There were a few more jinks in reserve. These are aged jinks, comparable to a smoky Gouda.
I don't really know what to do with myself when staying at Brenna's parents, as an adjunct, tucked into the curls of nested parentheses. Aside from generating forced syntactical comparisons, I never really know what I'm supposed to do at a given moment - where my actual coordinate in the family hierarchy is. One thing is certain: there are no paints here, and no tiny men to apply them to. It's a grisly state of affairs, but I have taken my solace in the written word.
I've tried, hopefully with some success, to make you as big a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold as I am. I celebrate her entire catalog - but trying to genuinely activate a person's enthusiasm for a twenty-two year old sci-fi swashbucklin' epic is a grim endeavor. Even if the interest is there, not everyone can spend time tracking down every volume of this thing on a stranger's say-so. This is what makes the fact that it is now freely available online such authentically crazy bullshit.
The Miles Vorkosigan Saga, which the aforementioned link represents almost in its entirety, constitutes some of the best, greatest fun I have ever had with the printed page. I've chosen the word fun on purpose; there's interesting world-building, a fairly singular protagonist, and I'm a huge fan so I could make this sentence go for awhile. But fun - as a substance, as a kind of mineral almost, a quantity - exists here in great supply. Adventure and derring-do. On spaceships. Which are, themselves, in space.
I mention this because we are entering the dark season, a season whose frigid excesses are best ameliorated by books of any shape, where you may find yourself tucked into nested parentheses and in desperate need of interstellar escape. By the end of your journey through this series, I'm certain you'll buy some of these books out of tearful gratitude, even though you nominally already "own" them. You may decide you need enough books to build a house, so that you can live inside. This seems likely, also.
(CW)TB out.
