Beyond Selidor

There's a blackbird that's taken to standing on the kitchen roof (just below our bedroom window), singing its heart out every morning around 6am to greet the dawn. It's like a natural alarm clock, and it's such a gentle introduction to each new day that I can hardly begrudge it.

I didn't know I needed a four-day weekend so badly until I had one, with four days stretching gloriously ahead of me, every hour my own to do with as I chose. It ended up being the perfect balance and mixture of activities, planned in such a way that everything worked out seamlessly, with even the weather cooperating. I'm good at this — organising holidays at home — but I so rarely have the opportunity.

I've described everything below in words, but have a representative photoset, as well.

This extended weekend's events can be grouped under a series of subheadings, as follows:

Movement
I swam 1km at the pool, three times: on Friday, Sunday, and today, gliding back and forth through the water, which was blissfully empty today and Friday, but too crowded for my liking on Sunday morning. On Saturday, I went to my classes at the gym, and then Matthias and I walked 4km out to Little Downham (about which more below), through fields lined with verdant green trees and flowering fruit orchards, watched by sleepy clusters of cows and horses, and then returned home the same 4km way. I did yoga every day, stretchy and flowing in the sunshine, listening to the birdsong in the garden. Yesterday, Matthias and I walked along the sparkling river, and then back up through the market, which was full of the usual Sunday afternoon of cheerful small children and excitable dogs.

Wanderings
As is the correct way of things on long weekends, we roamed around on the first two days, and stuck closer and closer to home as the days wore on. On Friday night, we travelled out into the nearby village of Whittlesford (via train and rail replacement bus), and on Saturday we did the walk to Little Downham, but beyond that I went no further than the river, the market, and the gym, and I was glad of it.

Food and cooking
The Whittlesford trip was to attend a six-course seafood tasting menu with wine pairings, which was delicate, exquisite, and a lovely way to kick off the weekend. In Little Downham, we ate Thai food for lunch at the pub, cooked fresh, redolent with chili, basil and garlic. I made an amazing oliahercules fish soup for dinner on Saturday, filled with garlic and lemon juice and briny olives and pickles. Last night I spent close to three hours cooking a feast of Indonesian food: lamb curry, mixed vegetable stir fry, slow-cooked coconut rice, and handmade peanut sauce, and it was well worth the effort. We'll be eating the leftovers for much of the rest of the week. We ate hot cross buns for breakfast and with afternoon cups of tea. We grazed on fresh sourdough bread, and cheese, and sundried tomatoes, and olives.

Growing things
On Sunday, we picked up some seedlings from the market: two types of tomato, cucumber, chives, and thyme, and I weeded the vegetable patches, and planted them. I was delighted to see that the sweetpea plant from last year has self-seeded, with seedlings springing up in four places. The mint and chives have returned, as have the various strawberry plants. Wood pigeons descend to strip the leaves from the upper branches of the cherry trees, and the apple blossom buzzes with bumblebees.

Media
The fact that we picked Conclave as our Saturday film this week, and then the Pope died today seems almost too on the nose (JD Vance seems to have been to the Pope as Liz Truss was to Queen Elizabeth II: moronic culture warring conservatives seem to be lethal to the ageing heads of powerful institutions), but I enjoyed it at the time. It reminded me a lot of Death of Stalin: papal politics written with the cynicism and wit of Armando Ianucci, and at the end everyone got what they deserved, and no one was happy.

In terms of books, it's been a period of contrasts: the horror and brutality of Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Xenogenesis trilogy, in which aliens descend to extractively rake over the remains of an Earth ruined by Cold War-era nuclear catastrophe, in an unbelievably blunt metaphor for both the colonisation of the continents of America, and the way human beings treat livestock in factory farming, and then my annual Easter weekend reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, about the implacable, inhospitable power of the sea, cut through with selfless human compassion. Both were excellent: the former viscerally horrifying to read, with aliens that feel truly inhuman in terms of biology, social organisation, and the values that stem from these, and unflinching in the sheer extractive exploitation of what we witness unfold. It's very of its time (for something that's so interested in exploring non-cis, non-straight expressions of gender and sexuality, it ends up feeling somewhat normative), and while the ideas are interesting and well expressed, I found the writing itself somewhat pedestrian. It makes me wonder how books like this would be received if they were published for the first time right now. Greenwitch, as always, was a delight. Women/bodies of water is basically my OTP, and women and the ocean having emotions at each other — especially if this has portentous implications for the consequences of an epic, supernatural quest — is my recipe for the perfect story, so to me, this book is pretty close to perfect.

I've slowly been gathering links, but I think this post is long enough, so I'll leave them for another time. I hope the weekend has been treating you well.

Today it's so windy that one of the sheets I have hanging out to dry has blown off the line repeatedly. Although this is somewhat frustrating, the combination of the heat and the wind suggests this laundry will be dry in several hours. Everything is sunlit and floral, and accompanied by a chorus of birdsong, which feels audibly more present than at other times of the year. Yesterday I got my first hot cross bun from the bakery down the road: a highlight of the year which (unlike supermarkets, which start selling hot cross buns practically on 26th December) is possible only for about two or three weeks in the lead-up to Easter.

It's been a low-key, low-energy weekend — other than the usual morning trips to the gym and grocery shopping at the market, I've barely left the house, which suits me fine, as work continues to absolutely flatten me, and I need a very undemanding weekend to recover. Matthias and I did watch a film last night (La Chimera, an Italian film which on the surface is about a group of rather hopeless people in a crumbling village eking out a living by stealing Etruscan archaeological relics from underground burial sites, but in reality just hurls every piece of of symbolism about descent to underworlds, otherworlds, labyrinths, death, sacrifice and harvest at the wall to see what sticks), and I did drag him out today for a wander around the market square in the sunshine, looping back home via what we jokingly termed the middle class trifecta of posh cheese shop, posh toiletries/homeware shop ('Don't let me buy any candles,' I said to Matthias before we left the house, and then returned with two new candles), and independent bookshop, but that's it for the weekend. I now plan to immerse myself in a mixture of reading (I bookmarked a bunch of stuff from peaked's recent fanfic exchange wrap-up post, and still haven't made a start on any of it), yoga, and lots of slow, fragrant, Iranian cooking. It should be good.

( This week's reading )

Yesterday, another annual event took place: a local farmer, and his young son arrived outside our house on a massive tractor, and cut all the grass in the vacant field over the road. That, along with the clocks changing over to daylight saving time last night, is a sure sign that spring is well and truly here.

The sun and warmth continues, and I've tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors and moving this weekend. The less said about the state of my mental health, the better — but there are still nice things.

Yesterday, Matthias and I walked for about 10km to the village of Sutton, which was having a beer festival. (I don't drink beer, but I like the vibes of beer festivals in new-to-me venues.) The first half of the walk is lovely: on a little public footway across the typical flat East Anglian fields, then through the village of Witchford (very picturesque), and past an excellent farm and gardening shop. After that, however, the second half of the walk is on a footpath/cycle path along a major motorway, and although it's not difficult to walk (flat footpath all the way), it's very noisy and cluttered with speeding cars.

The beer festival was — incongruously, to my mind — in a church, and was a fairly standard rural English affair: lots of families with little children running wildly around the church, a handful of older men who I see from time to time around Ely, dogs of various sizes, and a massive group of Morris dancers. Matthias and I stayed for a few hours, then caught the little bus back into town (which, astonishingly, arrived on time, and took exactly as long as it was supposed to take on the drive back to central Ely). The weather was so lovely that we stayed out in town, hanging out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar (along with everyone else, it seemed), and then eating dinner out in a newish restaurant that we'd been wanting to try for a while.

We were home early, and I was already tired enough by 8pm or so to want to go to bed, but tried to keep myself awake until a reasonable hour ... and of course when I did want to go to sleep, it eluded me for hours, and then was filled with ridiculous anxiety dreams (the dream in which I struggled for what felt like hours to get Zoom to load to teach a class at work, after which point one of my dream!students remarked sourly that if their trainer was unable to get Zoom to work, they didn't trust me to be competent enough to teach the content of the class, seemed too much on the nose even for me).

This morning, I dragged my exhausted self off to the pool, and dragged myself through the sunlit water, then returned home for the usual Sunday morning crepes, and laundry (the sight of which, hanging outside, drifting gently in the warm breeze, did lift my spirits). Matthias and I wandered around town, browsing a few stalls at the market, and generally enjoying the sense of everyone enjoying the first stirrings of spring.

This afternoon will be yoga, and reading, and rest.

Reading this week has been almost exclusively rereads, as I continue my nostalgic way through 1990s Australian YA novels. This time, this consisted of two series by two different authors: Robin Klein's Melling Sisters trilogy (historical fiction about four sisters growing up in genteel poverty in rural 1940s Australia, with a scatterbrained, dreamy mother, and a credulous father who has a tendency to be taken in by all kinds of get rich financial scams — prospecting for gold, buying shares in struggling farms or factories), and Libby Hathorn's Thunderwith and Chrysalis, about a teenage girl taken in by her father and stepmother after her mother's death, struggling to find herself in a life marked by loss and unmooring changes. Both series were as good as I remembered them — Klein's historical fiction in particular, which strikes a perfect balance between wacky childhood hijinks and a serious examination of the pain and petty humilations that come from living so close to the edge of financial disaster — and although they covered serious subject matter, they were exactly the kind of rest my brain needed.

The other book I read — Victoria Amelina's posthumously published Looking at Women Looking at War — was an exquisite piece of writing, and I feel I can't do justice to it in my current state. I'm hopeful I may be able to come back to it later and say more.

The breeze drifts through the open windows. The garden is alive with flocks of wood pigeons, and pairs of blackbirds. There are pink blossoms on the quince trees. The daffodils are promising to bloom, any day now.

That may as well be the theme of this weekend, for various reasons. On Saturday, I headed down to London for a demonstration in support of Ukraine. We marched from the Ukrainian embassy to the Russian one, and then had about an hour or so of speeches — the event was organised by Ukraine Solidary Campaign, so the speakers were Labour MPs, representatives of various unions (my union was there, but no one from it spoke), Ukrainian activists representing various civil society organisations, and a heart-wrenching speech from a young man who (aged 16) lived through 75 days of the siege of Mariupol before escaping.

Weirdly, given the dark place we are currently in in terms of European geopolitics, I felt a lot better after being part of this. My own rule of 'the antidote to despair is concrete action (especially involving physical movement, outside, with other people)' held true, and it was particularly helpful to listen to the specific things the MPs were saying in their speeches. I'm not good at estimating crowd sizes, but I'd say the numbers were probably in the thousands, which isn't massive, but isn't terrible. Most drivers (including buses) that passed us beeped in solidarity. It's no hardship to march in support of something that I'm fairly confident is a mainstream position across the whole UK; support for Ukraine is not a partisan issue here, apart from at the absolute extremes of left and right (even if our power — even at a political leadership level — to do anything about it is limited), so this was a protest to keep the fire alive, to lift spirits, and to remind Ukrainians that they are not alone. I saw another Dreamwidth friend mention in one of their posts that political action is like a muscle that you have to keep exercising, and I felt this was very much the case here. And it was cathartic to yell at the Russian embassy. Here's a photoset of placards (no faces, of course), plus vyshyvanka-clad dog.

I've already described the journey home in my previous post, so won't discuss that further here.

Today, I dragged my exhausted body off to the swimming pool, and dragged it through the water for 1km, and felt better for it. After a few hours back at home, our friends collected us for this month's walk with the walking group: 6km or so through the Norfolk fields outside the village of Hilgay. All our walks seem to feature some theme (horses, apples in an orchard, mud), and this walk's theme very much was snowdrops, which absolutely carpetted the landscape, and kept popping up in unexpected places. There was also a lot of interesting fauna, including swans, ducks, a buzzard, and a stoat. We opted to skip the rather creepy pub in Hilgay, and drove instead a few kilometres towards home, and stopped for a post-walk drink in the much nicer pub in Southery, which had a fire going in a little wood-burning stove, and offered a cosy respite from the wind and the cold grey skies.

Now I'm back home, with Matthias fretfully watching the results roll in from the German election, attempting to finish the last fifty pages of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, which has been a great distraction this week. For obvious reasons, I've been finding it hard to focus on reading, but weirdly, a discursive, historical doorstopper, filled to bursting with interesting digressions and new-to-me corners of the past was exactly the right thing to pick up. Other than that, I've only finished one other book, a reread of KJ Charles's historical M/M romance novel, Band Sinister, which kept me occupied on the train to and from London.

I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other.

This weekend has been a much needed reset after a very, very tiring week. Everything happened efficiently, without much effort on my part. Heavily limiting social media use also probably helped.

I began Saturday with my usual two hours of classes at the gym (my body is still in pain — in a good way — twenty-four hours later), and detoured home via the market, where I picked up Greek and Spanish deli items from their two respective stalls, and Tibetan food for lunch. I then spent the remainder of the afternoon slow-cooking a Burmese pumpkin curry for dinner, doing yoga, and chatting with people via Dreamwidth comments, before meeting Matthias — who had been out all day — and our friend E at our favourite cafe/bar. When I got there, they were sitting outside in the terrace garden, which was dark and bracing, but fine for an hour or so. I'm out of the habit of sitting outside in frigid British winter temperatures, although I used to do it all the time during the lockdown years.

This morning, I did yoga as the sun rose, ate a leisurely breakfast, prepared various bits and pieces for meals next week (stewed fruit, making up a fresh batch of muesli, etc), and drifted around the house aimlessly until Matthias and I decided to make the most of the clear winter sunshine, and go for a walk. The market square was as busy as it always is in such circumstances, and I had to queue for ages to get a coffee, but it was nice to be outside, and wander along the river, watching the geese, ducks, and swans frolic about.

I've been somewhat distracted this week, and my reading has suffered as a consequence — I only finished two books. The first, My Throat An Open Grave (Tori Bovalino), is a YA fantasy novel by an author I normally enjoy, retelling the Labyrinth film's story as a contemporary Appalachian gothic, with folk horror and commentary on the abysmal state of reproductive rights in the US. I feel as if I wish this had been better than it was: interesting ideas, let down by pedestrian execution and authorial timidity. (And why did it need to be told in first person present tense?). The other book was a reread: This Book Is Haunted (David McRobbie), a collection of ghost stories by an author who was a big deal in Australia when I was growing up. The book is from my childhood collection, and I had read it before, so none of the twists in the stories were shocking to me, but I did admire McRobbie's very broad interpretation of haunting. Very few of these are ghost stories in the classic sense: in many cases the characters are haunted by guilt, by stories unearthed on cassette tapes, by mysteries in old photographs, by advertisements in the Classified section of local newspapers, or by echoes of memories in buildings, landscapes, or artefacts. He has a particular interest in haunting journeys, as if trains and railway stations and ferry terminals evoke particularly vivid emotions, and in investigative journalism, and a magpie-like imagination, with an ability to find a story in everything. I really enjoyed the collection, and wondered if it would be possible to publish something like it — for a YA readership — today.

Now the remainder of Sunday stretches ahead, invitingly. At some point I'll need to start marinating the mackerel for tonight's dinner (spiced, seared, and served with a tomato-dill-lemon-garlicky sauce), but beyond that, I have absolutely no demands on my time, which is wonderful. Next week, I have the immense good fortune to be working from home four days out of the five, and I'm hoping that that, combined with the ease and calm of this weekend, will be enough to tackle the grinding exhaustion that has been such a major theme of this year.

This weekend has been absolutely glorious — exactly the right balance between being out in the world, and indoor cosiness. Saturday started with my usual two hours of classes at the gym, and then I returned home for lunch, through crisp, clear, biting cold air. I spent most of the afternoon cooking — stewing fruit for our weekday breakfasts, and preparing an absolutely massive quantity of northern Thai-style dal, a new-to-me recipe that involved cooking ginger, garlic and shallots under the grill until they were blackened on the outside and took on a smoky flavour.

In the evening, Matthias and I caught the train out to one of the little villages around Cambridge, where — after a half-hour walk through fields in the dark — we had a Burns Night-themed dinner at the local gastropub. The food was great, the fires were lit, people had dogs in the bar area, and in general everything was wintry and lovely.

This morning was spent swimming and doing yoga, and then we headed out after lunch for our monthly walk with our walking group. This time, the walk was around Ely, so we didn't have to be driven there and back, which was great. The weather was terrible — strong winds, scatterings of freezing rain — but it was still great to be out and about, chatting and catching up with everyone. The walk ended at the pub at the end of our street (after everyone walked past our house and gave us tips on how to prune our lavender plants; some of the group are professional gardeners, and the others have allotments and are very knowledgeable about all things botanical), and Matthias and I have just returned home, for a few hours of chilling out until the weekend draws to a close.

I've only finished one book this week, This Woven Kingdom (Tahereh Mafi), the first in a YA fantasy series inspired by Iranian mythology. Honestly, I have to say that it's fairly mediocre — tropey and formulaic, with insta-love between its protagonist and her love interest (who are, of course, Romeo and Juliet-style figures from opposite sides of a supernatural and political conflict), the heroine is super super special with powers and abilities possessed by no one else, the lost heir to a supernatural dynasty, living the life of an unappreciated, much abused drudge, in obscurity, etc, etc. The worldbuilding is paper thin. My tolerance for this kind of thing is very dependent on my mood — and because I was in a good mood this week, I responded far more favourably than the book probably deserved. It's trash, but it's my kind of trash. I certainly can't recommend it, unless you're in the mood for this kind of tropey mush.

I have, however, been reading a lot of other interesting things online, and I will leave you with some links.

I liked this piece on Max Gladstone's newsletter, which I felt had a handy analogy for the challenges of our current moment:

Jiu-jitsu this week gave me a useful opportunity to reflect on defense.

The first instinct when someone’s on top of you, aiming for a choke hold or a submission, is to get that guy t.f. off. You want out of here. The adrenaline hits; you buck, you roll, you twist and kick. Full-on animal spirits.

The trouble is, you spend a lot of energy thrashing about. And, if you aren’t much stronger than the other grappler—who, remember, has gravity on their side—you’re not likely to get anywhere, if your opponent has the faintest clue what they’re doing. Even if you are stronger in general, one or two failed maximum-strength attempts to break free will wear you out. A common first step is to establish frames: defenses that work by structure rather than strength. If you get your arm inside a choke hold that works by isolating your neck, the other guy will have a hard time. The structure of your arm, the bone fact of it, protects you. You can save your strength to seize a later chance.

The author Susan Dennard, who left social media for good in 2022, and slowly weeded out any further opportunities for scrolling aimlessly through any form of digital content (to the point that she now only uses the internet to post long-form writing, read some longform stuff, and communicate via email or videoconferencing/messaging platforms). She's written a recent essay reflecting on the various effects of these choices, which I found to be very relevant to the discussions I've been witnessing around leaving social media, or reframing one's relationship with it.

This piece by Talia Lavin, another in her 'notable sandwiches' series of essays, really encapsulates why I'm glad to have subscribed to her writing. It's about a sandwich, it's about The Count of Monte Cristo (and all its many adaptations), and it's also about this:

But the real fantasy at the heart of Monte Cristo—and what makes me keep returning to it along with all those playwrights and filmmakers and artists and animators—is the fantasy of justice. It’s the wronged man, the victim, rubbing the faces of his abusers into their own crimes; it’s the refusal to be cast away, the combination of the ability, the means, and the desire to right such a fundamental wrong. From a man who cannot even see the sky from his dungeon, Dantes becomes a bolt of vengeance sent from heaven. And because injustice continues, and multiplies; because those who wrong others continue to benefit from it; because the cruel use any means to perpetrate their cruelty—well, the fantasy of destroying them utterly, these ordinary heartless men, has endured for nearly two hundred years. The fact that fantastic resources are needed to enact such justice against the powerful is, amid all the fantastical elements of the story, apropos. The scales are so cruelly tipped that it takes a wonder-tale to reverse them.

Finally, here is an article about Ukrainian scientists researching whether radioactive fungi from the Chornobyl site might be able to function as a radiation shield for journeys to Mars.

I hope your weekends have been filled with nice things.

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.

This is my first year trying out a slightly new format and set of questions for the year-end meme; I made the decision this time last year to retire the previous format (which I'd been using for close to twenty years, since the Livejournal days), the questions of which seemed in many cases more suited to a teenager or undergraduate university student. I've taken this set of questions from falena.

( I'll sing a story about myself )

This has been a weekend of grey skies, and warm lights. I've had an aspiration to cover the ceiling of our living room with string lights, and — after years of procrastination — we've finally done so, at least in half of the room. We've also brought in our tiny Christmas tree from outdoors, and spent some time this afternoon decorating it, although somehow we've managed to lose all the baubles.

Yesterday evening Matthias and I went out to dinner with some of the people from our walking group, and other friends of theirs, and spent an enjoyable three hours or so chatting, eating nice food, in pleasant surroundings. One of the things I've been trying to work on this year is getting more local friends, and although it's been a bit of an uphill climb, I'd say we at least have local friendly acquaintances, which is more than I can say for my situation a year ago. It's so hard to make friends once you're no longer a student, though, unless you have children — and I feel so out of practice.

Today we spent this afternoon at the local wine fair, with an enjoyable few hours trying wines from a bunch of local-ish companies, and we came away with seven bottles. Luckily the wine fair venue is just down the road, which means it's more convenient to buy what we want and carry it home, rather than juggling deliveries on days we might not be in the house.

Other than that, it's been a fairly standard weekend — a couple of trips to the gym and pool, reading at home, cooking Indonesian food for dinner. I've been rereading more Benjamin January books, plus Tessa Gratton's gender-swapped, fantasy AU of Shakespeare's Henry plays, Lady Hotspur (amazing — I love Gratton's Shakespeare retellings, which really do a great job of conveying the damage done by the toxic weight of parental expectation, and have a fantastic sense of place and atmosphere). I've finished (although not posted) my Yuletide assignment, plus two treats, and have hopes of completing at least one (possibly two) more treat before the collection closes.

Next week is likely to be quite draining, in terms of work, so I will leave things here for now. I hope everyone has been having a good weekend.

I made it to the pool and back this morning without being rained on, which, given the weather this weekend is something of an achievement. It's been showering on and off since late Friday night, including torrential rain that blew horizontally under our umbrellas (and under the stall's marquee) during the time Matthias and I were at the market buying vegetables yesterday. It's very much been a weekend in which to hunker down at home, and stay as cosy as possible. After I've finished writing this post, I'm going to start preparing dinner — a juliusroberts roast chicken which he calls 'epic tarragon chicken,' which seems like the perfect nourishing choice for a cold rainy Sunday.

Yuletide assignments are out, and I'm pretty pleased with mine — lots of interesting prompts into which to sink my teeth, and my recipient seems to like the same things in canon that I do. I'm going to let ideas brew for a few days before settling on a final choice for the assignment. (And as an aside, it does feel this year as if I were going into the exchange more blindly than usual. I may be imagining things, but it felt like there were fewer letters, and less buzz around adding them to the letters app, or post, and so on. That may be a false impression, but it's certainly the sense I got.)

I have been reading quite a bit, and all of it's been enjoyable.

Earlier in the week, I read Nocturne (Alyssa Wees), a YA novel set in 1930s Chicago which interweaves retellings of Beauty and the Beast, the Hades and Persephone myth, and Phantom of the Opera. The prose is lush (verging on purple), and the setting I felt was underdone (a sprinkling of cliches), but the author's evocation of the experiences of professional ballet dancers, and especially what it feels like as a performer to perform had the ring of truth. I'm not sure I can completely recommend it — I found it enjoyable, while essentially mentally averting my eyes from its many flaws.

I then reread Adèle Geras's Egerton Hall trilogy. These are books that I first read in primary school (when I was definitely slightly too young to take in everything they were doing), published in the 1990s but set in an English girls' boarding school in the early 1960s. Each book is narrated in first person by a different teenage girl — a trio of close friends in the boarding school — retelling the fairy tales of Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White respectively. I have been reading and rereading these books for the past thirty years, and have always been impressed by the ambition of what Geras was trying to achieve, and the fact that she was able to achieve it — in YA novels, in so few pages (each book is about 150 pages long). On one level, they are spectacular works of historical fiction, capturing vividly the mores and pop culture of a very specific time and place, in a way that plays on the senses. You can almost feel the candlewick bedsheets and rustling 1960s dresses, or taste the bland insitutional cooking in the boarding school and the hot chips and tea cakes smothered with butter ('real butter!' as the characters rhapsodise, as opposed to the margarine they get at school) eaten on Saturday trips into the village neighbouring their school. The prose itself is lovely — flowing and unobtrusive, with memorable turns of phrase that have stuck with me since I first encountered the books. But where Geras truly triumphs here is as a reteller of fairy tales: the rarefied lives of these upper middle class girls, tucked away in their boarding school or in carefully circumscribed social activities in which they are shielded from the complications and difficulties of the wider world are their own kind of fairytale unreality, making the bizarre sequences of events drawn from the source material feel plausible and solid. And I have seen a lot of Goodreads reviews criticising these books for their 'unbelievable' romance (the insta-love based on little more than a glimpse or a conversation) — but that to me is the most believable part of them. I wouldn't go so far to say they are universally representative of teenage female sexuality, but the intensity of emotion, the tendency to imbue minor events with epic, poetic, portentous significance — all of that is painfully familiar to me (in the sense of 'teenage me is in this picture, and she doesn't like it'). There's some stuff in the books that you just have to roll with (and if you can't get past it, you will not have much fun with them) — they are aggressively heterosexual, and there is the aforementioned insta-love, often with people we'd consider wildly innappropriate (the Rapunzel book is about a romance between a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl and the new 22-year-old lab assistant in her school; he's not her teacher, but it's obviously not a relationship most of us would be comfortable with). They are not romance novels, even though romantic love is the ribbon that runs through them — they are fairytale retellings, and among the best I've ever read.

Finally, I read (for the first time) The Throne of Caesar, the concluding book in Steven Saylor's Roma sub Rosa historical mystery series. I have read all the other books in the series many times, but at some point I stopped keeping up with the series, and until this year had no idea that Saylor had written this book, which focuses on the days immediately before and after the assassination of Julius Caesar. In his author's note, Saylor mentions that he had avoided writing about this period — even though it was the logical conclusion to his series, which starts during Sulla's dictatorship and follows the next few decades of the erosion and death of the Roman republic, with each book involving a mystery linked to key political events during that time period — because, as it was one of the most well-known political assassinations in history, he couldn't think of anything about it that could be a mystery for his ancient Roman sleuth to solve. In the end, he managed to find an angle — and a mystery — and wrapped everything up neatly. The series (most of which was published in the 2000s) is explicitly linked to Saylor's own sense of anxiety and despair at American national politics and international relations during the George W. Bush period, and this last book, which was written in 2014 (but published in 2018) seems as much to be closing a door on those previous political anxieties (which seem now so small, with the hindsight of what was to come) as on the series' characters. I can't help but wonder what they would have been like if he'd started the series a decade later.