Beyond Selidor

This weekend has involved more putting one foot in front of the other. The weather has been freezing, but gloriously sunny, and I've tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors.

Matthias and I caught the train to Waterbeach (the next village down the train line) yesterday afternoon, and walked for about half an hour until we got to the little brewery in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town. This brewery opens up roughly once a month — usually in summer — but had for whatever reason elected to open on the first weekend in March. There was a food truck selling bao, the place was heaving with people, and it was a nice change of scenery. We wandered back at around 5.30, breaking the journey home with Nepalese food and some of the most comically incompetent service I've ever experienced in a hospitality venue. The food was nice, and I was more amused than annoyed, but it was a bit ridiculous.

This morning I was out at the pool, and then took great pleasure in hanging laundry outside for the first time this year, under the blue, clear sky. Other than that, I've been reading, wandering around town, and preparing tonight's dinner, which involves marinating a whole duck according to a recipe which my Indonesian cookbook assures me is Indonesian, and which my Malaysian cookbook assures me is Malaysian, and which I will therefore settle on describing as 'southeast Asian'.

In terms of reading, this week I finished four books: one much-anticipated new release, and three rereads of Australian YA novels from my youth.

The new book was The Dark Mirror, the fifth in Samantha Shannon's dystopian Bone Season series which involves individuals with clairvoyant powers being persecuted by their dictatorial government, and the various growing revolutionary movements seeking its overthrow. As with every new book in the series, The Dark Mirror expands this alternative world (here we spend time in free countries that have not yet been taken over by the authoritarian regime: Poland, Czechia, and Italy), and moves into a new genre (in this case, it's definitely a war novel). And as with all the other books in the series, the strongest elements are the things that drew me to it in the first place: the relationships, the thoughtful and nuanced way that Shannon portrays people who are surviving trauma, and her heroine's slow transformation from fugitive criminal to revolutionary leader. Shannon has been criticised in the past for info-dumping in these books, and I have to admit I lost patience for this in places (there are about five or six different organisations/networks, all of which have their own slang and jargon for everything, not all of which needs to necessarily be listed in detail on the page), but in general I found this a solid addition to the series.

The rereads were as follows:

Mandragora (David McRobbie), a haunting, supernatural story about two teenagers in a small Australian town who uncover lost artefacts from the 19th-century shipwreck whose survivors founded their settlement — artefacts which, when exposed to view, begin to curse the town in the same way they cursed the ship previously.

Witch Bank (Catherine Jinks) — the name, if you are Australian, is an absolutely groan-worthy pun — in which a mousy young teenage school-leaver takes up secretarial work in the head office of a big bank, and becomes part of a network of women with magical powers. (As a side note, the absolute specificity of this was delightful to me: it's not just set in Sydney, it's set in very, very specific parts of Sydney, such that I know exactly which bank building the fictional office in the book is meant to stand in for, and such that the literal street where my mum and sister live gets name-checked in places.)

Beyond the Labyrinth (Gillian Rubinstein), in which a troubled, choose-your-own-adventure-stories-obsessed teenage boy, and the daugher of a family friend encounter an alien anthropologist who's been sent to their small coastal town to study the local Indigenous population pre-European settlement, but somehow ends up arriving two hundred years later. This was, quite honestly, really really weird. I had no memory of any of it (other than the choose-your-own-adventure stories element), and clearly only read it once when I was a child, unlike other Rubinstein books which I've reread obsessively for over thirty years. It's very subtle — the boy's dysfunctional family is written in a way that doesn't immediately leap out at you, but creeps up disturbingly over the course of the book — in a way that I feel wouldn't pass muster in contemporary YA publishing.

Two things which struck me really forcefully when reading all these three books back to back: they rely on a cultural understanding that is highly specific to Australian society at a very specific time (all these small regional towns with local history museums with paid curators and public libraries and paid local government jobs and thriving high streets, all those administrative jobs in the bank that could be taken by school-leavers with no qualifications, and so on), and there is so much casual racism that thankfully would probably not get past the editorial stage these days (so many instances where every character who is not a white Australian of British origin gets described in racialised terms while the white people don't, plus a whole lot of benevolently intended noble savage stereotypes in Beyond the Labyrinth). Time most definitely marches on.

I watched the recording of a Zoom conversation with Samantha Shannon, hosted by a Canadian independent bookshop. In it, she covers her two current series of books, but far more interesting to me is the discussion of the work involved in reissuing The Bone Season, ten years after it was first published, with heavy edits of the structure and content. This book — Shannon's debut — was written when she was 19 and published when she was 21, and she has apparently long been dissatisfied with it. She was given an opportunity that few authors are — to republish an 'anniversary edition' with the significant editorial changes that I mentioned. This has then necessitated lighter editing and subsequent reissuing of later books in the series (all of which will come out in May next year), meaning there are going to be two different versions of the first few books in the series existing simultaneously (and apparently confusing to read if you swap between the versions). I find the whole thing fascinating.



The next literary livestream I'll mention is happening later this week — 7pm British summer time on Friday — and is a British Library-hosted conversation between Natalie Haynes and Susan Cooper (later to be joined by Simon McBurney and Robert MacFarlane, who adapted The Dark Is Rising as a radio play last year). You can book tickets to view the Zoom conversation on the British Library website.

Finally, snickfic is hosting a no-frills friending meme — follow the link to participate.

It wasn't intentional, but for some reason the last three books I've read were all epic fantasy novels, all part of multi-book series. I'll try to sum them up briefly, but given they were all very chunky books, this might be difficult!

The Thousand Eyes (A.K. Larkwood) is the sequel to her previous novel, The Unspoken Name, which I can best sum up as what if The Tombs of Atuan, but Tenar was a lesbian and Ged was evil? I adored this first book, and enjoyed the sequel immensely, which was a mixture of twisty political machinations and betrayals, weird, weird magic, and loads of characters being consensually possessed by gods for a variety of reasons. I'm not sure if there are plans for a third book in the series — if not, things have concluded in a satisfying manner, but open-endedly enough that there's room for new books.

The First Binding (R.R. Virdi) bills itself as the first in Silk Road-inspired fantasy series. Whenever I hear 'Silk Road,' I always want stuff set in a fantasy version of central Asia, but so far Kate Elliott's Crossroads series seems to have been the only epic fantasy series I've encountered in which this is the case. The setting of this book is mainly inspired by South Asian history and cultures, and it also draws heavily on (as far as I can tell, having not read it) The Name of the Wind. Like Rothfuss's book, it features an unreliable narrator, a frame narrative (the protagonist recounts his history over the course of the book to a woman he's hooked up with in a tavern), and a protagonist who seems to be inexplicably gifted at everything he puts his mind to. The former two are fine by me, the latter I find really grating, and as we follow the narrator through a series of stock fantasy novel settings (a theatre troupe, a band of pickpocket children exploited by the adults who control them, a training montage at a school for magical children), unravelling the circumstances that have seen him locked in a quest for revenge, I can't say I found a huge amount to captivate me.

A Day of Fallen Night (Samantha Shannon) is a prequel to her epic fantasy brick of a novel, The Priory of the Orange Tree. This second book (equally brick-like) is set five hundred years previously to the first, in a world suffering the simmering threat of apocalyptic destruction by fire-breathing dragons, bound in dormancy under the earth, but always at risk of rising to wreak havoc again. This book, and the series in general, is interested in the thorny issues of inheritance and legacy — the problems inherent in monarchical rule (the imperative to have heirs even for people who don't want to bear children, the risk of the fate of a nation being placed in the hands of a child, or someone ill-suited to authority, the scheming and resentment by those whose blood or place in the birth order renders them unable to rule), and the dangers caused by flawed or suppressed historical memory. It's also a book about motherhood, in all its facets, and although I thought this was done well, it doesn't quite work given the series' setting, which is one free of homophobia and transphobia. Same sex relationships (including, but not always, marriages) are viewed in the same way as heterosexual ones, and there are numerous named trans characters, including nonbinary characters, even in parts of the world which have very rigidly defined gender roles. And yet, for certain characters in certain settings, motherhood, and specifically the need to become pregnant and give birth to one's own biological child, is considered essential for reasons that supersede everything else. For plot and worldbuilding related reasons, this is necessary, and it is shown to be a terrible burden and a flawed assumption, but it really doesn't work for me because it seems to contradict other aspects of the internal logic of the world Shannon has created. For the most part, I could ignore it because I love the settings, and the characters, and the epic sense of scale in terms of time and distance (Shannon is one of the few authors I've encountered who really understand that one thousand or five hundred years is a long, long time), but it is certainly a problem that is hard to resolve, given the story that Shannon wanted to tell.

I'm now moving on to read Wild and Wicked Things (Francesca Ma), which is a story of magic and the occult set in the years immediately after the end of the First World War. Have you been reading anything interesting recently?

It's the end of the month, and I am really done with winter. I normally don't mind this time of year, but January in 2021 has mainly be rain, mud, and gloom — none of the crisp, clear, icy winter weather that I enjoy. Nonetheless, Matthias and I spent the one nice hour of the day out walking along the river, and if you follow me on Instagram (ronnidolorosa, you can see some of the weird and wonderful sights we encountered, via my Stories (before they disappear).

I've finished off the month with an uptick in reading: the first two books in Barbara Hambly's James Asher vampire series (combining two of my favourite things: vampires, and Barbara Hambly; lirazel, you were absolutely right, I adore these books!), and a memoir by Huma Qureshi called How We Met. The latter was a gentle, sweet book about how she and her husband fell in love. She is the daughter of Pakistani (and Muslim) immigrants to the UK, her husband is a white British man, and she was raised fairly conservatively, with expectations of an arranged marriage after university. What felt really refreshing about her experiences is that hers is not the story of a woman 'escaping' the restrictions of an oppressive religion and culture (to be clear: I don't think that Islam, or Pakistani migrant communities in the UK are such a thing, just that this is normally the cliché of how relationships such as Qureshi's and her husband's are portrayed). Instead, her now-husband converted to Islam, and her story is one of two people bringing their own experiences, backgrounds, and values together, to build something new, without needing to give up deeply-held, deeply-felt beliefs. Qureshi makes it clear that the pressure to marry was damaging to her, but that she had no desire to rebel against the norms of her family and community, and resists setting up a dichotomy between her religious and cultural background, and discarding all that for 'rebellion' and 'freedom' — for her, although her choice of husband led to a challenging situation, choosing him was not an act of rebellion and instead it enabled her to find the married happiness expected by her family.

Finally, I read one of my most anticipated books of 2021, The Mask Falling, the fourth in Samantha Shannon's amazing Bone Season fantasy dystopia. I reviewed it on my longform reviews blog:

The Mask Falling is a perfect midpoint to this brilliant dystopian series. It broadens and deepens our understanding of this richly imagined world, and every new corner explored feels lived-in and redolent with history. Old characters return after several books’ absence, and we have a clearer view of their roles and motivations. We meet new characters who draw Paige’s story forward. She and Arcturus finally have the time to think about their relationship — shared traumas, deceptions, power imbalances and all. And the book ends on a cliffhanger that had me both cursing Shannon’s diabolical genius, and applauding her skill at drawing so many different threads together into such a intriguing tapestry.

The day is somewhat running away from me, so I will leave things here, as I have a bit of cooking to do (meal prep for next week, turning a huge bunch of green chilli into shatta — a delicious pickle from Sami Tamimi's Falastin cookbook — and dinner), and Matthias and I need to move our belongings from the spare bedroom into the main bedroom. (We'd been sleeping in the spare room until our new bed was delivered and assembled, which happened yesterday.) If there's time I might reread Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, which feels appropriately wintry. I also need to make time at some point to go through the new Festivids collection (thanks for the link, goodbyebird!).

I hope you've all had good weekends!

After my month of posting every day about books, I seem to have completely vanished from the internet, and Dreamwidth in particular. This was mainly due to illness, brought on by intense stress about the political crisis in the UK and the impending Brexit catastrophe. More about that below.

But first, I'll talk about nice things.

I spent last weekend in Germany for the wedding of one of Matthias's cousins. The cousin (and indeed that whole part of the family) live in Iserlohn, and the wedding and reception were all in that part of the world. Matthias and I flew in to Dortmund on Friday afternoon and were collected by his parents, who drove us to the hotel where we were all staying (and which would also be the reception venue). We all had dinner on the Friday night in the hotel with another aunt and uncle. The wedding itself was on midday on the Saturday, in a castle on the top of a hill, and sadly I didn't get any photos of the ceremony itself, but trust me when I say the setting was very picturesque. We then returned back to the reception for what ended up being an entire day of being fed. The reception meal at German weddings (at least in my experience) is always dinner, but as it was about 2pm at that point and no one had had lunch, we were given open bread roll sandwiches as canapes with our sparkling wine. This was then followed by coffee and a variety of cakes at 3pm, and finally the huge buffet dinner in the evening. There was also apparently a midnight snack of cheeses and fruit, but I was certainly not hungry enough by that point to investigate!

There was a DJ playing (as always) the cheesiest collection of both German and English-language music, and I danced for hours. We finally staggered up to bed around 1am. Now normally I would be able to sleep fine, even with the DJ still going several floors below, but because my body's been in panic mode pretty much for the past three weeks, my sleeping abilities are wrecked, and I ended up not being able to sleep at all that night, even though the DJ finished up around 2.30 and then it was deathly quiet. Luckily I didn't need to do anything on the Sunday beyond being driven to the airport (with a detour to a nearby lake which we walked around in the sunsine).

On Monday I went down to London after work to go to a panel discussion at the Piccadilly Waterstones between Samantha Shannon, Zen Cho, Tasha Suri, and Zoe Marriott, moderated by their fellow author Katherine Webber. It was a fun talk — all, with the exception of Marriott (who was a bit rambly) were great speakers, and although it didn't really tell me anything new about their books, it was great to see them in conversation, bouncing ideas off each other and gushing over one another's books.

From the heights to the depths: the ghastly, stressful political, economic, social and psychological catastrophe that is Brexit. For several weeks, I was feverishly following every moment: Twitter open with various commentators live-tweeting sessions in the House of Commons, the Guardian's frenzied politics livefeed open in the next tab over. This did serious damage to both my mental and physical health (I couldn't sleep, I had panic attacks that lasted all night, I had nightmares, the lack of sleep gave me a cold, at one point I literally vomited from stress at work), and in the end I had to stop. I had been following every moment because I was afraid something terrible would happen and I would miss trying to stop it. On Wednesday last week, after a particularly bad night of panic attacks, I realised that I had to just completely switch off everything. So no Twitter, no news — I can't even go to news websites to look up articles on something else, in case I see anything Brexit-related. I've been living in a sort of cone of silence for over a week now, and it's helping, mostly.

I do know that the EU allowed Britain a longer extension, because Matthias told me this morning, meaning that the country will still be in the EU tomorrow, and I will still be an EU citizen for now. I'm assuming we'll have to hold EU parliamentary elections now, although even that was unclear (but surely the EU would be mad to offer an extension to October without making the EU parliamentary elections a condition?). But the panicked uncertainty was too much for me, so I think I'll have to maintain my distance.

I see also that Scott Morrison has finally called an election, so that will be another thing to vote for in May. I'm hoping desperately that all the polls are right and we're going to get a change of government (although the prospect of Bill Shorten being rewarded for essentially not being Scott Morrison is pretty depressing; I met Shorten at a dinner party before he was an MP and I was not impressed). I'm imagining that the campaign will be dismal and ugly.

So that's been my life for the past couple of weeks. I've been listening to a lot of M83. Carry on, carry on/ and after us the flood indeed.

Thirty Day Book Meme, Day 3: One with a blue cover.

I love that this is a prompt. My librarian heart is laughing and laughing.

Over the years I've no doubt read many books with blue covers, but I went with The Bone Season, the first in Samantha Shannon's wonderful dystopian series, because it's one of my favourites, and because its cover, inspired by the sundial in Seven Dials in London, is gorgeous. I reviewed the book some time ago, so rather than rehashing it again, I'll link to that review. The one-sentence summary is that it's a dystopian novel, whose heroine is captured from London (where she leads a double life as a government official's daughter by day and a member of a criminal clairvoyant syndicate by night) and taken to a prison camp in Oxford, where she learns about the terrifying supernatural powers really running things behind the scenes. I love the book for its setting — particularly the bits that take place in my favourite parts of London — its wonderful heroine (who is, I feel, realistically terrified by the situations in which she finds herself, and makes more morally grey compromises than I feel most dystopian YA heroines normally do), and the central romance (although your mileage may vary on this, as it's very Stockholm Syndrome-y with a massive power imbalance, but what can I say? the id wants what it wants).

( The other days )

By a strange coincidence, I posted a review of another Samantha Shannon book today, her standalone epic fantasy The Priory of the Orange Tree. This is a very different beast to the Bone Season series — it's a sweeping epic fantasy, inspired by Elizabethan England and Tokugawa Japan, about the uses and misuses of history, with dragons. You can read my review here.

Other books I've finished or started this weekend are Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (a dizzying blend of various African myths and histories, a straightforward quest story about people with supernatural powers hunting for a lost child, but very tough going due to the meandering, nested style of labyrinthine stories within stories, suddenly starts to have a plot about fifty per cent of the way in, and extraordinarily bleak in its worldview), My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Nigerian noir novel about an older sister who finds herself repeatedly responsible for cleaning up the bodies of men killed by her younger sister; it's also about the double edged sword that beauty can become — at once a weapon, and something that can be wielded against you), and The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark (another foray into his alternate, steampunk Cairo where djinn and other supernatural beings roam the streets).

It's been a pretty miserable, cold weekend, which I guess is what explains all the media consumption — as well as all the books, I watched BlacKkKlansman with Matthias (which I think was robbed in terms of the number of Oscars it ultimately won — it was excellent), along with various episodes of TV shows. It's been raining on and off, and, to be honest, leaving the house was not a particularly attractive prospect!

This week has been absolutely excellent for people saying brilliant, eloquent, important things.

To journey is to be human. To migrate is to be human. Human migration forged the world. Human migration will forge the future, writes Ishtiyak Shukri in 'Losing London'. This was the post of the week for me, and affected me deeply.

We already have the table of contents, but now we have the cover of Athena Andreadis's To Shape The Dark anthology, illustrated beautifully by Eleni Tsami.

I really loved this interview of Aliette de Bodard by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz: I’ve come to realize that “appealing to everybody” is a codeword for bland, unobjectionable stuff; or at the very least for something that doesn’t challenge the reader; and, just as I like to be challenged when I read, I would in turn like to do that to my readers!

Speaking of Aliette de Bodard's writing, she's put 'In Morningstar's Shadow', the prequel short story to The House of Shattered Wings, up online for free. I read it last weekend and loved it.

I liked this essay by Marianne de Pierres on Australian myths in contemporary SF, but I've been worrying away at some of its conclusions for reasons I can't quite articulate. Certainly I appreciate the recognition of Australian writing's emphasis on the dystopian and post-apocalyptic, but I worry about her characterisation of the Australian landscape as universally barren, inhospitable and predatory. Let's just say it is not so to all inhabitants of Australia, and is not represented as such in the stories of all Australians, although it is a really significant theme in Australian literature.

Sophie Masson wrote on authors in a changing publishing landscape. I smiled a little ruefully at this quote:

When my last adult novel, Forest of Dreams, came out in 2001, I was commissioned to write a piece for a newspaper on the historical background of the novel (a paid piece), and reviews of the book appeared in several print publications, despite its being genre fiction. When The Koldun Code, also genre fiction, came out in 2014, I had to write several guest posts for blogs, do interviews for online publications (all unpaid) and reviews only appeared online.

I did not review this book, but I did interview Masson and review several of her YA works for print publications, where I was paid for my work. Now I retweet links to her articles and review things exclusively online for free. Oh, how times have changed!

Authors who are parents have been posting about the experience. There are too many posts to include here, but you can find links to all of them at the #ParentingCreating hashtag.

The latest of Kari Sperring's 'Matrilines' columns, on Evangeline Walton, is up. I've been finding these columns both illuminating - in terms of introducing me to many authors whose work sounds right up my alley - and disheartening, in that almost all of them were entirely new to me, instead of well-known figures in the SF canon.

I found this post by Samantha Shannon on judging a literary award to be a very interesting read.

In a departure from these posts' usual content, I have a music recommendation: CHVRCHES' new album Every Open Eye. It stops my heart, in the best possible way.

Today's linkpost is a little early, and contains poetry, translation, and a literary treasure hunt of sorts.

This is a great interview of Zen Cho and Stephanie Feldman by Sofia Samatar.

Ted Hodgkinson interviewed Daniel Hahn and Fahmida Riaz about literary translation.

Samantha Shannon answers readers' questions. (Beware Mime Order spoilers.)

The Book Smugglers announced their new slate of short stories, which should be great.

Zen Cho has set up a directory of Malaysian SFF writers and projects.

A new issue of Through the Gate is out. I particularly liked the poem 'Juli' by M Sereno, which I found heart-shattering and powerful.

I love the Where Ghostwords Dwell project. The site is dedicated to discarded text, forgotten words and the memory of dead manuscripts, and each entry embeds links hinting at its origin, or pointing the reader forwards towards further connections. It's part Russian doll, part literary treasure hunt, and I love it.

I leave you with every argument about Buffy on the internet from 1998 to now. This is one blog post where you're going to want to read every single comment, and it makes me ridiculously happy.

This week's linkpost is up a bit early, and contains many fabulous things.

I'm a huge fan of Sophia McDougall's review of Birdman: over at Strange Horizons. In it, she compares the film to Boris Johnson. It's an apt comparison.

Here's a great interview with Samantha Shannon. 'Cities are made of narrative' indeed.

Aliette de Bodard's description of her subconscious as a library is a fabulous metaphor, and one that I might steal myself!

There's a great set of guest posts over at Ladybusiness on 'What books are on your auto-recommend list?' (For the record, mine are the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, the Pagan Chronicles series by Catherine Jinks, Space Demons, Skymaze, Shinkei and Galax Arena by Gillian Rubinstein, Parkland, Earthsong, Fire Dancer and The Beast of Heaven by Victor Kelleher, the Romanitas trilogy by Sophia McDougall and the Crossroads trilogy by Kate Elliott.)

Episode 4 of Fangirl Happy Hour is up. This week Ana and Renay are talking Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear, Jupiter Ascending and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. I'm not quite as critical of S.H.I.E.L.D. as they are, while I think there's room for difference of opinion about the feminism of Jupiter Ascending, but as always, I appreciate their thoughts.

The first few guest posts about representation and diversity are up on Jim C. Hines' blog.

Shannon Hale talks about gender segregation at readings she's done at schools. It's heartbreaking.

I thoroughly enjoyed this article by Robert Macfarlane about language and landscape. Beautiful stuff.

I really liked the recent BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. This interview by Julia Raeside of Claire Foy, who played Anne Boleyn, goes a long way towards explaining why.

For reasons that will soon become apparent, although I can't provide a link to it, the #readingAuthorName hashtag on Twitter has been a powerful and positive movement. It works like this: think of an author whose works moved you and shaped you into the person you are. Tweet about it. Add the hashtag #readingAuthorName (obviously replacing AuthorName for the author's actual name). Feel happy.

It appears that I didn't write anything on LJ/Dreamwidth for the entire month of April. I'm not sure exactly why that was, although I will say that I had Matthias' family staying for two weeks, which made it very difficult to find a spare moment. His sister and her fiancé stayed with us for one week, and his parents were here for two weeks, although they stayed in their caravan in a camping site nearby. The fiancé had never been to Cambridge before, so we did a bit of sightseeing, including going up onto the roof of my college chapel, from where you can see the whole of Cambridge. To get there you have to climb this very claustrophobic, winding spiral staircase. It's worth it when you get to the roof, though.

Anyway, after they left, Matthias went to Aberystwyth for four days. He's just started doing an MA in library and information studies there (via distance learning), and you need to attend a week-long course there every year. The rest of the coursework is done by distance. I really, really dislike being home alone. I find it almost impossible to sleep and generally feel unsafe at night. I can cope with it when I live in an apartment building, or at least on the upper floor of a house, but our house is single-storey, which is just about the worst for me. But Matthias had a good time on his course, and met all the other people in his cohort, who all seem a very interesting bunch. They're mostly in their 20s or 30s, and tend to have done at least a BA (and in some cases an MA and PhD) in some kind of humanities field and come to librarianship indirectly, like him. I'm interested to see how he goes with the course, as I'm keen to do it myself in a few years' time (once I've recovered from the exhaustion of doing a PhD!).

On Friday, I went to London to hear Samantha Shannon (author of The Bone Season, the first of a series of novels about a dystopian London where people have supernatural abilities) in conversation with Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish, whose film company has the rights to adapt the first book. I did a write-up on Tumblr. The event was mostly awesome, although there was one sour note. One of the main characters in The Bone Season is an otherworldly being called Warden. He's not described in much detail in the book, aside from mention of him having 'dark, honey-gold'-coloured skin. People in the audience were asked to suggest actors who fit their mental image of him. Those suggested were Tom Hiddleston and Cillian Murphy. I think you can figure out why those are appalling suggestions, but in any case, I was heartened to see that most of the fandom seems to support me in perceiving Warden as just about anyone other than a white actor. What was even more encouraging is that Samantha Shannon herself agreed with me and said she was committed to fighting against whitewashing in any adaptation of The Bone Season. I will be very disappointed if a white actor is cast as Warden, and will not see any film in which this is the case.

Yesterday, our department hosted the annual colloquium which we share with Oxford. It's for students of Celtic Studies at both universities to present papers on aspects of their research, and alternates between Cambridge and Oxford as a location. I found it interesting to note that when we went around introducing ourselves at the beginning, all the Oxford students said their individual college affiliations, whereas the Cambridge people all said the name of our department rather than our colleges. It's a subtle indication of how we perceive ourselves, I guess.

The conference was good fun, particularly as I didn't have to give a paper this year. I just relaxed and hung out with all my friends, most of whom I hadn't seen in over a month. My supervisor was there, and we were talking about my decision to leave academia and work in libraries. She asked me if I missed research, and I realised that I didn't miss it at all. Most people I know who work in academia have this drive, this single-minded obsession with whatever they research (in much the same way as authors have this drive to tell stories). I've never had it, and I guess that's another indication that I was never cut out to be an academic.

I finally succumbed to the lure of 8tracks. I'm ridiculous enough about music as it is, so I guess it was only a matter of time before I joined. If you're on there, you should add me. I've already made one playlist.

We Own the Sky from dolorosa_12 on 8tracks Radio.

In other musical news, the new Seven Lions EP, Worlds Apart, is simply glorious.