Still banking on the Hugo Award package, as I realised the Best series category also cames with most of the novels, I started reading th Goblin King series, by Katherine Addison, quickly realising I had already read (and enjoyed) the first volume. Thanks to being stuck in Sapporo airports for an unspecified duration, I went through two of the volumes, which are enticing enough if somewhat slow and focussing on very mundane aspects like the layering of the city where the action takes place and its tram lines. (And never omitting a single meal or tea type, the more annoyingly because these types are all made up!) Another shortlisted series is John Scalzi’s Old Man War, of which I already read four volumes and enjoyed very much, if not to the point of reading the seven of them. Maybe later! I also read the novelette Automatic Noodle, which features a group of abandoned robots starting a (Xi’an!) noodle company by making almost perfect biang biang pulled noodles. 
(With the intricate ideogram 𰻞𰻞麵) After almost a month in Japan eating soba at least once a day (!), it should have appealed to me but it did not, as the robotic aspects were very light while the whole story fell flat and stale, far from the expected dish! But it made me curious to attempt to try making the noodles..!
Watched (over the Arctic Ocean!) Au revoir là–haut (See you up there), a 2017 movie by Albert Dupontel about a couple of WW I trench veterans conceiving a heist by selling war memorials that never materialise. The story is told on the fantastic realism side, methinks too much!, but it vividly reminded me of a WW I museum in La Somme I visited a few years ago, where a whole section was dedicated to the (rough) treatment of disfigured soldiers with missing face parts… And of the birth of neuroplastic surgery.
The most frightening section of 
