Beyond Selidor

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.

It's been a nice, cosy, relaxing weekend, after a long run of weeks packed with activities. I've currently got chicken stock bubbling away on the stove in the next room over, ready to be used in tonight's soup for dinner. Both the sound and smell of stock are the epitome of warmth to me.

The extra hour of sleep was extremely welcome, and it was glorious to wake up in full sunlight after weeks of dark mornings (although the months of darkness at 4pm is always going to hit me like a hammer), walk out to the pool in the freezing sunlit air (all the neighbourhood cats were sitting in their respective windows, looking out at pedestrians as if we were crazy for being outside), swim my regular 1km in an uncharacteristically empty pool, and then walk along the river and through the market with Matthias. The sun disappeared at virtually the exact moment we walked back through the door of our house, which was unintentionally impeccable timing on our part.

Other good things: the pottery taster class last week was lovely. I was spectacularly bad at it — there are just so many things to keep track of, and the smallest, most subtle hand movement or shift in the body's position can cause a pot to collapse beyond repair on the wheel — but the setting was great, the instructor was patient, and the activity was meditative. I definitely want to do more, but it will probably need to wait until next year, due to various upcoming travels and other activities. It was good to try it out, though.

Last weekend, Matthias and I also went down to London on Sunday to attend, of all things, a sumo tournament (the first outside Japan in nearly 35 years) in the Royal Albert Hall. Matthias, who's never met a sport he doesn't like (except for golf), got massively into sumo a few years back, and the serendipitous existence of this exhibition tournament in London was too good to miss. As with many of his interests, I was just happy to be along for the ride, but I ended up having a great time. I love the Albert Hall as an events venue, and it worked brilliantly here. It was packed to the rafters, including with lots of groups of youngish children who were clearly massive fans (with banners, etc).

Work has been exhausting, and my choice of reading material (mostly rereads of childhood favourites) has reflected that, although I did finally get to The Voyage Home, the concluding book in Pat Barker's trilogy of books retelling events in and around the Iliad from various female characters' perspectives. The first two books are the Briseis-centric retelling of my heart — the versions of these stories for which I'd been searching for decades, trudging through a lot of dross to get to — and I'd been a bit sad to see that Barker had decided Briseis's story was done in the second book, and moved on to other characters. Did the world really need yet another retelling of the tragedy of Cassandra, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and was Barker actually going to add anything to this well-trodden ground with her contribution? Even after finishing the book, I'm not sure I know the answer — I found it excellent and compelling, but unlike Barker's take on Briseis (which I talk about in more detail here), it didn't dig itself into the spaces around my heart, with truths at once obvious and devastating. Violent patriarchal honour culture is awful, and will destroy everyone, including violent patriarchs? Life goes on, and people will find a way to survive, in spite of incredible devastation, carving out their own little spaces of safety wherever they can? These are interesting enough as animating ideas, but do they justify yet another retelling?

In my wanderings yesterday, I went past the independent bookshop and bought my own copy of The Rose Field, the concluding brick of a tome in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials sequel/prequel trilogy, The Book of Dust. I've only read 150 of 600+ pages, so I'll make no firm conclusions here, other than to state I feel quite bittersweet about the whole thing. His Dark Materials was utterly formative for me (I read it at exactly the right ages, while having to wait for the second two books to be published), and it is no exaggeration to say that if not for picking up Northern Lights/The Golden Compass as a thirteen-year-old, I would not be living in this country, have done the PhD that I did, be working in the line of work that I do, nor be married to the person that I am. The message boards of a fan forum for HDM were my first experience of online fandom, and remain my gold standard for fannish community. I'm still good friends with most of the people I met through the forum, though our days of dissecting Pullman's books and speculating about future directions of the series are long gone. They've all been posting photos of their own copies of The Rose Field and seem for the most part hugely excited to see how Lyra's story concludes. I myself feel quite alienated by all this, and hesitant to raise my ambivalence. I loved the prequel of this new trilogy, but found the second book (chronologically, the first half of the 'sequel' component of the trilogy) not just a let down, but actively enraging (there's a whole vanished Twitter DM conversation between me and sophia.mcdougall consisting of me ranting in real time as I read my way further through the book), and apparently laying the groundwork for one of my few massive character dynamic squicks. It didn't change how I felt about the original trilogy, because that's so embedded in me that there's no extracting it, but it did cause a major shift in my overall thinking about Pullman as a writer. So far, I don't have such a strong Do Not Want reaction to The Rose Field, but it's early days, and my overall assessment hinges on how all the various threads are pulled together.

Rather than leaving this post on such a grumbling note, I will close with a link to a Substack post by Marie Le Conte that's been bringing me a lot of joy. In it, she talks about the rather surreal experience of her teenage years, when she and a couple of other friends had the enormous chutzpah to create and run a somewhat successful internet music fanzine. I won't go into more detail than that, except to say that the specific combination of teenage certainty and intellectual arrogance is extremely recognisable to me, although my own context was different. It's a fun read, even if there were a lot of moments of 'I'm in this picture and I don't like it.'

My four-day weekend has reached its final day, and although it hasn't been quite as relaxing as I intended, it has been a lot of fun. Matthias and I just came back from a little Sunday market wander in the rain, and I'm now curled up in the living room in my wing chair, a takeaway coffee in hand, watching people walk by and the raindrops fall. The sky is white, rather than grey, and it feels as if we are under cotton wool.

This weekend has involved two trips into Cambridge. On Friday night, Matthias and I had booked to attend a collaborative event between the upmarket wine sellers and one of the restaurants, with wine from Bordeaux and a French-ish five-course dinner. We've been to several of these types of events, although all the others have been in one of the wine seller's shops and more like a wine-tasting with canapés, rather than a full sit-down restaurant meal. I was amused to discover that the restaurant was actually run by the guy who used to manage the wine cellars and catering at my old Cambridge residential college (on one memorable occasion, I was invited on a tour of the extensive underground cellars, led by him, by virtue of the fact that I lived in a share house with a woman who was the head of the college's postgraduate student committee). He was already an older man when I knew him in college, so I'm amused that he's elected to spend his 'retirement' doing something as stressful as running a restaurant! In any case, the food was good, the wine was excellent, but the people organising things had clearly failed to consider the fact that not everyone attending actually lived in Cambridge — things went on until after 11pm, and we had to dash out to make the last train (which was inevitably delayed by half an hour), and didn't get to bed until close to 1am. I was not super thrilled to be waking up at 7am on Saturday morning to go to two hours of classes at the gym, that's for sure!

Our second trip in to Cambridge was somewhat spontaneous, as misshoijer announced on Thursday that she'd be in the city for a flying visit, and would anyone like to meet up on Saturday afternoon. She's a friend from my postgraduate days in Cambridge — she did her undergrad degree in the same department where I did my MPhil and PhD, and for three years, I sat in on her undergraduate medieval Welsh classes (by the third year, it was just her, one other guy, and me, and we grappled with medieval Cornish and Breton as well). She moved back to Sweden a couple of years ago and I hadn't seen her for ages, so it was good to catch up — and all done in a logistically straightforward way that meant I didn't have to go into central Cambridge on the same Saturday when all the students moved back in for the start of the new academic year: she, Matthias and I met in a pub that was literally on the train station platform, we had one drink, and then she went on to London and we went back to Ely, where we tried a new Indian restaurant for dinner. This restaurant is in somewhat cursed location on the high street — it used to be a nightclub (so the space is big) which closed down at some point during or immediately after the pandemic lockdowns, then it got turned into an extremely mediocre cocktail bar (we went once and were basically the only people there in a cavernous space — very depressing), which then closed down, and it had been sitting empty for several years when suddenly I saw that it was alive and kicking as an Indian restaurant. The food was excellent (and absurdly cheap) — southern Indian food from Kerala, which is probably my favourite. We were home by 9.30, and I was asleep by 10pm.

I've only finished one book this week, but what a book it was: Tori Bovalino's adult fantasy debut, The Second Death of Locke, which was much anticipated on my part, and definitely exceeded my high expectations. I should warn everyone that my enjoyment is entirely due to the fact that it is very much My Kind of Nonsense — self-indulgent in a way that really suits my particular tastes and preferences when it comes to character dynamic. (Amusingly, it also manages to involve two separate ideas that teenage me had for fantasy novels that never saw fruition at my hands — when I say it is my kind of nonsense, I'm not kidding.) This is a world in which magic springs from intense bonds between mages and their human sources (called 'wells'); the former draws on the latter for all manner of supernatural outcomes. It's also a world in which the source of magic is running dry, due to an act of betrayal some years previously in which the titular island and dynasty of Locke (from whence springs all magical power) was annihilated, save a lost heir whom all other powers in the land are fighting to locate and control as their magical power source puppet.

Into this chaos step our two focal characters: Kier, a mage fighting in the army of one of these countries, and Grey, his well and childhood best friend (she's an orphan and was in effect raised by his family; she's also secretly in love with him and has been pining unrequitedly for many years). When they're tasked with escorting a captured hostage teenage girl to a potential ally, this perilous quest risks exposing the pair's many dangerous secrets, with implications for the wider political and supernatural context in which they find themselves. The characters' absolutely intense bond is at the heart of the novel, and if you like stories where characters are loyal to one another to absurdly self-sacrificing degrees (barely a few chapters pass without either Kier or Grey putting themselves in life-threatening danger in order to save the other), you will find lots to enjoy here.

As with many current ostensibly adult fantasy novels, although the characters are in their twenties, it still does feel a bit YA in terms of the relationships, and the whole thing is a bit of a teenage girl power fantasy (at least for the kind of teenage girl I was), but I had an absolutely fantastic time reading it, and won't apologise for that! If I had read it slightly sooner, I would possibly have nominated it for Yuletide.

This morning has been absurdly productive — I've already been to the pool, done a load of laundry (hanging inside, much to my disappointment, due to the rain), done a yoga class, and, as previously mentioned, strolled around the market. I'm looking forward to a few hours spent lying around and doing very, very little. I picked up a copy of Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) from a free book exchange outside a house near the river, and I imagine it will feature heavily in this afternoon's plans. Next week is the start of the busiest few months of the year for me at work, and I'm hoping this weekend was enough of a reset in terms of my energy levels to leave me equal to the task.

I wanted to spend the afternoon lying in bed, reading, as the raindrops splashed against the window, but the weather didn't play ball, and I'd already finished my book before the rain arrived. Nevertheless, it's been a cosy couple of days, aided by a day off on Friday in which I did very little besides go swimming, chat on FaceTime with my sister and then my mum in quick succession, and sit out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar with Matthias for a pre-dinner drink.

Yesterday, I was in Cambridge during the morning to get my hair cut, and also took the opportunity to refill all my spice jars at the health food shop that does refills. We do have a zero waste shop in Ely, but it only does refills of oils and vinegars, legumes, grains, nuts and dried fruit, and toiletries and cleaning products.

Matthias and I watched The Ballad of Wallis Island as our Saturday film last night. We'd meant to see this at the community cinema a few weeks ago, but ended up being sick with a cold, and we had to abandon those plans; thankfully it was available to rent on streaming fairly swiftly. It's a film that starts off being hilariously awkward, and awkwardly hilarious — an eccentric fan hires the two halves of his favourite (disbanded) folk duo for a private concert on a remote island, and all the artistic, professional, and romantic tensions that caused the pair to break up a decade ago come bubbling to the surface — and ends up sweet and emotionally affecting, without ever feeling saccharine.

This morning Matthias and I woke unprompted at about 6am, which I actually don't mind on the weekends — there's something nice about being awake at a time most people are asleep, watching the sunlight spread across the garden, lingering over breakfast and coffee, wandering around the cathedral and along the river, looking at smoke curling out of the houseboat chimneys, as the town slowly wakes up. We were back home by midmorning, and I baked an apple cake — an experiment that turned out successfully. I'm not a very good baker, and I'm worried that if I put more effort into it, I'll start treating it as I do cooking. I had to restrain myself from buying a stand mixer there and then (which would definitely do the job better than the whisk attachment on my handheld blender — which sent butter and sugar flying around the room — but which would also only enable me in this insanity).

I was a bit burnt out by reading, and therefore only finished a single book this week — Those Beyond the Wall (Micaiah Jonhson) — which I read essentially in an entire sitting this afternoon. It's a follow up to Johnson's incredible dystopian multiverse extractive capitalism critique, The Space Between Worlds, involving many of the same characters, but focusing not on the privileged elitist tech company town, but rather on the Mad Max-esque community eking out an existence on its periphery, sustained both by an incredibly codified violent honour culture, and an incredibly intense sense of community cohesion (residents may be terrified by the violence of their existence, but they would prefer that at least their own people are the ones inflicting it). As with The Space Between Worlds, it's both a plausible future endpoint of, and an incredibly unsubtle metaphor for, the history and contemporary politics of the United States (in this case colonisation and the genocidal displacement of the land's original inhabitants), but written with such exquisite worldbuilding and interpersonal dynamics between the characters that I can definitely forgive a lack of subtlety. I find the ending a bit too tidy and convenient, but hey, if Johnson wants to indulge the fantasy that it's possible to reveal a society's injustices to its citizens in a way that will inspire them to react en masse, who am I to stop her?

ETA: Updating with a second book — Sunbringer (Hannah Kaner), the second in her epic fantasy Fallen Gods trilogy. As with many second books in epic fantasy trilogies, this one sees our ragtag band of misfit heroes artificially separated for most of the book, so we miss out on the fun character dynamics that come from throwing together a bunch of mismatching individuals and seeing sparks fly, but it's still a lot of fun. My favourite part of this series is the way it conceptualises gods and deities, and how people understand and practice religion in a world where the divine is tangible and present (and terrifying). The double crossing, shocking reveals, and twisty political machinations come thick and fast, setting things up for what should hopefully be a satisfying concluding third book in the series.

The rain has started in earnest, and the sky is a mass of white. The house smells of cooked apples and brown sugar, and things couldn't be more cosy if they tried.

It's been a pretty standard weekend by my ... standards. I met Matthias at one of the pubs in town on Friday as I returned home from the train station, where we sat out in the garden under a double rainbow, listening to live music and watching various small children and dogs of all sizes gambol about. We made it home just before the rain began again, and sat smugly in the living room, letting the working week slide away.

Saturday was the usual gym classes and market affair, but it felt satisfying and noteworthy that our lunches this weekend have consisted of homemade hummus, homemade pickles, and homemade fermented tomatoes from the garden. Everything tastes fresher and more like itself than the shop-bought equivalent. The tomato plants continue to be absurdly prolific, and every time I go out into the garden, I end up returning with a bowl filled with about thirty cherry tomatoes, which feels utterly abundant.

Faced with this glut, I made a double tomato whammy of Indian recipes last night, sailing merrily past the instruction to serve the tomato rice with dal, rather than a tomato-based curry. Both recipes were excellent, and I'd highly recommend them, either singly or together.

Thanks to everyone who recommended Thunderbolts* as a return to form when it comes to the MCU — Matthias and I picked it for last night's Saturday evening film, and found it an absolute riot from start to finish. It was nice to know that Marvel can still make solid, fun films, when they remember to crawl out from underneath a decade plus of accumulated films and mandatory joyless TV series backstory, and just focus on the magic that can happen when you throw together a bunch of mismatched characters and force them to work together. I enjoyed it immensely!

It poured with rain all of Saturday night — I went to sleep with it lashing the bedroom windows — but I woke to sun shining on wet ground, walking to the pool surrounded by the smells of greenery and rich earth. There are some yellow leaves on the ground, but it still feels more like summer for now. I had to restrain myself from picking blackberries on the way home, since they're still not quite ripe enough to eat.

Matthias and I then wandered through town for a bit, sipping iced coffee (or chai on his part) and browsing through the market, before returning home for more of the aforementioned homemade lunch. Now it's the early afternoon, and after catching up on Dreamwidth, I'm going to spend a bit of time communing with plants indoors and out, doing a long yoga class, and figuring out yet another tomato-based dinner.

Two books seems to be my maximum per week at the moment, and I found one to be excellent, and the other merely competent. The first book was The Pretender (Jo Harkin), a reimagining of the story of Lambert Simnel, a Yorkist pretender to the throne during the time of Henry VII. (The Wars of the Roses produced a lot of random pretenders at various stages). In tone and writing style it reminded me a lot of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy: lyrical, and in the present tense (the latter of which I usually only tolerate if the writing is really beautiful, which this is, in my opinion), although unlike Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, who knows and understands much more than those around him, Harkin's protagonist is a child, and a rather naive one at that, so hers is a story of the journey from ignorance to rueful understanding of the political machinations of the world. I remembered the broad contours of Simnel's story (like most royal pretenders, he does not have much luck), but she's fleshed it out in a way which feels plausible and perceptive. What I found truly impressive about the book, however, is the way Harkin uses medieval and early modern literature — the various classics of the day, with which Simnel was being tutored by those using him in order to mould him into a plausibly believable Yorkist heir — to shape the story. This is not just in terms of allusions (when her protagonist hits his lowest point, he's reading Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, for example), but even in the way the character moves through the narrative, so that there are points that feel more like a sort of mirror for princes, whereas other times where the story shifts to a courtly romance, and towards the end it reads more like a Renaissance revenge tragedy. It's a really remarkable feat of literary craft, and was a lot of fun to try to spot and anticipate these things.

The second book, Morgan Is My Name (Sophie Keetch) is the start of a new Arthurian fantasy trilogy, told from — as you can probably tell from the title — the perspective of Morgan Le Fay. There's nothing really wrong with Keetch's book, as she trots her readers through the familiar passages of the tale, and it's always interesting to see which bits of Arthuriana get slotted in where, and which bits get set aside (and speculate as to why), but I can't help but feel that an Arthurian retelling from the perspective of a female character needs to do more than just reiterate that patriarchal honour cultures are dangerous and awful for women, and that changing the point-of-view character from a familiar cycle of tales changes the perspective on events from within that cycle. (Maybe this would feel more groundbreaking to people who didn't read Marion Zimmer Bradley and a bunch of her imitators during their teenage years?) Keetch makes much of the Welsh origins of much of the Arthurian story in her afterward, but there doesn't seem to be much use of any of the Welsh tales I can remember — it's the usual mishmash of medieval and early modern sources, and the usual ahistorical mush of immediate post-Roman Britain politics, much later medieval cultural conventions, and fantasy elements. Her Morgan is ... fine as a point-of-view character, albeit very much lacking in any flaws beyond perhaps being too impulsive and quick to react emotionally in situations where it would probably serve her better to pause and come up with a clever plan. I'll probably stick with the trilogy, but it's definitely not among the more impressive Arthurian retellings, in my opinion.

I hope everyone has been having lovely weekends, and possibly better luck when it comes to the evenness in quality of their reading material.

This has been a pretty standard weekend: exercise, Saturday lunchtime in the market, a little bit of wandering with Matthias, Saturday film night, some reading, some cooking, some pottering about in the garden. I feel stretched but relaxed, which is exactly what I wanted.

Due to all the travel (and being sick), my exercise regime has been very irregular for the past couple of months, and for various reasons, yesterday was my first time doing my two hours of Saturday fitness classes for about six weeks. It was tough going, but I made it through, though my muscles are very angry at me today. After struggling my way through the classes, I met Matthias at the market, and we did the week's grocery shopping (mainly vegetables, of which there are many, and all are splendid), collected library books, and ate woodfired pizza from a food truck in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar, which was filled with excitable dogs. I also impulse-bought a secondhand Le Creuset lidded skillet in extremely good condition, for half price, which was an unexpected bonus.

I spent most of Saturday afternoon lying around on the couch, alternating between reading and watching cooking videos on Youtube, apart from half an hour doing stretchy yoga in an attempt to stave off the inevitable muscle soreness. Then I cooked a lazy dinner (vegetable frittata — other than chopping the vegetables for roasting, you just stick things in the oven and leave them alone), and we settled in for our selected Saturday night film: Mountainhead, a direct-to-TV satire about a quartet of terrible American tech billionaires holing up in a mountain retreat to get away from the fallout from a disastrous rollout of new features on one billionaire's social media platform, and plot and scheme about the future. This is possibly too on the nose for US politics reasons (two characters are really obvious fictionalised versions of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; the others feel more like amalgams of various horrible tech elites), and it's not exactly subtle, but if you want to spend an hour and a half watching the antics of a quartet of terrible, oblivious, and pathetic people, this will serve you very well. The dialogue is absolutely word perfect.

Sunday dawned sunny and bright, and I headed off to the pool to swim my laps through liquid sunshine (again difficult, as my swimming routine has been as erratic as my fitness class attendance), and then walk home, where I passed a house in which three different cats were all lying contentedly in various patches of sunlight, looking thoroughly pleased with their life choices. The morning was mostly eaten up with cooking crepes and doing household chores, but Matthias and I did venture out briefly after lunch to get gelato (a good life choice on our part). I've been spending the afternoon doing yoga and catching up on Dreamwidth, and in a bit I'll get started on dinner, which will be a stuffed capsicum recipe from the Ottolenghi/Tamimi Jerusalem cookbook, using some of the giant tomatoes from our garden.

This week's reading has had a bit more genre variety than normal, which made me happy.

( Books behind the cut )

And that's pretty much it, although earlier in the week, Matthias and I also met up with friends from our former department, who now live in Germany and have a ten-month-old baby. It was a hot night, and we sat out under the trees in a lovely Cambridge beer garden, catching up and delighting in the antics of their very cute baby. I hadn't seen them since their wedding, which now feels like an age ago.

I'll close out this post with the news that one of my friends from undergrad, who is now a children's book author, won the Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year. (Hers isn't the book that gets discussed in depth in the article, but I was struggling to find any publication other than paywalled material that focused on hers.) On top of winning the juried vote, her book also won the shadow award voted on by a panel of children, which is fantastic, and very well deserved.

I've been terrible about logging my reading (and to be honest, comparatively slow in terms of the number of books actually read), so this is a mega round up representing the past couple of months. Most of these books were read on trains (to holidays, or on my commute to work), on ferries, or on planes — in other words, as I was getting from A to B. Opportunities to just sit down and read in an uninterrupted manner have been rare (until this weekend, but more on that in a later post).

( Eleven books behind the cut, mainly fantasy literature )