Hugin & Munin Journal

I attended my first Worldcon, Interaction in Glasgow, in 2005. It was both interesting and enjoyable, although fairly expensive on a student budget. I had known about Worldcon for some time, but its return to Europe was what finally made attending seem feasible. I would dearly have liked to follow it with Nippon 2007 in Yokohama, combining two of my greatest interests: Japan and books. Instead, fourteen years passed before I returned to a Worldcon. I had my sights set on Loncon 3 in London in 2014, but it came too soon after the birth of my first son. The birth of my second son then ended any realistic hope of attending Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in 2017. Baby number three almost prevented Dublin 2019 as well. We had initially planned to make it a family holiday. In the end, my wife was halfway through the pregnancy and felt that Dublin would be too much on top of the other travel we had already arranged, so I went alone. Thursday Because of work and the available flights, I di...

I have always found it interesting to see what other people are reading and to hear their thoughts on books, especially when I have read the books myself—or when I am looking for recommendations. Not that I really need more books to read. The to-be-read pile is not exactly shrinking. I have a bad habit of reading several books at once, so this first current-reading post will be a mixture of early impressions and random musings about the books currently competing for my attention. Cover images: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski, published by Orbit, and Time and Time Again by Ben Elton, published by Black Swan. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. I started reading The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski after watching a couple of episodes of The Witcher on Netflix. The show did not immediately capture my interest. Part of the problem may simply have been misplaced expectations: I knew the series largely through the r...

I think most readers have at least a few books that matter more than others: books that inspired them, opened new interests, or otherwise helped shape who they became. Mine mostly come from childhood and adolescence, when a book could still redraw the boundaries of the world. My mother used to read to my brother and me when we were young. I loved it, but I also found it frustratingly slow; I always wanted to know what happened next. I obviously do not remember that time perfectly, but I suspect that impatience helped spur me to learn to read, so that I could devour books on my own. I do not know exactly when I moved from children’s books into books aimed at older readers. I do remember reading The Hobbit on my own in second or third grade, after my mother had already read it to us. It was probably one of the first books to carry me beyond children’s fiction and into a much wider literary world. My mother later read The Lord of the Rings to us. I cannot place the year precisely,...