Friday's Activities Include: dentist, Battle Road, groceries, taxes

The taxes are filed! For us, this is early. It isn't even October yet. We had lunch at Battle Road after.

T. went to the dentist with his sitter. She will be unavailable next week. That should be exciting.

I went grocery shopping this morning.

I had a nice chat with K. on the phone today.

I have a list of things that I've been meaning to blog about. Perhaps I'll do that next.

_Vanguard_, Jack Campbell

I really enjoyed Campbell's lawyers in space series under the name Hemry. I have a copy of _Stark's War_, altho I still haven't read it. But I've read all the Lost Fleet and ancillary novels and was excited to get my mitts on this prequel story, set in the pre-Alliance years -- and starring another Geary.

The book follows a variety of people who leave their current planet to go further "down and out" in search of freedom, to avoid rules, to try to make a difference. They run into each other in the course of their travels, and then separate once again. But they remember each other, and when later in the story they need help, they seek each other out. This is an episodic structure, but one which worked really well at least for me. Indications are that future books in this prequel series will follow some or all of these characters (at least the ones that don't die) on further adventures, and the nascent connections among them will eventually form the kernel of the Alliance. Or maybe the Alliance will form around them at an official level in part because they unofficially kept the whole thing going with spit and baling wire in the face of piracy and tyranny.

This Geary is not the near-deity that the other Geary is (at least not yet!). But like the other Geary, he benefits greatly from the respect, assistance, timely advice and direction (and weapons) offered by numerous strong women he meets. Fundamentally, this is probably what I love most about Campbell's writing.

As always, looking forward to more. I think this would work fine to read as an entry point to the universe.

_Rapture in Death_, JD Robb

The 4th in the In Death series.

This time around, a bunch of suspicious suicides, seemingly unconnected, other than the fact they are suicides who had zero history of suicide, depression, self-destruction, etc.

SPOILERS!

The roomie who said his dead friend didn't ever go on dates because he had some long distance thing going on with a woman who had brains, body, etc. and why accept anything less? caused me to perk right up when Rheeana (<-- probably spelled that wrong) appeared. But Robb did a nice job throwing distracting sand up. Nothing like having more than one person engaging in mind control to confuse the reader.

I think this might be the most tightly plotted of the first 4. There are some things that happen with the main couple that could be profoundly trigger-y however (consent issues triggered by the mind control).

I wasn't really intending to keep reading, but these books really hit the spot, when I want something mildly humorous, mildly interesting as a puzzle and "a future from the past" that I find really entertaining. Clearly, they work on some level for a substantial fan base, or there wouldn't be 44 of them. There's a real risk I'm going to wind up reading all of them.