Do you know the language of flowers?
Mar. 30th, 2025 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Today it's so windy that one of the sheets I have hanging out to dry has blown off the line repeatedly. Although this is somewhat frustrating, the combination of the heat and the wind suggests this laundry will be dry in several hours. Everything is sunlit and floral, and accompanied by a chorus of birdsong, which feels audibly more present than at other times of the year. Yesterday I got my first hot cross bun from the bakery down the road: a highlight of the year which (unlike supermarkets, which start selling hot cross buns practically on 26th December) is possible only for about two or three weeks in the lead-up to Easter.
It's been a low-key, low-energy weekend — other than the usual morning trips to the gym and grocery shopping at the market, I've barely left the house, which suits me fine, as work continues to absolutely flatten me, and I need a very undemanding weekend to recover. Matthias and I did watch a film last night (La Chimera, an Italian film which on the surface is about a group of rather hopeless people in a crumbling village eking out a living by stealing Etruscan archaeological relics from underground burial sites, but in reality just hurls every piece of of symbolism about descent to underworlds, otherworlds, labyrinths, death, sacrifice and harvest at the wall to see what sticks), and I did drag him out today for a wander around the market square in the sunshine, looping back home via what we jokingly termed the middle class trifecta of posh cheese shop, posh toiletries/homeware shop ('Don't let me buy any candles,' I said to Matthias before we left the house, and then returned with two new candles), and independent bookshop, but that's it for the weekend. I now plan to immerse myself in a mixture of reading (I bookmarked a bunch of stuff frompeaked's recent fanfic exchange wrap-up post, and still haven't made a start on any of it), yoga, and lots of slow, fragrant, Iranian cooking. It should be good.
My reading has slowed a bit, but I did still manage to get through a few books this week. These included The Last Days of Budapest (Adam LeBor), a fascinating glimpse of the city during the lead-up and duration of World War II, as seen through the diaries of some of its inhabitants (ranging from aristocrats to Western spies and escaped prisoners-of-war, from resistance fighters to political collaborators, and many Jewish citizens from all walks of life, chronicling their own destruction). Any one of these figures would have been a fascinating subject for a book on their own, and LeBor's writing suffers a bit from a tendency to jump from person to person in order to give different perspectives on the same events (plus an irritating habit of ascribing emotions and perceptions to the people described without having any way of knowing what they really felt if it wasn't recorded in their diaries or memoirs), but all in all, it's a fairly solid piece of work. I knew the broad brush outline of this period of Hungarian history, but even so I was struck by the level of denial that was the common thread throughout the book: the Hungarian political leadership (a mixture of old-school conservatives still living by a kind of 19th-century aristocratic honour code, and out-and-out fascist ideologues) thinking they'd somehow be able to make a separate, favourable peace with the western Allies when the Soviet army was already at the gates, the western Allies thinking they'd somehow be able to peel Hungary away from its alliance with the Nazis in the early days of the war, and even in how the country's experiences of the war (and in particular its non-Jewish, non-Roma population's complicity in the Holocaust) have been remembered.
On the basis of a recommendation byisis, I picked up City of Stairs, the first in a trilogy of fantasy novels by Robert Jackson Bennett in which the gods whose tangible power translated into real, earthly power for the peoples who worshipped them were killed by inhabitants of a nation which was cut off from these gods' favour, and consequently enslaved and mistreated. The death of the gods upends the world order, inverting the power dynamic, and the novel picks up around 100 years after these events have taken place, and the god-killing nation has occupied all the countries of its former oppressors. This uneasy state of affairs is, of course, more unstable than it appears on the surface, and various political and metaphysical intrigues unfold and interweave in a satisfying way. I was recommended the series because I had mentioned I like stories in which the divine is tangible, and how that affects people's relationship with, and attitudes towards, gods and other supernatural beings. The book is great in this regard, but it's also fantastic at exploring another favourite scenario of mine, in which a war or great injustice has taken place, and rather than ending with complete defeat of an invading force, both sides in the war have to live uneasily with one another and accommodate themselves to this unsatisfactory state of affairs. I love seeing how characters deal with this, and I look forward to seeing things unfold in the remaining two books.
I've always felt Octavia Butler's writing was a glaring absence in my familiarity with the western SFF literary canon — I'd read Kindred years ago, but none of her other books were available in my public library, and I hadn't pursued her writing further. Then a whole bunch of her books became available for £0.99 each as ebooks, and I took advantage of the situation, downloading the lot, and starting my trip through her bibliography with Parable of the Sower, a post-apocalyptic road novel set in the 2020s as imagined by Butler in 1993 with devastating perception. It begins in a besieged community (inhabited mainly by Black and Latino citizens of what was once a middle-class Californian oasis of white-collar workers), whose residents struggle to eke out an existence of security and survival under almost constant, violent attack from those who possess even less than their scant means of sustenance. The interesting thing here is that most characters at this point think of their world as dystopian (government and institutions no longer work as the older characters remember from their youth, everything is gradually being privatised, corruption and bribery are the only way to get any institutional support, whether that's police to investigate a crime or medical care, most jobs no longer pay cash but instead are paid in room and board, if they exist at all, the only food characters get is what they can grow, farm, hunt or trade, education is provided communally by unqualified parents to small groups of children, etc), but readers can see that the apocalypse has already happened (everyone is armed, and survival must be backed up with violence). The second half of the novel is a journey, as our point-of-view narrator (a teenage girl with a religious vision of her preferred future, and a singleminded relentlessness in moving towards it) is forced to leave this fragile oasis, journeying north by foot with an ever-growing band of companions towards an uncertain future. The book is an absolutely unflinching portrait of one possible, but plausible future for the United States, drawn with devastating clarity in Butler's spare prose — almost prophetic in its vision.
Finally, I read Storm Pegs, poet Jen Hadfield's account of her move to Shetland and attempt to build a life there. The way Hadfield tells it, Shetland itself — its landscape, weather, history, and dialect — is elusively difficult to pin down in words, at least in English, and the book is a memoir about grappling with a place that feels for her like a fierce Atlantic storm, or a mackerel on a fishing line, or an item of laundry trying to break free of its titular storm pegs in a wild gust of wind. If you like navel-gazing memoirs about people, places, and language, I'd definitely recommend this book.
Yesterday, another annual event took place: a local farmer, and his young son arrived outside our house on a massive tractor, and cut all the grass in the vacant field over the road. That, along with the clocks changing over to daylight saving time last night, is a sure sign that spring is well and truly here.
It's been a low-key, low-energy weekend — other than the usual morning trips to the gym and grocery shopping at the market, I've barely left the house, which suits me fine, as work continues to absolutely flatten me, and I need a very undemanding weekend to recover. Matthias and I did watch a film last night (La Chimera, an Italian film which on the surface is about a group of rather hopeless people in a crumbling village eking out a living by stealing Etruscan archaeological relics from underground burial sites, but in reality just hurls every piece of of symbolism about descent to underworlds, otherworlds, labyrinths, death, sacrifice and harvest at the wall to see what sticks), and I did drag him out today for a wander around the market square in the sunshine, looping back home via what we jokingly termed the middle class trifecta of posh cheese shop, posh toiletries/homeware shop ('Don't let me buy any candles,' I said to Matthias before we left the house, and then returned with two new candles), and independent bookshop, but that's it for the weekend. I now plan to immerse myself in a mixture of reading (I bookmarked a bunch of stuff from
peaked's recent fanfic exchange wrap-up post, and still haven't made a start on any of it), yoga, and lots of slow, fragrant, Iranian cooking. It should be good.My reading has slowed a bit, but I did still manage to get through a few books this week. These included The Last Days of Budapest (Adam LeBor), a fascinating glimpse of the city during the lead-up and duration of World War II, as seen through the diaries of some of its inhabitants (ranging from aristocrats to Western spies and escaped prisoners-of-war, from resistance fighters to political collaborators, and many Jewish citizens from all walks of life, chronicling their own destruction). Any one of these figures would have been a fascinating subject for a book on their own, and LeBor's writing suffers a bit from a tendency to jump from person to person in order to give different perspectives on the same events (plus an irritating habit of ascribing emotions and perceptions to the people described without having any way of knowing what they really felt if it wasn't recorded in their diaries or memoirs), but all in all, it's a fairly solid piece of work. I knew the broad brush outline of this period of Hungarian history, but even so I was struck by the level of denial that was the common thread throughout the book: the Hungarian political leadership (a mixture of old-school conservatives still living by a kind of 19th-century aristocratic honour code, and out-and-out fascist ideologues) thinking they'd somehow be able to make a separate, favourable peace with the western Allies when the Soviet army was already at the gates, the western Allies thinking they'd somehow be able to peel Hungary away from its alliance with the Nazis in the early days of the war, and even in how the country's experiences of the war (and in particular its non-Jewish, non-Roma population's complicity in the Holocaust) have been remembered.
On the basis of a recommendation by
isis, I picked up City of Stairs, the first in a trilogy of fantasy novels by Robert Jackson Bennett in which the gods whose tangible power translated into real, earthly power for the peoples who worshipped them were killed by inhabitants of a nation which was cut off from these gods' favour, and consequently enslaved and mistreated. The death of the gods upends the world order, inverting the power dynamic, and the novel picks up around 100 years after these events have taken place, and the god-killing nation has occupied all the countries of its former oppressors. This uneasy state of affairs is, of course, more unstable than it appears on the surface, and various political and metaphysical intrigues unfold and interweave in a satisfying way. I was recommended the series because I had mentioned I like stories in which the divine is tangible, and how that affects people's relationship with, and attitudes towards, gods and other supernatural beings. The book is great in this regard, but it's also fantastic at exploring another favourite scenario of mine, in which a war or great injustice has taken place, and rather than ending with complete defeat of an invading force, both sides in the war have to live uneasily with one another and accommodate themselves to this unsatisfactory state of affairs. I love seeing how characters deal with this, and I look forward to seeing things unfold in the remaining two books. I've always felt Octavia Butler's writing was a glaring absence in my familiarity with the western SFF literary canon — I'd read Kindred years ago, but none of her other books were available in my public library, and I hadn't pursued her writing further. Then a whole bunch of her books became available for £0.99 each as ebooks, and I took advantage of the situation, downloading the lot, and starting my trip through her bibliography with Parable of the Sower, a post-apocalyptic road novel set in the 2020s as imagined by Butler in 1993 with devastating perception. It begins in a besieged community (inhabited mainly by Black and Latino citizens of what was once a middle-class Californian oasis of white-collar workers), whose residents struggle to eke out an existence of security and survival under almost constant, violent attack from those who possess even less than their scant means of sustenance. The interesting thing here is that most characters at this point think of their world as dystopian (government and institutions no longer work as the older characters remember from their youth, everything is gradually being privatised, corruption and bribery are the only way to get any institutional support, whether that's police to investigate a crime or medical care, most jobs no longer pay cash but instead are paid in room and board, if they exist at all, the only food characters get is what they can grow, farm, hunt or trade, education is provided communally by unqualified parents to small groups of children, etc), but readers can see that the apocalypse has already happened (everyone is armed, and survival must be backed up with violence). The second half of the novel is a journey, as our point-of-view narrator (a teenage girl with a religious vision of her preferred future, and a singleminded relentlessness in moving towards it) is forced to leave this fragile oasis, journeying north by foot with an ever-growing band of companions towards an uncertain future. The book is an absolutely unflinching portrait of one possible, but plausible future for the United States, drawn with devastating clarity in Butler's spare prose — almost prophetic in its vision.
Finally, I read Storm Pegs, poet Jen Hadfield's account of her move to Shetland and attempt to build a life there. The way Hadfield tells it, Shetland itself — its landscape, weather, history, and dialect — is elusively difficult to pin down in words, at least in English, and the book is a memoir about grappling with a place that feels for her like a fierce Atlantic storm, or a mackerel on a fishing line, or an item of laundry trying to break free of its titular storm pegs in a wild gust of wind. If you like navel-gazing memoirs about people, places, and language, I'd definitely recommend this book.
Yesterday, another annual event took place: a local farmer, and his young son arrived outside our house on a massive tractor, and cut all the grass in the vacant field over the road. That, along with the clocks changing over to daylight saving time last night, is a sure sign that spring is well and truly here.