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dolorosa_12I've just come back from a little, sunlit walk into town with Matthias. We collected iced coffee, and watched dogs frolic on the lawns beside the cathedral.
The weekend began with two hours of classes in the gym on Saturday morning, after which Matthias and I headed into the market. It was warm, and sunny, and we'd prudently booked a table in the courtyard garden at our favourite cafe/bar — and then smugly watched multiple groups of people showing up and having to be turned away because everyone else had had the same idea and there was no more room outside. We ate lunch from the Indian food truck at the market, and watched the clouds pass overhead in the blue sky.
Saturday evening was cosy and quiet. I cooked this recipe, we shared a bottle of white wine that we'd bought at a wine tasting in December, and, after I was reminded of its existence on Friday, we watched Lola Rennt (Run, Lola, Run), which Matthias had never seen, but which we somehow managed to own on DVD. It was as good as ever, but given that I love a) Berlin, b) techno music, and c) self-sacrificing, resourceful women, I would of course say that!
This morning started with a gorgeous morning at the pool: I was (as I always am) first into the water, gliding back and forth for 1km in the clear sunlight. Then Matthias and I spent the morning after breakfast in the garden, digging up the ever-encroaching blackberries, and planting seeds for peas, corn, and spring onions in some of the vegetable patches. We'll see how all this goes — this year is something of an experiment.
Other than my ongoing Benjamin January and Roma sub Rosa rereads, I've finished two new-to-me books this weekend, one excellent, and one very good.
The excellent book was The Warm Hands of Ghosts (Katherine Arden), the author's first book for adult readers since she completed her Winternight trilogy. This new book is a standalone novel, set on the grim, muddy trenches of the Western Front in the final year of World War I, and follows the path of Canadian nurse Laura Iven, who has returned to the battlefield after being sent home injured, as she seeks her brother Freddie, who is missing in action. Interwoven with Laura's story is that of Freddie, who became trapped by artillery fire in a collapsed structure in no man's land with a German soldier, the pair having to work together to emerge from the darkness and survive. The book wears its influences — essentially every story in the western canon about journeys into underworlds, otherworlds, and lands of the dead — obviously, and the blasted landscape of the war is rendered quite literally an underworld of death and trauma-induced forgetting, inhabited by people whose experiences of the war have separated them from the company of the living. Arden's ultimate conclusion is that hell is not the violence and cruelty of the war, per se, but rather the empty meaninglessness forcing the young men and women of the early twentieth century into such violence and cruelty. We meet the Christian Devil in this book, and his evil is not in acts of cruelty and physical pain, but rather in psychologically breaking people with the realisation that they have suffered through human-built hell for no cause or purpose. Evil is indifference, and to escape from its claws and return to the world of the living, the book's characters must rebuild themselves piece by piece into people capable of feeling connection and purpose.
The second book — which was good, but not excellent — was All the Seas in the World (Guy Gavriel Kay), the third in a trilogy set in Kay's usual alternative version of our own world, with a focus on the events in and around the Mediterranean Sea during the Renaissance. As is Kay's preference, the story deals with a moment of profound change in human history that unmakes the world and unmoors everyone caught up in its wake — in this case, the fall of Byzantium to/capture of Byzantium by the Ottoman Empire (depending on one's perspective). His characters, as always, are people who can easily move between settings and worlds — mercenary leaders, merchants, pirates — with even more of an emphasis on these focal characters' experiences of exile and being outsiders than usual. As always, our heroes are the kinds of people who approach thorny problems and danger with resourcefulness, bravery, and canny alliances. If you've read a lot of Kay's books, you'll know what you're getting in for — he knows what to do in his stories, and he does it well. I have to say that this time around, his way of writing religion annoyed me more than usual. His alternative world has analogues for Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and he does a reasonable job in this regard — but, like many fantasy authors, he has a poor sense of the variations within religious beliefs and practices caused by space and by time. In essence, all his Christian characters worship in the same way across his entire imagined world, all his Jewish and Muslim characters practice their religions in the same way in his book set in the dying days of Al-Andalus as they do in fake fantasy Renaissance Venice or Ottoman Istanbul, and so on. The only variation is between fanatics and hypocrites of all religions, and the religious beliefs and practices of the characters he views as laudable — tolerant, compassionate, and with space for flexibility and pluralism. For a world that otherwise feels quite vivid and lived-in, it's a glaring blind spot.
Now I'm going to make a cup of tea, and sit with Dreamwidth for a while, before heading upstairs to do some yoga in the afternoon sun, and then make dinner. Honestly, this weekend has been pretty close to perfect.
The weekend began with two hours of classes in the gym on Saturday morning, after which Matthias and I headed into the market. It was warm, and sunny, and we'd prudently booked a table in the courtyard garden at our favourite cafe/bar — and then smugly watched multiple groups of people showing up and having to be turned away because everyone else had had the same idea and there was no more room outside. We ate lunch from the Indian food truck at the market, and watched the clouds pass overhead in the blue sky.
Saturday evening was cosy and quiet. I cooked this recipe, we shared a bottle of white wine that we'd bought at a wine tasting in December, and, after I was reminded of its existence on Friday, we watched Lola Rennt (Run, Lola, Run), which Matthias had never seen, but which we somehow managed to own on DVD. It was as good as ever, but given that I love a) Berlin, b) techno music, and c) self-sacrificing, resourceful women, I would of course say that!
This morning started with a gorgeous morning at the pool: I was (as I always am) first into the water, gliding back and forth for 1km in the clear sunlight. Then Matthias and I spent the morning after breakfast in the garden, digging up the ever-encroaching blackberries, and planting seeds for peas, corn, and spring onions in some of the vegetable patches. We'll see how all this goes — this year is something of an experiment.
Other than my ongoing Benjamin January and Roma sub Rosa rereads, I've finished two new-to-me books this weekend, one excellent, and one very good.
The excellent book was The Warm Hands of Ghosts (Katherine Arden), the author's first book for adult readers since she completed her Winternight trilogy. This new book is a standalone novel, set on the grim, muddy trenches of the Western Front in the final year of World War I, and follows the path of Canadian nurse Laura Iven, who has returned to the battlefield after being sent home injured, as she seeks her brother Freddie, who is missing in action. Interwoven with Laura's story is that of Freddie, who became trapped by artillery fire in a collapsed structure in no man's land with a German soldier, the pair having to work together to emerge from the darkness and survive. The book wears its influences — essentially every story in the western canon about journeys into underworlds, otherworlds, and lands of the dead — obviously, and the blasted landscape of the war is rendered quite literally an underworld of death and trauma-induced forgetting, inhabited by people whose experiences of the war have separated them from the company of the living. Arden's ultimate conclusion is that hell is not the violence and cruelty of the war, per se, but rather the empty meaninglessness forcing the young men and women of the early twentieth century into such violence and cruelty. We meet the Christian Devil in this book, and his evil is not in acts of cruelty and physical pain, but rather in psychologically breaking people with the realisation that they have suffered through human-built hell for no cause or purpose. Evil is indifference, and to escape from its claws and return to the world of the living, the book's characters must rebuild themselves piece by piece into people capable of feeling connection and purpose.
The second book — which was good, but not excellent — was All the Seas in the World (Guy Gavriel Kay), the third in a trilogy set in Kay's usual alternative version of our own world, with a focus on the events in and around the Mediterranean Sea during the Renaissance. As is Kay's preference, the story deals with a moment of profound change in human history that unmakes the world and unmoors everyone caught up in its wake — in this case, the fall of Byzantium to/capture of Byzantium by the Ottoman Empire (depending on one's perspective). His characters, as always, are people who can easily move between settings and worlds — mercenary leaders, merchants, pirates — with even more of an emphasis on these focal characters' experiences of exile and being outsiders than usual. As always, our heroes are the kinds of people who approach thorny problems and danger with resourcefulness, bravery, and canny alliances. If you've read a lot of Kay's books, you'll know what you're getting in for — he knows what to do in his stories, and he does it well. I have to say that this time around, his way of writing religion annoyed me more than usual. His alternative world has analogues for Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and he does a reasonable job in this regard — but, like many fantasy authors, he has a poor sense of the variations within religious beliefs and practices caused by space and by time. In essence, all his Christian characters worship in the same way across his entire imagined world, all his Jewish and Muslim characters practice their religions in the same way in his book set in the dying days of Al-Andalus as they do in fake fantasy Renaissance Venice or Ottoman Istanbul, and so on. The only variation is between fanatics and hypocrites of all religions, and the religious beliefs and practices of the characters he views as laudable — tolerant, compassionate, and with space for flexibility and pluralism. For a world that otherwise feels quite vivid and lived-in, it's a glaring blind spot.
Now I'm going to make a cup of tea, and sit with Dreamwidth for a while, before heading upstairs to do some yoga in the afternoon sun, and then make dinner. Honestly, this weekend has been pretty close to perfect.
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Date: 2024-04-16 04:06 pm (UTC)The Winternight series is so good!
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Date: 2024-04-15 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-04-15 10:31 pm (UTC)Good luck with the garden!
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Date: 2024-04-18 12:07 pm (UTC)