Hot chocolate is my goto for when I find myself in a coffee shop, as I don’t like coffee and they can’t make tea properly.
Unfortunately, Starbucks can’t make that properly either (their “hot chocolate” tastes like it comes out of the Nutrimatic from H2G2), so I’m completely out of luck if I find myself there.
Starbucks can’t make coffee, either, so don’t feel left out.
I like chocolate but not hot chocolate. Something about drinking chocolate just seems weird to me.
Hot chocolate is my winter “I need to warm up but it’s late in the day” drink.
I can deal with sugar in the evening but not caffeine.
My favourite hot chocolate is a blend of cocoa powder, sugar, and spices (chilli, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon), to which one adds boiling water and (if one is sensible) a healthy dash of Cointreau. Spicy dark orange chocolate. It is very good.
(Edit: This should probably be in the What are you drinking? thread.)
Kinda - with the various different versions of LeGuin’s Earthsea novels I have 5 different editions of A Wizard of Earthsea, but one of them is bound into the collected book she did illustrated by Charles Vess (which is an absolutely lovely version, as are the bound editions from The Folio Society).
I always give away multiples.
There is a particular type of prose writing that involves an author relating an incident of considerable individual personal experience. I’ve just found a second of these in my reading that I caught immediately and the contrast with the first stands out
What I just went through was chapters 1 to 7 of Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City
The progress of Mike learning he will not attend university but go into banking follows Wodehouse’s brief personal account in Over Seventy quite closely in event-by-event outline but with more detail and considerable emotion
It is quite personal to Wodehouse that Mike chooses lodging in Dulwich to be near a school and spends his first evening out of the house alone and meditatively on the school grounds. This being the grounds of Wodehouse’s own school, Dulwich College. That moment at the end of chapter 3 is a standout low emotion moment for Wodehouses’s writing and among his most poignant
He pulls out of it quickly when Psmith arrives on the scene in a return to form. If were inclined to do so, I could contrast Wodehouse’s conception of his actual self in Mike with his vision of an idealized self in Psmith in chapters 4 and 5. The exchange could possibly be read as an internal discussion of decision to pull out of melancholy rumination
My contrast for this is chapter 5 of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Triplanetary which is clearly autobiographical of his experience working in the munitions industry during WW2. That incident, I think, has a similar level of fidelity to given events. However the emotional note is an unresolved bitterness that is particularly stunning from a writer whose prose is so devoid of nuanced emotion as Smith. Even the first time I read that chapter with limited context I could tell Smith had an axe that required grinding at every available moment
What’s amazing to me is that, within 8 years of what seems to have been one of the greatest letdowns in his life to date, Wodehouse was able to write about it not only in a professional but also in a remarkably touching and artful manner
TLDR => read Wodehouse it’s therapeutic
It’s easy to forget - I don’t suggest you do - that the country-house life that Wodehouse is mostly known for was even in his time barely seen any more; it’s as much a nostalgic exercise for him and his original audience as setting something in the 1980s-1990s might be for us.
There’s a part of my alt-history/“gamer who’s read GURPS alternate earths too much” brain that periodically imagines a “Psmith at the Psomme” from 1919 or so along the thematic lines of Dunsany’s Unhappy Far-Off Things but prose fiction retaining Wodehouse’s style that marks a quite different future career for Wodehouse
Not forgetting, of course, that Wodehouse and Lovecraft corresponded.
Apologies, the specific piece I was recalling “The Prayer of the Men of Daleswood” is in Tales of War, not Unhappy Far-Off Things.
Amazon has a bunch of pterry’s discworld kindle books on sale for $2 for the rest of the day. Don’t know if a similar offer is available outside the USA.
I am reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. I actually bought a paperback because I refuse to get a translation when I can read English and I refuse to go to get it from Kindle Unlimited.
It’s very fun.
(found out about it b/c… bgg hotness)
Me too! Buddy lent it to me. I’m on Chapter 7. The pacing so far has been… weird? I remain cautiously optimistic about it.
Oh … maybe I am used to One Piece pacing now so nothing can shock me anymore 
I am almost done. I think it’s pretty good and I did back the Kickstarter with both Unstoppable (which I had been meaning to get the reprint of and now did not) and the RPG because… I mean… it sounds like it could be fun.
Just finished republic of thieves. Probably my least favourite of the series so far. I just didn’t enjoy the duel narratives and felt that it left me with a sense of the main characters as pretty inept.
