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dolorosa_12I'm about a day-and-a-half into a three-day weekend, and so far it's been great. After months of drought and heatwaves, it would be the August long weekend that was filled with rain, but I was so sick of this new climate change normal summer that I greeted the rain with absolute delight. Matthias and I spent most of yesterday out on a day-trip to Bury St Edmund's, and managed to time things well, so that the rain only fell when we were under shelter.
We were there for a beer festival in the cathedral, where we scored the perfect table in the cloisters, and spent a fun few hours chatting, eating food truck food, and people watching. We followed that up with a great meal in this place, then caught the train home beneath dramatic sheets of black clouds, beating the rain again.
Today, I greeted the morning with a fantastic yoga class, taking advantage of our newly-empty spare room (the old furniture is gone, the new laminate flooring has been laid, but the new furniture hasn't arrived yet) to move and stretch with a gorgeous view of the rising sun and the birds and squirrels frolicking in the treetops and hedgerow surrounding the field across the road. Then it's mostly been cleaning and journalling, interspersed with reading (Four Aunties and A Wedding, Jesse Sutanto's fun sequel to her earlier comedic family drama Dial A For Aunties). I think the rest of the weekend will be more of the same, plus some swimming and slow cooking. All in all, it's been perfect so far.
I've mentioned a couple of times that I've been working my way through a reread of an Australian Celtic fantasy series that I loved as an undergrad, and that I was spectacularly unimpressed. Now that I've finished all six, I can confidently say that while the overall plot of Kate Forsyth's Witches of Eileanan is competently enough done (if unoriginal), my sentiments on the reread are entirely justified. The premise of the series is that people in Scotland persecuted as witches during the early modern period really possessed magical powers, and a large enough group of them were able to fold space and time and transport themselves into another universe (the titular Eileanan), a place inhabited with various supernatural creatures (dragons, merpeople, etc) where they can live freely and practice magic openly. After 1000 years have passed (but of course technological developments and socio-political arrangements have remained entirely static, oh epic fantasy, never change!), the pendulum has swung, and witches are now hunted and persecuted once more. Over the course of the six books of the series, our heroes fight to overthrow their unjust rulers and restore a world with magic at its heart where all are free to live according to their own beliefs. I can recognise exactly what captivated eighteen-year-old me: the two heroines are a pair of twins, raised without the knowledge of each other's existence, with super-special red hair and blue eyes, super special magical powers (one can talk telepathically with animals and transform herself into different animals, the other was raised by a nation of super austere mountain warriors and is a skilled fighter, and she can also fly), tragic backstories, and super special love interests, and twenty-plus years on, I can look back indulgently on all that. Who amongst us hasn't fallen in love with source material almost designed in a lab to appeal our teenage power fantasies?
In some ways, I'm being really unfair to the series. This sort of thing was utterly typical of the genre in the 1990s and early 2000s when it was published, but I just don't have patience for it now. Among other things, it contains:
The completely uncritical conservative monarchism of the genre (the solution to a bad ruler is obviously to replace him with a good one, and nothing will ever go wrong again)
Completely uncritical misogyny
Completely uncritical noble savage tropes so cringeworthy that I almost physically flinched back from the page
Sexual violence used as an easy route for a tragic backstory for one of the heroines
Nonsensical worldbuilding (how did one flying ship of fleeing Scottish witches manage to populate an entire continent which had no human population before their arrival? why is Eileanan such a mishmash of random Scottishness from a variety of different time periods? etc)
Wildly inconsistent characterisation to suit plot needs (one minute Lachlan, the rightful king the characters are fighting to restore to the throne, is traumatised and vindictive and unable to forgive his adversaries, the next he's magnanimous and urging everyone to be pragmatic for the sake of the bigger picture), and character decisions (e.g. betrayal, mishearing and misinterpreting crucial information) determined by the needs of the plot
Phonetically written out Scottish accents
In general, not something I'm planning to revisit again any time soon. I reread a lot, and frequently (I'd say that probably close to 1/4 of my total yearly reading is rereading), and the vast majority of this stuff holds up, so this was something of a surprise. There was a huge boom in Celtic epic fantasy by Australian women authors in the 1990s and 2000s, and I read most of it, but the quality is definitely variable. It's interesting that this reread finished just before I encountered this essay by Marissa Lingren about rereading in your forties and beyond, as Lingren's characterisation is much closer to my usual experiences, but so wildly divergent in this specific case. I can still see exactly what about Forsyth's series captivated me, but it's like opening the door on the mind of a different person.
We were there for a beer festival in the cathedral, where we scored the perfect table in the cloisters, and spent a fun few hours chatting, eating food truck food, and people watching. We followed that up with a great meal in this place, then caught the train home beneath dramatic sheets of black clouds, beating the rain again.
Today, I greeted the morning with a fantastic yoga class, taking advantage of our newly-empty spare room (the old furniture is gone, the new laminate flooring has been laid, but the new furniture hasn't arrived yet) to move and stretch with a gorgeous view of the rising sun and the birds and squirrels frolicking in the treetops and hedgerow surrounding the field across the road. Then it's mostly been cleaning and journalling, interspersed with reading (Four Aunties and A Wedding, Jesse Sutanto's fun sequel to her earlier comedic family drama Dial A For Aunties). I think the rest of the weekend will be more of the same, plus some swimming and slow cooking. All in all, it's been perfect so far.
I've mentioned a couple of times that I've been working my way through a reread of an Australian Celtic fantasy series that I loved as an undergrad, and that I was spectacularly unimpressed. Now that I've finished all six, I can confidently say that while the overall plot of Kate Forsyth's Witches of Eileanan is competently enough done (if unoriginal), my sentiments on the reread are entirely justified. The premise of the series is that people in Scotland persecuted as witches during the early modern period really possessed magical powers, and a large enough group of them were able to fold space and time and transport themselves into another universe (the titular Eileanan), a place inhabited with various supernatural creatures (dragons, merpeople, etc) where they can live freely and practice magic openly. After 1000 years have passed (but of course technological developments and socio-political arrangements have remained entirely static, oh epic fantasy, never change!), the pendulum has swung, and witches are now hunted and persecuted once more. Over the course of the six books of the series, our heroes fight to overthrow their unjust rulers and restore a world with magic at its heart where all are free to live according to their own beliefs. I can recognise exactly what captivated eighteen-year-old me: the two heroines are a pair of twins, raised without the knowledge of each other's existence, with super-special red hair and blue eyes, super special magical powers (one can talk telepathically with animals and transform herself into different animals, the other was raised by a nation of super austere mountain warriors and is a skilled fighter, and she can also fly), tragic backstories, and super special love interests, and twenty-plus years on, I can look back indulgently on all that. Who amongst us hasn't fallen in love with source material almost designed in a lab to appeal our teenage power fantasies?
In some ways, I'm being really unfair to the series. This sort of thing was utterly typical of the genre in the 1990s and early 2000s when it was published, but I just don't have patience for it now. Among other things, it contains:
In general, not something I'm planning to revisit again any time soon. I reread a lot, and frequently (I'd say that probably close to 1/4 of my total yearly reading is rereading), and the vast majority of this stuff holds up, so this was something of a surprise. There was a huge boom in Celtic epic fantasy by Australian women authors in the 1990s and 2000s, and I read most of it, but the quality is definitely variable. It's interesting that this reread finished just before I encountered this essay by Marissa Lingren about rereading in your forties and beyond, as Lingren's characterisation is much closer to my usual experiences, but so wildly divergent in this specific case. I can still see exactly what about Forsyth's series captivated me, but it's like opening the door on the mind of a different person.
no subject
Date: 2026-08-30 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-30 12:13 pm (UTC)You're so right that romantasy has taken over from the 'shy special magical girl meets damaged boy' epic fantasy teenage girl power fantasy of my youth!
no subject
Date: 2026-08-30 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-30 12:35 pm (UTC)I'm glad you liked the essay. It rings so true to my own experiences. There are books that I reread now that I've definitely reread over 100 times since I was a child, so it was wonderful to read an essay on the topic by someone who so obviously feels that this is a worthwhile endeavour.
no subject
Date: 2026-08-30 05:14 pm (UTC)That said, what a lovely alternate perspective from that Lingren essay! I enjoyed it very much; thank you for the link. I'm pleased to see The Hero and the Crown brought up there: it really is a book that offers something to an older reader. McKinley's oeuvre as a whole is, actually; all my adult rereads of her books (except, perhaps, Beauty) revealed new depths.
no subject
Date: 2026-08-30 05:34 pm (UTC)I so appreciated the Lingren essay crossing my path at this exact moment — it was such a tonic after slogging with grim determination through the Eileanan books in baffled incredulity that I'd given them four stars when I last logged them on Goodreads. And you're so right about McKinley!
no subject
Date: 2026-08-30 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-30 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-09-11 03:35 pm (UTC)