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.

My project of backing up all my old newspaper book reviews continues, and I've now managed to post everything up to the end of 2004. I still feel the same tendencies I deplored initially — the penchant for treating my own preferences and tastes as facts rather than opinions, and to make sweeping statements without much evidence to back them up — are there, although I'm not sure my opinions of the specific books reviewed would have changed much in the intervening twenty years, just my manner of expressing such opinions!

The reviews are:

Bleak glimpse forward to a decaying world — review of Jackie French's Flesh and Blood dystopian YA novel

A magical, mythic tale — my review of Sophie Masson's In Hollow Lands (children's fantasy literature inspired by Breton mythology and medieval history)

Rich avenues wandering the streets of Quentaris — a review of several books in the shared world Quentaris children's fantasy series

Convict tale full of twists and treats — a review of Jackie French's Tom Appleby, Convict Boy (children's historical fiction)

Comforting reminder of a simpler world — my first foray into the newspaper's Sunday 'Borrowers' column (in which reviewers wrote about older books that might be borrowed from the library, in this case Rumer Godden's The Greengage Summer)

Only one has the magic touch — a review of more Quentaris books and other Australian children's fantasy novels

Depth and quality to keep every child happy — a round up of books I recommended parents buy their children for Christmas/summer holiday reading

It would be interesting to revisit some of these books (the Rumer Godden in particular), since I'm absolutely certain I would interpret them in very different ways, even if my overall opinion of their quality is likely to remain the same.

Today is, apparently, all about the online author events. Having watched the recording of Roshani Chokshi's Instagram Live event last night, I'm now alerted to the fact that Zen Cho is doing a similar event in about half an hour today. Since this will fall right at the start of my working day, I'm also going to watch it later, and will update this post with the link to the recording so you can all do the same. [Updated to add the link to the recording.]

I will, however, be able to watch Amal El-Mohtar's keynote speech at Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations live on Youtube this afternoon, as it's due to stream at 5pm British Summer Time, which is exactly when I stop work. This may be of interest to some of you as well — check what time it is in your timezone, or come back to the same link to watch asynchronously, as it will be available for a little while afterwards. El-Mohtar is a great public speaker — she's brilliant whether in a podcast, a panel, a kaffeeklatsch, or doing a keynote address, so I highly recommend this event.

Reading-wise, I've been firmly ensconced in Egypt these past few days, with P. Djèlí Clark's short story 'The Angel of Khan el-Khalili' (about feminism, justice, and the workers' movement (including a scenario evocative of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire), set against a version of 20th-century Egypt where steampunk automata are part of every home, and angels and djinn talk to people who dare to seek them out), and then Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, a work of historical children's fiction that I read after lirazel used it as the answer to one of the thirty-day book meme prompts. I think if I'd read this as a child, as lirazel did, I would have enjoyed it uncritically. However, while I love the overall story and setting (a teenage girl, enslaved and chafing against her situation, winds up working as a spy and embroiled in the dangerous politics of ancient Egypt in the time of Hatshepsut), the book is very much of its time, with some very unfortunate 1950s implications which soured things a bit for my twenty-first century eyes.

Onwards to the last book meme prompt:

30. A book you detest that people are surprised by

( My answer )

And that's the final post in my series of answers to a great set of questions about books and reading. I've really enjoyed answering them, and I'm happy that I managed to do this across every single day of April without any gaps!

I'll leave you with some photos and a video of the beautiful blossoms in our garden! Have a great weekend!.

When I was a child and teenager, I consumed stories with an urgent, hungry intensity. I reread favourite books again and again until I could quote them verbatim,* I wandered around the garden pretending to be Snow White or Ariel from The Little Mermaid or Jessica Rabbit.** I had a pretty constant narrative running through my head the whole time I was awake, for the most part consisting of me being the character of a favourite story doing whatever activity I, Ronni, happened to be doing at the time. (No wonder I was a such a vague child: every activity required an extra layer of concentration in order for me to figure out why, say, the dinosaurs from The Land Before Time would be learning multiplication at a Canberra primary school.) The more I learnt about literary scholarship, the more insufferable I became, because I would talk at people about how 'URSULA LE GUIN WROTE A STORY WHERE EVERYTHING HAS A TRUE, SECRET NAME AND THEN ANOTHER USE-NAME AND ISN'T THAT AMAZING IN WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT IDENTITY?!?!' For the most part, I don't inhabit stories to the same extent, and they don't inhabit me to the same degree, although there are rare exceptions to this.

The rare exceptions tend to be things that sort of satisfy my soul in some deep and slightly subconscious way.*** And the funny thing is that although I can write lengthy essays explaining why something both appeals to me on this hungry, emotional level and is a good work of literature (indeed, I have been known to dedicate a whole blog to this), I can also remember a specific moment when reading/watching these texts and they suddenly became THE BEST THING EVER. I can remember exactly what it was for all of them.

The following is somewhat spoilerish for Romanitas, Sunshine by Robin McKinley, Galax-Arena by Gillian Rubinstein, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, The Demon's Lexicon, The King's Peace by Jo Walton, Parkland by Victor Kelleher, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Robin Hood: Men in Tights,
Ten Things I Hate About You, Cirque du Soleil, Pagan's Crusade by Catherine Jinks and His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.


( Probably a closer look at my subconscious than is comfortable )

Do you have moments like that?
____________
*Which led to a very awkward moment in Year 5 when our teacher was reading Hating Alison Ashley out loud to the class, but would skip bits from time to time - whereupon I would correct her.
**(whose appeal was less that she wasn't 'bad, just drawn that way' and more due to the fact that she wore an awesome dress)
***I've seen people describe fanfic like this as 'idfic', but for me this tends to be a phenomenon of professionally published fiction.

So, I'm meant to be learning German modal verbs, but what ended up happening was that sophiamcdougall and I discussed making playlists for stories/characters. And then of course I began whining that all my fandoms are small, and WOE IS ME, THE STORIES THAT GRIP ME ALWAYS HAVE A FANDOM OF LIKE TWO OTHER PEOPLE.

And then I had to make a Presh/Allyman* playlist. Because that's how I roll.

( I change shapes just to hide in this place but I'm still just an animal )

Wow all my ships are dark. Dark dark dark. (Also, I had to seriously refrain from using the same Tiësto and Florence+The Machine songs I use for all playlists because 'Rushes into my heart and my skull' and 'No more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world' are very very Ronni lyrics and I always tend to associate them with EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE.)

*Presh and Allyman are my favourite characters from Gillian Rubinstein's Galax-Arena books. I love those crazy, damaged, brilliant kids so much. So much it HURTS, you know.