6 Encounters Without Any Birds

It is well and widely known that owls are false birds from the moon. Perhaps, though, you are looking to run an encounter, defined by its complete absence of birds in another fashion? Here are some other ideas for things that are not birds.

Snot Crow

Apparently named by the same kind of mind responsible for the sea horse. It's black, it's flying, it's making... sounds. Must be some kind of crow.

A chimera of gas sacs, vents, and feathery limbs keeps this reeking ball of slime and fungus afloat. It has an uncanny sense for movement far below it and drips adhesive slime onto its prey, followed by a plunge which reveals its killing root-beak.

HD 1+1 AC as leather (rubbery, uncertain anatomy) Drop 1d8 (only usable from above)
Move Fly clumsy Int mindless Morale fearless
Wants absorb nutrients

Glop: Only usable from above. One target must save or be slowed.

Pop: When a snot crow dies, living creatures near or under it must test Morale as they're showered in stinking black goo.

Anti-Simurgh

When the Simurgh, The Lord of Birds, manifests, drawing towards and into itself all birds in the region, by necessity a vacuum of bird is created elsewhere. Though natural forces quickly move to fill this void with more bird, cagey wizards have been known to sometimes capture it in enchanted cages (hence their name).

A caged Anti-Simurgh is more of a force than a creature, though it may be mistaken for the latter the way it flickers and flutters against the lead and orichalcum bars. If released, it will dart unerringly towards the nearest bird and cancel it, resulting in an explosion that deals d6 damage per HD of the former bird in a radius 10 times the bird's former size.

Scab Finches

The name is possibly a corruption of "scab filchers". Or they were named by the same person responsible for the snot crow.

Actually a kind of green beetle, or dusky wasp, it's a little unclear. Definitely not a bird, though, too many legs. They flit in to steal the scabs off living creatures' wounds to build into their nests of bark and paper. Some druids swear this material makes for superior scrolls of blood and tree magic.

HD 2 AC as unarmored Peel 1d6 (damaged creatures only)
Move Fly normal Int mindless Morale high
Wants steal scabs

Swarm: Minimum damage from direct attacks, maximum damage from area attacks. Can attack everyone in its space and squeeze through tiny cracks.

A Chair

Wise sphinxes know many riddles. Terrible sphinxes fake it with obstinance and may insist the solution to "what is not a bird" is "a chair", for example.

They're not wrong. This encounter is a chair, and it is distinctly not a bird. Is it also anything other than a chair, though?

1. No.
2. Bears fine engravings of The Final Mole. Worth 10x a normal chair.
3. Can levitate once a day for 5 minutes when commanded by someone sitting in it. (This is levitating, not flying, so it's not like something a bird would do.)
4. Collapses when it hears a certain note. Can be reassembled in 10 minutes. (This effect is artifice, not magic.)
5. A secret compartment under the cushion. Well-hidden, and locked with a small key. Currently holds several stale biscuits, half a flask of brandy, and a candle snuffer.
6. Hmmm. This chair might actually be a bird after all? There's something fatuous and unsettling about it. If wielded as a club it deals an extra die of damage to sphinxes and other extremely logical creatures.

The Bee of the Bird of the Moth

Oh no.

This encounter is at the center of a series of underwater caves. Unsettling, unseen waves permeate the place, and despite its location it is patrolled by intelligent, noxious snakes riding horses.

The Bee of the Bird of the Moth is a colossal hummingbird moth. It could be misconstrued as a bird, except that bird would be a bee. It feeds on the strange radiation of these caverns, growing, amassing its forces of horses (and snakes), and preparing to conquer the overworld with its hypnotic powers in search of sweet, sweet nectars.

The Bee of the Bird of the Moth

HD 8 AC as chain (flits, can't be believed) hypnotizing tractor beam see below
Move Fly fast Int as human Morale brave
Wants dominance, nectar

Dread hypnotic flying: When The Bee of the Bird of the Moth flies overhead, living creatures must test Morale or cry and scramble away.

Hypnotizing tractor beam: Emitted from between the antenna. Anyone struck by this beam is subject to any of the following effects of The Bee of the Bird of the Moth's choice:

• Hypnotize: Target must save or spend their next turn gazing in reverence.
• Pull: Slowly moves the target up to 30' closer towards The Bee of the Bird of the Moth.
• Fling: Quickly moves the target 30' behind The Bee of the Bird of the Moth. If it strikes a hard surface (including the ground) it takes 1d10 damage.

Deforming in the swarming: If three or more of the The Bee of the Bird of the Moth's mounted snake minions charge while they can see it, anyone they strike must save or get a random mutation.

Snakes

As large poisonous snakes, but their venom is laced with protozoa. This odd poison resists treatment (neutralize poison and the like grant another save instead of removing the effect outright).

They can also straighten themselves out to act as their own lances during a charge.

Horses

As horses, but morale brave when serving The Bee of the Bird of the Moth. Loyal steeds of the protozoic snakes.

The Final Mole

In some faiths, infants are delivered to their waiting parents by a stork. Less spoken of is the thing that waits at the end of their lives, coming up from below to take what was brought from above: The Final Mole.

HD 3 AC as plate (mostly underground) claws 2d6
Move burrow normal Int clever Morale fearless
Wants death, grubs

Tireless: The Final Mole does not need to sleep, eat, or rest.

Snuffle: The Final Mole can unerringly track any of the stork-born, and burrow across planes to find them at the end of their lives. But it cannot fly.

Mounting: If the The Final Mole is defeated, it crumbles to dirt and worm castings. The next dusk it reforms somewhere within six miles or so with another hit die and begins its mortal snuffle anew.

Books Completed December 2024

Kind of a short stack this month. I put a lot of effort into Christmas this year, and then fell down the Hades 2 hole. But I received over 30 books as gifts, so expect to have larger stacks in the coming months.

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut - I found a collection of Vonnegut books in a little free library, and asked my dad if he had any interest in them. He's not much of a fiction reader, but is sometimes interested in books from years ago he hasn't read in a long time, or such things by similar authors, and he took up my offer. He started with Cat's Cradle, so I grabbed my copy for the novelty of reading a book at the same time as him. Once he got past the invented words he really enjoyed it. I still do too, for the most part - I think I read it for the first time in high school in the 90s, and I was surprised to notice how many little individual bits were still rattling around in my brain.

Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett - I read it every December. Total comfort read, which was nice, because there was some sickness in the house while I was reading it.

How to be a Praying Mom, by Jeannie St. John Taylor - Another little free library find. After finishing this, I remain a childless atheist, so instructions unclear. I did learn that some people apparently refer to God as "Abba Daddy" which... yikes.

Gunslinger, by Night Owl Workshop - A Kickstarter I forgot about and arrived as a present for me from me. Thanks, me! Our current D&D game is using a lot of Western tropes, and I followed the main author/designer's blog, and decided to back this project once he mentioned he was doing illustrations for every entry in the bestiary, and I love a bestiary. The game itself is a serviceable OSR hack. The tables look pilferable. I would have liked to see some of the weirdness fleshed out a little more, and I think it could have used a sensitivity read for something set in largely historical Texas. Overall it's a nice addition to my growing Weird West RPG collection.

Books Completed November 2024

 

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair - I found this in a little free library late in the month, and thought I knew the gist of it despite never having read it. It seemed topical (UNFORTUNATELY) so I decided to give it a go. This is an "enhanced" edition, apparently intended for schools or reading groups - I appreciated the extra context the prefixes and suffixes supplied. The book itself is wrenching, and I can understand the impact and outrage it created when it was published. Knowing it was a protest novel, I should have been more prepared for the long speeches at the end, but it did feel like a kludge still. On the whole, I can't say I'm glad I read it, but I think it was important to finally do so, and I'll be thinking about it for a while (UNFORTUNATELY).

Oglaf: Book Four, by Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne - They keep churning out hilarious filth, what else can I say. I loved the introduction of Wobbly John, God of Lies.

H. P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu, by Gou Tanabe - My wife picked this up for me for Halloween, but it arrived a few days late. No matter, November was still plenty spooky. This is a manga adaptation - I've read a few other of Tanabe's works in the same vein. This one again shows his skill at capturing a sense of huge scale in small, black-and-white pages. It varies the original less than some of his other works.

Dominic, by William Steig - I've had this for years and pulled it off the shelf on a whim. It's a book for older children, so not a challenging read, but share that same deeply weird, almost stream-of-consciousness feeling of Steig's other stories, amplified greatly by his sketchy illustrations. More children's books should use words like "seneschal", especially when describing a peacock. 

Ubik, by Philip K. Dick - My mother in law brought this over, thinking I would like it. I realized that somehow I'd never actually ready any PKD, so this was my first experience with an original instead of a movie adaptation. Shame I've been missing out all these years! I can see how this has influenced so many of the authors and stories I have read, and I'm going to be seeking out more, both for the stories' own sakes and to fill in some cultural gaps. I do have to say the last chapter felt a little schlocky or cheap, though.

Ozma of Oz, by L. Frank Baum - A well-weathered little free library find. This and The Marvelous Land of Oz were broken apart and remixed into everyone's favorite fever-dream childhood film Return to Oz, so you know there's some extremely bizarre notions and characters zipping around in here. Ozma hasn't reached the godlike levels of power she has in the later books, so there's some actual conflict here resolved through some classic fairy-tale logic.

The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss - My nephew came to visit, so I had the box of kid's books out. After he left, I pulled out this classic and read it for the first time in a while. Still clever! I tried to give and adult eye to the structure of the rhyme and the illustration technique - he was definitely crafting something here instead of churning out whatever the publishing industry of the time wanted. It worked out well for him, I think we can safely say.

Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero - An early Christmas gift from my sister. I very much enjoyed this "What Ever Happened To...?" approach to the slew of 70's teen sleuth stories. Clever writing and dialogue, good amount of pathos without being sappy, a few genuinely scary scenes, all bound together by a mystery that skips back and forth between the decades - it was a romp. I'm passing it on to my brother as an on-time Christmas gift.

The Monsters Know What They're Doing, by Keith Ammann - Another early Christmas gift from my sister in the same visit. It was a little odd reading this right as 5th edition is shifting minor versions and the monsters haven't been published yet, particularly with the changes in attitude towards innate alignments for humanoids that's happened in the past decade. But it was really great bathroom reading, and I'll take a few ideas away for my table.

Books Completed October 2024

 Horror movies took up a lot of time this month, so the stack's a bit small.

The Inhuman Condition, by Clive Barker - I pulled this off the shelf for Halloween times, having not read it for, oh a decade or so. I remembered the first two stories pretty well, though the latter ones did not feel familiar at all. This is pretty early, raw Barker, first published in 1985, but his style and talents are already definitely there. It felt like a good one to have kicked off the spooky season with.

(This edition is from 1987 and has a pull quote from Stephen King on the cover, which will become relevant later.)

Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1983 - A little free library find. Not technically a book I guess but whatever, this is my blog. I thought all of the stories were basically fine, no surprise hidden gems here, just an enjoyable pulp magazine. The essay by Asimov about some of the history of the discovery of photosynthesis was fun in that acerbic way he had. The book review section by Algis Budrys, covering some post-apocalyptic works, had a bit that felt topical in 2024 unfortunately:

You know what the straights are going to do? They're going to crack this planet because they can't afford the clothes and the car that would allow them to date Loni Anderson or Tom Selleck. Of course, each of us knows in our heart of hearts that we'll emerge from the rubble and make sense of it after they've screwed it all up, right?

The back cover's book club promo is a great microcosm of that year in fantasy and sci-fi, too:

Frontier Scum, by Karl Druid - An "Acid Western" TTRPG with the tagline "A game about outlaws and their acts of wanton survival on a lost frontier". I read a review of this and decided to give it a try since my game group's current setting is also some kind of weird West. It's based on Mörk Borg, so is rules-light and design-heavy. I've never seen a book bound this way, with an exposed spine that lies flat and perfect-trim pages. There's a lot of clever little things in here, like d4-d4 for abilities, how drunkenness is handled, and losing your hat to soak a hit. 

Sometimes I felt like the design was getting in the way of the rules' clarity, but perhaps at the table the visuals would become anchors. Not sure, don't expect to ever get a chance to play it. My biggest complaint is that the sample adventure takes up a lot of the book and is literally a railroad, which does hardly anything to establish the party within the setting outlined at the beginning with a considerate level of detail. On the whole I'm glad to have this one on the shelf to flip through for inspiration, though.

Behind Her Eyes, by Sarah Pinborough - I mentioned to my sister that I didn't feel like I had much on the shelves for Halloween season that I hadn't already read several times, and she was kind enough to send me a few from her house, of which this was one. I don't normally read thrillers but went ahead with this one, and I'm glad I did, it was a wild ride with some genuinely creepy moments and a lot of twists. The final twist is incredible, one of those ones that changes your perception of the whole story retroactively.

(Now, this was published in 2017, and like the book from 1987 above, it also has a pull quote from Stephen King on the cover. That's just some impressive presence!)

Men and Cartoons, by Jonathan Lethem - Found in a little free library, and pulled entirely on the strength of the jacket's graphic design, which mimics those ads from the backs of comic books where you could send away for shock rings and fright wigs and 7-foot skeletons and hot pepper gum. The stories were taut but enjoyable, with some outlandish settings that are just to be taken for granted, and a sprinkling of super hero tropes and references. I liked it well enough that I plan to pass it on to my brother.

The Mysteries, by Bill Watterson and John Kascht - This one also came from my sister. An eerie little fable told largely through intricate illustrations. I'm not going to spoil it but it's not one of those fables with a particularly uplifting moral.

Books Completed September 2024

  

Cunning Folk, by Tabitha Stanmore - I think I picked this up based on a book discussion thread on Bluesky because I often like popular histories that focus on how a single facet of life was experience by everyday people throughout time. This delivers for how people in medieval Europe integrated their beliefs in magic with their day-to-day lives as well as their religion. I learned a few things and liked it well enough to pass it on to a neighbor who is into similar things.

The Spare Man, by Mary Robinette Kowal - This was part of the Christmas stack of books from my wife. I'm not normally a big mystery fan - I never know if I'm supposed to be playing the game along with the author, trying to guess the reveal before the investigator does. I didn't try too hard in this one, which is good, because I don't think it would have been possible to guess. The ending pulled in a couple tropes to heavy handed effect and fell flat for me, but again I'm not very familiar with the genre. The setting and spaceship were carefully and interestingly constructed and explained naturally without lingering on them, though, and the treatment of trauma throughout was thoughtful.

The Salt Grows Heavy, by Cassandra Khaw - This was in my bookshop.org shopping cart - I don't remember putting it there but I bought it anyway. What a strange and gory little tale. I wish I had known to save it for October. The handling of setting or world-building here was one of those "it's the notes you don't play" situations and nicely handled at that.

Dreadful, by Caitlin Rozakis - This one definitely came from a recent Bluesky thread. A fun fantasy romp that uses a normally tired amnesia premise to great effect, asking some questions about what it means to be good along the way. It also plays with fantasy archetype characters, having most of them revealed to not be what they seemed when introduced. I'm looking forward to passing this one along.

Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren - A little free library find. I remember seeing the movie a few times as a kid, but I couldn't say how faithful it was to the original. This was a hoot though. I'd just as easily believe Pippi to be some kind of fey trickster as a little girl. Actually that might be the best explanation for what's going on here! I'm going to get copies for the niblings and cause some trouble indirectly in the family I think.

Fats: A Global History, by Michelle Phillipov - My wife and I were talking about popular histories after I showed her Cunning Folk, and we got to wondering if there was one about fat, since that's an everyday thing that's been handled so differently in different cultures. Found this one after a little searching and gave it a whirl. Turns out it's part of a larger series called "Edible" that gives a similar short treatment to one food item per book. This one had more than its fair share of copy editing mistakes, which are always distracting, and I thought it focused overlong on America's interests with processed fats through the 1900s. It also barely avoids falling into being a list of facts - there's some structure within the chapters that stop it from being just trivia, but then the chapters don't mesh cleanly. I guess I learned some things.

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter - I am pretty sure a friend recommended this to me months ago. It was another mystery entry in my shopping cart and I went for it. I don't know - I liked it but I am having a hard time saying why, because this is a hard work to explain. Almost a prose poem as a novella? A contemplative exploration of grief through a series of unreliable narrators, which grief makes of us all.

The Yellow Wall-Paper (and other stories), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Part of a collection of classics my sister gave me years ago, and I happened to notice this one towards the end of the month as I was starting to think about spooky season reads. I didn't know anything about this other than remembering it mentioned in several lists of classic weird tales over the years. And rightly so! Downright eerie. I went and read some analysis essays of it afterward and can see how this slotted into early feminist studies. I might pop one of the film adaptations on in October. For the creeping.

Books Completed August 2024

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - This was part of last year's Christmas stack from my wife. It took me a long time to get rolling on this one. Everything about it should have worked for me - the brooding atmosphere, the hybrids, the tense secrets - but it couldn't hook for whatever reason. About halfway through it finally did and I finished it in a couple of days, carrying it room to room. There small central cast and half a dozen evocatively described locations they move between, and once I imagined it as a staged play in those constraints the flow worked better for me.

The Gods of Pegāna, by Lord Dunsany - I've read this many times, and once, long ago, tweeted the entirely of its text. Recently I pulled it off the shelf after talking with my UU minister neighbor, wondering if there was something in there she might make a sermon of, and ended up reading the whole again. Holds up. This is an awful public domain, POD edition though so I'm not going to share it with her. Looking for a better one with the original Sime illustrations.

The Mystery of Doggerland: Atlantis in the North Sea, by Graham Phillips - My mom sent me this for my birthday with a note like "I don't know, seemed interesting". I went into it with what I felt was the appropriate amount of skepticism for any non-fiction book that mentions Atlantis in its title, but it was surprisingly reserved. No mention of ancient hovercrafts at all, but rather a fairly measured discussion of the rise and fall of sea levels over the past several thousand years and how that has displaced cities and societies. I liked the speculation around the discovery of ruins that might have been an ancient spa.

Every Heart A Doorway, be Seannan McGuire - Another part of the Christmas pile from my wife. I've read a few other of McGuire's books over the years and generally enjoy them, and the pattern holds here. It's a compact little "kill your darlings" queer magical mystery that I think I finished in a day.

H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, by Gou Tannabe - This manga adaptation of one of my favorite Lovecraft stories was a birthday gift from my wife. She has previously given me Tannabe's adaptations of At the Mountains of Madness, which I also really enjoyed. This one takes more liberties with the source material, mixing in some aspects of (spoilers) Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, but make it work extremely well. Where Madness showed Tannabe's skill at illustrating huge vistas, this work focuses on claustrophobia and decay with equal skill.

Delicious in Dungeon Vol. 14, by Ryoko Kui - The last one! I'm finally free of spoilers. Could not have predicted how this was going to end but by gum it stuck the landing. What a great series, and I'm excited to see the second season of the anime next year.

A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein - A little free library find. Of course I've read this many times over the years, and it wasn't a huge investment to sit down for an hour on an afternoon with it and read it again. It does contain one of my favorites, and one I've taken to heart at work over the years:

If you have to dry the dishes
(Such an awful, boring chore)
If you have to dry the dishes
('Stead of going to the store)
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor—
Maybe they won't let you
Dry the dishes anymore.

Alien Nation comics, by Adventure Comics - I finished up my rewatch of the original series and all the made-for-TV movies earlier this year. While looking up trivia about them, I discovered there had been a whole (short lived, again) line of comics published shortly after the TV series ended! eBay provided a pretty complete collection in one order, but I have a few others to pick up to finish the whole run. One thing I noticed was they didn't have a consistent approach to handling the Newcomer's language - I guess continuity editors are a newer invention.

• A Breed Apart - The first one I cracked, and it made me trepidatious of the rest. The art was... "gifted high school student" level and the story ended on multiple cliffhangers with a plea in the afterward for readers to write in and beg for its continuation. This was the only one in the stack I have to use the medium of comics to introduce visuals that couldn't have been done in the TV show, though.
  
• The Firstcomers - Better, but with a really frustrating narrative structure bordering on "it was all a dream". Since this is an officially licensed work, I guess it means The Greys exist in the Alien Nation universe. Good to know. The male lead in this one is an irredeemable prick with a rat-tail haircut.
  
• The Spartans - Good one, pulls in some characters from the show. Plays with the Overseer concept in a way the show never did. Sets itself up for a sequel without begging for one.
  
• The Skin Trade - Best of the lot, really enjoyed it. If there had been a second season of the show, I would have liked to have seen it based off this. The main character, Mason Jar, adapts a hard-boiled detective persona based off movies he watched in internment and leans into it. Great character names and tweaks on lore established in the show. Also characters from the other comic runs show up and are referenced, showing Action was trying to set up a whole parallel roster. A shame nothing else came of it.

 

Books Completed July 2024

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett - After finishing Pratchett's biography a few months ago, I decided to round out my Discworld collection. This is one of the ones I hadn't read, and I picked it up one day when I was feeling kind of down and wanted some comfort food. It's supposed to be a book for children or young adults, but with Pratchett's approach to his readers, it's anything but simple or saccharin. It was a timely read, too, because we're dealing with a rat surge in the neighborhood this summer. Our methods have been less elegant than hiring a piper though, I'm afraid. Really enjoyed this one, and looking forward to when my niblings get a little older and I can share it with them.

Jungle Tales of Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs - Found this one in a little free library. It was printed in 1919 and in really good shape, with some great (unattributed) pen-and-ink illustrations, so that was an exciting discovery. I hadn't read any original Tarzan stories before somehow, despite reading a lot of John Carter over the years. I went in expecting some amount of racism, given it was written over 100 years ago by a white American about Africa, but I was not prepared. If we put that aside for a moment, the writing is really quite thrilling and you can see how Tarzan became the cultural icon he is. My favorite story in here was probably the last one, "Tarzan Rescues the Moon". But I've gone and done some research on Burroughs since, and learned he was an outspoken eugenicist and proponent of scientific racism, which the Tarzan stories were explicitly supposed to convey, so yeah. I can see why we generally encounter Bowdlerized versions now.

The Snouters, by "Harald Stümpke" - I do not remember how I got this little book. It might have spontaneously formed on a shelf, because it's so extremely weird that I can barely imagine someone sitting down to write it, yet here it is in my hands. Published in 1967, it's an absolutely straight-faced scientific recounting of a small island chain where a whole new order of mammals has evolved, the rhinogrades, who all have exceptionally developed noses that allow them to fill every matter of ecological niche. It should be a two page joke, but it keeps going, with an entire fake bibliography, invented scientific rivalries, and anthropological notes about the islands' original inhabitants (who were all wiped out by a common cold carried by the Swedish prisoner of war who escaped and swam to the shore). It's also fully illustrated with these outlandish beasts. In a terse epilogue, the whole island chain is destroyed by an errant test nuclear explosion. Simply one of the weirdest books I own.

Hey what the fuck.

Witch Hat Atelier, Vol. 1, by Kamome Shirahama - My wife got this for me for my birthday, because she is nice. I think it does a pretty good job of establishing the fantasy setting without info-dumping, though it skims dangerously close a couple of times. Having the main character be a student at a magic school is a classic storytelling device for a reason, I guess. The art somehow reminded me of early 1900s American comics, particularly Little Nemo, though Shriahama draws jaws particularly expressively. I will probably pick up a couple more volumes since I've gotten past the "here's how magic works in this world" portion of the story.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses, by Tom Standage - A little free library find, though one that had been soaked in something weirdly fragrant at some point, so I could only read a few warped pages at a time before I got kind of woozy. It's a global history of humanity that uses six different drinks as a lens: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. Sometimes it could lose its thesis in the author's excitement to share some bit of trivia he'd learned along the way, but it's not the worst example of that I've ever read. The shape of the history is pretty American middle school, just a general kind of "march of progress", with a treatment of the European Dark Ages that has the Levant serving as some kind of battery of knowledge waiting to be rediscovered. Also there's a random picture of George Washington in the spirits chapters, like we don't know what George Washington looks like. Anyway, I learned a few things and it was enjoyable enough, but it's heading back to the little free library for someone else to smell.

Deserter, by Junji Ito - Another birthday gift from my wife. Somehow I haven't read very much Ito, so having a collection of some of his early stories is a probably a good start to reading more. What can you say, it's Ito. Take a simple concept, play it straight and horrifying, lean on it, iterate, end abruptly on a shocker page. "Unendurable Labyrinth" was my favorite overall, but "Bullied" had the best last page. I'm going to seek out some more, I think.

Army Food and Messing, by Military Service Publishing Company - Another little free library find. This one took a couple months to get through, and was almost certainly never intended to be read cover-to-cover, but that's what I did. This is a practical guide to all aspects of food and mess management in the Army of 1942, with only a few dozen pages actually devoted to recipes, all for 100 men. There's menu planning, mess management, how to build a field stove, pages and pages of supply inspection guidelines, how to store supplies, how to bake at scale... just weirdly fascinating stuff. The inspection guidelines in particular had a weird poetry to them, trying to describe how good apples or bread or coffee should taste. The recipes looked generally fine, and economical, but I did notice there's beef broth in everything.