stress and comfort food^Wreading

I've been spending a lot of time at the farm latetly to ground and recharge. So much that I had planned to not go out there today. But after the past few hours, which have been one stressful thing after another as I try to get ready to upload the last debian-installer build for the release, I am ready for some unstressful time offline again, for the third time this week.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite times of year, with it getting chilly enough at night to appreciate some blankets, and contrastingly warm enough in the days to enjoy that. Not much of a fall harvest this year, since I didn't plant a garden, and Anna's was an early summer garden, but we still have some delicious squashes and sweet potatos.

After a long dry spell this summer when I didn't read many books at all, and was leaning toward nonfiction in what little I did read, I've gotten back into regular reading over the past month. Before my trip to Germany, I was enjoying some very hard SF, with an emphasis on ultra-strange worlds. So I had fun with Stephen Baxter's Raft, set in a universe with different gravity, and with Christopher Priest's The Inverted World, set on a fractal (except for the annoying conclusion). I also read the latest Ringworld book, Ringworld's Children, which was forgettable, and returned again to my old favorite, the flawed and generally overlooked The Integral Trees. Why didn't they use kites in that book? I also read a number of other hard SF books outside this theme, particularly others by Stephen Baxter.

Now I seem to have switched gears with the onset of colder weather, and am for some reason enjoying rather fluffy fantasy. A newish Pratchett book was quite enjoyable; he's really rebounded in his latest novels. I even read and enjoyed a Lackey book somehow. And I'm very happy to have discovered the novels and short fiction of Nina K Hoffman. Airborn was a particularly fun, marginally "young adult" romp.