This is scraped of facebook, and presented mostly without comment (and translation).
I also have a distinct lack of memories over quite a lot of those.

Geht hin und lest Gideon the Ninth, und To Be Taught, If Fortunate, und Monstrous Regiment.

Things that were read

First book of the year: Knaves: A Blackguards Anthology, edited by Melanie R. Meadors and Alana Joli Abbott.
And the year starts somewhat disappointing. What in the end convinced me to participate in the kickstarter campaign funding this short story collection was Howard Tayler’s pitch he also uses in the introduction, that this was “a good book about a bad people”. And while the stories are generally okay, they are more about people in above their heads, people on the wrong side of the law or people actually getting a redemtion arc, and that was very much not what I signed up for. Can’t always get what you want, I guess.

Second book of the year: An Honest Death and Other Stories by Howard Tayler.
A collection of four non-Schlock Mercenary short stories, all of them good, and with some interesting worldbuilding.

Drittes Buch des Jahres: Schloss und Schlüssel von Heinz Pickshaus.
Ein Übersichtswerk über die häusliche Schließtechnik und deren Sicherheit, allerdings bei weitem nicht so einsteigerfreundlich und deutlich alltagsbezogener als angepriesen.

Fourth book of the year: The Fisher of Bones by Sarah Gailey.
A novella about a girl who takes over her fathers position as prophet leading her people through the desert towards the Promised Land. Which turns out a tiny bit different than expected.

Fifth book of the year: House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds.
One of Reynolds’ stand-alone novels, this is a tale of atrocities, deep-time scifi and very interesting worldbuilding. It’s also a very pleasant read.

Sixth book of the year: Mass Effect: Annihilation by Catherynne M. Valente.
This is an excellent whodunnit, playing out aboard the Ark Keelah Si’yah, the Quarian-and-others-ark, aka “the most interesting ark of the whole fleet and therefore the one that was put on the bus for the first and as we now know only game in the series”.
If you like murder-mysteries with a side-dish of attempted grand-scale speciecide and/or like anything Mass Effect: go read this book. I am not kidding.
(also this book has a better more coherent and less contrived plot than ME:A fight me)

Seventh book of the year: Batman: White Knight by Sean Murphy.
I am reasonably sure that this was my first interaction with the Batman-lore through an actual comic (as opposed to games, moving-picture-media and random wiki-binges), which is a completely irrelevant piece of information.
A more relevant piece of information is probably “I enjoyed it”.

Ninth book of the year: Shadow Captain (Revenger II) by Alastair Reynolds.
In which we return to the shattered solar system Reynold’s created, with all its delightful weirdness (and its sunjammers), and in which he tells a story about looking too deep into the abyss.
I’d like the third book now, please.¹

Das zehnte Buch des Jahres: Dagobert Duck: Sein Leben, seine Milliarden von Don Rosa.
Hach 💚

Twelfth book of the year: Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children III) by Seanan McGuire.
In which a motley crew of characters goes on a road trip to find body, soul and nonsense of their dead friend, to make her stop being dead and stop her daughter from becoming undone.
It makes sense in context.

Das dreizehnte Buch des Jahres: Motel der Mysterien von David Macauley.
Eine Apokalypse passiert und 800 Jahre später interpretieren Archäologen die Überreste eines Motels.
Fehl.
Als Kultstätte.
Ich für meinen Teil habe sehr gelacht.

Fourteenth book of the year: Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi by, well, John Scalzi.
It is – as will come completely unexpected – a collection of very short stories, and most of them are good.

Fifteenth book of the year: In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children IV) by Seanan McGuire.
Oh so different from the third one, this is the story of a traveller who finds her door, and her door leads to The Market. And as these stories go, this place has rules, and as these stories go, the rules have to be broken and the consequences suffered. And when you think yourself genre-savvy enough to roughly predict the beating that will come, the story picks up all the shards of broken rules, spikes its club with it, and proves you wrong.
I’ll now spend some hours staring at a wall.

Sixteenth book of the year: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Prachett.
Re-read in preparation for the series coming out soon.

Eighteenth book of the year: The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov.
Which tells the story of Middle Earth a bit different, in that the whole story was an attempt to destroy the on-the-brink-of-industrialisation-society of Mordor with the help of a bunch pointy-eared foreign allies who certainly will just leave once this all over.
The story comes in four parts (survival behind enemy lines, an insurgency, a spy-duel, and “how to carry a nuclear warhead right into the red teams HQ”), focusing on different sets of characters. Make of the set-up what you will – all in all I liked this apocryphal work.

“At which point, Polly decided that she knew enough of the truth to be going on with. The enemy wasn’t men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin’ stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.”
– from Monstrous Regiment (Discworld 31) by Terry Prachett.
Which is incidentally the nineteen, and was chosen for a re-read mostly because I needed it.

Das einundzwanzigste Buch des Jahres: Roma Nova von Judith Vogt.
Eine Interpretation des Spartacus-Aufstands in einem SciFi Römer-im-Weltraum Setting.
Ich hatte viel Spaß xD

[about the thirty-first book of the year:]²
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:
Drop whatever you’re doing.
Go and get yourself a copy of “how to: absurd scientific advice for common real world problems” by Randall Munroe.
Read. It.
You can thank me later.

Things that were seen

The last two evenings I did something very un-me and watched the whole of Love, Death & Robots.
As with every short story collection, it was kind of a mixed bag, but all in all I liked it.
My overall favourite was Helping Hand, followed on equal footing by Sonnie’s Edge, Three Robots and Good Hunting.
Beyond the Aquila Rift was also great, but it also had a very nope moment xD

So I finally managed to sit my ass down and watch Into the Spiderverse, and I’m contemplating to just watch it again right now.

“Somewhere out there is an eight year old girl, lying in bed, dreaming of being a criminal… let’s do this for her.”
Ocean’s Eight is a pretty decent heist movie.

Game of Thrones Season 08, apparently. There were hints. It was not great.

Atomic Blonde is a Ride and very much fun to watch.

Zu Mulan: Als Gegenpol zur Gesamtsituation habe ich eine Bildungslücke geschlossen.
Hätte ich vor langem schon tun sollen, so rückblickend.

Finally got around to watch Good Omens. Yeah, it’s good.

Okay. I’ll… I… uffz.
I just saw my third Last Star Wars, the second of which on big screen. No spoilers.
As the end of this specific trilogy: yes.
As a space opera: 5% awesome, 95% fart noise.

Other things thinged

Sooo, I just “finished” both Hitman (2016) and Hitman 2 (2018) inside Hitman 2 (2018)³. Which means “I played every campaign mission once”.
And I loved every bit of it. Previous attempts at Hitman-games never really clicked for me, but this time, well, it did. All the missions are wonderful happy murder funtime puzzles, and while I have no idea if I’ll have the endurance to do every last challenge the game offers, I’ll likely come back quite a few times to inhume some more persons-of-interest.
Highly recommended game.

After KP: I am technically home, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. Yet. The blues will go away, but for now I will wallow in memories of this utterly bonkers happening and all the great people I had the luck and the honour to meet, both again and for the first time.
Also, Solmukohta is over a year away, and I’m not happy about that.⁴

NASA just oficially called off MER/Opportunity.
Something something end of an era.
Rust in peace, little hero.

1. Guess who, up until now, mid-2026, has not finished Revenger III. ↩︎
2. Apparently at some point I just stopped doing The Thing. ↩︎
3. There should be a legal requirement enforced by orbital bombardment for numbering series, ffs. ↩︎
4. Solmukohta turned out to be five years away, ↩︎