August books

1. Five Unicorn Flush, TJ Berry


2. Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
   Reread after bingeing the new Amazon series (twice) and mainlining a lot of fanfic, sometimes book related and sometimes series related. I had commented to someone that I thought the TV series was actually better than the book (which incidentally I have loved for years), so I decided to read the book again, and the reread made it clear that I was correct. Despite the absence of Greasy Johnson and the Additional Bikers of the Apocalypse, the series is better. There's too many glibly racist jokes in the book (for example Newt Pulsifer's Japanese car and Madame Tracy's Native American spirit guide) and the story is improved by their removal. Not to mention, bringing the A/C subtext further forward until it's actually text. *g* Though to be fair, I never knew what "a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square" meant until the series (I'd never heard of the song¹), but it's right there in the book in black and white!


3. Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

¹ My cultural knowledge is weirdly spotty, especially where it comes to music and television between the Classical era and about 1984. By Classical, I mean anything sold in that section of a record store: includes Baroque, Romantic, Rococo, etc. To be fair, I'm not exactly expert on that either. My father was brought up with mostly classical music, my mother was brought up mostly without any music except hymns, and nothing modern got played in my house growing up, either. Nor did we possess a television until I graduated high school in 1986.