Crack, pure crack... Don't you people know I have finals?

I got Karen Armstrong's memoir The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness from a book fair ages ago, but kind of avoided reading it because although I knew that Armstrong used to be a nun and that informs her perspective of religion, I was nervous that knowing Armstrong better might make me enjoy her other books less. As it turns out, knowing a bit more about life experience has indeed changed the way I view her books that I've already read, but in ways I wasn't expecting, and most of the guesses I'd made from her style of writing turned out to be pretty close.

( Cut for length. )

Anyway, great read, enjoyed myself even through the difficult parts, I have a better understanding (I think) of the ways that Armstrong thinks that differ from my own, but still illuminate routes that are useful to think about.

I bought Alexander Freed's novelisation of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story back when the movie first came out and I was fannishly excited over it, but I didn't read it. I think it's because most of the time novelisations don't really work for me, either by overexplaining what I prefer to be open, or going for characterisation choices that I disagree with. This novelisation does both! But enough time has passed, and Andor has opened the world further into its own thing, that I can process the novelisation as a product of a specific point in time.

Also, good thing I didn't read it back then because it completely undoes my missing scene fic, in the usual ways that crack me up, eg. my thinking that the timeline as seen didn't make emotional or plotworking sense in order to accomplish all the things that film needed to do during the Yavin 4 interlude, but the movie script, and from there the novelisation, disagreed with me.

The novelisation itself was interesting, and I suppose scratches that itch for world details and setting the scene. But its blank spots are funny, eg. Cassian really has nothing going on emotionally, except (1) mission and (2) Jyn, with the second point overtaking the first pretty quick; no insight into Chirrut's headspace at all, since he only gets the one scene (where he dies) since everything else is given to Baze, I think due to limitations in being able to flesh out the Guardians of Whills lore; Bodhi really does not get his due for what he actually did and sacrificed in order to get the plans out. The movie's already a little waffly on the last part, and I get that the story is wholly Jyn's, but... the novelisation's Jyn is not the movie's Jyn either, so I couldn't really pin emotional investment there either. The broad strokes of the character are the same, but the novelisation (and the script's?) Jyn is way angrier, conflicted and traumatized that movie!Jyn's heartbroken stoicism. So there's that! But I did like the imperial bureaucracy and Orson Krennic parts, which I suppose are difficult to get wrong.