The Land of Nowhere

Henry VI, Part II, William Shakespeare. Readaloud. I am continuing to read the part of King Henry VI through these, and he pretty much spends the whole play saying "How now?" and "Oh, God", because he is pretty much a disaster of a king. In a way that gives echoes of Richard II, although this play was written first. Though interestingly, although Richard II also echoes Marlowe's Edward II, I'm not seeing much commonality between Henry VI and Edward II -- they're both young kings who fail at their times' standards of masculinity, but Henry VI does not at all come across as gay. It was fun to hear the popelarpers' suggestions about how one could get Henry VI made pope in an alternate timeline.

Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse, Martha Wells. More Murderbot! The next time I read this series I'm going to do it in internal chronology order (so Fugitive Telemetry before Network Effect) so as to better follow Murderbot's character arc. But both Network Effect and Fugitive Telemetry were good, in different ways, with the former being heavier and more intense, and the latter being "Murderbot solves a mystery and realizes he's good at this being a detective thing". Looking forward to getting back to System Collapse, and hoping that there will be many further books in this series.