Flickering I roam
Nov. 6th, 2022 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I go on and on about our garden vegetables and fruit trees, but these things were a massive selling point when it came to making the decision to buy our house, and they have brought me so much happiness over the past two years. They're a marker of the passage of time and the turn of the seasons, if nothing else: today I cooked up the final apples from the tree, and gathered all the windfall quince to make quince jelly. Now all that's left are the herbs, and the container garden — sporadic tomatoes and chilli, handfuls of thyme, sage, or rosemary to flavour various meals.
This weekend has very much been all about the bucketing rain, dashing out during breaks in the weather. Once a year, local artists and craftspeople have an exhibition (and sale) in the community theatre/cinema/exhibition centre, and it happened this weekend (the aim, I think, is to get people to buy things as Christmas presents). Matthias and I wandered on down on Saturday morning, and ended up buying a couple of pieces of fiber art to hang on the walls in the upstairs landing. We followed this up with lunch from the Mexican food truck and a couple of drinks in the beer garden of our favourite cafe/bar in town.
We made it home just in time to avoid the rain, I cooked this this lentil and confit leeks recipe for dinner (and did yoga while it was in the oven), and we snuggled up to watch our Saturday evening film — this time the Enola Holmes sequel, a riot of mystery-solving Victoriana with a dash of social commentary.
Today started with its usual 8am swim (I made it to 14 laps out of the eventual 40 before anyone else joined me in the lane, which I count as a massive win!), leisurely crepes and coffee for breakfast, and a bit more work on my Yuletide assignment, which I'd assess as being about 1/3 done. I then ducked my head into Twitter (which is still in full panic mode) before settling down to finish my book. Before I launch into my thoughts on the book, I thought I'd flag some words of caution about the cohost terms of service, which have been doing the rounds on Twitter and whichforests_of_fire also pointed out to me in the comments of my previous post. My feeling is that cohost's creators never anticipated becoming the next big thing in terms of popular social media platforms, and didn't really think things through (because they were assuming they were going to be a tiny space used by a small group of likeminded people for similar purposes). I would be cautious about sharing personally identifying information or longform original content there — but hopefully people are generally pretty savvy and responsible about such things on new and untested online platforms.
And now, on to the book — Her Majesty's Royal Coven (Juno Dawson) — which unfortunately didn't work for me.
The book is a fantasy novel which imagines a society of magic users, hiding in plain sight in contemporary Britain. They've got various organisational structures in place, and they carry the weight of a difficult history, including real-world historical persecution of supposed 'witches' in the UK and elsewhere. This scaffolding is interesting, and I liked the overall idea of a group of childhood friends who now women in their thirties, trying to deal with the various challenges of adulthood, their own supernatural powers, and their changing friendship.
However, the whole book is really a fairly clunky and obvious metaphor for the ongoing vicious cruelty of supposedly feminist transphobes in the UK towards trans people (and those who are accepting of them), and for JK Rowling's trajectory from successful and well liked national treasure to transphobe-in-chief specifically. This is obviously an important current in UK politics and culture, but I don't think the book adds anything to the conversation. It's written in such an introductory level, and with such unsubtlety, that it's hard to know its intended audience — those who are appalled at Rowling and other transphobes, and those who know that stereotypical 'white feminism' has massive blind spots when it comes to intersectionality are not going to get anything out of this book, while those who really need to hear these messages are never going to read them. It's a book aimed at adult readers, rather than teens, so readers who may find it revalatory or feel seen in terms of its representation of trans youth are unlikely to pick it up.
It's the start of a series, but based on the first novel, I'm unlikely to pick up the next.
Over the course of writing that short book review, the light has left the sky, and the house has begun to fill with the aroma of tonight's dinner, which is a Burmese curry, slow-cooked in the oven. The weekend is winding down, and I feel sleepy, and slow, and wintry.
This weekend has very much been all about the bucketing rain, dashing out during breaks in the weather. Once a year, local artists and craftspeople have an exhibition (and sale) in the community theatre/cinema/exhibition centre, and it happened this weekend (the aim, I think, is to get people to buy things as Christmas presents). Matthias and I wandered on down on Saturday morning, and ended up buying a couple of pieces of fiber art to hang on the walls in the upstairs landing. We followed this up with lunch from the Mexican food truck and a couple of drinks in the beer garden of our favourite cafe/bar in town.
We made it home just in time to avoid the rain, I cooked this this lentil and confit leeks recipe for dinner (and did yoga while it was in the oven), and we snuggled up to watch our Saturday evening film — this time the Enola Holmes sequel, a riot of mystery-solving Victoriana with a dash of social commentary.
Today started with its usual 8am swim (I made it to 14 laps out of the eventual 40 before anyone else joined me in the lane, which I count as a massive win!), leisurely crepes and coffee for breakfast, and a bit more work on my Yuletide assignment, which I'd assess as being about 1/3 done. I then ducked my head into Twitter (which is still in full panic mode) before settling down to finish my book. Before I launch into my thoughts on the book, I thought I'd flag some words of caution about the cohost terms of service, which have been doing the rounds on Twitter and which
forests_of_fire also pointed out to me in the comments of my previous post. My feeling is that cohost's creators never anticipated becoming the next big thing in terms of popular social media platforms, and didn't really think things through (because they were assuming they were going to be a tiny space used by a small group of likeminded people for similar purposes). I would be cautious about sharing personally identifying information or longform original content there — but hopefully people are generally pretty savvy and responsible about such things on new and untested online platforms.And now, on to the book — Her Majesty's Royal Coven (Juno Dawson) — which unfortunately didn't work for me.
The book is a fantasy novel which imagines a society of magic users, hiding in plain sight in contemporary Britain. They've got various organisational structures in place, and they carry the weight of a difficult history, including real-world historical persecution of supposed 'witches' in the UK and elsewhere. This scaffolding is interesting, and I liked the overall idea of a group of childhood friends who now women in their thirties, trying to deal with the various challenges of adulthood, their own supernatural powers, and their changing friendship.
However, the whole book is really a fairly clunky and obvious metaphor for the ongoing vicious cruelty of supposedly feminist transphobes in the UK towards trans people (and those who are accepting of them), and for JK Rowling's trajectory from successful and well liked national treasure to transphobe-in-chief specifically. This is obviously an important current in UK politics and culture, but I don't think the book adds anything to the conversation. It's written in such an introductory level, and with such unsubtlety, that it's hard to know its intended audience — those who are appalled at Rowling and other transphobes, and those who know that stereotypical 'white feminism' has massive blind spots when it comes to intersectionality are not going to get anything out of this book, while those who really need to hear these messages are never going to read them. It's a book aimed at adult readers, rather than teens, so readers who may find it revalatory or feel seen in terms of its representation of trans youth are unlikely to pick it up.
It's the start of a series, but based on the first novel, I'm unlikely to pick up the next.
Over the course of writing that short book review, the light has left the sky, and the house has begun to fill with the aroma of tonight's dinner, which is a Burmese curry, slow-cooked in the oven. The weekend is winding down, and I feel sleepy, and slow, and wintry.