Beyond Selidor

It's been a good, restful weekend, all of which was sorely needed. Matthias brought a cold back with him when he returned from Germany last Sunday, which hit me like a truck on Tuesday, and I was sick for most of the rest of the week. I preemptively cancelled all bookings for swimming slots and fitness classes, and even stopped doing yoga (although I suspect I would have been able to manage that). Beyond that, I just did the bare minimum. For the most part, I feel recovered by now, but it was good to have an excuse to stay at home and nest.

I cooked the usual wintry stodge — congee on Friday night, covered in an excess of chili oil, a thick tomato-y vegetable stew last night, Polish goulash tonight — so most afternoons have begun with something bubbling on the stove. I lounged around under a blanket, rereading old favourite books (of which more later), and watching biathlon out of the corner of my eye. Apart from a trip into a cafe in town which sells mulled wine, I basically haven't left the house since Thursday. Last night Matthias and I watched Polite Society — a film we've had our eyes on for a while, a comedy in which a British-Pakistani teenager becomes increasingly suspicious that her sister's fiance and his overbearing mother are not all they seem, and chaos and hijinks ensue. It's the work of the same writer who was behind We Are Ladyparts, and written with the same affectionate humour and focus on the relationships between women and girls.

I had meant to spend time writing a second Yuletide treat (the main assignment, and one treat are finished), but somehow that ended up being a lot of time spent on Dreamwidth, with posts that generated a lot of comments. A reminder, for those who missed them on Friday, that I have one post up where people can share their fandomtrees sign ups and holiday love meme threads, and another post up acting as an kind of all-purpose recs collection. Feel free to add your own contributions.

I also managed to transcribe the last four old newspaper book reviews from 2005 to my reviews blog ... so now I just have the years 2006-2013 to go! It should get easier soon, though, as the later years I still have in Word documents, whereas the earlier articles were either saved to desktop on an old computer, or written in now-incompatible file formats. As always, I feel a bit amused at the self-righteous certainty with which I wrote, and the way that I constantly asserted my own narrative tastes and preferences and ~thoughts about literature as if they were objective facts. The reviews are as follows

Weaving a magic thread (on The Curse of Zohreh by Sophie Masson)
Magic: the garden variety (on Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier)
Love and dreams for better things (on Alyzon Whitestarr by Isobelle Carmody)
A fantasy novel like a pebble set (on The Well of Tears by Cecilia Dart-Thornton)

Suffice it to say that my tastes have changed a lot since 2005.

Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than in my experience rereading, back to back, six Sharon Penman historical doorstoppers in quick succession. Penman debuted with an extremely partisan account of the life and rule of Richard III, and then wrote a trilogy about the Angevins and Poitevins, and another trilogy about medieval Welsh princes, the Norman-English monarchy, and Simon de Montfort, and it's these latter trilogies that I've been rereading. I remember absolutely loving these books when I was in my early twenties, and being filled with admiration for (what I saw as) Penman's meticulous research and attention to detail. She certainly researched the books thoroughly — in the sense of knowing which historical figure was where, doing what, when, and day-to-day minutiae of medieval material culture — but their flaws are much more apparent to me now. They're aggressively heterosexual (in a way which I suppose was much more common in historical fiction published in the 1990s and early 2000s), and although Penman is conscious of the fact that medieval sources could be partisan and untrustworthy, her own firm opinions about certain historical figures introduce their own kind of bias which is understandable, but of which I don't quite believe she was ever fully conscious. If she likes or admires a character, they display modern sensibilities, challenging (even if only in the privacy of their own mind or marriage) religious and sociocultural certainties of their era, so as to make them more likeable to Penman's perceived 21st-century readers' capacity for empathy. I don't always mind this kind of thing, if I feel the author is conscious that they're doing it, but I'm not convinced that Penman was, and, if challenged, would have protested about her in-depth research and so on.

I also just remember finding all the central relationships in these novels to be the height of romance and tragedy, whereas now — although I still enjoy the endless messy Plantagenet soap opera — it's as if I enjoy the story of these historical figures while trying to ignore Penman's writing and interpretation, which makes for a strange reading experience.

It's been an interesting experience, that's for sure!