a million times a trillion more (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dolorosa_12) wrote2025-01-12 04:57 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2025-01-12 04:57 pm
Dance for life
Last night, it was so cold that we elected to put a bottle of wine outside the kitchen door in the garden, instead of in the fridge — and it chilled to a far cooler temperature than would have been achieved in the fridge. Everything is covered with a thick layer of spiky frost that doesn't melt away in the sunlight. I have been outdoors — to the gym and the market yesterday morning, and for a brief walk with Matthias today — but it's a bit too biting even for me. I like to look at the landscape, rather than be within it, if possible.
It's been a (mostly) good week for reading. I've finished three books — two of which were excellent, the other of which showed promise, but was let down by its execution.
Let's start off with the more disappointing book, Ink Blood Sister Scribe (Emma Törzs), a standalone fantasy novel in which books, written in blood and wielded by the right hands, are infused with deadly magical power. The two sisters of the title are grappling — badly — with this dangerous legacy, attempting to lead lives under the radar, protecting the secrecy of their family's extensive collection of magical books. The novel got on my bad side almost immediately due to two of my pet irritations: Americanisms in the mouths and minds of ostensibly British characters (surely an upper-class British person would not complain about travelling in 'coach,' and threats to employer-linked private health insurance would almost certainly not be at the forefront of most British people's minds, since this kind of health insurance is not the norm), and characters staying for the long term in foreign countries, with no mention of dual nationality nor the need to apply and be eligible for specific types of visas. But really, the main problem — which kept the book firmly in the 'interesting ideas, pedestrian execution' — was that this was a book about big secrets, and big, plot-twisty reveals, none of which were particularly difficult to spot from a mile away. The final big reveal is laid out to the reader by a clunky infodump towards the end of the book, by which point I'd lost patience entirely.
Thankfully, I followed this up with something much better: The Garden Against Time (Olivia Laing), a book which I remember seeing recommended at some point by at least one person here on Dreamwidth. This is in part a memoir (Laing and her partner, an older Cambridge academic, buy a house in Suffolk in early 2020, and set about restoring its overgrown, chaotic garden), in part a journey back through time as Laing digs into the historic roots of the garden she is restoring, and her own personal and family history, and in part a political, social, cultural and literary history of the garden, mainly in a British context (although she also looks at plantation gardens in the Caribbean and the United States). As we follow Laing on her personal journey, the political events of the 2020s are interwoven with John Milton and William Morris, with Jane Austen and Derek Jarman, with gardens as flawed utopias and as sites inscribing political power into the land. It's an incredible book, made all the more personal to me because I'm familiar with all the physical locations Laing describes — this is very much my part of the world — and can still remember the specific years covered by the book, which line up with the years that I myself started work on growing my own gardens, so when Laing notes that 2022 was a particularly hot, dry summer when the grass burnt in the heat, I can visualise my own lawn immediately.
Finally, I spent most of this afternoon reading The City in Glass (Nghi Vo), a gorgeous feast of a book in which an angel and a demon, connected by complicated, intertwined love for each other, and for a city, drift in and out of each other's lives over centuries, nurturing and rebuilding and shaping the city — and its inhabitants — as they bind each other closer together. It's a story for which the phrase heartbreakingly beautiful feels like an appropriate description.
As well as books, I've been fortunate in my viewing this weekend. Last night, Matthias and I lit the wood-burning stove, and curled up in front of the TV to watch Kneecap, a multilingual (Irish and English) film about two incompetent small-time drug-dealing brothers, and a dissatisfied music teacher in a Gaelscoil, who form the eponymous Irish-language hip hop group of the title. It's set in Belfast, and is exactly the right blend of earnest and irreverent in its approach to both the legacy of the Troubles, and the struggle to keep the Irish language alive in that part of the world. It works very well purely as a musical version of a sports movie (struggling underdogs experience setbacks on their way to achieving their dream), but if viewed with at least some knowledge of the history and current sociopolitical context of the north of Ireland, and/or experience of learning Irish, it's absolutely hilarious (I have learnt Irish back in the day, though my understanding is pretty passive these days — indeed the same dialect spoken in the film — and when all the secondary school students are shown robotically reciting sentences such as the girl cuts peat in the rain in their Irish class, I howled with laughter).
Beyond films and books, I've been keeping an eye on the prompts at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
threesentenceficathon, and have been sporadically adding my fills to this series on AO3; I'll try to add some prompts of my own once a new post opens up.
fandomtrees is close to opening — there are a handful of requests which need at least one more gift before the collection is ready to go. If you're able to fill any of the prompts here, I'm sure this would be very welcome by the remaining participants. You can see a list of all requests on this Google spreadsheet.
I hope everyone's been having cosy and nourishing weekends.
It's been a (mostly) good week for reading. I've finished three books — two of which were excellent, the other of which showed promise, but was let down by its execution.
Let's start off with the more disappointing book, Ink Blood Sister Scribe (Emma Törzs), a standalone fantasy novel in which books, written in blood and wielded by the right hands, are infused with deadly magical power. The two sisters of the title are grappling — badly — with this dangerous legacy, attempting to lead lives under the radar, protecting the secrecy of their family's extensive collection of magical books. The novel got on my bad side almost immediately due to two of my pet irritations: Americanisms in the mouths and minds of ostensibly British characters (surely an upper-class British person would not complain about travelling in 'coach,' and threats to employer-linked private health insurance would almost certainly not be at the forefront of most British people's minds, since this kind of health insurance is not the norm), and characters staying for the long term in foreign countries, with no mention of dual nationality nor the need to apply and be eligible for specific types of visas. But really, the main problem — which kept the book firmly in the 'interesting ideas, pedestrian execution' — was that this was a book about big secrets, and big, plot-twisty reveals, none of which were particularly difficult to spot from a mile away. The final big reveal is laid out to the reader by a clunky infodump towards the end of the book, by which point I'd lost patience entirely.
Thankfully, I followed this up with something much better: The Garden Against Time (Olivia Laing), a book which I remember seeing recommended at some point by at least one person here on Dreamwidth. This is in part a memoir (Laing and her partner, an older Cambridge academic, buy a house in Suffolk in early 2020, and set about restoring its overgrown, chaotic garden), in part a journey back through time as Laing digs into the historic roots of the garden she is restoring, and her own personal and family history, and in part a political, social, cultural and literary history of the garden, mainly in a British context (although she also looks at plantation gardens in the Caribbean and the United States). As we follow Laing on her personal journey, the political events of the 2020s are interwoven with John Milton and William Morris, with Jane Austen and Derek Jarman, with gardens as flawed utopias and as sites inscribing political power into the land. It's an incredible book, made all the more personal to me because I'm familiar with all the physical locations Laing describes — this is very much my part of the world — and can still remember the specific years covered by the book, which line up with the years that I myself started work on growing my own gardens, so when Laing notes that 2022 was a particularly hot, dry summer when the grass burnt in the heat, I can visualise my own lawn immediately.
Finally, I spent most of this afternoon reading The City in Glass (Nghi Vo), a gorgeous feast of a book in which an angel and a demon, connected by complicated, intertwined love for each other, and for a city, drift in and out of each other's lives over centuries, nurturing and rebuilding and shaping the city — and its inhabitants — as they bind each other closer together. It's a story for which the phrase heartbreakingly beautiful feels like an appropriate description.
As well as books, I've been fortunate in my viewing this weekend. Last night, Matthias and I lit the wood-burning stove, and curled up in front of the TV to watch Kneecap, a multilingual (Irish and English) film about two incompetent small-time drug-dealing brothers, and a dissatisfied music teacher in a Gaelscoil, who form the eponymous Irish-language hip hop group of the title. It's set in Belfast, and is exactly the right blend of earnest and irreverent in its approach to both the legacy of the Troubles, and the struggle to keep the Irish language alive in that part of the world. It works very well purely as a musical version of a sports movie (struggling underdogs experience setbacks on their way to achieving their dream), but if viewed with at least some knowledge of the history and current sociopolitical context of the north of Ireland, and/or experience of learning Irish, it's absolutely hilarious (I have learnt Irish back in the day, though my understanding is pretty passive these days — indeed the same dialect spoken in the film — and when all the secondary school students are shown robotically reciting sentences such as the girl cuts peat in the rain in their Irish class, I howled with laughter).
Beyond films and books, I've been keeping an eye on the prompts at
threesentenceficathon, and have been sporadically adding my fills to this series on AO3; I'll try to add some prompts of my own once a new post opens up. fandomtrees is close to opening — there are a handful of requests which need at least one more gift before the collection is ready to go. If you're able to fill any of the prompts here, I'm sure this would be very welcome by the remaining participants. You can see a list of all requests on this Google spreadsheet.I hope everyone's been having cosy and nourishing weekends.