Beyond Selidor

It's been another homebody weekend, which I don't regret in the slightest. I did go out on Friday night to an event at the tiny local museum, which was a launch of sorts for its latest temporary exhibition. The museum is so small that the temporary exhibitions are housed in a single room about the size of my kitchen; this one was about the history of beer-making, and so the launch event involved talks and tasters from a trio of local breweries. We followed this up with a drink in our favourite cafe/bar, which was heaving with customers — always a good sign on a Friday night.

Other than that, it's been spring cleaning — I cleaned all the external windows and windowsills, including clambering onto the kitchen roof in order to get at our upper floor bedroom windows — classes and swimming at the gym, and batch-cooking. Matthias and I also spent half an hour or so this morning planting wildflower seeds in the front and back garden raised beds, plus beetroot seeds in the vegetable beds. The other seeds that I started off in the growhouse — chives, cucumbers, rocket, salad greens, and spring onions — are coming along nicely, even though it's been cold.

Other good things: Pretty Lethal, the ridiculous black comedy/luridly violent action thriller involving a troupe of American ballet dancers stranded in a Hungarian forest en route to a competition in Budapest, and swept up into a deadly showdown between two rival gangs of goons who want to kill them, one of which is headed up by bitter ex-ballet dancer Uma Thurman (sporting an indeterminate Eastern European accent). The soundtrack is all scores from famous ballets, and all the action scenes involve a sort of intersection of martial arts and ballet. It's as silly as it sounds, and made for a great Saturday night film.

I finished up my Earthsea reread over lunch with The Other Wind, which I think I've only ever read once or twice, but which remains achingly beautiful, like a dragon's half-remembered flight across a sunset sky. I think the peak of the series is probably Tehanu, though, which always renders me awestruck. I have read the Earthsea short story collections at some point, but I don't own copies, so those will have to wait if I want the reread to be fully complete. For now, though, I plan to turn to one of the books from my stack of five from the public library, or possibly Amal El-Mohtar's new short story collection, which I'd preordered and was delivered to me last week.

I hope you've all been having similarly cosy weekends.

Hot cross buns have reappeared at my favourite bakery in town (the time between them posting about this on their Instagram stories today, and me rushing out to the bakery to buy some was six minutes), everything is all wild garlic, all the time, and I hung my laundry on the washing line outdoors for the first time this year. All, in their way, are my personal markers of spring's return — although it began raining after lunch and I had to rush out into the garden to rescue everything before it had completely finished drying.

Yesterday I was in Cambridge for the afternoon. I went for a massage (the masseuse told me my shoulders and neck were the tensest she'd ever seen in a client), refilled my spice jars at the refill shop, and got my hair cut. My hairdresser, who is prone to belief in conspiracy theories and quackery, didn't even spout any nonsense this time around (apart from recommending black seed oil as a cure for all medical ailments), which was something of a relief.

After the haircut, I met Matthias for dinner at this restaurant, which was fantastic, and of course featured at least one dish involving wild garlic!

( I've read three books this week )

Today has been sleepy and slow: laundry, cups of coffee, hot cross buns, reading in the living room. For most of the morning I was following the sun around the room like a cat, basking. Now, I'm watching the rain on the windows.

The weekend kicked off in delightful style with the silent disco on Friday night. It was the usual joyful chaos of crowds dancing and singing their hearts out to the cheesiest music imaginable. Usually the three DJs are split thematically, with one channel playing pop, one alternative music, and one hip hop and rnb, but this time they split up across the decades. I think if I counted every song up, the '90s channel probably slightly won out for me, but I was too busy happily jumping around to count. My face literally hurt from smiling so much and so widely. Amusingly, there was a bit of confusion at the beginning when one of the DJs announced that somehow his channel was being transmitted at Ely train station. I have no idea how this would even be possible, but if true, the commuters heading north or south at 8pm would have had a rather disorienting experience.

Although — in deference to the cathedral location and the fact that most attendees are over forty — the event finished at 11pm and I was home about five minutes later, three hours straight of dancing followed by not enough sleep did take its toll, and my two hours at classes in the gym on Saturday morning were even more exhausting than usual. I made it through, hauled myself into town to meet Matthias at the market, and whipped around doing the grocery shopping at top speed in order to escape the impending rain. We made it into our favourite cafe/bar, amazing food truck cheese, sauerkraut and pickle toasties in hand, just as the first drops began to fall.

Spring is finally starting to show its face — dark pink flowers on the quince tree, crocuses blossoming purple in the raised beds, and other bulbs emerging from the ground. I bought a bird feeder, filled it with mixed seeds, and hung it up in the back garden, although I haven't noticed any birds making particular use of it so far. This year, I'm starting my fermentation plans early, and made a test batch of this sauerkraut yesterday. It needs a few days left alone in a dark cupboard, and then I'll test the results.

This morning was swimming, crepes, river and market wander, with coffee from the rig in the market square. I've just returned downstairs after a very lazy yoga class, and I plan to spend the rest of the afternoon slowly winding down, with my crysanthamum flower tea in hand, catching up on Dreamwidth.

I read two books this week, both in their way dealing with trauma recovery, one with staggeringly better results than the other. The difference in quality is so dramatic that it almost feels unfair to compare them, and yet I can't help doing so due to their thematic overlap.

First up was Deerskin, Robin McKinley's retelling of the 'Donkeyskin' fairytale, which was the remaining recommendation from my post requesting fairytale/mythology retellings. This dark and unsettling fairytale has incestuous rape at its heart, and so for obvious reasons doesn't get included very often in anthology collections. McKinley handles this difficult subject matter with perception and sensitivity, telling a story in which physical and mental flight, and space and time (in a sense outside of space and time) experiencing the cyclical and linear growth of the natural world allow her heroine to return back to herself, in healing, bravery, justice and human connection. One thing I always feel McKinley does very well is convey the full richness of all the senses, and this is on full display in Deerskin: the bite of the winter cold, the softness of a new puppy's first fur, the welcome intense taste of food after a long period of hunger, the way fear and trauma are felt in the body, and so on. The whole thing is just staggeringly well done — McKinley at her absolute best.

The second book was A Theory of Dreaming, Ava Reid's follow-up to her dark academia A Study in Drowning. The former was originally intended as a standalone, and certainly drew its characters' stories to a satisfying close, but given it ended up being a breakaway success almost solely due to TikTok word-of-mouth and reviving its author's career, I assume a sequel was more or less inevitable. Dreaming sees its central couple Effie and Preston return to university, uncovering more shocking secrets about the great canonical works of literature that underpin their two warring nations' origin myths, contend with more institutional sexism, classism and xenophobia, and try to shore up their relationship in the face of Effie's ongoing mental illness and trauma. The problem, as always with Reid, is the complete absence of any subtlety; everything is overexplained and beaten into the reader's head with the clunkiness of a hammer blow. Reid is one of the worst culprits for a kind of fearful authorial overexplanation, as if writing in anticipation of a social media mob ready to descend at the slightest hint that depiction might equal endorsement, spelling out her books' central messages over and over again like a streaming-era TV show putting clunky plot and thematic exposition into its dialogue in case its audience gets distracted by mobile phones and misses something crucial. The rarefied ivory tower privilege of her fictionalised university, the unsophisticated exploration of war, the resolution to all the various injustices piled up on Effie — everything is anxiously spelt out, and then spelt out again, and then concluded in the most 'and then everyone applauded' Tumblr post manner imaginable. As with A Study in Drowning, the inspiration from AS Byatt's Possession is clear (and acknowledged), but honestly, that just made me want to reread Possession again.

I have another Ava Reid book making its way to me at some point via library holds, and I know it's likely to irritate me in similar ways. Her first couple of books had promise, but I feel everything since has been a serious step down in quality, and yet I keep trying.

This weekend has been calm, relaxing, and wintry. Yesterday's skies were clear and blue, and it was a real pleasure to walk out to the gym for my two hours of classes, watched through the windows by myriad cats as they observed me make my way through the freezing air. After lunch, Matthias and I assembled the growhouse we bought for germinating this year's vegetables. All things being equal, I'm hoping to start with tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, and some herbs by the end of the month.

In the evening, we went out for a meal at this place — a former stately home that's now a boutique hotel and events venue, just slightly out of town near the village of Stuntney. It's not reachable by public transport, and the last time we ate there we got taxis back and forth, but this time around we decided to try walking. It's not the most picturesque walk: you walk along a paved footpath next to a main road for about half the trip, then you have the option of continuing along the main road with no footpath (i.e. walking on the verge), or going slightly out of the way into Stuntney village, walking the length of the village and then rejoining the main road when the village ends. We went with the latter (the idea of walking along the verge of a main road in the dark did not appeal), and the whole thing took just under an hour. It was definitely a good way to work up an appetite! It was lovely to sit in the bar next to an open fire, drinking champagne, before moving into the restaurant for the meal, which was fairly solid gastropub-type food, in a conservatory with views back across the fens to the cathedral, and a woman singing covers of various pop songs. The whole experience was so warming and cosy.

It was meant to start raining and snowing at 1am, but in actual fact this only really arrived in the light of the morning — drenching me when I ducked out to the bakery to pick up pastries for breakfast. We had deliberately planned to spend the whole of Sunday indoors, and the advent first of heavy rain, and then of snow, confirmed the wisdom of this decision! The snow was intense: fat flakes that danced through the air, and settled all over the trees, roofs, and ground. It lasted for a couple of hours, although it's all well on the way to melting now, and turning to slush. While it lasted, it was a beautiful backdrop to some slow yoga, watching the Olympics, and lots of reading.

You may recall that a few weeks back, I was asking for recommendations of fairytale/mythology/folktale retellings, and this week is when I've made proper efforts to start with some of the books you recommended. This somehow worked out as being two very different Eros/Cupid and Psyche retellings: The Sharpest Thorn (Victoria Audley) and Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis), both doing very different things with the myth, both doing them well.

( Cut for some (positive) remarks on The Sharpest Thorn, as I know the author here on Dreamwidth and this gives the choice whether to read my remarks or not )

As for the Lewis, I went into this with some trepidation that I'd tried to overcome due to my general trust in the taste of the people who'd recommended it. I last read Lewis more than twenty years ago, when I was assigned That Hideous Strength to read for a university class during my undergrad degree, and felt the book's misogyny with an almost physical force. It remains one of only two books that made me so angry that I literally hurled them at the wall, and I had determined then to never, ever read another C.S. Lewis book again.

I genuinely cannot reconcile the writing of women (from a woman's first-person perspective, even) in Till We Have Faces with the seething, misogynistic contempt of That Hideous Strength. It's almost as if the books are written by two entirely different people. This retelling tells the story of Cupid and Psyche from the point of view of one of Psyche's sisters (who, in the original versions of the tale, out of jealousy of their sister's material circumstances, convince her to break her divine husband's taboo on viewing him, sparking Psyche's exile, misery, and ill-treatment), and what it's really concerned with is the gulf between the human and the divine, and how the former are only able to perceive the latter dimly, through darkness. I'm not doing it full justice with that description — really, it's something that has to be read to experience fully — but I'm just in awe, really. It's one of the few works of fiction that really conveys the yawning gulf between mortal and immortal ways of being, seeing, and experiencing existence. Per Lewis, ordinary human beings are for the most part so incapable of understanding the divine that they fill in this chasm with darkness, with symbols, with metaphor, and with monstrosity. What an incredible book (although I couldn't help rolling my eyes indulgently at the whole Golden Bough of it all — oh mid-twentieth-century authors with interest in comparative religion, never change).

In the time since I've started this post, the snow has now melted fully, and that silvery snowlit quality in the sky has been replaced by soggy grey. The afternoon is, I suppose, somewhat running away from me. This cosy conclusion to the weekend, however, holds nothing more complicated than some slow-cooking Iranian food for dinner, cups of smoky tea, and a fire in the wood-burning stove. It's been a good two days all around.

It's been a good weekend after a tiring and emotionally difficult week. Saturday was filled with the kind of icy clear wintry skies that I love, and it was wonderful to wander around the market gathering vegetables, eggs, and other bits and pieces, before retreating to the house. I made a batch of ginger-, lemon- and honey-infused water to use as a sort of tisane on cold nights, and lay around catching up with podcasts and Dreamwidth comments. On my walk out to the pool this morning, almost every second window had a cat slumbering on the windowsill, and the hedgerows were filled with clouds of twittering sparows. I put in even more effort than usual in the pool this morning and at the classes in the gym yesterday, and my body feels pleasantly tired. Now, I'm sitting in the living room with softly foggy skies outside and a whisky-scented candle, while a noorishbynoor Bahraini-style dal simmers on the stove in the kitchen for tomorrow's dinner. Everything feels sleepy and slow.

I'll start things off with some very good news. Some of you may recall my post last week about Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, with suggestions of ways to help. This included a fundraiser to buy large, expensive batteries for Kyivan families so that they had reliable sources of power in the wake of constant blackouts, and loss of heating and hot water in their homes. These batteries cost $3400 US apiece, and when I posted about the fundraiser last Saturday, the organisers had bought two so far. As of this week, they now have nine, and you can see some photos of Anastasiia Lapatina, the journalist who organised the fundraiser, with the delivered batteries, in her latest Substack newsletter update. Thank you to everyone who donated or spread the word of this fundraiser: you contributed to this, and you can see concrete proof of your actions. It's a small thing in light of the overwhelming horrors going on all over the world, but it is genuinely, unambiguously helpful. The fundraiser is ongoing, so please feel free to continue to share my original post or donate if you are able. Other concrete ways to help are the Ukrainian government's fundraising initiative for air defence or Come Back Alive's fundraising campaign for drones to use as air defence against other drones — helping civillians cope with the attacks on energy infrastructure is good, but preventing those attacks from happening at all is obviously better.

Reading this week has mostly been rereads, with the only reread of note being Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month poetry and short fiction collection. This was a project she undertook in 2010, when a friend spent the month of February sending her different samples of honey each day, and she wrote a poem or short story in response to the look, smell and taste of each sample. Each creative piece of writing is preceded by a description of the sensory experience of that specific honey, vividly captured so that the reader is brought along for the ride. Although this is an early piece of El-Mohtar's work, it has all the hallmarks that I've come to expect and appreciate in her later writing: lyrical, fairytale storytelling, with each item in the collection an exquisite, self-contained gem. Her writing is always a rich feast for the senses — one does not just read her stories and poetry, but rather tastes, smells, and touches the little worlds she creates within them — and this collection really plays to those strengths.

I'm also about a quarter of the way through Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan's adult fiction debut, in which a young woman with terminal cancer is offered a chance to save her life if she elects to be transported into the fictional world of the wildly successful series of fantasy novels of which she and her younger sister are fans. The only catch — she finds herself in the body of one of the series' villains, who is slated for execution, and must therefore rely on her knowledge of the series' plot, and wider genre knowledge in general, in order to wriggle her way out of things. Rees Brennan herself was diagnosed with cancer in her thirties, and went through a long, painful recovery, and the fear and rage of that experience is conveyed with real vulnerability, deftly sitting next to the book's gleeful, quippy humour. It's written with real affection for both transformative fandom and the way that experience of collectively engaging with fiction transcends the sometimes questionable quality of the source material (if a work of fiction is meaningful, that's all that matters), and I can tell it's going to be a wild ride from start to finish.

I've got laundry to hang out (in the kitchen, as outdoor laundry will not be possible until at least late March), and more reading to do, and then Matthias and I will be heading into one of the villages south of Cambridge for a Burns Night dinner in one of the gastropubs we frequent sporadically. I'm expecting tartan, bagpipes, and whisky, the latter of which will be a bit of a shock to the system as I have been refraining from alcohol for the past month. But it will be good fun!

I've had this post written and locked for over 2.5 hours, hoping that the next snowflake_challenge prompt would be posted so that I could add it here and then unlock things, but it's getting to the point in the day when I close all screens and step away from the internet, the next prompt is still not posted, so I'm going to unlock things now and update ... who knows when?

We were promised apocalyptic storms and snow all weekend, but apart from a bit of sleet on the ground yesterday, and now some wind that keeps blowing our green bin out of the front garden and onto the footpath, the dire warnings were not necessary in this part of the world. Nevertheless, it was a weekend for hunkering down at home, although I was out at the sports centre for my classes yesterday and my swim this morning (nearly slipping over on the ice as I walked there both days), and Matthias and I did a quick run into town to return a bunch of library books this morning. The heating has been on almost constantly all week, and I supplemented it last night with a fire in the wood-burning stove. I added branches from the Christmas wreath, and the whole living room smelt of pine sap.

The combination of global politics and some difficult stuff with my family back in Australia have rendered me incapable of getting to sleep without watching dialogue-free cottagecore videos of Youtubers gardening, cooking and cleaning their cosy houses, but between that, and deliberately selecting yoga classes which feature kittens (my yoga teacher fosters cats, and tends to foster mother cats with new kittens when she does so), and ruthless avoidance of social media and news websites, I'm doing about as well as I can to manage the situation.

Last night Matthias and I picked the Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein adaptation for our Saturday movie night. It's been over twenty years since I read Shelley's novel, but as far as I could remember, this was a pretty straight adaptation — some characters fleshed out and some details added, but in essence faithful to the ideas of the source material, unsubtle biblical and birth and death metaphors and Victoriana included. This was a real labour of love for del Toro, and he and the cast clearly had a fantastic time bringing the story to life.

This week's reading was two novels, and a couple of SFF short stories, one of which I found bafflingly unsatisfying (the characters' choices and motivations seemed to boil down to 'I love you so I'm going to order my underlings to stop torturing you' and 'I love you so I'm going to forgive the fact that your underlings tortured me and we are on opposites sides in a cosmic battle, and clearly your side is in the right'), the other of which I found hauntingly folkloric and charming.

The first of the novels was The Lantern Bearers, as I continue to make my way through Rosemary Sutcliff's works for the first time. This one is set at the moment in which the last Roman legions are withdrawn from Britain; our point-of-view character is a legionary who opts to desert rather than forsake his family and their farm in Britain, and then barely survives defending said family and farm against Saxon raiders, in an attack in which his father and most of their employees (their farm does not use slave labour) are killed, the farm is destroyed, and his sister is carried off by the raiders and later goes on to marry one of them and bear his child (with, it is assumed, not much choice in the matter). Aquila — the protagonist — is left embittered and broken, unmoored in the aftermath, drifting into the orbit of the remnants of the Romano-British order, pushed out into what is now Wales, struggling to hold back the tide. Here we are treated both to a retelling of some Welsh Arthuriana, and also a very painful personal story of the limits of revenge as a motivating factor, and how to survive and carve out a life when you are hollowed out by grief and loss. I liked it a lot, but found in this book that Sutcliff's appparent absolute lack of interest in the interior lives of women almost tipped over at times into actual misogyny, which I had to essentially push aside and ignore in order to enjoy and appreciate the story she was interested in telling.

Also, sentiments like:

'I sometimes think we stand at sunset. It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.'

are almost painfully relevant but also excruciatingly optimistic, given the state of the world. Ooof.

Finally, I picked up The Silver Bone (Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk), the first in a series of historical mystery novels set in post-First World War Kyiv. This one takes place in 1919, at a point when the city kept changing hands between White Russian, Red Army, and Ukrainian nationalist control, and Kyiv residents are just trying to keep their heads down and survive. Kurkov strikes a great balance between conveying both the terror (the novel begins with the protagonist's father's death before his eyes at the hands of a bayonet-wielding Cossack, an attack which he survives but costs him his ear), and the absurdity (all these different armies keep issuing different documentation and currency and the population struggles to know what to use, in the end settling on bartering things like fuel, salt and sugar, which at least remain useful no matter who is in charge). Via a convoluted series of almost comedic events, Samson (the protagonist) falls into a job working with the police while Kyiv is under shaky Soviet control, and, after overhearing (via an almost magical realist mechanism) the nefarious plans of a pair of Red Army soldiers who have commandeered most of his flat, he has his first case to crack. There's also a charming subplot about Samson's halting courtship of Nadezhda, an earnest, idealistic young woman who works in the Soviet bureau of statistics. In terms of historical mysteries, I would say this is heavier on the history and lighter on the mystery — a great evocation of a city and its people experiencing (as they are also, tragically, now) turbulent change. I'm very much looking forward to the following books in the series.

I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon watching the rain on the windows and the wood pigeons frolicking in the hedgerows over the road, as the weekend draws to its grey, windy close.

The last day of 2025 dawned clear, freezing, and frosty. I've spent the morning curled up in the living room, watching the sun rise, drinking Christmas spiced coffee, and reflecting on the year that was. I've been enjoying seeing everyone else's thoughts on their own 2025; mine are behind the cut.

( And the only sound is the broken sea )

Happy Gravy Day to those who celebrate! It's been a bit of a disjointed few days. I'm working right up to (and including) 24th December, so there's the usual mad scramble to deal with the inevitable mad scramble of students and researchers wanting to 'wrap things up before Christmas,' I'm trying to get all the food shopping and Christmas preparation done around that, and to top it all off, both Matthias and I have been sick. He's mostly better now, and I'm on the way to recovery, but the timing was less than ideal.

author_by_night suggested that I talk about the discrepancy between conventional understanding of history (based to a large extent on the experiences of the upper echelons of society), and the realities of ordinary people's lives for the December talking meme, and although I don't really feel qualified to provide a definitive answer to this, I'll do my best.

( See more behind the cut )

I've picked up The Dark Is Rising for my annual winter solstice reread, but haven't finished it yet, and have otherwise only finished one other book this week: The Art of a Lie (Laura Shepherd-Robinson), another great novel by one of my favourite writers of historical fiction. This was a page-turning, enjoyable read with all the features I've come to enjoy about Shepherd-Robinson's books: a scammer in eighteenth-century London embarks on a new con job on a wealthy widow, and finds he's picked a more savvy and complicated mark than his usual targets. The book switches perspectives, each time revealing more unreliabilities in its pair of narrators, pulling the rug out from each other and from the reader with every shift in point of view. As always, the author's extensive research and rich evocation of this period in history is on full display — I was delighted to learn more about eighteenth-century confectionery- and ice-cream-making, law-enforcement in London before it had a dedicated police force, and all the various opportunities for scamming and corruption (most of which are essentially unchanged to this day — there was a common 'Spanish prisoner' scam which is identical to today's 'Nigerian prince' scam).

And that's about it for this week. I hope everyone else is having a restful time.

I don't normally do standalone book reviews these days, but a recent read was so extraordinary, so overwhelming, and just so unbelievably good at what its author was trying to do that I found myself haunted by it even before I'd read its final page. I reread it five times in succession this week, unable to pick up anything else: that's how much it got its claw into me.

( More behind the cut )

This is a belated attempt to catch up on some book logging, and consists of stuff read while flying to, from, and within Australia, plus on some Australian train journeys. As most of the flights took place at night, I didn't read as much as I could have given the time available, so I feel this list is somewhat shorter than expected.

In any case, I read five books.

The first two were the latest to me in the Clorinda Cathcart series, Dramatick Rivalry and Domestick Disruptions. This series by LA Hall is written from the perspective of the journal entries of a comfortably well-off courtesan in 19th-century London, and the various aristocrats, wealthy businesspeople, intellectuals, scientists, playwrights, theatrical actors, Bow Street Runners, and other interesting fictional luminaries who end up in her circle. The books are written with a wryly observant tone, and each contains various high- and low-stakes challenges and conflicts that are cleverly resolved by the end. I find them extremely relaxing to read — cosy fiction is a hard sell for me, but this series works well in that regard, although I'm making my way through it quite slowly, as I find two books in succession is enough for a while.

In general, my brain focused better on nonfiction during long-haul flights, so I spent a lot of time reading Diary of an Invasion (Andrey Kurkov), which is what it says on the tin: the author's experiences in the first few months of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Kurkov is an accomplished Ukrainian author of both literary and historical detective fiction, but in those intense, frightening first few months of the full-scale war, he turned his talents to memoir, documenting his family's flight from Kyiv to the west of the country, when it felt as if the entire country and wider world held its breath, and every action was harnessed to survival, until the dawning realisation that Ukraine had withstood and pushed back against the first blow, but that what remained would be an almost unfathomably difficult military, diplomatic, economic and psychosocial marathon with no end in sight. I remember those times well: shock and outrage warring with wild hope and optimism, typified by this Onuka song. Kurkov has since followed these initial reactions with a memoir about the long years of the ongoing war, which I will certainly be seeking out.

From history to historical fiction, with Cecily (Annie Garthwaite), the first in a series of novels about the Wars of the Roses from the perspective of Yorkist matriarch Cecily Neville. This book follows Cecily from the early years of her marriage, her years manoeuvring from behind the scenes to further her husband's political ambitions, his battlefield defeat and execution, and the dawn of a new day with Cecily's eldest son Edward on the throne. I'm pretty familiar with this period of history as depicted in popular fiction, and Cecily didn't really bring anything new to the party, but I enjoyed it all the same. In terms of vibe, it's essentially Hilary Mantel meets Sharon Kay Penman: lyrical writing that luxuriates in the interiority of its protagonist's mind, and uncritically Yorkist partisanship. The term grates, but Cecily Neville really is Garthwaite's precious blorbo who can do no wrong: the most politically savvy, the one whose read on every situation is always right, whose only misfortune is to live in a time in which those skills and that intelligence must instead be harnessed to advance the cause of the men in her life, rather than on her own behalf.

Finally, I picked up Kate Elliott's latest epic fantasy doorstopper: The Witch Road, the first of a secondary world duology in which Elen, a low-ranking courier at the edge of a vast empire is suddenly thrust into an unwanted spotlight when she is required to accompany an imperial prince and his retinue on a perilous journey. Elen and her travelling companions contend with challenges both political and supernatural, in a sweeping road trip peopled with a fantastic cast of characters. Kate Elliott's considerable strengths as a writer: the meticulous world-building that gives us a fictional world that feels at once three-dimensional and lived-in, and her devastatingly perceptive depiction of the tensions inherent in navigating profoundly power-imbalanced relationships (on a national, communal, and interpersonal level) are on full display here, and I enjoyed this almost as much as I enjoyed my favourite of her series, the Crossroads trilogy.

That's it for reading so far, although I did trudge through the rain to pick up a library book today, so I may have more to say about books tomorrow. But for now, I'll draw this post to a close.