dolorosa_12 | Island of apples (Reply)

The summer has continued to stretch into October — it was 25 degrees and sunny yesterday, which was perfect for our planned activity: wandering around the stalls on the green outside the cathedral, then picking up lunch to eat under the sky. The stalls themselves were there for the annual (and incongruous due to the weather) harvest festival: a heavy focus on apples (sold as fruit, juice, cider, in baked goods, etc), and various craft and food stalls selling their wares. We picked up a large haul of rare-ish varieties of apples, a couple of bottles of sharp, sour apple juice, and some fudge, and then paused to eat lunch at one of the large central tables — Jamaican food and prosecco (me), and pizza and cider (Matthias). It was lovely to be outdoors, so we spent a few hours in town, drifting from place to place.

Other than that (and the usual classes and swimming at the gym), I've been watching a lot of gymnastics, as the World Championships have been on. I'm not too fussed about who wins (or being spoiled about it), so mostly I've been watching things on catch-up having already known the results — I'm just here to see what the gymnasts are able to do. The quality has been high, and I find it pleasing in general that more and more countries seem able to send fantastic gymnasts to these kinds of competitions, rather than the same handful of usual suspects.

Due to spending a lot of time watching gymnastics, I've not had so much time to devote to reading, but I have read three books:

The Lion-Tamer's Daughter (Peter Dickinson), a reread of a book of four YA spooky stories that arrived in the boxes sent over by my mum. This was much more unsettling than I remembered — which has been my experience in general with the 1980s/1990s YA ghost story collections (of which I have several). It's not so much that the stories are scary, it's that they have chilling implications that completely passed me by when I read them as a teenager but which are extremely obvious to an adult reader.

The Sea of Tranquility (Emily St John Mandel) — the second pandemic novel by this author. It consists of four interlinked stories set in 1912, January 2020 (with some flashbacks to several years earlier), the 2200s, and the 2400s, with characters dealing with grief, loss, and the devastating shadow of historical and imagined pandemics. I found each individual section and its characters to be brilliantly drawn, written with exquisite perception and empathy (the book tour on Earth of a novelist based on a lunar colony in the 2200s is particularly well done), but I found the time travel conceit linking them to be kind of trite, with nothing original to be said about the ethics of time travel or the moral dilemmas it places on the time traveller. In some ways I just wish it could have left the mystery of the connection between the four stories unexplained and open ended.

A Study in Drowning (Ava Reid), a secondary world campus novel/gothic horror story in which two undergraduate academic rivals find themselves working in the mysterious, decaying manor of their country's most prestigious (and recently deceased) author, and uncovering terrifying and dangerous secrets. I really loved the atmosphere of this, and the book played to Reid's strengths (she's particularly good at writing characters who are dealing with mental illness and the aftermath of abuse and trauma), although the two central mysteries of the novel will be obvious to anyone who is familiar with both British and Irish folklore about otherworldly fairies, and A.S. Byatt's novel Possession. When I was proved right on both counts due to my own knowledge of such things, I didn't feel particularly cheated — I was just happy to be carried along on the wave of Reid's writing.

I'll close the post with a couple of Instagram recommendations if you like looking at beautiful and interesting places. Two of my favourite authors — Samantha Shannon and Kate Elliott — have recently returned from research trips to some spectacular parts of the world: Iceland and Central Asia respectively, and the photos they've been posting are wonderful. If you have Instagram accounts, you can view them at