Everything I hoped it'd be, plus a few slightly dirty jokes.

Carefully focused on only birds that I'm likely to see in my area, which is a great blessing.

A glorious collection of classic midcentury graphic design and airport architecture, reproduced in stunning color!

I hope this is only Volume 1 of a long and mostly happy life. Now pardon me while I go read [b:Lumberjanes|22554204|Lumberjanes, Vol. 1 Beware the Kitten Holy (Lumberjanes, Vol. 1)|Noelle Stevenson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435843806l/22554204._SY75_.jpg|42397963]!

A fun story, pitch-perfect for this ’verse, with all the double — uh, triple — uh, let’s just say there’s a lot of crossing going on here.

Packed with practical tips (don’t use vintage thread—it gets brittle; make notes for your future self about your progress on a project), The Act of Sewing teaches the basics in clear language and explains the importance of habits that veteran seamstresses take for granted. Tracing your patterns with chalk before cutting, for example, might reveal that your fabric’s design aligns with body parts you don’t want to emphasize.

After walking the reader through four simple garments (a top, a shirt with set-in sleeves, a skirt, and trousers), The Act of Sewing describes and illustrates how to adjust the width and length of the patterns, as well as more specific changes to the shoulders, bust, and crotch.

The following chapter is a smorgasbord of optional tweaks to add to your repertoire and make your clothing fancier (different necklines, sleeves, cuffs, yokes, and plackets), better fit for your body (gathering, pleating, tucking, and ruching) and more useful (belt loops and a variety of pockets).

The final chapter brings everything together (literally: top + skirt = dress! top + trousers = jumpsuit!) and encourages the reader to experiment with combinations of the patterns and techniques in the book to create clothing that’s distinctively your own and eminently practical for the way you live.

I strongly recommend actually sewing along with the author’s instructions for the four provided patterns (whether you intend to wear them outside the house or not); it will help you understand the instructions in the later chapters.

I am grateful to NetGalley for a free preview copy.

If [b:Latin for All Occasions|114491|Latin for All Occasions From Cocktail-Party Banter to Climbing the Corporate Ladder to Online Dating-- Everything You'll Ever Need to Say in Perfect Latin|Henry N. Beard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309204131l/114491._SX50_.jpg|110249] (1990) was right up your toga, you’ll appreciate its spiritual successor, Old Norse for Modern Times. This is a novelty book, not a scholarly resource, with translations of lines famous to fans of Star Trek (Es þetta góðr dagr feigum = It is a good day to die), Star Wars (Megi fjǫlkynngin fylgia yðr = May the Force be with you), and Skyrim (Vas ek vikingr sem þú, aðr ek fekk ǫr í knéð = I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow to the knee).

There are also useful translations for phrases like “Hello, how are you?”, but this book was never meant to be taken too seriously. A tourists’ phrasebook would have included instructions on how to pronounce all of the bewildering variety of vowels (a, á, e, é, i, í, o, ó, ǫ, u, ú, y, ý, æ, ø) instead of only ð, þ, and æ. Don’t worry about it. If there are any living Vikings around to correct you on your accent, phonology will be the least of your worries!

I am grateful to the authors, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.

An extended and pompous dialogue between our Marty Stu narrator, “Randalthus”, and the Lunarians he meets on a mystical journey to the moon. They discuss basic astronomy and planetary science, then spend a fair amount of time on religion, moral philosophy, and politics.

There are a few viewpoints expressed that would qualify as enlightened by early-2020s standards: The Lunarians regard all Earth people as terribly misguided for dominating and eating other animals, and Randalthus at one point sympathizes with enslaved African people, noting that the white man is “the real savage”. But the narrator then uses up about half the damn book describing how awful, uncivilized, and barbaric are the people found in nearly every part of the Earth excepting, of course, his own. Every religion other than is own is laughably, or pitiably, misguided. (The Lunarians, to his relief, all worship God.)

It’s all pretty awful, but for an example, here’s what he has to say about Australian Aboriginal people:

Spoiler

“The little whitish speck, which you faintly discern to the left, is the island or rather the continent of New Holland, whose wretched inhabitants are said to be overwhelmed in greater barbarity, and to approach nearer baboon species, than any other people, on that planet.”

Utter racist trash, of course, and if I hadn’t been looking for science fiction terminology of the era I would have hurled it with great force into the nearest digital rubbish bin.

Social science fiction the likes of which I’ve never read. Think [b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1575509280l/5129._SY75_.jpg|3204877] but unironically, with an unmatched horniness for capitalism. At least half of it was descriptions of society, especially its supposedly perfected economic system, in which anything may be your property if you can show that you can make more profit from it than anyone else can, because that’s the best way to measure value to society.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Elon Musk invented time travel specifically to have published this back in 1882, hoping to somehow become even richer in the present.