dolorosa_12: (sunflowers)
a million times a trillion more ([personal profile] dolorosa_12) wrote2021-08-15 04:51 pm

Trying to catch your heart is like trying to catch a star

This has been a good weekend, with lots of nice things:

  • Fresh zucchini and beetroot from the garden, and lots of grazing — every time I go out there I help myself to blackberries from the neighbours' overgrown mess of a garden, and new peas from the vegetable patch, and fennel seeds from the herb garden.


  • Yoga every day.


  • Walking out with Matthias, [personal profile] notasapleasure, her husband and their two giant rescue greyhounds to one of the nearby villages, where we sat out in the garden of the pub and ate Thai food for dinner. Here's a photoset.


  • [community profile] ladybusiness linked to one of my old blog posts in a recent links roundup. Since I'm really struggling with longform blogging at the moment, it's nice that my older longform posts are still resonating with people.


  • But mostly, it's just been books, and books, and books. They've all been very different:

  • Grave Importance, by Vivian Shaw, the final book in her Greta Helsing trilogy, in which the heroine is a doctor to supernatural creatures, and everyone is competent and trying their hardest to do the right thing.


  • Daughters of Night, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, a historical crime novel set in 18th-century London. The tone and content reminded me a lot of the TV series Harlots.


  • 'Enemies to Lovers', by Aster Glenn Grey, a f/f romance novella in which the two women are fandom nemeses. Enjoyment of this will depend on your tolerance for the presence of every fandom cliché in the book, but its evocation of transformative fandom rang true to me, although I found it almost quaint that the two characters' dislike of each other hinges on conflicting tastes in the portrayal of their favourite fic pairing, rather than moral panic over supposedly 'problematic' content vs a ship and let ship attitude.


  • A Ghost in the Throat, by Doireann ní Ghríofa, an autobiography that interweaves the author's experiences as a mother in twenty-first-century Ireland with the story of the (female) creator of an eighteenth-century Irish poem. My summary could not do this book justice — it's about 'women's work,' the quiet, painful ordinary labour of everyday life, about family, and about the act of creation (of art, and of life).


  • Cold Bayou, by Barbara Hambly, another of her Benjamin January mysteries. This one hinged on wealth, and inheritance, and the complicated family trees of the wealthy French families around which Benjamin and his own family orbit, and involved all my favourite characters (above all Dominique and Chloë) having to work together, so it's definitely among my favourites of the series so far.


  • The Light of the Midnight Stars, by Rena Rossner, a fantasy novel about sisters, survival and magic in medieval Hungary and Romania, drawing on fairytales, folklore, and Jewish mythology. I'll read pretty much any work built on these elements, and Spinning Silver and The Wolf and the Woodsman are among my favourite fantasy novels of all time, and The Light of the Midnight Stars occupies a similar space in terms of reclaimation of antisemitic tropes and painful history. However, I would say that it is much less hopeful in the conclusions it draws than these other two books, and allows its characters much less happiness.


  • I hope your weekends have been lovely!
    bruttimabuoni: (Default)

    [personal profile] bruttimabuoni 2021-08-15 06:20 pm (UTC)(link)
    This sounds pretty wonderful as a weekend!

    I really liked the first Laura Shepherd-Robinson, must pick this one up too.
    merit: (Star Trek Spock)

    [personal profile] merit 2021-08-16 10:09 am (UTC)(link)
    It is probably my Australian-ness but fandom is handled so... awkwardly by so many writers, I just get cringe most of the time. Indirectly, I can handle.

    I really must try to read Rena Rossner this year.
    chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)

    [personal profile] chestnut_pod 2021-08-16 08:17 pm (UTC)(link)
    That sounds like a lovely weekend, and I'm glad you've been spending time with good books.
    trepkos: (Default)

    [personal profile] trepkos 2021-08-17 10:37 am (UTC)(link)
    It's nice to see cows left with their calves. We never see that in Jersey.
    lirazel: An outdoor scene from the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice of Lizzie and her aunt and uncle reading at the foot of a tree ([film] extensive reading)

    [personal profile] lirazel 2021-08-17 02:30 pm (UTC)(link)
    So glad to hear it's been a good time for you!