I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Just finished watching Julie and the Phantoms on Netflix, a show that has no business being as good as it ended up being. Julie is a teen who lost her mom, and also lost the ability to play the music that she used to make with her mom. When she accidentally brings three ghosts—three members of a boy band that was on the verge of breaking out when they died—back, they discover that they can be heard when they’re making music. The actors commit to roles that require extreme suspension of disbelief, and they’re very wholesome and charming. The songs are generic but the lead is a great singer, and I ended up sobbing twice in later episodes because it skillfully played on my heartstrings. Obviously, premised on death of a parent, death of a teenaged child. Mild romance, no sex.

Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves: ( war and intrigue )
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Guns of the Dawn: ( monstrous regiment? )
Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Tiger and the Wolf: ( shapeshifters without fandom tropes )
Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys: ( YA fantasy )
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi: ( drowned world )
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future: ( ecohopepunk? )
Everina Maxwell, Winter’s Orbit: ( romantic SF )
Seanan McGuire, Across the Green Grass Fields:( unicorns )

Mishell Baker, Impostor Syndrome: ( is she going to run out of diagnoses? )
Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male: ( fascinating debut )

Compostela: Tesseracts Twenty, ed. Spider Robinson & James Alan Gardner: ( Canadian sf/spec fic/poetry )
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2140: ( future imperfect )
Tracy Townsend, The Nine: ( Epic fantasy, nice debut )

Thanks to josephina_x  for the gingerbread man!

Finally recovering a bunch of my music from a lost computer, and I realize that I really want a Dean Winchester vid to “Going Through the Motions” from the Buffy musical. It wouldn’t work except in my head, but the heart wants what it wants.

How to suppress women’s remix, round zillion, from Ars Technica.

( dystopian YA, quasi-utopian solar system colonization, disappearing woman )

Non-sequels this time; sequels to come: ( Jones, Sterling, Kaye, Robinson, Banks, MacLeod, Guilfoile )

Sigh. I have a really, really good reason that I probably won't get to see Serenity in theaters in September, and the DC advance showing on May 26 is already sold out. Damn you, fellow obsessed fans! (If anyone knows where I might snag a ticket, let me know -- I'm willing to travel pretty much anywhere within a 5-hour radius of DC.)

Talking to harriet_spy made me realize I haven't actually said here that my visit in DC has turned into a non-visiting, tenure-track job, which is great. I miss NY for the friends (and the chocolates), but it turns out I go back on a regular basis and get to see the fabulous folks pretty often. Also, Mariebelle sells via the Internet, so the chocolate part is under control. A guy is coming to put built-in bookshelves in the Riv-cave tomorrow, so I guess we're here to stay.

( Fiction: Rusch, Hamilton, Robinson, Baker, Butler, Mosley, Ruff, Crusie )

O my Honda Civic Hybrid -- I love you because when I took misterrivkat to the airport for his trip to Iceland, we left DC at 4:15 and I spent until around 6:30 navigating the usual, moderately awful DC-area rush hour in DC, Maryland, DC again and then Virginia.

And I got over 45 miles per gallon.

Admittedly, this is a notable result, and I probably won't get that for the whole tank. But it still makes me unreasonably happy.

( Book reviews: Coben, Rusch, Robinson, Kellerman, Briggs, Stross, MacLeod, Butler )