There and back again

I'm back from a week in Germany, visiting Matthias's family. The whole thing was a whirlwind of Covid tests, hanging out with niece and nephews (a five-year-old, a nearly three-year-old, and a six-week old), picking apples, and sitting out in the sunshine in various bucolic settings, and it left me exhausted and gave me a very bad cold. (I'm pretty sure it's not Covid but will know for sure when the results of yesterday's PCR test are given to me this evening. Edited to add that I've just received the result, and it was negative as I expected. As I was saying to various people, I'm the only person on earth who'll still get a cold in spite of lockdowns, working from home, spending virtually no time indoors with strangers, and wearing facemasks while surrounded by others wearing facemasks.) It was good that we went — Matthias's family really, really wanted us there — but I'm glad to be home and able to catch my breath for a few days before work begins again next week.

While in Germany, I read three books:

Dial A For Aunties by Jessie Sutanto, a lighthearted and madcap tale of romance, wealth and family about a young Indonesian Chinese-American woman who runs a wedding business with her mother and three aunts, and who is trying to juggle her love life, her plans for the future, the massive society wedding she and her relatives have been hired to organise — and the dead body stashed in her aunt's catering fridge. The book is a great blend of ridiculous, soap operatic shenanigans and family dynamics, bossy, interfering aunties, and exploration of 'women's work' in immigrant communities.

Elatsoe by Darcy Little Badger, a YA novel with a very 1990s/early 2000s urban fantasy vibe (except that it's set in more rural locales) in which supernatural beings live openly among ordinary humans, and magical/supernatural abilities are a part of everyday life. The book draws heavily on Native mythology (specifically Lipan), and is at once a coming-of-age adventure story and a book whose villain is whiteness and settler colonialism. I found the worldbuilding fun, but the story itself frustratingly clumsy in terms of execution for reasons I can't easily articulate.

Blood and Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson is the first in her series of historical mysteries set in Georgian England. I'd accidentally read the series out of order (the second book first), but the stories are self-contained enough that it didn't matter. This book was mostly set in Deptford, which was at the time a port town whose wealth came from slavery, and the mystery hinges on enslavement, the abolitionist movement, and the lives of black people in Britain, both enslaved and free. It was a great book, with a story well told, but the subject matter is — as you can probably tell from the description — pretty heavy, so bear that in mind.

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I very much enjoyed (in the sense of boggling and laughing with much schadenfreude) this Guardian long read about a group of cryptocurrency millionaires attempting to set up a libertarian paradise at sea without a clue as to how any of it would work. The results were predicatable, and the author skewers those involved with precision and scorn.

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There's a love meme doing the rounds, and I think we could all do with a dose of anonymous praise. My thread is here, and please feel free to drop links to your own threads in the comments.

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I will end this post with the observation that I have spent a frustrating and absurd amount of time over the past two days attempting to identify the designer of safaahathot's amazing dress, and so far it has been entirely fruitless.