Beyond Selidor

Today is another January talking meme post, this time brought to you by montfelisky, who asked for a significant childhood memory.

Me being who I am, I couldn't narrow it down to one.

( When I was a child the world seemed so wide )

I could go on, but that's probably enough. I have a dreadful short-term memory, but my memories of distant childhood experiences are clear and vivid, and extensive.

So, here we are at the close of yet another year. My country of origin is on literal and figurative fire, my chosen home country at the moment is on the figurative cliff edge, ready to dive off on 31 January, and generally the state of the world is not good. This is, therefore, yet another year of great personal and professional success for me, which took place against a backdrop of apocalyptic collapse.

So I guess it's time for the year's end meme?

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

I'm good at planning and queueing, which meant that I only missed out on one panel that I wanted to see at Worldcon — and this because it was back-to-back with another panel I was attending. Fortunately, however, Matthias was able to make it into the panel I missed, and he took notes, as requested by dhampyresa and schneefink.

( Panel description behind the cut )

( Matthias's notes behind the cut, transcribed exactly as written so apologies if things don't make sense out of context, also apologies that I don't know who said what )

This weekend has been a calm one, full of books, and sunlight, and growing things. I spent most of Saturday in Ely with Matthias, where notasapleasure and her husband fed us a dinner comprised almost entirely of vegetables grown in their allotment. We were able to sit outside in their garden for about five minutes, at which point it began to rain, so we went indoors to eat in their conservatory, listening to the rain patter on the roof.

It's been a good week for catching up with female-centric TV: I finished watching the second seasons of both Killing Eve, and Harlots. The latter, in particular, is fantastic, although I'm finding it mildly amusing how many minor characters appear to have been named after current Conservative Party politicians — you would have to think that six characters named as such is deliberate, surely?

Last time I did a reading log post, I'd been a bit disappointed with the quality of the books most recently read, but I'm glad to say things have improved significantly since then. Like most of my corner of the internet, I was overwhelmed and awestruck by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's joint novella, This Is How You Lose the Time War, an epistolary love story between time-travelling spies on opposing sides in a vast, cosmic war. It's a gorgeous, intricate story in which both authors' voices interweave beautifully, and I reviewed it here.

I had been particularly disappointed by Jordanna Max Brodsky's novels about Greek gods solving supernatural crimes in modern-day New York, so I was doubtful going in to her novel The Wolf in the Whale, a historical fantasy about the medieval Norse journey to, and presence in, North America, told from the perspective of Inuit characters. But in actual fact I loved it a lot, although (and I might be wildly wrong here, given that I am cis) I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone who is trans, particularly if they were AFAB, as there were several characterisation elements in this regard that gave me pause.

Other than these books, I've been continuing to make my way through the Hugo finalists — I've now read all the Best Novel nominees (other than one book which is the final in a trilogy whose first book I didn't enjoy and doubt I will enjoy in its series' final installment), and just have a couple of Campbell finalists' works and YA novels to go. But I will leave my discussion of those to my final Hugos discussion post, which should go up at some point next week, depending on how fast I can read.

I hope everyone else has had equally restful weekends.

One of the unfortunate side effects of having a depressive episode for most of March and early April is that my ongoing reading log sort of dropped off the radar. This is a shame, as I've read a lot of great books during that time.

I'm going to leave The True Queen by Zen Cho and Wicked Saints by Emily A. Duncan for later, longer reviews over on my reviews blog, as they were definitely the high points of my recent reading.

Other than those, I read a little bit of short fiction - 'Old Media' by Annalee Newitz (featuring characters from her book Autonomous trying to navigate relationships and consent in a world inhabited by robots and indentured people; meandering and character-driven, but a bit lacking in substance), 'Rag and Bone' by Priya Sharma (creepy horror story set in an alternate nineteenth-century Liverpool where the rich can use the poor for body parts), and 'Miranda in Milan' by Katharine Duckett (what happens to Miranda when she leaves the island after the events of The Tempest; The Tempest is my favourite Shakespeare play, so I was very much looking forward to this, and I was not disappointed). The first two works are free to read on Tor.com, while the second is a novella, and not free.

In terms of novels, my library holds on The Wicked King by Holly Black and Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor finally came through. Taylor is very hit and miss with me. I think she writes fabulous, atmospheric settings, but her writing style usually doesn't work for me, and I think her stories generally lack in substance. I mean, her usual theme is that kindness, imagination and love will save the world, which is unobjectionable, but, as I say, I usually feel that all her effort goes into setting and the general feel of intricate weird quirkiness, and this was definitely my impression from Muse of Nightmares. On the other hand, I adored The Wicked King. Holly Black is a very iddy, indulgent writer, and thankfully her id and mine tend to align. I love what she's doing in this newest iteration of her fairyland setting — she plunders the best bits of European folklore about the otherworld, emphasising in particular the lore that fairies can't tell lies. I love that her fairy characters regard human beings and their ability to lie with fear and horror, and how truth, lies, and circumlocution (and all the other tricks that beings who can only speak the truth employ to avoid speaking truths they don't want spoken) become weaponised. The plot gallops on at a mile a minute, and the twist at the end was fantastic. I'm very much looking forward to the final book in the trilogy.

Sadly, the final book I've read in this recent burst of reading, Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear, was a big disappointment. I've enjoyed Bear's books set in her Karen Memory universe, and particularly appreciated how character-driven they were, so I had expected her space opera to take a similar approach. Instead I found flat characters, lots of engineering/physics info-dumping, and a story that felt like a trial to read. It picked up a bit after the first twenty per cent or so, but convinced me that I am best sticking to Elizabeth Bear's steampunk, unfortunately.

Which recently read books have you enjoyed?

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 10: Reminds me of someone I love

Most of the books I own remind me of someone I love, either because they were gifts from my mother (and I sort of feel that my love of reading was indirectly a gift from her, because she read aloud to me so much when I was a child, and encouraged me to be a reader), or from my husband, or I bought them on the recommendation of someone I love.

However, what I will go with today is The Girls in the Velvet Frame by Adele Geras. I mentioned this book in passing on an earlier day of the meme, but didn't go into much detail. It's the story of a family consisting of a widowed mother and her five daughters (ranging in age from thirteen to three), living in genteel poverty in Jerusalem in around 1918. There's also a flamboyant, outrageous unmarried aunt (whose stories of her misspent youth travelling around Europe both entrance and outrage her conservative Jewish relatives), and various neighbours in their block of flats who also feature as almost de facto family members; over the course of the book Rifka, the oldest daughter, begins working in a bakery and starts courting the young son of family friends, as part of a tentative future arranged marriage. Hovering just outside the pages is the missing oldest child of the family — the only son, who emigrated to New York seeking a better life, and who has essentially dropped off the map. He hasn't written, he hasn't sent money as promised, and it's a great source of worry and grief to his mother and sisters. The search for Isaac (the brother), is a subplot that meanders through the novel, involving the velvet framed photograph of the title, the community effort of Jewish migrants to New York, and the persistence and ingenuity of the five sisters. But the book's true focus is on the incidental stories of everyday life — sneaking out to feeding the neighbours' rabbits, tables laid with Eastern European cakes and tea, keeping up appearances in the face of poverty, snacking on sugared almonds at their aunt Mimi's house — and it is beautiful because of it.

Why it reminds me of someone I love — when I am neither Jewish, living in the early twentieth centuries, nor having ever experienced that kind of poverty — is its emphasis on the relationships between mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts (men are almost incidental, plot devices rather than characters, which is honestly often what my childhood felt like), and its insistence in putting the stories of women and girls front and centre. My mother isn't very like the mother in the story (although one of my aunts is quite like the aunt, something I recognised even when I first read the book as a seven-year-old), and I grew up with one younger sister, not four (although in adulthood I did end up with four younger sisters — the youngest three were born to my stepmother when I was seventeen, twenty-two, and twenty-nine respectively). But the book has always reminded me of my family, and the family dynamic of my maternal relatives — supportive to the point of bossy interference, in and out of each other's houses without warning or invitation, but happiest in each other's company in spite of everything. It was the first book I read that prioritised the kinds of relationships that were important to me when I was growing up, and showed that stories often treated as marginal, boring, or unimportant were worth being told.

( The other days )

First up, nominations have now opened for waybackexchange, so if you're thinking of participating, you have until 20th February to get your nominations in. I've already used up all my nomination slots, but if anyone has any free, please do drop me a comment here (or a DM) as I have at least one other fandom I'd love to get nominated.

ladytharen has created a great new comm for Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows duology, so if you're interested, please do think about joining!


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( This week's books )

( This week's TV )

( Other weekend stuff )

It's been snowing in much of the UK this weekend, although not in Cambridge. However, it has been freezing here — witness the frost as I walked in to the market this morning. I've just returned from a walk to and from Grantchester, and although it was around 2pm when I was out, much of the frost on the ground has not thawed at all.

Other than walking around in frosty landscapes, I've spent a lot of the weekend out — on Friday night Matthias and I went out to one of our favourite wine shops/bars for a few drinks and food truck dinner, and on Saturday it was my former academic department's annual black tie dinner. The number of current students/postdocs/lecturers I know in the department shrinks every year, but most of the time alumni come back for the dinner, so there's always a good handful of people I know to catch up with at the dinner.

My remaining spare time this weekend has been spent reading. As well as Roshani Chokshi's glorious The Gilded Wolves, which I finished on Friday and will probably review more extensively later, I devoured K.J. Charles's The Magpie Lord while lying in a pool of sunshine on the couch this morning. I know a lot of people in my circle are fans of Charles (if my Goodreads feed is anything to go by), and enough people whose reading tastes I trust seemed to have read some or all of her work, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was a sweet, undemanding m/m romance novel, a great blend of mystery, historical fiction and fantasy, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It felt to me as if it could be an interlude within the universe of Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — the way magic worked felt similar, as did the scaffolding of myth and folklore, although it lacked the literary-ness (and playful re- and deconstruction of the conventions of nineteenth-century novels). And it was just restful to read about fundamentally good and decent people being generous and brave, you know? As a bonus, the ebook also included a short story, 'Interlude with Tattoos', set in the same world, which temporarily fed my hunger for this series — although I suspect I will be buying the next two books in the series as soon as I've finished this blog post!

Other books I've read recently include Katherine Arden's The Winter of the Witch, which again I plan to review more extensively later, The Mermaids in the Basement by Marina Warner (a short story collection in the vein of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, in which biblical tales, stories from Greek myth and so on are given a second-wave feminist twist), and The Prince of Darkness, the fourth in Sharon K. Penman's Justin de Quincy stories (historical mysteries in which the protagonist is a private detective of sorts working for Eleanor of Aquitaine). Both these latter two books had been on my 'to read' list for a very long time, so I'm glad to have finally read them.

What has everyone else been reading this week?

'I think,' Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, 'that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.' - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

For a writer who was so preoccupied with the interplay of life and death, with mortality and living, and whose works did so much to make me confront death's finality, I was surprised by how hard Ursula Le Guin's death hit me. There was something ageless and eternal about her, and she seemed to pop up everywhere, generous with her words and thoughts and wisdom.

Her books are part of the fabric of me.

Above all things, she wrote about migration and exile, and she wrote about ordinary, ceaseless, everyday work (particularly 'women's work') in a way that imbued it with a kind of power and magic, and she wrote about the ways women and our work are both seen, and not seen. I remember in particular reading The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, and, later, The Other Wind as a teenage girl and young woman and coming to understand the terrible things I would carry, being a woman in this world. Those stories showed me this frightening, inescapable truth, but helped me face it. In some ways I feel that her writing helped me understand how to be a woman.

My Twitter profile has always said that I am located in 'Selidor'.

I remember reading an obituary of Terry Pratchett that described him as 'both wise and kind', and the same was true of Le Guin. She was kind -- her writing was kind -- without ever being sentimental; it was a kindness that illuminated and educated and pushed you out of your complacency. Not a word was out of place, and her words resonated like stones dropped in clear, still water. And every word served a purpose: striving, illuminating, witnessing without flinching. Doing the work.

And now she is 'done with doing', but the words and work remain.

I went straight back to work on Tuesday, and was thrown straight into it: a lot of teaching, a lot of students back and studying, and a period of downtime as we switch from one library management system to another. This latter meant that we had access to neither the old system nor the new, but were still expected to issue, return and renew books, and register new users -- quite hard to do when you can't access the required program, but we found workarounds.

This weekend has been slightly busier than I would have liked, given the work week I had (and given how busy January is shaping up to be), but I still found time to snatch a bit of reading. I'm just over one hundred pages into The Will to Battle, the third in Ada Palmer's extraordinary Terra Ignota series, and I'm as awed by this third book as I was by the first and second. My husband sent me a link to great article by Palmer about her use of social science (as opposed to 'hard' sciences) in her science fiction, and it's reminded me all over again how intricate and clever her books are. naye, you might be interested in reading the article; it's here if anyone wants to read it.

Two of my four sisters (Kitty and Nell, sisters #2 and #3) are about midway through a trip around Europe with their grandparents (for new readers of my Dreamwidth, the reason I say their and not our grandparents is that my three youngest sisters only share a father, not a mother, with me and my other younger sister -- and thus only one set of grandparents; these are their maternal grandparents). This past week they were in London, and I organised for the four of them to take the train up to Cambridge and visit me and Matthias. I hadn't seen these sisters since 2015, and although we stay vaguely in touch via social media, they are quite young (Kitty is fifteen, and Nell ten), and it's been harder to stay a part of their lives than it has been with relatives and friends who are adults. In any case, I showed them and their grandparents around Cambridge, and we all had lunch together, and it was easy to pick up where I left off. I was struck once again by what wonderful people the two girls are: so thoughtful and clever and kind. Obviously I'm a bit biased -- I think all my sisters are amazing -- but my heart sang to see what good people they were.

Other than reading and hanging out with my family, it's mostly been a weekend of cooking and chores. I've got this slow-cooked pork recipe roasting away in the oven, and it's filling the whole house with the smell of apple, redcurrant and rosemary.

How have everyone else's first weekends of 2018 been?