Following on from last year's round-up of my reading, here's a look at the fiction I enjoyed in 2021. I managed to read 42 books in 2021, up from 31 last year. That's partly to do with buying an ereader: 33/36% of my reading (by pages/by books) was ebooks. I think this demonstrates that ebooks have mostly complemented paper books for me, rather than replacing them. My book of the year (although it was published in 2019) was This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: A short epistolary love story between warring time travellers and quite unlike anything else I've read for a long time. Other notables were The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel and Robot by Adam Wi niewski-Snerg. The biggest disappointment for me was The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), which I haven't even finished. I love KSRs writing: I've written about him many times on this blog, at least in 2002, 2006 and 2009, I think I've read every other novel he's published and most of his short stories. But this one was too much of something for me. He's described this novel a the end-point of a particular journey and approach to writing he's taken, which I felt relieved to learn, assuming he writes any more novels (and I really hope that he does) they will likely be in a different "mode". My "new author discovery" for 2021 was Chris Beckett: I tore through Two Tribes and America City before promptly buying all his other work. He fits roughly into the same bracket as Adam Roberts and Christopher Priest, two of my other favourite authors. 5 of the books I read (12%) were from my "backlog" of already-purchased physical books. I'd like to try and reduce my Backlog further so I hope to push this figure up next year. I made a small effort to read more diverse authors this year. 24% of the books I read (by book count and page count) were by women. 15% by page count were (loosely) BAME (19% by book count). Again I'd like to increase these numbers modestly in 2022. Unlike 2020, I didn't complete any short story collections in 2021! This is partly because there was only one issue of Interzone published in all of 2021, a double-issue which I haven't yet finished. This is probably a sad date point in terms of Interzone's continued existence, but it's not dead yet.

The snow we got a couple of days ago hasn't abated here in Montreal. We had a cold snap right after the snowfall, so temperatures have been around -20C for the last couple of days. Last night Maj had her French classes at the Montreal YMCA, and Micaela had spent the day seeing art museums and visiting bookstores downtown. (She's a poetry nut -- loves finding books by Canadian poets, francophone and anglophone, that she can't get at home in Melbourne.) So Amita and I went to meet her about halfway from our local Metro station, at the Pizzad lic on Ave Mont Royal. I covered Amita in about 10 layers of clothing, then put her on her little purple sled and dragged her up towards Mont Royal. She kept wanting to get up and walk herself ("Up!" is her newest and most insistent word), but when she was standing she wouldn't walk at all. So it was a long time getting to the restaurant. When we got there, Micaela was leaning against the front door shivering. Apparently Pizzad lic is out of business (bummer!). A graver cause for concern, however, was Amita's face: the parts showing around her scarf were tomato red from the cold. Gah! We rushed her home (crying all the way), and when I got her undressed she had a red stripe across the middle of her face like the people in those frozen pizza ads. I bathed her cheeks in cold water, and then gave her a hot bath, and by the time she was out she was calm and regular-colored. We got pizza delivered at home, which she enjoyed a lot. No permanent damage, as far as I can tell, except to my self-confidence as a competent parent. When Maj got home later that night, she reminded me that for extremely cold weather you have to put Vaseline on babies' cheeks to protect their delicate skin from the cold. Amita and I went to Loblaw's this morning to do some grocery shopping (in the car), which was a much more reasonable experience. Tonight for dinner I made pat chinois, a plate with baked mashed potatoes and ground beef known to English-speakers as shepherd's pie. (I make it with mushrooms and veggie beef.) Here in Quebec it's called "Chinese casserole", for unknown reasons. The best guess is that French Canadian lumberjacks worked at sites in the USA where it was common to have Chinese immigrant cooks. Confronted with a potato dish they didn't recognize, they assumed it was a meal from the cooks' home country. I don't know if this origin is true or not, but it sure is a good story. Anyways, it's good stick-to-your-ribs food, which you need on a night like this. When it gets down to -28C (as it will tonight), you need a lot of carbs running your internal furnace for you. tags: montreal snow cold shepherds pie pat chinois quebec babies amitajune

Piknic lectronik The good snow we're having means that one of my favourite events of the year is going to be white and cold and fluffy and fun. For the last few years, Piknic lectronik, the group that produces weekend outdoor parties on le Ste H l ne on the site of Expo 67, has done a single, crazy outdoor party in the dead of winter. This year, the party, called "Igloofest", is happening in the Vieux Port on the Quai Jacques Cartier. It's going to be two nights, January 19-20 (that's 29-30 Niv se for you aficionados of the French Revolutionary Calendar), from 5 to 11PM. We're going out on Friday night -- our pals from Ninjatune are part of the party, and our friend DJ Ghost Beard is on that evening. It should be a great time; I'm really looking forward to dancing in the snow and having vin chaud afterwards. tags: montreal piknic lectronik party dancing ninjatune winter snow

BarCampMontreal II: Camp Harder Just got the news from my blogroll: Sylvain Carle notes that the second BarCampMontreal will take place April 28th. That's going to be close for us; we'll be at the Wikitravel Get-together in Puerto Rico up until the 22nd. And we plan to fly there from Miami. But, hey: stranger things have happened. Our BarCamp last year was an absolute blast (see my follow-up on Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV); lots of fun people doing interesting things in fun ways, and then talking about it. I'd really like to be there for this next one. tags: barcamp montreal barcampmontreal wikitravel puerto rico

Louisianne I'm happy to see that in an alternative history universe called Ill Bethisad, the French Revolutionary Calendar is used in the North American francophone nation of Louisianne. On the downside, my city of Ville-Marie is in the royalist enclave of New Francy, which uses the boring old calendar. Ill Bethisad is an impressive alternative-history project, and the wiki format seems to really be conducive to its further development. Great idea, and nice to see the ol' FRC included. tags: alternative history french revolutionary calendar ill bethisad north america

Baby Lessig Congrats to Lawrence Lessig and family on the birth of a new son. tags: baby lessig