Book Club 2025: Connective Tissue by Bob Fingerman

I have to admit I bought this by mistake (in 2009) — I assumed it was a comic book, but it’s not. So it has remained unread until now.

It’s much better than I imagined it would be, really. It’s basically Alice in Wonderland, but by Bob Fingerman, so there’s a lot of squishy things. And tentacles.

About half the pages are illustrations, and I guess they’re the main attraction here. They don’t exactly add a lot to the text — there’s no playful interaction going on, which I find pretty odd for somebody that mainly does comics.

It’s pretty entertaining, but it feels like a trifle: The text is quite digressive, and while it’s humorous, it’s not at any point actually funny.

Connective Tissue (2009) by Bob Fingerman (buy used, 3.44 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: All Systems Red by Martha Wells

This was made into a TV series this year, but I bought this book five years ago and then forgot to read it. Until now.

I quite enjoyed the TV series (but eight 20 minute episodes released weekly felt, er, not optimal), so I was wondering whether this was going to be another example of the Bad Book/Good TV Series thing. (It also works the opposite direction.) But no! This is a very entertaining, very brisk little book.

I guess it’s a novella (150 pages long), but it reads like a short story, really. It’s very compressed, and doesn’t elaborate on anything. It feels refreshing — this book could easily — easily! — have been expanded to 400 pages (by adding some “character development” and all that stuff). It works well overall, but certain sections feels more like reading a recap than reading a book.

I think basically everything that’s in this book is in the TV series — the dialogues are copied word for word, I think. But the TV series did indeed expand on stuff, so we got more emoting, and some added plot points. But reading the book, it kinda amazes me how well the TV series managed to capture the brisk feel of the book, so perhaps they did it in 20 minute chunks for good reasons.

Hm… but do I want to read further books in this series? Hm… Yeah, I guess? Oh, I see there’s five more books and a lot of short stories… OK, I think I’ll try the next book at least and see how things go. I can easily imagine how this sort of thing could go completely off the rails.

All Systems Red (2017) by Martha Wells (buy new, buy used, 4.13 on Goodreads)

Music Festival (Far Away Edition)

Because I stupidly forgot my ear plugs.

See!? They were here, all the time, hiding on the desk in the hall. *pout*

I know, I know, they give away foam earplugs, but I just hate those things, so I had to position myself way away from the stage…

Still, Beth Gibbons won the festival. She’s so awesome. And the musicians she had brought were so good. It was just perfection.

(Except that everybody took their phones out and started filming when she did Glory Box.)

I was really impressed by ganavya, who’s somebody I hadn’t heard before. I’m buying all her albums.

And jasmine.4.t was a lot of fun, so I’m going to sample her albums… And while most of the artists did some kind of Palestine appeal (ganavya had us singing a Palestine lullaby, for instance), she was the only one that led the crowd in a “free free Palestine” chant. Props!