Beyond Selidor

This weekend has involved more putting one foot in front of the other. The weather has been freezing, but gloriously sunny, and I've tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors.

Matthias and I caught the train to Waterbeach (the next village down the train line) yesterday afternoon, and walked for about half an hour until we got to the little brewery in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town. This brewery opens up roughly once a month — usually in summer — but had for whatever reason elected to open on the first weekend in March. There was a food truck selling bao, the place was heaving with people, and it was a nice change of scenery. We wandered back at around 5.30, breaking the journey home with Nepalese food and some of the most comically incompetent service I've ever experienced in a hospitality venue. The food was nice, and I was more amused than annoyed, but it was a bit ridiculous.

This morning I was out at the pool, and then took great pleasure in hanging laundry outside for the first time this year, under the blue, clear sky. Other than that, I've been reading, wandering around town, and preparing tonight's dinner, which involves marinating a whole duck according to a recipe which my Indonesian cookbook assures me is Indonesian, and which my Malaysian cookbook assures me is Malaysian, and which I will therefore settle on describing as 'southeast Asian'.

In terms of reading, this week I finished four books: one much-anticipated new release, and three rereads of Australian YA novels from my youth.

The new book was The Dark Mirror, the fifth in Samantha Shannon's dystopian Bone Season series which involves individuals with clairvoyant powers being persecuted by their dictatorial government, and the various growing revolutionary movements seeking its overthrow. As with every new book in the series, The Dark Mirror expands this alternative world (here we spend time in free countries that have not yet been taken over by the authoritarian regime: Poland, Czechia, and Italy), and moves into a new genre (in this case, it's definitely a war novel). And as with all the other books in the series, the strongest elements are the things that drew me to it in the first place: the relationships, the thoughtful and nuanced way that Shannon portrays people who are surviving trauma, and her heroine's slow transformation from fugitive criminal to revolutionary leader. Shannon has been criticised in the past for info-dumping in these books, and I have to admit I lost patience for this in places (there are about five or six different organisations/networks, all of which have their own slang and jargon for everything, not all of which needs to necessarily be listed in detail on the page), but in general I found this a solid addition to the series.

The rereads were as follows:

Mandragora (David McRobbie), a haunting, supernatural story about two teenagers in a small Australian town who uncover lost artefacts from the 19th-century shipwreck whose survivors founded their settlement — artefacts which, when exposed to view, begin to curse the town in the same way they cursed the ship previously.

Witch Bank (Catherine Jinks) — the name, if you are Australian, is an absolutely groan-worthy pun — in which a mousy young teenage school-leaver takes up secretarial work in the head office of a big bank, and becomes part of a network of women with magical powers. (As a side note, the absolute specificity of this was delightful to me: it's not just set in Sydney, it's set in very, very specific parts of Sydney, such that I know exactly which bank building the fictional office in the book is meant to stand in for, and such that the literal street where my mum and sister live gets name-checked in places.)

Beyond the Labyrinth (Gillian Rubinstein), in which a troubled, choose-your-own-adventure-stories-obsessed teenage boy, and the daugher of a family friend encounter an alien anthropologist who's been sent to their small coastal town to study the local Indigenous population pre-European settlement, but somehow ends up arriving two hundred years later. This was, quite honestly, really really weird. I had no memory of any of it (other than the choose-your-own-adventure stories element), and clearly only read it once when I was a child, unlike other Rubinstein books which I've reread obsessively for over thirty years. It's very subtle — the boy's dysfunctional family is written in a way that doesn't immediately leap out at you, but creeps up disturbingly over the course of the book — in a way that I feel wouldn't pass muster in contemporary YA publishing.

Two things which struck me really forcefully when reading all these three books back to back: they rely on a cultural understanding that is highly specific to Australian society at a very specific time (all these small regional towns with local history museums with paid curators and public libraries and paid local government jobs and thriving high streets, all those administrative jobs in the bank that could be taken by school-leavers with no qualifications, and so on), and there is so much casual racism that thankfully would probably not get past the editorial stage these days (so many instances where every character who is not a white Australian of British origin gets described in racialised terms while the white people don't, plus a whole lot of benevolently intended noble savage stereotypes in Beyond the Labyrinth). Time most definitely marches on.

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.

( Three books and a movie )

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.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had a particularly successful Yuletide this year, in terms of both the gifts written for me, and how the fic I wrote was received. (I was completely overwhelmed by travel and visiting my in-laws, however, and didn't have a chance to read anything else in the collection besides my own gifts, so for the first time since I participated in Yuletide, I unfortunately won't be able to include recs from the collection here.)

This year, I received not one, but two gifts, which I can now see were written by the same author.

The main gift was Paige/Arcturus fic for The Bone Season — a pairing and fandom which I have been requesting for ten years in almost every single exchange in which I participated. I'm so delighted that someone chose to write it for me at last, and to have dug into so many things that I love about these characters and this pairing.

Adamant (1024 words) by cher
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Paige Mahoney/Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Characters: Paige Mahoney, Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Additional Tags: POV First Person, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma Recovery
Summary:

Paige vs PTSD, with her usual feelings about battles.

Every year, I've hoped (while knowing that no one is entitled to such things) that someone might choose to write an additional treat for me, and for the first time in ten years of Yuletide participation, someone did! I feel very grateful and privileged, especially since the fic is for a tiny (even by Yuletide standards) fandom of which I thought I was the only person who felt fannish: Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons trilogy. Again, the fic really got to the heart of what I love about this canon, characters, and pairing — right down to the nostalgic 1990s tech and internet!

futurism (1259 words) by cher
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Space Demons Series - Gillian Rubinstein
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: pre Mario Ferrone/Elaine Taylor
Characters: Mario Ferrone, Elaine Taylor, Ben Challis
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Mario in the aftermath, reaching for a future.

( My three fics — The Dark Is Rising, and the Winternight series )

So that was my Yuletide. I have today and tomorrow remaining as holidays, before returning to work (from home) on Friday. I'm going to ease my way gently into 2025 with a long yoga class, doing the final bits of set up of my bullet journal, and starting a new book. I hope the first hours of the new year have been kind to you.

I said on Friday that I was looking forward to a weekend with no social obligations, and lots of cooking, and broadly speaking, that's been the case. It's been great!

I went for a little walk this morning, and was pleased to note slight hints of the change of the seasons towards autumn — hues of red and yellow in some of the trees around the cathedral, and the smell of woodsmoke emanating from several houses. I'm still hoping for a winter filled with foggy, frosty mornings. There's no sign of that yet, but I have at least been able to content myself with photos of such weather in other places — in Vilnius, Kyiv, and Ærø in Denmark. (As an aside, I highly recommend — if you use social media — following accounts that focus on photography of places around the world you love and have visited or want to visit in the future. It's like a way to travel, virtually, and expand the landscapes of your mental geography.)

As I hoped, there was a lot of cooking this weekend — slow, flavourful meals for dinner (oliahercules oven roasted stuffed capsicum yesterday, Burmese curry currently roasting in the oven today), plus a lot of preserving. I picked over two kilograms of green tomatoes that I don't think will ripen, and turned half into green tomato chutney, and started the other half to ferment. I've always aspired to be the kind of person who has a pantry full of pickles and preserves, and although I don't have the storage space to do this on a massive scale, I've liked my attempts this year, and will continue adding to my repertoire as I grow a greater variety of vegetables.

Other than cooking and wandering, and the usual weekend personal maintenance, I've spent a lot of time reading — a mixed bag, but on balance mostly good. The books are as follows:

Honey (Isobel Banta), a novel following several aspiring pop stars in the Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera etc mould in the 1990s and early 2000s. The book does a fantastic job of capturing how truly messed up that moment in time was — how it ate up young women with big voices and big dreams, and sucked them dry and spat out the bones like a piece of old rubbish. As someone who was a teenage girl during that time period, the depths of the abuse and cruelty — that toxic nexus of the last gasp of print tabloid media and the rise of internet gossip columns — just seemed like the fabric of the universe, but looking back, it was its own breed of horrifying. Banta conveys this with empathy and understanding, and although her characters and their music is entirely fictional, there are a lot of echoes of real-world stars and music industry figures, recognisable to anyone who paid passing attention to that pop cultural moment. The only false note to me was the pop music starlets' depth of awareness of all the toxic structures around them, which didn't ring true (I feel that in reality, the real-world equivalents of these characters maybe understood subconsciously how they were viewed and being treated by the industry, but not in a way that they would have been able to articulate).

All My Rage (Sabaa Tahir), Tahir's first foray into contemporary (non-fantasy) fiction. The novel interweaves the stories of Salahudin and Noor, the only two Pakistani-American teenagers in a remote Californian desert town, as well as flashbacks from Salahudin's mother's early married years back in Pakistan. It's a story haunted with grief and pain — the intergenerational trauma and racism experienced by the characters is dealt with in terrible, unhealthy ways. This is a book about people who are incapable of giving voice to their regrets or pain, instead sealing up everything inside, where no words will reach them. Tahir herself grew up in a similar environment — like Salahudin, her parents were Pakistani immigrants running a small-town desert motel — and she writes with experience of the sense of being trapped in a tiny, insular community where you do not fit in, and see no way out.

Lady Macbeth (Ava Reid), the book that sparked my Friday open thread prompt about satisfying and dissatisfying retellings. As is probably obvious, this is Reid's attempt at a retelling of Macbeth, focusing on Shakespeare's most acclaimed female character. Reid's usual thing (and what made her an insta-read for me to begin with) is to write a story about teenage girls and young women whose experiences of abuse and trauma render them monstrous in the eyes of the wider world, with a relentless emphasis on the fact that abuse survival is not soft or pretty. While this has served her well in earlier novels, you may be able to see why this approach is not a good one for the character of Lady Macbeth. Instead, Reid has done what I've often seen criticised in the glut of supposedly 'feminist' retellings of Greek myths: written a traumatised, abused, frightened young woman who is utterly blameless of any of the bad or even controversial actions perpetuated by the character in the source material. To top this off, the story is a historical, geographical, and linguistic mess (the constant, grating use of the word 'Scots' to describe what is presumably meant to be Gàidhlig is merely the most glaring) — and while Shakespeare was obviously no paragon of historical or geographical accuracy, Reid's defensive author's note on the fluidity of her treatment of language, history, and cultural and national identity only serves to emphasise the lack of care in this regard. (As an irate Goodreads reviewer commented, 'what has Scotland ever done to Ava Reid?') A female character-centric Shakespeare retelling, use of Breton lais and the folkloric trope of the three impossible tasks, in the hands of an author whose previous work I've enjoyed immensely? I've never been so disappointed.

Where the Dark Stands Still (A.B. Poranek), a gorgeous blend of Polish folklore, Howl's Moving Castle, and Beauty and the Beast. This, on the other hand, was an absolute delight. If you like Uprooted, you'll probably like this. Our heroine is a misfit teenage girl with magical abilities, there's a creepy, sentient forest, and an immortal supernatural boyfriend. Poranek isn't doing anything particularly original with these building blocks, but the heart (at least my heart) wants what it wants, and quite frequently, what it wants is this, done well — and Where the Dark Stands Still delivers.

Today's post is a bit of a blissed-out sunny mish-mash. It's been a lazy weekend, almost like taking a deep breath before the frantic business I'm anticipating (for various reasons) for the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday I met Matthias at the market after my two hours of classes at the gym, picked up the final things we needed, then headed home, gulped down lunch, and headed out immediately again for the little outdoor fair outside the cathedral (which was raising money for the boys' choir). It was the usual mix of food trucks and craft stalls — although the draw for us (and the thing which brought us out of the house again, despite the grey skies and gusty winds) was the chance to buy champagne and little bowls of strawberries and cream, which we consumed on a park bench and tried not to be blown away. We might have lingered longer (or walked to the other side of town where two friends of ours were holding their annual plant sale in their garden), but the weather drove us home. I slowly cooked Burmese food for dinner, and then we tucked ourselves into the armchairs in the living room, where I read Leigh Bardugo's latest book (The Familiar, of which more later) in a single sitting.

Today, we woke naturally at about 5.30am due to the sunshine, and dozed on and off until it was time for me to walk to the gym for my 8am swim, which genuinely felt like swimming through liquid sunlight. I spent the morning after my return from the pool picking away at my rarepairexchange assignment, which finally unlocked for me after many weeks of difficulty.

But the weather was too nice for us to remain sequestered indoors, so out we went again for food truck food from the market (Tibetan for me, Greek for Matthias), sitting under the trees in the courtyard garden of our beloved favourite bar/cafe. When we arrived, the place was empty, and after about ten minutes, every table was taken — such is the characteristic behaviour of British people when the sun finally deigns to shine.

Now I'm trawling through Dreamwidth, and trying to decide whether I should go out again for gelato or stay in the house — I suspect the gelato will win! I've been gathering Dreamwidth links like a magpie, and will share them with you:

Via vriddy: the Japanese Film Festival Online in which 'a variety of 23 films will be delivered during the first two weeks, followed by two TV drama series for the subsequent two weeks. These will be streamed for free with subtitles in up to 16 languages, available in up to 27 countries/regions.' I imagine this may be of interest to some in my circle.

Some steps to take to ensure any eligible British voters in your life have the requisite ID and voter registration required by the deadlines to vote in the upcoming 4th July general elction, via thissterlingcrew. There are particular concerns about younger voters, so do pass these details on to any 18-24-year-olds you know.

Staying with politics (in this case US), this Timothy Snyder essay really resonated with me, as his commentary and analysis generally does. Voting, for me (and treating elections seriously), is like the bare minimum tax we pay for the enormous unearned good fortune of being citizens of (albeit flawed) democracies.

On a lighter note, I just went on a downloading spree from these gorgeous batches of icons from insomniatic (here) and svgurl (here); perhaps you'll see something you like too.

And then I took a bunch of photos of all the fruit trees in our garden.

And finally, on to reading, and Bardugo's wonderful The Familiar. This is a standalone adult fantasy novel set in Spain during the early years of the Inquisition, and its focus is on the paranoid, terrifying antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-any-non-normative-Catholic-Christianity atmosphere of the era. Its protagonist, Luzia, is a young Jewish conversa, born into a family which for several generations has maintained its Jewish identity in secret, following religious and cultural practices as best as they can while removed from the Jewish community so necessary for those practices to find full expression. In addition to this dangerous heritage, Luzia is able to perform magic (in a stroke of genius, the mechanism for doing so is Ladino refranes or proverbs, and the act of speaking, and language as a kind of cultural and personal magic, are at the centre of the novel), which brings her to the attention of Madrid's aristocratic elite. This fame brings Luzia (and those around her) nothing but grief, and the novel as a portrait of the constant anxiety sparked by attracting the notice of the powerful is a brilliant, stressful piece of writing.

The Familiar really does feel at last like Bardugo's novel of the heart: my reactions to her previous fiction range from adoration to being left cold, but all have felt to me to have been written to the market, hitting on a winning trend at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way. She has, of course, been incredibly successful while doing so, and I would assume wrote with some degree of affection for this previous output — but The Familiar definitely feels like the first of her books that was written not to satisfy a specific trend in genre fiction, but solely for Bardugo's own need. The soul sings stories to us, and some of us are lucky enough to be able to give those stories voice, and sing back.

Until snowflake_challenge is over, I'm going to piggyback on their prompts and use them for my own each Friday. Today's prompt is:

Choose Your Challenge: we will give you the challenge of making a list (who doesn't love lists?!?) and then you get to choose what list to make.

Five Things! The five things are totally up to you.



I can never resist making a 'five things' list into a 'five times she did, and one time she didn't' list, so that's what I've done here. Feel free to use my own list topic, or make your own 5 (+1) things list in the comments.

( Five TV shows perfect after just one season, and one cancelled before its time )

I had one day of leave left to use up by the end of September, and so I decided to make this a long weekend, and take Friday off. I'm glad I did, because it allowed me to go to London with Matthias to celebrate a friend's birthday at a party that had been organised in a very last-minute manner.

We made a London day trip of it, catching the train down in the late morning in order to have lunch at one of my favourite restaurants — a Malaysian one in north London — enjoying laksa and various shared snacks while watching the world go by. We then travelled out to an exhibition of contemporary African photography at Tate Modern, walking across and along the river in the afternoon sunshine, before heading over to the birthday party in the evening.

On Saturday I had to go into Cambridge for a couple of errands, which was made more complicated by a total rail strike (meaning no trains at all), which necessitated going in and out by bus. The buses between Ely and Cambridge only go about once an hour (sometimes only every two hours), and my past experience has been that if they're having to cope with rail commuters as well, they quickly become extremely crowded and delayed — so I was dreading the journey. In the end, I needn't have worried — both bus trips were on time, and I sped through the fields, watching the landscape unfold through the bus's top floor front window. Normally when I need to go into Cambridge on the weekend, Matthias comes with me and we go out for a meal at one of our old favourite restaurants or new places that have sprung up since we left, but because of the public transport complications we were too anxious to do that (and in any case the last bus leaves at 6.30pm), so instead we went out for dinner at the Turkish restaurant here. The meals at that restaurant are always massive, meaning I have lots of leftovers!

Today was my typical Sunday — swimming, cooking, yoga, household chores, and lots of reading. I've been working my way through a series of books I loved with fierce intensity when I was in my early twenties but haven't revisited since then (the arrival of all my childhood/teenage/undergrad library from Sydney after fifteen years apart has sparked a desire for endless rereads of old favourites) — Sara Douglass's epic fantasy Troy Game series. This four-part series has an amazing premise — the legendary settlement of Britain by Trojan refugees fleeing the catastrophic consequences of the Trojan War, interwoven with the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur, magical labyrinths whose colossal power can be harnessed by trained individuals to protect (and destroy) cities, and the history of London from Iron Age times to the twentieth century. Each book features the same characters reborn at crucial periods of British history (the mythological founding of London in the wake of the Trojan war, the Norman invasion of England, the restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War, and the first years of World War II), locked in an endless cycle of shifting alliances and betrayals of each other, the labyrinthine power, the city of London, and the elemental powers of the land, doomed to be reborn until they've managed to settle their differences and make common cause. This central premise, and Douglass's seamless weaving of it with weird and forgotten corners of London's history, architecture and landscape, still hold up really well, but I hesitate to recommend the series due to the characters themselves. I used to think — when I read the books for the first time — that Sara Douglass was a bit of a misogynist, but now I honestly just think she was a misanthrope. The books are a ridiculous soap opera of murder, sexual violence, incest, and abuse: Game of Thrones has nothing on them! I kind of treat this like I treat mythology in general — it's stories of non-human and inhumane supernatural beings who are so detached from human morality that it seems pointless to try and apply it to them (the characters in the books start off human, but have become something very different as time goes by, picking up vast and varying supernatural abilities and identities as they go). But if you need characters who behave in a compassionate and admirable way in order to connect with a story (or if you just have a — perfectly reasonable — problem with endless fictional depictions of abuse and sexual violence and women falling in love with their abusers) I would urge you to stay away from these books!

I'll wrap up this post by linking to the five old newspaper book reviews I've managed to transcribe/back up on my long-form reviews blog this past month:

Reading war's unsung songs

Humour behind the absurd

Cruising through a sea of history

Seeing life in inspired ride on the wild side

Telling the stories of survivors before it's too late

I'm making fairly good progress with these, which is pleasing.

Saturday was a day of motion, today is a day of stillness, which to be honest is my ideal division of the weekend. It suited the weather perfectly: yesterday was baking and cloudless — one of those days that feels like the last gasp of summer — while today has been covered with a thick blanket of greying clouds.

Saturday morning was spent in yoga at home, then two hours of classes at the gym, after which point I met Matthias and we walked into Little Downham, a village a couple of kilometres away, following hedgerows covered in blackberries, and newly-harvested wheat fields. Our destination was one of the village's two pubs, which is run by a Thai family who make really nice Thai food — a great change from standard British pub fare. We ate lunch outside in the garden, surrounded by flowering rosebushes, marigold plants, and chili, tomato and capsium plants covered with ripe fruit. Every so often, people would ride past on horses.

Today, everything was sleepy and slow — crepes with tea and coffee, a visit to the bakery to pick up fresh bread, and lazy hours reading in the living room. I did a 45-minute yoga class focusing on the upper body, and finished off a whole book in an hour. Dinner will be something slow-cooked, with chicken stock, and rice, and garlic and ginger: the return of autumnal food.

I've read three books this week:

Moon Dark Smile (Tessa Gratton), which I somehow missed was the second half of a fantasy duology, but was comprehensible enough on its own. It's the story of an imperial heir, who sets out on a coming-of-age journey, accompanied by the palace demon (to whom her family owes its authority), which she has allowed to possess her so that it's able to leave the palace. It's also about cycles of revenge, the power of names in shaping identity, and finding confidence within yourself by understanding others. I'm always drawn to stories of consensual possession and weird love triangles (particularly those that involve three people but only two bodies), and Gratton writes these things so well here.

Red Smoking Mirror (Nick Hunt), an alternate history novel in which Islamic Spain (i.e. Al Andalus) never collapsed, and instead went on to 'discover' and colonise the parts of our world that became the Americas. This book is set some time after the initial voyage and colonisation took place, and an uneasy equilibrium has been reached by both old and new residents of the region — but the seeds are there to rupture and then shatter this state of affairs. The narrator is an ageing Jewish man, and the emphasis is very much on minorities, people on the margins, and people who translate and move between cultures.

Goodbye Eastern Europe (Jacob Mikanowski), a social and cultural history of that part of the world, mainly focusing on the nineteenth century onwards, and drawing on strands of thematic commonalities across regions and/or countries, rather than focusing on the political history of individual places. I found this to be a refreshing approach, as it emphasises interconnection rather than looking at individual countries (or regions) in isolation.

I might have time to pick up another book this afternoon, but I suspect that will be it in terms of completed reading for the week.

This has been the first weekend in quite a while spent at home, without visitors, and without various time-consuming and exhausting household tasks to get done — and it has been wonderful. I've got a fairly full-on weeek coming up in terms of work, and having this brief, relaxing pause has been incredibly helpful.

It poured with rain all day yesterday, and Matthias and I got thoroughly soaked when heading out to the market, but we're now well stocked up on fresh fruit and vegetables, have picked up and returned various library books, and we were able to spend most of the remainder of the day hanging around inside, listening to the rain pour down around us. I felt bad for the stall-holders — not just at the market, but also at some kind of food festival taking place around the cathedral, since they would have been sodden, and would not have got much in the way of footfall.

Yesterday was also our wedding anniversary, and Matthias and I celebrated by going out for dinner and eating a ridiculous amount of sushi, which was delicious and cozy in the rain. We've also been revelling in all the various major works that have been done in our house over the past few weeks and are now finally complete: landscaping of the front garden, replacing the carpet on the stairs (the new stuff feels so soft and squishy underfoot), and having the tatty carpet in the living room, study and upstairs landing replaced with laminate. It all looks fantastic, and it's just such a relief to have it completed at last — what was there before was bothering me a lot, it was depressing to look at, and now it looks fresh, and clean, and new.

Other than all that, it's been a fairly quiet weekend. The weather today was nicer, so Matthias and I went out for a brief looping walk along the river, picking up takeaway coffee on the way home. Once I've finished catching up on Dreamwidth I'll go upstairs and do a slow, stretchy, calming yoga class.

Beyond all that, I've been doing my semi-annual reread of one of my favourite book series of all time, Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. I've already written so much about these books, in my two tags for the series; my default icon on Dreamwidth is a drawing by the author of one of the characters with a quote from the books about her, for many years I was the series' sole online fandom, trying to generate fannish enthusiasm through sheer force of will, to the extent that I got to know the author and she thanked me in the acknowledgements of the third book 'for being generally wonderful.' In other words, my feelings about these books are deep, and just a lot in general. It's not so much what the books are about, although obviously I like that too (alt-history contemporary Roman empire political conspiracy thriller in which a ragtag band of dispossessed and devalued people — some of whom have supernatural abilities — try to take on the might of an empire), it's also the way the books are written, and the way the point-of-view characters think about themselves and carry themselves through the world. Of the four main point-of-view characters, three have this intense interiority — they're in their own heads so much, with this instense, obsessive focus on their own thoughts and actions, and how they are perceived by the people around them — and the fourth point-of-view character is basically the opposite of that, and the other three are constantly baffled and astonished as to how he can be so comfortable and easy in his own skin, in the company of any other people, everywhere. All this, shall we say, resonates a lot.

And that, in essence, has been my weekend so far.

I feel as if I've barely been around these parts recently — I think it's been close to a week since I logged into Dreamwidth, and there are an overwhelming number of posts to catch up with. Luckily, I've been very productive this weekend, and after writing this post I've essentially got the entire afternoon free, so I can dive into my feed and see what you've all been up to.

I've got a couple of short stories, two films, and a book to log in terms of stuff read/watched since I last posted.

The short stories were from one of the recent issues of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and as always I found myself impressed at the editorial choice to group things together that fit well thematically. Both the stories were about the experiences of people coming to terms with the colonisation of their lands and communities, and trying to navigate this traumatic situation without much recourse to power.

'Our Grandmother's Words' (M.H. Ayinde) is a story in which the colonial erasure of language and culture is made starkly literal: the colonists possess the ability to rob locals of their words, including the ability to say no, or to advocate for fair trading conditions. But it's also a story about the power of language and memory and culture to survive and resist.

'Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea' (Kelsey Hutton) is a story in which a woman from a colonised nation finds herself thrown into the role of ambassador for her people at the court of the colonising country, and she has to navigate this fraught environment using the skills and abilities she possesses, pleading the case of her people to indifferent, uncomprehending ears.

I would have to say that neither story is particularly subtle!

I've just finished reading Book of Night, Holly Black's adult fiction debut. I had thought it was a stand-alone, but it's actually the first in a trilogy in a fantasy version of our own world in which magic exists, but is not equally distributed. Some people have the ability to separate themselves from their shadows, possess other people, and force them to do their will. Black's favourite themes and character dynamics are all on display here — she loves scammers, tricksters, con artists and elaborate supernatural heists, and relationships between characters who are lying to each other and themselves. She likes to write stories about people living on the margins, in the interstitial places, eking out a living throught their ability to read people, lie convincingly, and run successful scams, but always with a slight sense of desperation, as if they know their luck may run out at any moment. She has a couple of irritating stylistic tics that I find very grating (constantly name dropping brands; her protagnist never gets into her car, but always 'her Corolla,' she sends her sister not to the chemist/pharmacy, but 'to Walgreens,' and so on), but I've read enough Holly Black books by now to know that she and I share an id (in particuar when it comes to relationship and character dynamics) so I grit my teeth and put up with it.

On Thursday night, Matthias and I saw a film at the community cinema — Ynys Men, an unsettling, nightmarish film set on an isolated Cornish island in the 1970s. There's very little dialogue, and we observe a middle-aged woman engage in repetitive, ritualistic daily routines. As these routines cycle around, strange memories and historical moments start to intrude, and the audience's grip on reality becomes more and more tenuous. It's as if the island is haunted by the memories of its previous inhabitants, and the blasted landscape of ruined buildings, decaying mines, and weathered standing stones adds to the eerie atmosphere. The film's use of sound, in particular, is excellent.

Last night, we watched the Luther film, which has just been added to Netflix this week. In it, the titular police officer (played by Idris Elba) stalks his way through a labyrinthine, dystopian London, hunting a serial killer whose cruelty is particularly theatrical and comic-bookish, even by the standards of this show. We're missing the character of Alice, who in the TV series was played with amoral aplomb by Ruth Wilson and was a fabulous foil for Luther, and the film does suffer from her absence, but if you liked the show, you'll probably like the film. I'm on record as absolutely detesting any work of fiction that suggests that some criminals or terrorists are so vile and evil that stopping them means abandoning correct police procedure and stooping to their level (the Nolan Batman films are a particularly hated example of this for me), and that is of course the central premise of the Luther series, so I guess it's my one exception. I suppose it helps that a) the rule-breaking police officer is played with such presence and charisma by Idris Elba (it really is his best role) and b) his slow slide (and then speed run) towards damnation is shown to utterly destroy him as a person, until he's hollowed out, nothing but a dramatic swooshy coat and a death wish. But his methods are vindicated in that they're shown in the show (and film) to work, and implied to be the only thing that would work in such circumstances, which makes me uneasy, although Luther is hardly the only crime drama to make this particular argument. It helps, I guess, to view the whole thing as a setting-change and no-superpowers Batman AU.

In addition to reading and films, I've finished the first draft of my once_upon_fic assignment, gone to the gym twice for swimming, and for fitness classes, wandered along the river with Matthias, and done a bunch of cooking (including multiple recipes from sami_tamimi's Palestinian cookbook). Compared to how I was feeling for much of the past six weeks, it's a change very much for the better. I feel like the vegetable seedlings growing in the kitchen — emerging from the dark earth, into the light.