![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12The final day of Worldcon was a day for winding down. I had committed to only one event, a reading by Jeannette Ng, in which she read from a work in progress, her short story 'How the Tree of Wishes Gained its Carapace of Plastic' (published in an anthology of stories in conversation with works by Kipling, called Not So Stories), and recited excerpts from the Mulan epic poem in Cantonese, translating into English as she went.
I made friends with people in the queue for the reading, and was even given a bottle of colour-changing gin by someone else in the queue (apparently because I'd asked a 'kitbag question', which had impressed the gin gifter, an Israeli, who explained that due to the fear of an ordinary question becoming a kitbag question, asking questions is somewhat discouraged in Israeli culture, something they found frustrating. So the gin was a gift to me for being the opposite of that ... aggressively helpful to the point of personal detriment). Of course the problem was that we only had hand luggage with Ryanair, so I spent the remainder of the convention trying to find someone to give the gin to!
After meeting up with Matthias (who had been in a panel on literary representations of dragons), we headed off for a final lunch in Dublin, in a nice Japanese restaurant near the convention centre, before collecting our bags from the hotel and heading for the airport. In spite of the fact that we were flying with Ryanair, we had more luck getting home than many other friends, whose tales of flight cancellations and other debacles sounded horrendous. Our flight was only one hour late, which with Ryanair means you've come out ahead!
In spite of how much time I spent in queues at Worldcon, I didn't end up spending much time reading, but I did manage to finish two books (mainly on the flights and in the airports): The Frangipani Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu (a cosy mystery set in 1930s Singapore, told from the point of view of Chen Su Lin, a Singaporean Chinese teenage girl who works as the assistant to a police inspector, which I enjoyed so much that I immediately bought the sequel and am reading it now), and The Heart of the Circle by Keren Landsman (a disappointing urban fantasy set in Tel Aviv which unfortunately had flat characters, inconsistent worldbuilding, and essentially reminded me that while I like how Abigail Nussbaum writes her reviews, I tend to disagree with her taste and interpretation in 95 per cent of instances and shouldn't look to her blog for recommendations).
I've got a photoset of pictures from my time in Dublin up on Instagram, and also a photo of the lovely message Kate Elliott wrote in my copy of Buried Heart, which she signed for me.
All in all, I had a fabulous time at Worldcon, and am very glad I went.
I made friends with people in the queue for the reading, and was even given a bottle of colour-changing gin by someone else in the queue (apparently because I'd asked a 'kitbag question', which had impressed the gin gifter, an Israeli, who explained that due to the fear of an ordinary question becoming a kitbag question, asking questions is somewhat discouraged in Israeli culture, something they found frustrating. So the gin was a gift to me for being the opposite of that ... aggressively helpful to the point of personal detriment). Of course the problem was that we only had hand luggage with Ryanair, so I spent the remainder of the convention trying to find someone to give the gin to!
After meeting up with Matthias (who had been in a panel on literary representations of dragons), we headed off for a final lunch in Dublin, in a nice Japanese restaurant near the convention centre, before collecting our bags from the hotel and heading for the airport. In spite of the fact that we were flying with Ryanair, we had more luck getting home than many other friends, whose tales of flight cancellations and other debacles sounded horrendous. Our flight was only one hour late, which with Ryanair means you've come out ahead!
In spite of how much time I spent in queues at Worldcon, I didn't end up spending much time reading, but I did manage to finish two books (mainly on the flights and in the airports): The Frangipani Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu (a cosy mystery set in 1930s Singapore, told from the point of view of Chen Su Lin, a Singaporean Chinese teenage girl who works as the assistant to a police inspector, which I enjoyed so much that I immediately bought the sequel and am reading it now), and The Heart of the Circle by Keren Landsman (a disappointing urban fantasy set in Tel Aviv which unfortunately had flat characters, inconsistent worldbuilding, and essentially reminded me that while I like how Abigail Nussbaum writes her reviews, I tend to disagree with her taste and interpretation in 95 per cent of instances and shouldn't look to her blog for recommendations).
I've got a photoset of pictures from my time in Dublin up on Instagram, and also a photo of the lovely message Kate Elliott wrote in my copy of Buried Heart, which she signed for me.
All in all, I had a fabulous time at Worldcon, and am very glad I went.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-26 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-27 01:17 pm (UTC)