Books Completed August 2022

Two photos this month because I wasn't expecting to tear through one book in the last few days of the month after already having mailed out another I'd finished. Whoops!

The History of the Buccaneers of America: Containing Detailed Accounts of Those Bold and Daring Freebooters by Alexandre Olivier Esquemelin - I found this in a little free library while I was walking along humming an Alestorm song and thinking about rules for a pirate RPG I was writing, so that's fate. It took me most of a year to get through a page or three at a time, as it's pretty dense, fairly archaic first-hand account from the late 1600's. Though there was lots of content that would make great additions to a game (and I started keeping notes for that way too late in my reading), to be honest it kind of put me off making anything about the pirates of that time into a game. They were desperate and brutal men, and all the excitement is bound up with suffering and wanton cruelty. After I finished, I mailed it off to my friend Matt, who happens to be a historian and the author of:

Free Hands #1 by Matt Wilding and friends - Got this through the Kickstarter. It's the first issue in what promises to be a bloody, piratical romp from Sequential Decay comics. I should take some inspiration from this that perhaps there is a way that we can tell stories of the pirates of yore in a meaningful way. My only gripe is the colors in my copy seem dark or murky. Might be an artifact of the production.

The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe - I finished the Book of the New Sun tetralogy last month, and immediately ordered this when I found out he had written a fifth book as a "coda". In a way, I wish I hadn't. There's praise aplenty heaped on this book, and from a technical perspective it's really interesting. Wolfe managed to create a work he clearly hadn't planned as part of the original and have it fit seamlessly into the continuity. However, it reminded me a bit of Sandman Overture: The author seemed compelled to come back to a completed work which contained loose ends and ambiguous events as part of its appeal and wrap them all up, taking most of that opportunity away from the readers. Also, this book introduces a whole bunch of time travel to make it happen which... I'm not a time travel fan.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery - Another little free library find I happened past and grabbed on a whim because I realized I'd never read it despite seeing the old PBS miniseries several times in my youth. Though it's not much of an achievement for a kid's book, I read this in two sittings in two days and found it delightful. Some of it's surely pure nostalgia for a time and place that basically never existed, but the characterization is so precise and delicate, and the descriptions of the land so loving, it just skims along. It somehow manages to capture the whole of a childhood and the melancholy of growing out of that in just a few hundred pages. I know there are sequels, but I think I might just let this one stand alone in my memory for a while.

Books Completed July 2022

 Again with the month delay.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - I'd read this before, but it had been years and years. The writing itself is quite dynamic, Huxley could weave three or four plot threads together, dashing between them paragraph by paragraph, carrying the reader along deftly. I could picture Bernard Marx skulking the depths of Reddit, his character was possibly the most prescient part of the book. The old "Shakespeare is the pinnacle of English literature" chestnut gets taken out and shaken around more than is to my taste.

Sword & Citadel by Gene Wolfe - These are the second two books in the Book of the New Sun tetralogy of which I read the first two, oh, a couple years ago. I really think they're meant to be read back to back though, there are so many references to characters and events of those first books. Apparently Wolfe wrote them that way, too.

Reading about this book, there are many discussions about how a clever or attentive reader will pick up on Severian's status as an unreliable narrator, and also how the archaic vocabulary will send them scrambling for a dictionary. Well joke's on them because I'm not that kind of reader at all and when I hit a logical inconsistency or a word I don't know I just chalk it up to not paying the right kind of attention and plow ahead.

Anyway I kept thinking the strangeness of the encounters and the episodic, tightly contained nature of the chapters made this feel like it would make a great anime.

I think I originally heard about this series from an artist whose RSS I used to follow did some fan art. Here it all is on Art Station - I still think it's pretty great.

Apparently there is a "coda" fifth book, which I ordered.

Into The Odd by Chris McDowall - Hooray for Kickstarters you forgot about that turn into little presents from your past self. A clean little fantasy RPG that I've run a couple of times as a one-shot. The production values on this edition are quite nice - paper is heavy, binding feels solid, color and bleed are crisp. It does seem to be missing a chapter about the city of Bastion for all the references it makes to its being "the only city that matters". Also the main example dungeon didn't seem to have a consistent theme, but maybe it would become apparent in play. The Arcanas are cool. I'd still run this if the opportunity came up.

Oglaf Books One, Two, and Three by Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne - My wife got me these for my birthday. I follow the comic on RSS so am up-to-date, but it had been a long time since I read the back catalog. Still, just, hilarious on the whole. Sithrakism is the closest I have seen to a believable religion: "God hates you and will torture you forever when you die, so stay alive as long as you can!". We use the punchline from this one in day-to-day conversations still. Reading them back to back I did notice that like 40% of the punchlines are basically "you don't think they're gonna have sex, but then they do", though.

Books Completed June 2022

I keep writing these almost a month late. Not a great pattern!

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift - Everything that's social commentary here has already been written. I'll just say that the tone holds up even if the specific targets have faded. But if you've ever read a published RPG module or supplement, it's hard to imagine how this hasn't influenced it. The Atlas of The Planet of Hats!

It's worth calling out the misogyny is troweled on so heavy none of the discussions I've read are sure if it's the author's own prejudices bleeding through or part of the satire. I didn't find similar discussions around the assumptions that every society encountered would be broken into labors and "betters", but, again, that's Swift?

Let's take some gameables from each book.

• Give your players a coloring book conflict. Make them the biggest players on the stage. Let them think their actions are unaccountable.
• Make your players weak and unaccountable, physically. Let them try to play factions against each other. Introduce a medium between the two scales.
• Flying island. Math worship. There's not a lot here that isn't just a shitty 1E module, other than that the clothes made by math are bad and that immortality destroys in kind.
• Infectious philosophy. Your "race" is a degenerate servant here.

The Mammoth Book of Terror edited by Stephen Jones - I was going to throw this into a purge box, but noticed one of the authors was Manly Wade Wellman, an author I have been interested in recently. Flipping the pages, I realized this is a book that had a whole bunch of stories I vaguely remembered reading through the years but had given up hope of discovering the source. No idea where I got this thick old volume to start with, but let's try to consider each story. I'm going to pull the list from this Goodreads review because, well, this is enough to type already. 

(Hate the cover of this edition btw.)

• "The Yougoslaves" by Robert Bloch: Wouldn't have been so creepily racist if the author hadn't acknowledged it was a self-insert in the intro. 
• "The Last Illusion" by Clive Barker: The novelette that apparently inspired the Lord Of Illusions movie, but branches off from it wildly after the first paragraph other than the characters' names.
• "The House of the Temple" by Brian Lumley: I love the idea behind this and want to steal cosmic horror parasites as a lower-level encounter.
• "Murgunstrumm" by Hugh Cave: Pulpy as fuck.
• "The Late Shift" by Dennis Etchison: Cyberpunk as fuck.
• "Firstborn" by David Campton: Ehhh, no.
• "Amber Print" by Basil Copper: Makes a little more sense now that I've seen The Cabinet, but not my favoite.
• "Crystal" by Charles L. Grant: I couldn't follow what this was trying to do, but a lot of Londoners died.
• "The Horse Lord" by Lisa Tuttle: THIS IS LEGITIMATELY ONE OF THE SCARIEST STORIES I HAVE READ. I was so glad to rediscover it here. If I ever edited a collection of horror, wow, I would feature this. I need to find more by Tuttle, I adore this story.
• "Bunny Didn't Tell Us" by David J. Schow: Good for the mud imagery, not much else.
• "Out of Copyright" by Ramsey Campbell: Weird revenge fantasy from a fiction author against the concept of EDITORS.
• "Pig's Dinner" by Graham Masterton: Gore. I was already off pork before I read this but, it'd help.
• "The Jumpity-Jim" by R. Chetwynd Hayes: Steal this for a simple D&D module: Demonic entity can be summoned by non-magical but very specific circumstances.
• "Junk" by Stephen Laws: What. At least the guy liked his dog.
• "The Satyr's Head" by David Riley: Basic cursed item story, but wet London. 
• "Buckets" by F. Paul Wilson: I thought I imagined this story, but someone wrote it. 
• "The Black Drama" by Manly Wade Wellman: Worth saving the volume from the trash. This is a weird bit, but it stood out to me as the first time I remember any character in a 30s/40s story wearing anything but a suit or dress. The guy puts on jeans and "canvas sneakers" while he's changing in the boathouse! A fun story in any way even if you can see what's happening a mile away. Good job, Manly Wade Wellman (what a name).
• "The River of Night's Dreaming" by Karl Edward Wagner: Invokes a fever dream well, but not sure what's going on here. Wet.

The Great Outdoor Fight by Chris Onstad - Achewood is brain tape for me, but it's fun to revisit the classics. I'd forgotten this volume includes (terrible) old recipes.

The Walking Dead Vol.10-22 by Robert Kirkman and friends - Flowed over from last month. Mostly an excuse to lie on the floor while my back healed up (much better now, thanks), but still interesting to compare to the memories of the show. By the end of this run I hated all the characters so good job.

Books Completed May 2022

Between yard work, work work, Rogue Legacy 2 coming out of early access, and messing up my back, I didn't get a ton of reading done this month. The fact that I'm posting this late in June doesn't bode too well for the June post either, but we'll see.

On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers - I don't remember where I saw this referenced, but I picked it up secondhand as inspiration for the pirate game I'm perennially writing. Perhaps that my copy arrived soaked in cologne prejudiced me, but I couldn't quite enjoy this book. There are a few good hooks slipped in early on that come together satisfyingly around the middle, but the end feels rushed. The action sequences are nice and dynamic, with lots of nameless pirates and sailors getting tossed around. It's a very casually -ist book, though. Like, only the black characters are given accents, or have their skin color described. One of the villains is your basic fat == evil. There are only three women with speaking roles in the whole book: One's the heroine, who four different men are chasing to own for various reasons; one is described mostly in terms of her breasts; one is a ghost. 

Dyson's Book of Swords by Dyson Logos - This barely counts as a read, but it's a fun little picture book of 50+ fantasy swords with evocative, short descriptions. They're cute and I can imagine using this as a flipbook treasure table.

Eat the Weeds by Ben Charles Harris - This has been in my subconscious for a long time as a classic of the foraging hobby, which interests me more from a local knowledge and awareness perspective than survivalist. Turns out this is out of print though, so can't be that much of a classic. Finally reading through a second-hand copy though, I can safely say the author was a lunatic.

It took me a while to pin down the writing style, which reminded me so much of modern right-wing articles for some reason. I think it's the tone someone who is convinced of their own correctness and intelligence they've never listened to feedback or actually tried to improve, so it just comes out as stilted and pompous. The usefulness of the material itself was hindered by this not being a field guide in the least, and assuming you already know what kind of plant you're looking to possibly eat. Or, as he suggests, bringing samples to local experts who will certainly be happy to take time out of their day to identify yet another mallow for you or such. Then the uses are almost all one of three:

• Substitute it for another Vegetable. There was a weird assumption about a baseline set of vegetables that you could sub in foraged stuff for. As in, the foraged plants were never discussed as first-class produce on their own, just something you could have instead of Spinach or Asparagus. Also, he capitalizes all the plant names like that and it weirds me out.
• Make a tea. Probably as a substitute for Coffee or Black Tea (again with the uppercase), which contains the harmful Caffeine (also a good smattering of proper nouns for no reason). Cold teas are to be avoided (this is also a health book from the 50's), and warm teas are to be drunk like eight times a day, and slowly swished in the mouth to mix them with spit before swallowing (what).

Add it to a soup. Inspired.

Also he consistently referred to Native Americans both in the past tense and in the possessive which, yikes.

The Walking Dead Vol.1-9 by Robert Kirkman and friends - I've had the early volumes of this on a shelf since they came out, but stopped keeping up with it around volume 13 or something. But I was  walking the dog and happened to find volumes 15-21 in a little free library. Then I noticed I had loaned out volumes 1 & 2 sometime in the past. Anyway, so I picked up the first two again and the two in the gap to fill in the collection because at this point why not.

This proved to be a good move because I really screwed up my back in May and had to lie on the floor for a long time and do not particularly challenging things. Like rereading comics. I've also seen the first few seasons of the show, so probably the most interesting thing about revisiting the comics was seeing where I could remember deviations between them, or watching how some events got reused in different places. I don't love the franchise, but it's entertaining enough. There's more torture put in front of the veil than I think is necessary, but I guess that was one of its selling points. The treatment of the group "dealing with" the cannibals is effective without showing the specifics, for example.

Books Completed in April 2022

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett - The funniest story at the intersection of nationalism and gender politics for my dollar. Been years since I read this first, but it felt relevant to the times so picked it up again. I do like to come back to a Discworld book after a few years - there's always some little bit I don't remember that gives me a chuckle, and bits and footnotes I'm glad to see again (“A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what the size of the onion, the dish or the woman”). My mom read this too a few years ago and was impressed by how well he wrote women characters. Jackrum remains a beast.

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson - This one took me since December to get through in fits and starts, but by golly I did it. I am not schooled in the social sciences at all, and this book definitely assumes some level of familiarity I didn't have. However, I still found it interesting to sort of let it wash over me, and I think I agree with the shape of the thesis and I can see it. Getting my hands around the concepts of nationalism seems important right now (see above) - I don't recognize much of it in myself, or really any adherence to a group, but it's clearly shaping my country and the world right now.

One thing that frustrated me here was early on Anderson comments about how most readers are monoglots, and then dwells on this at length when discussing the impact of a polyglot bureaucratic class among the colonies. Then, despite that, he doesn't provide translations of multiple quotes, in multiple languages. Sorry I don't speak French and Latin, Ben. Also the structure of the footnotes was baffling. Some were mere references, some were whole separate little essays, some wandered off into abject tangents. It would have been clearer to read if you didn't have to constantly shift attention between the main text and a four-paragraph aside.

Captain America, the Classic Years vol. 2 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby - I've read this volume a few times in the past couple decades, but pulled it off the comics shelf for no discernable reason. Maybe I wanted to see how it felt in the current political climate? Not sure I have that level of self-awareness.

Anyway, as long as I remember it was written for kids and just accept that the military camp is walking distance from both a foggy moor and a mobster-riddled city, it's fun in a flying fists kind of way. At the same time, knowing it was aimed at kids makes the propaganda aspects stick out all the more. The art, though pioneering, also sometimes borders on outsider art. Like, what are these faces:

Go get 'em, Cap.

A normal dog, or Jack Kirby predicts The Thing?

I'm sure others have written at length and with skill as to the pervasive racism in these comics, as well. It's worth calling out. You have a guy punching Nazis, which we can all get behind, but also saying stuff like "here come some Chinamen and they're not waving laundry tickets!". There's a whole story about a white artist driven to murder because he loses his hand and gets a "horrible black claw" grafted on to replace it. Yikes.

Boundless vol. 1 by Boston Comics Collective - Happened on this at our neighborhood yard sale. A fun little collection of comics on a nice variety of scientific topics. The entries about the Morris Worm and the nonlinear nature of research and discovery were my favorites.

The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart - Another one of those books you're probably not supposed to read cover-to-cover but oh well. An interesting overview of how various plants are used in brewing and distilling, and as flavors and tinctures. I learned a lot about agave in particular. The treatment of "Old World"/"New World" in terms of "explorers" "discovering" ingredients was uncomfortable at times. Learning about the global voyage Aquavit goes on may have inspired a D&D adventure, escorting some semi-secret cargo along a semi-secret route and bringing it back home.  

Pictures and Stories from Forgotten Children's Books by Arnold Arnold - Woodcuts are always fun, but on the whole perhaps there's a reason most of these stories were forgotten. The longest recounted here is a version of Jack the Giant Killer, where the supposed trickster hero slaughters a dozen giants with the most basic of "tricks". Other than that it's mostly alphabets, cautionary tales, and gender essentialism. Arnold Arnold seems like an interesting guy though - he did pick that name rather than being born with it, and is apparently the person who created the Parker Brothers spiral logo. So that's neat.

Storm of Locusts by Rebecca Roanhorse - The sequel to Trail of Lightning, which I read a couple years ago when it came out. The first chapter gets things going immediately, introducing a new character and thrusting a death flag through the neck of one of the characters from the previous story. On the whole I liked it, but it's the second second-in-a-series book I've read this year and maybe that made all the worldbuilding hits fall a little too heavily at times. The escape from the auction sequence was my favorite.

 

Books Completed in March 2022

 

Rackham Vale by Brian Saliba & Craig Schaffer - This is a fun little RPG sandbox based on the art of Arthur Rackham. Now I love me a fiction built on reinterpreting a small body of work over and over again so this tickled an itch I once tried to scratch myself by running a whole D&D campaign based on Blood Mountain. The layout and editing are impressive (but not perfect) for a small project and the quality is nice for print-on-demand. I only wish there was a map included for the Alchemist's Tower - it's described as a "general adventure site" the DM can drop anything into, but many actors and factions have specific bits mentioned as being tied back to it, and it also describes some specific contents. The map of faction relationships is a useful tool I'm hoping to see more sandboxes take advantage of.

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey - "Are you a coward or are you a Librarian?" asks the cover of this novelette. It's a sometime-in-the-future believable US of America situation where an approved job for single, upstanding women is to travel the land distributing Approved Materials. Of course there's more going on and I... think I read a romance novel? It was fun, and Gailey's debut.

The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier by Jakob Walter - Pulled this one off my wife's shelf of college history books. Anytime anyone starts talking about war in a glorious fashion you should be allowed to slap them with a copy of this book. The suffering described in here in such straightforward, work-a-day terms is horrifying. I cried a bit for a man one-hundred-fifty-years dead when he described finding some peas in a kettle, then having them ruined when a fellow soldier's added fat turns out to be soap. There's a weird passage where they're cured of "the fever" by a travelling stranger who writes a spell on scrolls for them to eat. This edition has a collection of six letters sent from the frontlines that never made it home: Soldiers begging their families to gather up some money so they can buy shirts or some bread, mostly. Reading this made me appreciate the third amendment in a new way. 

How to Take Over the World by Ryan North - The spiritual successor to How to Invent Everything, this is another broad popular science book that explores some of the boundaries of what science is capable of right now. The lens it uses is teaching you to become a supervillain, something North can claim expertise in as an established comics writer. My favorite takeaway was that there's a possibility in the far future that our then red giant sun could be close enough to Titan to turn it into an Earth-like environment, which could allow for a second run of evolution within our own solar system. The comic illustrations by Carly Monardo really help carry the points home.

Finna by Nino Cipri - A wild novelette about the (interdimensional) horrors of capitalism. "Oh yeah we used to have a team that would go into the planar rifts to retrieve lost shoppers, but we downsized them in the 90's. Now it's up to the least-senior team members. You get some gift cards!" And of course the two that have to go on this journey recently broke up a stormy relationship. On the way the author has a solid exploration of dealing with depression and anxiety and gender identity. Plus swordfights and retail zombies and carnivorous chairs.

Charlotte's Web by E. B. White - Grabbed this out of a little free library while walking the dog. E. B. White liked to make lists apparently. He made a list of the things Wilbur the pig ate, things at the farm's dump, types of cars parked at the county fair, things a rat might eat at said fair... there were others. It's caused me to make a list of lists. What a weird and melancholy book though. Reading it now, the part at the fair where they announce a special prize for Wilbur the pig and everyone's just like "Guess he's magic, huh?" and everyone claps and the dad gets $25 stands out as how I sort of imagining the adult world would work when I was a little kid.

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir - It takes a special kind of cheek to use "Well, jail for mother" as dialog in your novel but Muir pulls it off. I admit I did have to check online a bit to see what was going on here. This novel is intentionally confusing but that can be hard to make sure of if you haven't read the first one in a few years. Describing events contrary to what happened in the first of the series, and doing it all in second person, is a gamble to convey Harrow's fractured mental and emotional state to the reader, but sticking through it I do think it all (mostly) comes together in the third act and pays off. There was a lot of setup in here for the next couple books and now I feel like I'm beholden to them. (Also, "none pizza, left beef" and Homestar references sprinkled in.) 

Blueberry Hill Cookbook by Elsie Masterson - I didn't read this cover-to-cover, but I did read the preface, each section introduction, and skimmed all the recipes. What was mostly interesting here was this physical copy was my grandmother's, so it's got little annotations throughout, mostly "good!" or "very good!". Also it's full of pressed four-leaf clovers - I'm not sure if those were hers or my mom's. The book itself has an assertive tone, with a repeated sentiment of "if you can't get these ingredients exactly, don't bother." For 1959 the curry recipe is downright assertive with two whole tablespoons of curry powder (preferably imported).

Books Completed in February 2022

 Am I doing this every month now?

unnovations from zeppotron.com - This is a print version of a catalog of fake items from their website back in the 2000s sometime. Popped into my head and, though I wasn't able to find a decent archive, I was able to pick up this print copy on the cheap. This is a perfect example of the kind of humor I often find hilarious and leaves my wife stone-faced cold. Absolute nonsense presented as staid fact. Products include "The pocket hand-expansion bee that helps you appease Chad Michaels, woodland god", "Could this be the world's most dramatically effective baker-infuriating hat?", "Flying onion-and-sock squadron keeps mewling kids out of your hair for a second", and "The mouthless stumbling boy creature that shakes illegal intruders to the very core". Dumb.

The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges - I have a feeling this was not meant to be read cover-to-cover, but I've been reading RPG bestiaries that way for so long it felt natural. And there is a lot in here that could be harvested for a game. Humans made of shifting patterns of heat, and the conceptual ancestor to the salamander, the pyrausta. There's more than a dash of orientalism in here--alongside including Biblical and Talmudic creatures it makes for a surreal read, but I guess that's Borges.

The Secret History by Procopius - The Bright Ages, which I read last month, basically dedicates a chapter to this ancient screed. I had started in on it a bit last year but came back after reading that, so I have to admit to some prejudice in my read. The hate-boner for Theodora is on display. I was struck by how many of Justinian's described flaws reminded me of our 45th president--some incompetencies are consistent across the centuries it would seem. The mention of the monstrous whale Porphyrius was a surprise that I am stealing for a game.

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi - This was a hell of a way to kick off Black History Month. Not sure what to say here, or if it's my place to say anything at all or just hush and read the thing. I guess I'll say the parts that are speculative are chillingly believable.

Food (The Nib #11) - A quarterly comics compilation from thenib.com which I get from subscribing. My favorite entries in this installment were about the history of yams, and about feeding migratory vultures in Thailand. The longer form entries didn't click for me for some reason as much as the ones in previous issues had, though.

The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin - Among other things, this is a paen to New York City. A lot of that was lost on me--I've only been once, and the things that were described as making it wonderful here didn't connect for me. That said, all the other things this story is connected like a brick, and I'm looking forward to the next two books. Writing horror and writing horror movie imagery are different beasts, and the latter usually falls flat when attempted, but she makes it dance (writhe)? The chapters where one of the characters is facing down both otherworldly horrors and a real-world doxing simultaneously really stuck out to me.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells - This novelette confronts a surprising number of questions about free will and the borders of humanity for a story whose protagonist is named "Murderbot". You'd expect more action sequences, but the ones here are crisp and meaningful. The speculative nature of a future dominated by lowest bidders is perhaps too easy to believe right now.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson - Spoilers for a 130-year-old book coming up. One thing that popular culture has turned around in this story over the decades is having Hyde be hulking and Jekyll being a meek little man. In the original, Jekyll is a robust man, and Hyde is smaller and wizened, which the doctor speculates might be due to his evil nature not having been exercised much in his life so far. The story leans on a trope I don't think you see much these days, but still has legs--a scientist compounds some incredible formula, but one of the ingredients in the original batch is impure in a way they cannot rediscover. Speaking of tropes, you don't get many people dying of shock over the course of several weeks these days.

The Illithiad by Bruce R. Cordell - I discovered this while cleaning the basement, having thought it lost or sold years ago. It's a fun little splatbook from AD&D 2e all about mind flayers. I wonder how some of it would actually be used at the table, but it does have possibly the creepiest psychic power ever published for D&D: "Crisis of Breath", which shuts down the target's automatic breathing, forcing them to focus on it, to the point of foregoing sleep. The formatting is very weird, with the font just changing to a narrow sans-serif for a few sentences seemingly at random, then switching back. Not sure if it was a conscious decision or they just rushed it to the printer.