Lifted by the summer breeze
May. 28th, 2023 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12It's been a nice weekend — summery weather, green and growing things all around — and I've been doing my best to have a good time in spite of the rather bad brain week I've been having. Matthias and I have just come back from a longish walk out along the river (two hours in total), which we followed up with lunch from the market, drinks outdoors in the courtyard garden of our favourite bar/cafe, and gelato eaten as we returned home. I did my regular two hours of fitness classes at the gym yesterday, and 1km swim at the pool this morning, yoga will happen this afternoon, and in general I'm trying to make an effor not to sit around in the house stewing in bad emotions.
I've managed to transcribe three more of my old newspaper book reviews/articles over on![[wordpress.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/1225b00cee13/-/s.wordpress.org/about/images/wpmini-blue.png)
dolorosa12, my longform reviews blog, which takes us into material published originally in 2004. The three articles in question — an interview with author Kevin Crossley-Holland, an article about that newfangled phenomenon, online book fan forums, and a review of Christopher Paolini's novel Eragon are striking to me in that although I feel my writing has improved — they all read less stiffly and pompously, to my mind — my thinking at the time is like that of a totally different person.
Crossley-Holland's books were an Arthurian children's trilogy, and I'm kind of gobsmacked by the specific books I mention in the throwaway survey of Arthuriana — most of them were an utter flash in the pan and there's no way I'd be recommending the majority of them today. I also clearly hadn't started studying medieval literature at university, as I assert in the article that Malory is the 'definitive' take on Arthurian legends, with zero mention of medieval Welsh literature (even though some of the 21st-century books I mention in the interview were clearly influenced by Welsh versions of the tales).
Meanwhile, the article about fan forums was written at a time when I was a lurker, rather than a participant in any online communities, so my take is all about the joys of anonymity, and about these spaces solely as a place where people could talk about books — rather than build friendships and community, which is what these places actually ended up becoming once I actively started taking part. It's amusing to see mention of the 'massive' 36-page thread on the Philip Pullman forum debating whether Lyra and Will ever slept together — I'm pretty sure if memory serves that that thread eventually ballooned to several hundred pages, with no conclusive, convincing argument to shut the debate down. And it makes me laugh to see discussion of the bench in the Oxford Botanical Gardens — by the time I'd moved to the UK, it had basically become a rite of passage for all Pullman fans to travel to the bench, preferably in the company of other members of the forum. I think I've been there three times and been photographed with various different configurations of forum denizens.
And the last article — the Paolini review — just makes me laugh in baffled amazement, because I apparently gave Eragon a glowing review, praised it for being 'richly imagined,' and asserted that although the book's literary influences were obvious, this clearly showed that Paolini was good at his research rather than being an unimaginative hack. I think I was just overawed by the fact that he was the same age as me, and had published the book (with his parents' small press!) at the age of fifteen. In any case, reading the review, it's almost as if I damned him with faint praise in spite of myself, even though it clearly wasn't my intention at the time.
In any case, here are the links to these articles, if you're interested. As before, the titles are the same as what the newspaper's subeditors gave them at the time of publication:
Modern Arthurian legend a labour of love
It's Booklovers Anonymous in cyberspace
Teen creation richly imagined
Other than carrying on with this project of reposting those old reviews and articles, I've been trying to do a bit of (undemanding) reading. This has mainly consisted of more of the old middle grade books sent over by my mother — Linnea in Monet's Garden, Linnea's Windowsill Garden, and Linnea's Almanac (Christina Björk, illustrated by Lina Anderson), which are three books about a little Swedish girl visiting Paris and Giverny on a Monet-inspired trip, growing plants indoors, and doing seasonal gardening and craft activities respectively. These books were huge family favourites when I was growing up (to the extent that we framed an entire trip to Paris and Giverny around mimicking Linnea's own journey, when I was twelve), and they're quite sweet, with some surprisingly good practical advice about indoor container gardening (provided one lives in a well insulated Swedish flat with double-glazed windows).
I also read The Mystery of Thorn Manor (Margaret Rogerson), which follows a trend of which I approve heartily — authors publishing what amounts to professional fanfic novellas featuring characters from their own longer works. I say fanfic because it's very tropey stuff, and tends to place more emphasis on characters' relationships and low-stakes activities in their downtime — a departure from novel-length writing in which such characters are dealing with much higher-stakes problems and dangers. In this novella, two characters — a librarian and sorcerer respectively — are trying to cope with a sentient house which is attempting to involve itself in their relationship, and preparing for a masked ball in which the librarian will be meeting her sorcerer boyfriend's family for the first time. It's quite a cosy and fun book.
Finally, I read 'The Mausoleum's Children', a short story by Aliette de Bodard published in a recent issue of Uncanny Magazine, focusing on some of de Bodard's favourite things to explore in fiction: post-apocalyptic space settings, and the attempts of those who remain to find hope, meaning, and community in the ruins.
I hope everyone has been having lovely weekends!
I've managed to transcribe three more of my old newspaper book reviews/articles over on
dolorosa12, my longform reviews blog, which takes us into material published originally in 2004. The three articles in question — an interview with author Kevin Crossley-Holland, an article about that newfangled phenomenon, online book fan forums, and a review of Christopher Paolini's novel Eragon are striking to me in that although I feel my writing has improved — they all read less stiffly and pompously, to my mind — my thinking at the time is like that of a totally different person. Crossley-Holland's books were an Arthurian children's trilogy, and I'm kind of gobsmacked by the specific books I mention in the throwaway survey of Arthuriana — most of them were an utter flash in the pan and there's no way I'd be recommending the majority of them today. I also clearly hadn't started studying medieval literature at university, as I assert in the article that Malory is the 'definitive' take on Arthurian legends, with zero mention of medieval Welsh literature (even though some of the 21st-century books I mention in the interview were clearly influenced by Welsh versions of the tales).
Meanwhile, the article about fan forums was written at a time when I was a lurker, rather than a participant in any online communities, so my take is all about the joys of anonymity, and about these spaces solely as a place where people could talk about books — rather than build friendships and community, which is what these places actually ended up becoming once I actively started taking part. It's amusing to see mention of the 'massive' 36-page thread on the Philip Pullman forum debating whether Lyra and Will ever slept together — I'm pretty sure if memory serves that that thread eventually ballooned to several hundred pages, with no conclusive, convincing argument to shut the debate down. And it makes me laugh to see discussion of the bench in the Oxford Botanical Gardens — by the time I'd moved to the UK, it had basically become a rite of passage for all Pullman fans to travel to the bench, preferably in the company of other members of the forum. I think I've been there three times and been photographed with various different configurations of forum denizens.
And the last article — the Paolini review — just makes me laugh in baffled amazement, because I apparently gave Eragon a glowing review, praised it for being 'richly imagined,' and asserted that although the book's literary influences were obvious, this clearly showed that Paolini was good at his research rather than being an unimaginative hack. I think I was just overawed by the fact that he was the same age as me, and had published the book (with his parents' small press!) at the age of fifteen. In any case, reading the review, it's almost as if I damned him with faint praise in spite of myself, even though it clearly wasn't my intention at the time.
In any case, here are the links to these articles, if you're interested. As before, the titles are the same as what the newspaper's subeditors gave them at the time of publication:
Modern Arthurian legend a labour of love
It's Booklovers Anonymous in cyberspace
Teen creation richly imagined
Other than carrying on with this project of reposting those old reviews and articles, I've been trying to do a bit of (undemanding) reading. This has mainly consisted of more of the old middle grade books sent over by my mother — Linnea in Monet's Garden, Linnea's Windowsill Garden, and Linnea's Almanac (Christina Björk, illustrated by Lina Anderson), which are three books about a little Swedish girl visiting Paris and Giverny on a Monet-inspired trip, growing plants indoors, and doing seasonal gardening and craft activities respectively. These books were huge family favourites when I was growing up (to the extent that we framed an entire trip to Paris and Giverny around mimicking Linnea's own journey, when I was twelve), and they're quite sweet, with some surprisingly good practical advice about indoor container gardening (provided one lives in a well insulated Swedish flat with double-glazed windows).
I also read The Mystery of Thorn Manor (Margaret Rogerson), which follows a trend of which I approve heartily — authors publishing what amounts to professional fanfic novellas featuring characters from their own longer works. I say fanfic because it's very tropey stuff, and tends to place more emphasis on characters' relationships and low-stakes activities in their downtime — a departure from novel-length writing in which such characters are dealing with much higher-stakes problems and dangers. In this novella, two characters — a librarian and sorcerer respectively — are trying to cope with a sentient house which is attempting to involve itself in their relationship, and preparing for a masked ball in which the librarian will be meeting her sorcerer boyfriend's family for the first time. It's quite a cosy and fun book.
Finally, I read 'The Mausoleum's Children', a short story by Aliette de Bodard published in a recent issue of Uncanny Magazine, focusing on some of de Bodard's favourite things to explore in fiction: post-apocalyptic space settings, and the attempts of those who remain to find hope, meaning, and community in the ruins.
I hope everyone has been having lovely weekends!