orpí by Max Beson
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton
The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
The Vampire Genevieve by Kim Newman
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
The Magician King  by Lev Grossman
The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman
What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
The Committed by Viet Than Nguyen
Transient Desires by Donna Leon

Non Fiction

What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
In Search of a Kingdom by Laurence Bergreen
America and Iran by John Ghazvinanian
The Hardest Place by Wesley Morgan

Book Review: “What Abigail Did That Summer” by Ben Aaronovitch

What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

Well, I, for one, have been waiting eagerly to find out just what young Abigail was up to while Peter Grant was Unicorning out in Ruralshire (Foxglove Summer (2014))!

And we are not disappointed.

As we know, Abigail is a precocious young investigator who has been taken under the wing of the Folly.  When she passes the GCSE Latin—and we know she will crush it—Peter has promised she can start to learn magic.

In the mean time, she is the premier, and probably only, fox whisperer in London or the whole world for all we know.  Not that we really know what these talking foxes are, or where they came from.

What Abigail was up to that summer was a nasty case of disappearing kids.  Some kind of magic pied piper is calling in local kids.  At first, they return after a day or two, though they have no memory of where they were or what happened.

Abigail and her posse of foxes need to figure out what is going on and stop it.

She should tell Nightingale, of course.  But he would stop her from this dangerous mission, and Abigail didn’t get where she is by letting the olds interfere with her investigations.

And she does have resources.  Clever foxes.  Help (?) from the River Fleet.  Young Simon, and even Simon’s scary mother. 

But things get really, really dangerous, really, really fast.

If she survives, Peter will not be best pleased with her for rushing in.  Best make sure he never finds out.

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1. Ben Aaronovitch, What Abigail Did That Summer, Boston, Subterranean Press, 2021.