Annual thoughts: Traditionally, I have used the first Wednesday of the year as a bit of a place to reflect on the reading I have been doing. I had had a few goals in the last few years – read 100 books a year, read more nonfiction, read more broadly – and I think those goals have been pretty good for my reading habits!

This year, I want to focus this year on reading more complex books, and so I’m lowering the “total number of books” goal to down from 100 to 80 books. I also hope this will help with the nonfiction reading and the vague goal of reading more older books. I read just a few nonfiction books this year, only 6, but I really think they were fantastic choices, and I’m going to try and lean into that more this year. I think there’s good context out in the world that I need to get into.

I also had a number of books suggested over the course of Arisia 2025 that I would like to actually sit down and read! They are here, if you are curious: https://kitewithfish.dreamwidth.org/479961.html


What I’ve Read­
Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett – I have been slowly reading thru the Night Watch thread of Terry Pratchett, and this was very good. I know this was a re-read, but god knows how long ago it was. I liked this one, and the general message of (non) human decency and bonds among fellow watchmen was emotionally fulfilling while the book itself was very funny. Recommend!

I skipped the Wednesday Reading Meme posts for the last few weeks, so if you are interested in what I read that last two weeks, it’s in a round up post here! https://kitewithfish.dreamwidth.org/492482.html

What I’m Reading
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – The second Hunger Games book. About 30% in, and, well, recent evens make this feel like a good book to be reading about empires and power and violence and effective resistance not being something a sixteen year old girl can manage on her own. I think there’s a bit of a fashion of expressing annoyance at love triangles, but I think Katniss being torn between these particular two boys makes perfect sense. They are each decent and good people working in very different molds, and honestly, I can see how awful it is that Peeta’s earnest kindness is made into a snare against Katniss’s rebellion by the Capitol. This book is simply written but it never thinks the reader is stupid, and I respect the hell out that.

One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters – Book two of the Brother Cadfael medieval mysteries. Great so far – I do not know a lot about the civil wars of the 12th century, so I am likely missing some details but I generally trust the book to actually get me what I need to know. Ellis Peters, who is actually Edith Pargeter, has a deft had for women characters even if Cadfael is the lead, and I think that I will continue to enjoy these books for some time!

What I’ll Read Next
Playing it by ear.

Not quite the Wrap Up for 2025 – I got busy the last few Wednesdays so I am making an effort to post about the books I finished before the end of the year!

What I’ve Read
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – Xing Book Club – This was blast from the past, and one that held up amazingly. The beginning was every so slightly slow but also set up the world very well. I felt like Katniss is weirdly charming – she has so little concept of the world as a trustworthy place or people as kind, and that calculation serves to save her life in the Hunger Games. The ending of this book, with her beginning to understand what her approach has cost Peeta, is wonderfully sensitive and ambiguous.

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter) – A very pleasant medieval murder mystery that is solved by a clever protagonist in favor of a humanist and quite funny resolution. Brother Cadfael is a well traveled Welsh brother in an English Benedictine abbey in 1138, when one of leaders of the order takes it into his head that they need the bones of a saint to make their abbey a really hopping spot. This book was published in 1977, and features a fairly liberal mindset towards the medieval caste system and a deeply humorous Welsh disrespect for the English. I picked this up as a break on the recommendation of oldshrewsburyian (over at tumblr, but I see there’s a DW name and I think it’s the same person!)

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan – Oh, I really felt excited about the book that this wasn’t! ­I really thought there would be natural history in it! To be fair, the author’s interviews make it clear that she’s going for an Indiana Jones-inspired plot, and she’s very much accomplished that!

However, it’s not as funny or charming as Indiana Jones, and I would not pick up an Indiana Jones novel. The structure of the book impeded my enjoyment – the narrator is an elderly version of the main character writing her memoirs, but the main plot is a rollicking adventure where the younger character is doing field research in a rural foreign country and uncovering black market dragon schemes. This results in the author functionally interrupting the interesting plot and deflating the narrative tension to offer Her Humble Opinion on her younger self’s actions. If I needed distance from an unlikeable younger version of the character, this would be a good break. However, the older version of the character is snide, bigoted, defensive, and Not Like Other Girls. The effect is charmless and kludgey, and makes me lament that the young promising character we meet in the past grows up into this unpleasant arrogant person.

Anyone who reads my book ramblings on the regular will have picked up that I am vastly irritated when authors deflate their carefully constructed tension or have unsatisfying pacing. So, please feel free to try this book and see if it works for you.

Misethere by Astolat – I had to do a lot of rather stressful family socializing the last few weeks, so re-reading a past favorite! A wonderful story about someone too clever by half and the Witcher that loves him. 

What I’ve Read
Persuasion – Jane Austen – I was sick this week and re-watched the 1995 adaptation and, as often happens, lead to me returning to the book. The movie is wonderful, the book is wonderful, I was comforted by the world that Austen builds and writes in. I think this one is growing on me to the point it passes Pride and Prejudice now for me. I just love Anne Elliot, I love Wentworth, I love the whole stupid bunch of all the young people in a flurry of attraction and engagement bouncing off each other like superheated particles.

The Books of Magic – Neil Gaiman – Yeah, that guy. I picked this up because I had come across an article talking about the unacknowledged influences that JK Rowling (yeah, that guy) had on Harry Potter – and the dark haired working class boy with dumb glasses and a magical owl, getting introduced to the secret world of magic by a stranger, seems like it very well might have been in her mind when she started writing Harry Potter. (This series is from 1990). However, this book is largely a retrospective of magic characters in DC Comics thru the lens of a new character, Timothy Hunter, who could be “the greatest magician of his age” as he gets the guided tour from several magical trenchcoat guys from DC’s vault. It feels like themes that have been done before by better people. The charm of the comic-specific retrospective relies on Gaiman’s skill at re-working existing comic characters into the brief cameos they get in the story along with existing myths and legends. My opinion is that Gaiman did this better and more gracefully in Sandman, but, I am inclined to be far less charitable towards him because of his whole fucking shitshow of a personality. I recalled reading this book and thinking it was good – but I realize now that I was thinking of the continuing series that came after this by John Ney Rieber and Peter Gross, and that certain key moments are simply the work of other writers. (Also, I didn’t like the art in this series except for book three, so, there’s that.) I don’t feel like I can entirely rule out my suspicion that Rowling had seen or read this series before she wrote Harry Potter, but I also can’t prove it and I’m not willing to take the law suit. In short, I think it can be skipped unless you are particularly interested in DC Comics magical characters.

What I’m Reading

The Fortunate Fall – Cameron Reed – Static, due for book club next week.

Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant – about 70% and while I made a comparison to Michael Crichton last week, I think that was perhaps too generous. I’m not losing interest in this book so much as I get frustrated with the scene-level pacing. Multiple scenes have seemed like they are building up to punchy scientific revelations!Only to have decidedly unurgent exposition pop up in the middle and drag out the scene, taking the delicious tension with them. It ends up taking the steam out of my excitement to have it happen so often. I can’t really give details without spoilers. But, for example, our intrepid scientist who is on a mission to discover the deep sea creatures who killed her sister are real and dangerous, uses her scientific subskill (which has been described before) to discover that her ship’s about to face an immediate threat! And in the middle of that action, the narration of the book picks up on how she’s typing really hard and throws in a flashback to let the reader know that the main character has actually broken the keyboards on several of her laptops this way! Now, that detail is good character work! I like it! It just doesn’t belong in the space between the set up and payoff of her big discovery because it let the tension out of the scene like a balloon – you should have popped that balloon for a big bang, but it’s just farted it all away. I remembered this being a frustration with Mira Grant’s Newflesh book, so I feel like this is a writer/reader mismatch – she’s clearly doing all right for herself in getting her works published! She loves to tell you about how things work. But it keeps interrupting the action, and I’m getting fussed.

A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath (audiobook) – Audiobook romance by a favorite author. This is the third in a series that focuses on the lives of Victorian working class people in a variety of jobs. Our heroine, Theodora, wants to be on the stage doing the fun, risque musical hall act that she has been working on for years – but her stuffy family wants to be respectable and will not allow that kind of act in their theatre! When her sister elopes and her brother pulls her out of acting entirely to work as the family’s drudge, Theo runs off to a prizefighter turned music act manager as part of a deal -he’ll get a share in her family’s much larger theatre and she’ll get her chance on the stage!

I often find the structures of historical romances less grating to my brain than modern romances – something about the stronger patriarchal structures makes the genre less silly to me. Modern women can simply not get married and have a perfectly fine life – historical women leads have to figure this shit out and fast. (This is like monarchy – makes for a great drama, I’d rather it only appear in fiction.)

Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities – on hold. (This book is just obnoxiously large.)

What I’ll Read Next
Natural History of Dragons
The Hunger Games
The Grief of Stones
heated rivalry, since the show is all the rage

What I’ve Read
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison – finished this re-read literally today! I had actually re-read this earlier this year, when my book club had finished The Goblin Emperor and I needed more. You can find that review from July 2025 here (https://kitewithfish.dreamwidth.org/486536.html), but what stuck with me was this line “Both books are from the perspective of a person who wants to make the world better and kinder, and is actively working to do that, to the extent of their means.” I stand by that – this is a world with problems recognizable to us and likewise, full of people trying to help make life better. It’s also got a fascinatingly beautiful subtle romance that starts with our main character looking at the second cup for his tea that the waiter brought him and wishing he could share the honeyed spoon with someone -it’s such a sweet longing and it runs thru the book so softly that I only noticed it when I re-read it properly.

Alien Clay – Adrian Tchaikovsky -Oh, I loved this! It’s very alien, and very weird, and yet Tchaikovsky builds the story like an argument, point by point until you’re nodding along and like, oh, of course, what else could this have ended as. It’s weirdly inspiring and wonderful and also could be a body horror movie with great ease. It’s quite decent!

What I’m Reading

Guillermo del Toro Cabinet of Curiosities – with Marc Scott Zicree. I am enjoy this, as it mostly appears to be a person writing with breathless adulation about how much he enjoys being in Guillermo del Toro’s house and looking at the weird stuff he’s got. I’m here for it, mostly!
The Artists Way – Week 6 – Sense of abundance – eh.


What I’ll Read Next
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed - xing book club
Next Earthsea book?
No clear idea, honestly, I would take a suggestion!

What I’ve Read
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers (audiobook, narrator Ian Carmichael)
Ok, this is the kind of book that almost makes me love the English, tho they do not deserve it. Dorothy Sayers wrote this book, and it’s such a careful look at this one small town in this one backwater place with one magnificent church in it with a set of also magnificent bells. Both this and Murder Must Advertise have a reputation in the Sayers fandom (such as I am aware of it) as being The Weird Books – where you just have to follow Sayers into her latest obsession and trust that you’re going to get an exciting story out of it on the way. And you do! It honestly felt like it has some spiritual overlap with Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, about the women who provide so much support and life to the little parishes around England. This is set thirty years earlier and with a far more rural view, but man, it does have those careful little inside views of an English parish. Do I understand anything more about English style change ringing? Only the barest crumb! Did I enjoy myself? I had a wonderful time!

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
I feel I should recant my opinions from last week. I was irked by the audiobook narrator, who, I admit now, had the thankless task of attempting to narrate a book that starts in binary. I have seen a better light. Here’s the story:

I talked to a friend (thank you, bookclub gods, for nerds who read fast) and expressed my woes about how the book was slow and dumb and not scary and I didn’t care about any of the people who were dying and the genre mashup was not working for me because the book couldn’t decide if people know about specific monsters from literature (Dracula is in this book, did I mention?) or not (the space computer did not believe in werewolves) – and she said, “I don’t think it’s trying to be scary. I think it’s camp.”

And lo, in retrospect, it was pretty clearly camp. Not serious, and not scary, and one of the monsters is a mummy named Steve and the creature called Frankenstein is an art project gone wrong and the werewolf is gay. It’s fucking camp. I’m glad my friend reeled me back in, because I actually had a wonderful time reading this book and I feel moderately unstoppable riding that high.

What I’m Reading

The Artists Way – Week 4 – AKA, the week where you are supposed to not read anything and see how you fill the empty space that you had previously taken up in your life by reading and generally distracting yourself with things. It’s been a day. I hate it. I hate it so much. I walked up to a little free library with delight and said, “FUCK, I can’t read any of these!” to the delight of my amused spouse. I have also had three very meaningful conversations, taken a nice walk with my spouse in the windy fall day with deliciously crunchy leaves, cleaned and refilled several of my fountain pens, changed out the annoying keycaps on my work keyboard for better ones from my stash, bought replacement HVAC filters, and wrote a long tantrumy letter to a friend. So. Uh. It might be working.

What I’ll Read Next
Witness for the Dead Katherine Addison
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Next Earthsea book?

What I’ve Read

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club – Dorothy Sayers – I have been liberated from the library waitlist on the Wimsey audiobooks! (Thank you, kind person who may remain anonymous at their own discretion!)

Really enjoyed this one – several plots interacting with each other until mistakes get made. As I mentioned last week, the inciting incident is an elderly man found dead (!) of seemingly natural causes (?!) at his gentleman’s club. The time of his death has specific import because his wealthy sister has also died today. If he died after her, her will passes her money to him, and thru him, to his two sons; if the old man died before his sister, then her money passes nearly totally to her companion, a Miss Ann Dorland.

Sayers does such fantastic character work that the real pleasure of the novel is visiting with all of the people impacted in the death and investigation: one of his sons is impoverished by his PTSD and ashamed that his wife is earning their keep, so he’s an absolute ass to everyone around him. The older son is an unmarried old soldier who is utterly unflappable but deeply hurt that he can’t help his family more, and so driven to foolish ideas.

The book saves Miss Dorland’s interview with Wimsey for the end - simply a wonderful and sensitive examination of how trapped a feeling but strong willed woman could be in this era. In keeping her character and her intentions a blank until nearly the end of the book, Sayers keeps tension in the story in a way that I really enjoyed. It allowed Miss Dorland to feel real and wounded - I really enjoyed meeting the character like this. Loved the revelation of the mystery, honestly kind of loved the ending? It’s not unlike Clouds of Witness or Strong Poison, in that Sayers loves a woman being liberated from a horrible and immoral man, but it feels like its own thing.

Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin – Last week, I thought this would be a bit slow for me, and it’s not a speedy book. But it grew on me – Ged goes from a callow youth to a brave and cautious man. Le Guin throws enough ideas at this book to make a whole series, if she chose to focus on any one of them. Again, her strongest suite here is the capacity to think of both individuals and their communities as characters – Ged’s movement thru different islands and their different social levels and cultures take us on a journey with him, and provided subtle ways for him to grow as a person. Also, I do love that the best way to fight a dark spirit is to hunt it down and make it face you on your own terms. 

The Five Red Herrings (Dramatized) by Dorothy Sayers – I cannot say I followed this with an exacting focus. The performances by the voice cast were all quite good (to my un-Scottish ear) and I felt like a fair shake was made at really explaining a complicated murder plot. That said, it did feel so far the most like a whodunit, and I was less intrigued by the characters than I have been by Sayers novels. I enjoyed myself but I will put an asterisk by this book and read it properly later before I render a judgment on it. Someone who knows more about trains, art, or Scottish culture of the 1920s might be a better judge than me, in any case. Fun tho, and it kept me company on a rough cleaning day.

What I’m Reading

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer – about 79% as of time of writing. Baer’s thesis is that the Ottoman Empire is part of European history and neglecting it leaves the story of European development incomplete. I was largely on his side already, and man, he’s really done a good job of convincing me on the particulars! 

Baer's book is brisk and covering a lot of topics and figures– I feel like I’m getting a detailed thematic sketch of each major historical figure rather than full biography, as the focus is much more on how the Ottoman politics developed over the course of the empire's six centuries, rather than a biography. It’s broad strokes about internal groups – Baer tends to do a quick summary of the historical context around a group (including deviant dervishes, apocalyptic Sufi movements, Shia factions that opposed the Osman family, warrior castes, tax farmers) and then gets into the specifics of the chronological conflicts and how they impacted the Empire and its connection to European Christian powers and other Muslim countries. It’s fascinating just how weird the Ottoman Empire was and how quickly it became a military power.

Baer also has done a good job anchoring the details of this history to people and topics that I already knew about. For example, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses or “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” was published in 1517 because the Catholic Church was selling indulgences – specifically, to raise money to fund wars against the Ottomans! This kind of makes the Ottomans fairly crucial to the creation of Protestantism, one might argue! That seems important! Baer points out several other things Luther wrote about the Turks as a divine judgment on the sins of the Catholic Church. 

Sidebar: For context, I had a standard-to-good US public school history education, so I got a nice chunk of European history. Thematically, it focused on the nations with the most connection to US history -- so the UK, France, and Spain, the Dutch as an economic force, and the rise of Protestantism in the German states. I learned more about the Ottomans in passing when I studied in Vienna, and a bit more when I married an ex-Yugoslav, and honestly, through Dracula. So, I had a sense I wish missing a lot - this fills in a lot of the gaps nicely, and may suggest some more avenues for investigation.

This book probably doesn’t have enough detail for a real history buff, but if you’re looking for a broad overview on a brisk pace, you might well enjoy this.

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers narrated by Ian Carmichaels – 40% ish – Started this and then realized I would have to push on the Ottoman audiobook to get it done before the library recalls it, so I am putting Sayers gently on hold for now.  (A minor note for some language that is pretty racist, in brief passing, even for the 1920s).

I supposed I am technically reading The Artist's Way? It feels a bit more like a user guide than a reviewable book, but I am doing it, and finding some of it useful. It came up online as a tool for ADHDers attempting to get in touch with their own artistic selves. Which, not quite what I am doing, but I am trying to be more attentive to my own metacognition, so here we are. 

What I’ll Read Next
Witness for the Dead Katherine Addison - xing book club
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed -xing book club
Of Monsters and Mainframes -Barbara Truelove - necromancy book club

What I’ve Read
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance – Lois McMaster Bujold – You can really feel the Penric and Desdemona style books coming around in Bujold’s later work. Bujold built a great character in Ivan Vorpatril – he’s too close to the throne of an empire to avoid knowing about politics, so instead he has developed a perfectly tuned sense of political ramifications for every move he could potential make – and manages to build a life where he’s known for being a lady’s man and a bit vapid, instead of a good figurehead for a coup! He’s adorable and he’s got a good match in Tej. In some ways, this felt like Bujold having a good time with her own books and not being too serious about it.


What I’m Reading
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club – Dorothy Sayers – 25% - An elderly man is found dead at his gentleman’s club, and establishing the time of his death becomes crucial for executing his will when it’s revealed he died the same day as his sister. Did he die just before her, so that all her wealth passes to her lady companion? Or just after, so that her wealth joins his estate and passes nearly entirely to his eldest son? It’s also got lovely worldbuilding around the WWI veterans in the background of Peter Wimsey’s world – their comfort with death and soldiering draws a line between the young men and the older crowd of the club.

The Mismeasure of Man – Stephen Jay Gould – Feisty and interesting! I’m re-reading this after reading it as a teenager – it definitely informed my skepticism towards science that “proves” an existing social bias is grounded in hard scientific fact. Really good and clear writing, it does feel like it’s from 1981 at times. (Remember when we were just fighting fundamentalists about teaching evolution in public schools? And not about the continued existence of public schools??)

What I’ll Read Next
Witness for the Dead Katherine Addison
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed

What I’ve Read
Lent by Jo Walton – “A novel of many returns” – I read this for the first time about three months ago and avoided spoilers – I recommend this book and I also recommend going in without an idea of you’re getting into it. That said, I think some spoilers would help people make up their minds, so I will put them under a cut.

After I finished the book, I went looking for any interview where Jo Walton talked about the book, and found nothing – But! She did have this to say in an interview, about the pleasures of re-reading - ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAbUmD3Xs2c )

Whose Body by Dorothy Sayers – # 1 in series - Fun to read, really gives Lord Peter’s backstory some oomph, but it’s also a bit convoluted and very very English. I can see the promise of the future but if this were the first book I’d read, I am not sure I would have bothered with the rest of the series .

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy Sayers - #2 in Series – Wow, this book is just a careful examination, via murder mystery, of all the ways women are trapped in this society in this era. It introduces Peter Wimsey’s noble family, and his brother and sister are both moderately miserable to be caught in a murder investigation. It’s very 1920s England but also does a great job of characterizing a lot of ways a person could be flawed, and how women end up having to make the best of some fairly awful situations.

In news unrelated to reading, I’ve been trying for some time to get off the short form video content sites (mostly TikTok) and spend more time with people whose work feels thoughtful and interesting – so, here’s Technology Connections - https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections Go learn about how pinball machines do math.

The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 by Robert Darnton – The library has returned this lovely audiobook to me! I am really enjoying, as a counterpoint to Lent, the ways the book really looks at how the specific circumstances and personalities impact the decisions leading up to the breakdown of the French monarchy. I am sure this is all old hat to people who studied this period of French history in any detail, but I was not among them. Even my interest in the History of Napoleon podcast didn’t cover this period in such a pragmatic, on-the-ground, “who knew what when” approach. The little details matter – I had not know that, as the Estates General was meeting to try and figure out how France was to go on, King Louis XVI left for a day to go sit with his dying seven year old son. Like, it’s not the most important detail of the book, but it just sticks with me that all this uproar and confusion and politics, his kid was dying. I finished the book late last night – highly recommend.


What I’m Reading
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers
Mimesis – Auerbach -Just started this while I was trapped in a long meeting and it was available. Said’s forward is good!

What I’ll Read Next
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin for book club 
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

What I Read
Space Opera by Catherynne Valente – I think this is a book about hope and about regret and about really excellent coats and having sex with the first alien you meet. It’s so good on a sentence by sentence level that I can’t decide if the I’m disappointed by comparing the writing to the plot. I’d recommend it – I’m only getting a fraction of the musician jokes. I didn’t want to finish it because then it would be over. Like a lot of stories where the stakes are “the end of the world,” it feels like a forgone conclusion that they’ll pull it off eventually, but Valente does a very good job of seeding all the components of the ending steadily throughout the book. If you like her short stories, and I do, it feels like a well-organized collection of those about the same characters, right up until the end.

What I'm Reading
The Revolutionary Temper — Robert Darnton – like 75% paused because the library called the book back. Really interesting and easy to read look at the writing and ideas in the early French Revolution – thanks to Jo Walton for mentioning it at Reactor Magazine in her monthly reading round-up. I will pick this up when the library releases me from audiobook purgatory.

Lent by Jo Walton – A re-read for a book club – 50% in and I have stopped because book club meets soon and I was clear about not reading ahead. It’s a great book to read and a great book to re-read. I cried, as I have before, but in new places, and caught new allusions that Jo Walton was weaving into the text. (“’Will there be poetry in heaven?’, he asked, like a child”!)

I really enjoyed the book’s comfort with ambiguity – our main character is a monk born in the 1450s. His values not our values, his thoughts are not our thoughts - Walton’s fictional history is doing a better job than a lot of straight history narratives of making the past as weird and human as our current day. Savonarola is trying so hard to be a good person and doing it thru a framework that is at times familiar and a times totally alien.

It pairs oddly wells with The Other Olympians, where the past was both familiar and utterly foreign, and the author walks us thru the differences; and with She Who Became the Sun/ He Who Drowned the World, where fantasy allows the reader to believe the same things that a historical figure in China might have believed.

Worn: A People’s History of Clothing Sofi Thanhauser with Rebecca Lowman - just started, suddenly there's a lot of New England clothing history?? Nice! 

What I'll Read Next
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin for book club 
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
Monsters and Mainframes?
I feel due for a Pratchett.

 29 August 2025: Trash Questions - Original Prompt here: https://thefridayfive.dreamwidth.org/142805.html

1. Does where you live have regular doorstep rubbish collections or do you have to take your trash somewhere else?
A – Doorstep, with massive bins.

2. Do you separate recycling? What sort of stuff gets recycled from your household?
A – Plastic, glass, cardboard, cans – we do get a rebate on beverage cans if we recycle them but largely that doesn’t happen. 
We recently added compost, which is an opt-in but free program, and I am very pleased at the numbers for how much it has reduced town garbage!

3. Do you take things you don't need to charity shops, or give them away online, or sell them secondhand, or ...?
A- Charity shops, mostly. 

4. Do you pick up litter in your local area, from streets or trails or play areas or parks? Have you ever found anything interesting discarded or lost in a public space?
A- I used to do beach clean ups, which make you aware of the hundreds of ways plastic gets into the water. 

5. Are there "repair cafés" near you to help mend fixable items? Have you ever been helped by a community repair service or volunteered for one? Do you do any other kind of upcycling?
A- Some! Mostly bike or computer related as I am aware. 

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