Between iced coffees

It's too hot to write a long post today, and in any case I haven't been doing anything particularly exciting this weekend. Leaving the house has been an unbearable exercise in walking through increasing heat and humidity, and although it's been necessary at various points (to go to my two fitness classes, to visit the little local art gallery, to pick up such necessities as gelato), it's not been exactly pleasant. The fact that my desire to cool down with an iced coffee is warring with my disinclination to walk even the ten minutes to the bakery to get said iced coffee probably sums things up perfectly.

I spent most of this morning after I got back from the pool lying around on the bed, alternating between finishing my book and dozing, while the breeze blew heavily through the open window. It's another one of those days when I don't want to eat much more than tomato salad and cold fruit; one of our cherry trees is absolutely laden with ripe cherries but even the effort to pick them feels like too much, so I resort instead to grabbing handfuls every time I have to go out into the garden.

Other than rereads, I finished one book this week — Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries (Harriet Fawcett). This is the first in what I assume will be a trilogy (but what I had thought before completing it to be a standalone novel) in which the titular character, a folklorist working on the titular encyclopedia, travels to a fake fantasy version of an indedeterminate Scandinavian village to complete the last piece of fieldwork necessary for her research. The fairy lore is very well done, ringing extremely true to someone like me, whose most borrowed book from the public library as a teenager was definitely Katharine Briggs's Encyclopedia of Fairies, and overall I wanted to like the book a lot more than I ended up doing — I love stories about the interactions between humans and scary otherworldly beings, I particularly love stories that involve people travelling to the otherworld to release their family, lovers or neighbours from captivity, and all the weird and wonderful rules they need to follow in order to survive.

What I do not love are stories that are obviously in conversation with previous well-received books about nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Britain, scholarship and the occult (in a version of our world in which magic and the supernatural are real and everyone accepts this), such as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Sorcerer to the Crown, or Jeannette Ng's Under the Pendulum Sun, but which don't seem to have made much effort to accurately represent academia during that period. The faux academic writing and the author's various descriptions of both research and academic conferences do not ring true at all — they seem more like the twenty-first-century versions of all these things. To top things off, for a book that is trying create a sense of sort of quirky Britishness, there are glaring Americanisms that crept in — 'fall' instead of 'autumn,' and 'backpack' instead of 'rucksack,' were the ones I spotted, but I'm sure there were more. I have to say that all this really soured me on the book — and I wonder what on Earth the book's editor was doing. Either they didn't notice these things, or they didn't think they mattered — neither reflects well on their abilities.

And that's about where I'm at in terms of the weekend. I'm trying to motivate myself to do an hour-long yoga class, but as I will need to do this in the hottest room of the house, I'm not currently feeling a huge amount of enthusiasm at the prospect!