Beyond Selidor

This is definitely a post in brief — my mum's visit has taken up most of my time, and the rolling heatwaves have taken the remainder of my energy.

Over two days last week, my mum and I walked another two stretches of the Thames Path — Wallingford to Abingdon, and then Abingdon to Oxford. Altogether, once you add in the walking we did within Oxford, and then in London on our return journey, it amounts to nearly 40km in two days. My mum is 77 years old, and I can only hope that I have even half her energy and stamina at that age!

Here's a photoset from the walk, and here's another from the several hours we spent relaxing in the Oxford Botanic Garden (which as a His Dark Materials fan I have of course visited several times previously, with various configurations of Philip Pullman fansite friends in tow, although not since 2010). Everything was sunny, bucolic, and interwoven with the green Thames, unfurling like a ribbon across the landscape.

We got a new train station, and its existence makes my commute — and therefore my life — a whole lot more pleasant. The Guardian wrote a sort of travel puff piece about it, complete with tourist guide to less well trodden parts of Cambridge.

It's been just over ten years since I became a UK citizen, and I wrote about the complicated feelings that citizenship sparked, right from the moment I received it, on the occasion of receiving my new UK passport a few days ago.

That's all of note for now.

The tab situation is getting ridiculous on my browser (by my standards; I have about 16 tabs open, which is beyond the point that I start to get stressed out — I have no idea how some of you can cope with hundreds of open tabs), so I thought I'd do a linkpost and start closing some of them!

I loved this roundtable discussion on Ancillary Review of Books about reviewing and criticism — they covered their respective approaches to these things, and their thoughts on the state of the discipline in SFF specifically.

This article in the Guardian about the 'rise of consumer rage' is focused on the US, but definitely feels more widely applicable.

I can't say that the British royal family occupy that much of my headspace, but I have had this absolutely brilliant Andrew O'Hagan review of both Virginia Giuffre's memoir and a nonfiction book about the 'House of York' bookmarked since March, and feel it's well worth a read. It's one of those kinds of reviews that's more like an essay, where not a single word is out of place, and every sentence twists the knife further. Content warning for discussion of sexual abuse, of course.

I'd never heard of this this Australian conwoman, even though she was active during the years of my early adulthood, and many of the places featured in the linked deep dive article are incredibly familiar to me, including the rather disreputable Irish pub which features heavily in her story (and which was the place where a university friend met her now ex-husband).

My mum went to this exhibition at the Australian National Gallery a few months ago, and I've had the linked bookmarked since, even though I'm not going to make it there myself — I'm just in awe at the artwork.

I don't have a Bluesky account, but I've followed the Angry People in Local Newspapers group on Facebook for many, many years now, and this absolute classic of the genre just crossed my feed, and caused fits of laughter. I thought it better to share the Bluesky version of the post rather than FB, since it's probably easier to view without an account (indeed, as I myself don't have an account, I can confirm that it's viewable without one).

And that's cleared up my browser very nicely!

I've returned from a week away in Amsterdam, which I visited with my mum. The two of us were last there together in the winter of 2005 (although I've been back since, mainly to change trains en route to Matthias's family in Germany), and it was great to revisit the same places in the sunshine — and discover the city, much changed.

I kept a haphazard paper journal throughout the week, and will transcribe it behind the cut.

( Canals like the veins of a city )

I've put up two photosets over at ronnidolorosa: a general Amsterdam batch, and a collection of cats.

The less said about the chaotic journey home the better (suffice it to say that I made it onto my Eurostar train in Brussels with twenty minutes to spare), but I returned to a fully stocked fridge (so many strawberries and tomatoes!), a bottle of pink sparkling wine, and an incredibly lush garden.

I'm only peripherally engaged with the men's World Cup, but I accidentally stumbled into a very Balkans corner of Instagram, and discovered the absolute banger that is the Bosnian team anthem (a thirteen-year-old song about the bittersweet experience of being an immigrant, reworked by the surprised and ecstatic fans into an anthem for their team). It's so catchy, and the video is gold!



Now to catch up with ten days' worth of Dreamwidth!

Given my mum is about to arrive for an extended visit, I think it's highly unlikely that I will finish any more TV shows before the end of the month, so let's have the May wrap-up a week early! I finished three shows this month, and they were:

Miss Scarlet, a mystery series set in Victorian England in which the eponymous heroine works as a private detective, solving crimes alongside an array of allies and sidekicks, including a police inspector from Scotland Yard. This is silly, inoffensive fun — the sort of thing that doesn't challenge the brain much, in which the culprit is usually obvious from about ten minutes into each episode — perfect frothy Sunday night fare.

Season 2 of Deadloch, the comedic Australian crime drama. This one sees lesbian policewoman Dulcie ditch the eponymous Tasmanian small town of Season 1, and head to the Northern Territory to join the other half of her odd couple buddy cop duo, accompanied by her wife, and travelling in a campervan. Chaos, against a background of every Top End cliché imaginable, ensues, as various seemingly unconnected mysteries slowly reveal themselves to be interwoven. The humour, if anything, is even less subtle than in the previous season, and I feel that it's essentially making fun of the stereotypes the rest of us Australians hold about the remote parts of the Northern Territory (crocodiles wandering around, disappearing backpackers, impoverished Indigenous communities, packs of grey nomads living an extended holiday existence in caravan parks, plus various oddballs who have fled from other parts of the country to escape the authorities or otherwise live off the grid, spouting an assortment of conspiratorial beliefs, etc). There are some unexpected twists, and extremely hilarious lines, but I think it didn't quite reach the heights of the first season.

The final season of Daredevil: Born Again. I know, I know, I say every time that my monthly TV roundup includes a Marvel show that I'm burnt out and this is truly my last Marvel ever ... but then I found out that Krysten Ritter was coming back as Jessica Jones, and I had to watch. If you've seen previous Daredevil series, you'll know what you're in for: existential battle for the soul of New York between blind vigilante Matt Murdoch and his crime lord nemesis Wilson Fisk, who by this season has managed to get himself elected as New York's mayor. He uses this position both to enrich himself through various corrupt enterprises, and implement an anti-vigilante rein of terror that sees his super loyal armed branch of the police (unrestrained by any need to follow legal processes) rampage around the city, terrorising people. The allusions to real-world contemporary US politics are not subtle, which irritated me for two reasons. Firstly, I hate fantasy beings/superpowered individuals being used as a metaphor for real-world oppressed groups (since, you know, vampires are actually dangerous, and extrajudicial law enforcement is not a great thing, so equating this with real world marginalisations feels quite offensive in most instances). Secondly, because the show is constrained by the rules of its superhero comic book genre, the good guys are able to overcome all these metaphors for real-world iniquities in a way that is tidy, easy, and uncomplicated — which just ultimately feels insulting. But Jessica Jones was in it, and that was great!

It's been a cosy-ish weekend at home, with some gardening, some cooking, and more decluttering.

On Friday, in between bouts of torrential rain (and hailstorms) I managed to get rid of the remainder of Matthias's old books, plus some unwanted gardening equipment. People really will take everything off the street if we put it out on the footpath! There's still stuff to go, but everything feels a lot more manageable now, and we don't have boxes all over the living room floor.

Yesterday was fitness classes, vegetable and fruit from the market (the strawberries at the moment are amazing, and I've just discovered that the discarded strawberry tops can be added to tap water to infuse it in much the same way that I usually do with slices of lime or lemon — it tastes fantastic), momos from the Tibetan stall for lunch, then pottering around at home. Today I spent a lot of time in the garden this morning, mainly repotting seedlings: tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, and some chives. So far the only stuff that's actually ready to eat are the mixed salad greens, which are a variety of shapes and colours, and taste bitter and earthy. We've got unripe strawberries, cherries, apples and pears, but nothing edible at the moment.

Reading this week has involved a great array of books.

I picked up The Draw of the Sea (Wyl Menmuir) on chestnut_pod's recommendation, and I'm glad I did. It's a collection of nature writing, mainly about the Cornish coast (although there are diversions to Svalbard, and other waters), meandering from environmental and social commentary to meditations on surfing and freediving. As suspected, my favourite parts were about the psychological effects of ocean swimming. It paired nicely both with Dee Holloway's fantastic zine Lost Coast (an in depth exploration of the various watery threads connecting Susan Cooper's Greenwitch and the films The Fog and Enys Men), and this new-to-me music (electronic Breton mermaids).

Next was The Bloody Branch (Brigid Lowe), which did for me for the Mabinogi what Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls did as an Iliad retelling: a complex, nuanced reworking of the source material in a way that does it the courtesy of taking its characters' alienating worldviews and frames of reference seriously, while giving the female characters interiority, voice, and agency within the truly awful situations in which they find themselves. Lowe does an incredible job conveying the sheer weirdness of the original medieval Welsh material, which exists in its own strange universe of blurred lines and shifting boundaries — between human and animal, between the otherworld and the waking world above, between earth and sea, and so on. Her Blodeuwedd felt really believably made of flowers, and the horror at that unbounded floral existence being forced into the shape of a human woman is absolutely visceral; likewise her Arianrhod felt half woman, half ocean. It's a brutal, violent book, in which brutal, violent things are done to its female characters, and sometimes the only possible response is endurance, survival, and the ability to tell their own stories, in their own words. I absolutely loved it.

Finally, I devoured the final novel in Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan quartet of books, The Story of the Lost Child, which covers the later adult life of its pair of childhood friends. While the events of the earlier three novels took place in relatively tight timeframes, this one covers more than thirty years — motherhood, relationships (and their ends), careers, the demands of complicated extended families, and the complex mess of the characters' origins in an impoverished, violent neighbourhood of Naples, and the way they're never fully able to escape this. Both the characters — the narrator in particular — make some truly terrible decisions; the consequences of these decisions are so excruciatingly obvious that I was almost reading through my fingers in horror for the hundred pages or so until the characters caught up with me and realised the same thing. While the intense interiority of the other novels remains, the authorial gaze also sweeps outwards, to take in Italian politics and societal changes during the period, and the ever present struggles against corruption and organised crime, and the ways these brush up against the lives of the characters and their families. I'm so glad that I picked up this quartet of books at last: the hype is so incredibly justified.

I'm almost scared to pick up a new book, because the week's previous reading has been so good!

This has been an extremely efficient weekend, on various domestic fronts.

When Matthias's father was visiting a couple of weeks ago, he brought multiple large boxes of Matthias's old stuff — books in English and German, magazines, school exercise books, DVDs, VHS cassettes and CDs — the sort of childhood ephemera that gathers and lingers in the parental home if one is an immigrant who has lived one's entire adult life outside the country of origin. I remember boxing all this stuff up about a decade ago and storing it in the box room at Matthias's parents' place, and there it's remained, even though the house is now owned by Matthias's sister, who lives there with her husband and their three kids. The last boxes of my own equivalent stuff arrived by mail two years ago — mainly my childhood and teenage books — so it was high time to deal with Matthias's belongings.

He's already been through the English-language books, shelved the stuff he wanted to keep, and weeded out the stuff to go (including duplicates of books I already owned). We put the unwanted books out on the street, and people have already taken most of them. Every time I've put books out on the street, everything goes eventually, and I'm pretty certain that will happen in this case as well.

(On top of that, we're transitioning in Ely in June to a new rubbish/recycling regime which means we no longer need the big black bin bags for non-recyclable rubbish. We hardly ever have rubbish to collect, so we tend to accumulate far more of these bags than we could ever possibly need. We periodically put rolls of the bags out in the street for others to take, and on Friday I put out the last handful, along with some clean, unwanted sturdy paper shopping bags — and they all went as well.)

We're a bit hampered with rubbish by the fact that we don't drive or have a car, so I was slightly concerned about all the VHS cassettes (which Matthias didn't want to keep), but we figured out that the recycling centre in Witchford would take them, and that this was an easy half-hour walk through public byways in the fields, so this morning, after breakfast, we each filled a backpack with VHS cassettes, plus some batteries that we also couldn't get rid of anywhere else, and walked them over to the tip. As we were on foot, we didn't have to wait our turn in the huge, backed-up queue of cars waiting for a slot, and were in and out, and back home within a hour of leaving.

We cleared out the big living room cupboard (where I'd shoved a bunch of appliance boxes when we moved in and never looked at them again), and moved them up into the loft. And now I can see Matthias going through the boxes of old newspapers and magazines, so those will be dealt with by the end of the weekend too.

In the garden, we constructed a covered archway over one of the vegetable beds to protect the seeds and seedlings, as we have enormous problems with blackbirds — as soon as we plant anything, they come and dig it up and eat it, and hurl mulch all over the footpath, and I'm sick of it! I also planted out some cucumber, parsley, dill and chard seedlings, planted amaranth, sunflowers and radishes, and scattered a few more packets of wildflower seeds around. After I've finished this post, I'm going to tie the self-seeded sweetpea plants to stakes, and that will be the garden tasks done for now. We're doing well when it comes to herbs and salad greens — and indeed ate home-grown mixed greens and chives in a salad for lunch today.

There's also been a lot of cooking, pickling and fermenting going on: stewed apples with cinnamon, plus cooked strawberries, to go with our breakfasts next week, sauerkraut (with cabbage, cucumber and fennel, plus caraway seeds), a jar of homemade pickles, and another jar of shatta (fermented chili condiment).

That's plus two hours of classes in the gym yesterday, and 1km swimmming on Friday and again this morning, and some decent, lengthy yoga classes at home.

I'd say all that feels pretty decent, and the decluttering in particular is extremely satisfying. I'm really glad we got all that done so efficiently (although in some ways it would have been better to have discarded all the stuff we gave away/recycled/threw away ten years ago in Germany, but given I behaved in a similar way with my own belongings in Australia, I find the extended hanging on to stuff that eventually just gets binned entirely understandable).

As a consequence, I have not had much time for reading or other media, although I did watch Send Help (a comedic thriller in which an overworked and underappreciated corporate office worker ends up stranded on a tropical island with her childish and unappreciative boss, where her hitherto unrecognised side hobby of outdoor survival in extreme landscapes of course comes in incredibly handy, with predictable results) last night. Hopefully next weekend will have a bit more time for proper relaxing, but I'm happy to have been able to devote so much of this weekend to getting all this stuff done so efficiently.

I've been extremely busy, and consequently extremely tired, and haven't been around on Dreamwidth all that much in the past couple of weeks. Rather than one of my standard weekend wrap-up posts, I'm going to attempt to go through the various things that have been happening, in brief, in list form.

Two weeks ago, catpuccino came up to Ely to visit. She lives in London, we've known each other since the first day of high school, but what with one thing and another, I hadn't seen her in person since 2024. She's going through some tough stuff at the moment, so it was nice to be able to help her get away from all that for twenty-four hours, at least (and talk foodie things with someone who's even more plugged into that scene than I am).

Almost immediately after that, my father-in-law came over from Germany to visit for a week. He drove, and took the ferry, which meant he was a free agent, and could go out and do things while Matthias and I were at work, and he did catch up with some local friends a couple of times, but for the most part he seemed to just want to chill out in our garden, under the cherry trees. His regular daily life involves a lot of energetic grandchildren (my sister-in-law has three kids), and I think he viewed our place as something of an oasis of calm. My mother-in-law was the real Anglophile in the family — she came over to England on exchange as a teenager, fell in love with the place, and the two of them basically visited the UK almost once a year for their entire adult lives, barring the Covid years and my mother-in-law's increasingly fragile health. So coming back here alone after her death was a bittersweet experience for my father-in-law, stirring up a lot of complicated emotions, but I think he was pleased to have made the trip.

He left on Wednesday, and on that evening Matthias and I went to an author event with Andrey Kurkov, hosted by the local independent bookshop. (Ely is a sleepy small rural town, but it definitely punches above its weight in terms of literary events due to this fantastic bookshop.) He read from and chatted about his latest historical mystery novel (set in 1919 Kyiv), and answered audience questions with patience. (My favourite, somewhat left-field answer: '[In the final decade of the Soviet Union,] I graduated with a qualification in Japanese translation, and they wanted me to do my military service as a spy listening in to the Japanese in the Russian far east, but I didn't want to do this, since it would have prevented me from being allowed to leave the country. I asked my mother, who was a doctor, if she had any well-connected patients who could get me out of this, and one of her patients, who was a senior military figure, was able to instead transfer me to doing military service as a prison guard in Odesa. When the other guards found out I was a writer, one of them asked me to write his speeches for his meetings with the leadership, so I spent my military service reading propaganda magazines and rewriting the articles for him to reuse in his speeches.' This struck me as the absolute peak absurd Soviet experience.)

I've had a run of lots of timetabled, lecture-style teaching, which happens this time every year, but is always a bit exhausting: it's in a huge, echo-y wooden lecture theatre (when the students come through the doors, they slam loudly and make a massive amount of noise), it's to groups of 75 students, repeated three times to different groups, and it's with undergrads rather than the postgraduates and researchers I normally teach (who are a lot more work to keep focused), and I always feel completely flattened by the time the Friday class is over. The one nice thing is that these classes are in central Cambridge instead of out on the hospital site where I normally work, and I can buy decent food and coffee afterwards. I guess it's a good thing I don't normally work in that part of town, because I'd be so tempted to eat lunch out every day, and end up bleeding money.

I read Innamorata (Ava Reid), and with Reid I think at this point it counts as hate-reading, since my expectations are always so low, and they're always confirmed. This is her take on a gruesome gothic novel, complete with purple prose, and the literary equivalent of a child hopping up and down going 'look! look! did you see what I just did?' Did I see her obvious and intentional allusions to Mervyn Peake? Yes, yes I did. Am I shocked at all the gore, bodily fluids and shock value edginess? Shocked that I keep picking up Ava Reid books, maybe.

Then I read Almost Life (Kiran Millwood Hargrave) and Testament of Youth (Vera Brittain), and was a lot happier in my choice of reading material. The former is a novel about two young women who meet, hook up and fall in love in 1970s Paris, then go their separate ways, but continue to haunt and fall in and out of each other's lives, in a mess of intense emotions, difficult choices, and lost chances. The latter is both a memoir of the author as an individual (fighting the parental expectation to marry and instead attend Oxford as a young woman in the 1910s, then serving as a nurse in WWI and watching all the young men in her life be swallowed up into the maw of that terrible war), and a portrait of the absolute wrenching collective trauma experienced by her entire generation, and how impossible it was to go back to civillian life and go on living afterwards.

Then I read The Red City (Marie Lu), which had a great premise (clandestine underworld alchemist syndicates fight a global battle for dominance, operating much like real-world organised crime), and an absolutely wrenching depiction of intergenerational immigration trauma, but was written for absolutely no reason in third person present tense, which for me is the literary equivalent of someone chewing audibly near my ear. I only like present tense when it's used to evoke a sense of stream-of-consciousness-like immediacy, as if you're getting a glimpse inside a character's messy, unedited interior monologue (I prefer it much more in the first person), but when the whole story feels as if it could work perfectly fine in past tense, the use of present tense is distractingly grating.

Yesterday was Eel Day in Ely, which involves, among other things, a giant cloth eel on a frame being paraded through the town, trailed by an incongruous juxtaposition of local groups (think Morris dancers followed by a girls' rugby club, followed by musicians playing steel drums, followed by a Scout group, etc). We were in the market buying vegetables, so missed the actual parade, but did witness all these various participants marshalling in front of the cathedral beforehand. We did a quick swing around the stalls afterwards, but it was pretty hot, and we'd already eaten lunch, so we didn't stay long.

We watched the recent Wuthering Heights adaptation yesterday, and I regret to report that it was 90 per cent vibes and dramatic scenery, and I was not particularly impressed.

As it's a long weekend, there was a food and craft fair outside the cathedral today, and Matthias and I wandered around, eating lunch from one of the stalls, people- and dog-watching, before meandering on home, having picked up a box of macarons to eat over the course of the week with our tea and coffee.

We've made a start at booking tickets, etc for our summer holiday, which makes it start to feel a bit more real. I love the planning stage — investigating food, activities, transport, and so on, with the days of the holiday unfolding, and given greater shape.

... and then I'll stop, I promise!

This lengthy essay gives a blow-by-blow account of the staggeringly overwhelming non-stop series of shenanigans (autocratic regime and its external autocratic patrons) that voters had to deal with during the lengthy lead up to Sunday's vote. (This included: nonstop antisemitic propaganda campaign claiming the democratic opposition were stooges of Zelenskyy, recycled from a previous nonstop antisemitic propaganda campaign claiming the same thing about Soros, ham-fisted false flag attacks from Russian intelligence on an oil pipeline in Serbia which they tried to spin as a Ukrainian sabotage, intelligence operations targeting teenage opposition IT specialists, attempts to charge independent investigative journalists with espionage, etc.)

Plus:

systematic vote-buying: bribing people with bags of potatoes, cash, even drugs; local strongmen threatening to fire them from their jobs if they don’t vote Fidesz, or call child services on them; thugs accompany citizens into the voting booth — a full logistics chain of stealing the election.

As the author of the essay said, Hungary under Orbán was 'not a democracy with flaws, but an autocracy with elections.'

It took a lot to overcome that wall of horrors, and this thread by a Hungarian academic summarises it well.

What they were up against was unbelievable, and I am so immensely impressed. No wonder everyone took to the streets and partied as if they'd just won the World Cup.

I've just rushed in to gather the remainder of the laundry, as it suddenly began bucketing down rain. Amusingly, the neighbours on either side sprinted out to their own gardens at exactly the same moment to do exactly the same thing, and we all gave each other rueful smiles. It's that time of year.

I was recovering from a fairly mild cold this weekend (the worst of it was on Wednesday and Thursday, so by Saturday I was just at the stage of sniffling a bit, and having constant nosebleeds), so things have been relatively quiet, even by my standards: no pool, no gym, very limited activities. I did go to Waterbeach with Matthias yesterday, to sit for a few hours in the taproom of the brewery that only opens up one Saturday a month (where we listened to the couple next to us plan their wedding, with much arguing over seating plans and whether or not to have a traditional fruit cake, but general agreement as to the — seemingly bottomless — quantities of alcohol they were going to serve their guests), and eat handmade pizza from the food truck next door.

Otherwise, the only eventful stuff this weekend has been gardening: readying a few containers with compost in order to transfer the mixed lettuce, dill, and spring onion seedlings out of the growhouse some time later in the week, and planting the next batch of growhouse seedlings (rocket, radishes, corn, zucchini, butternut pumpkin, garlic kale, red spring onions, giant cabbages, and peppermint chard). I'm feeling quite smug that we managed to get all this done this morning, before the rain began.

I think I've only finished two books this week — probably not helped by the fact that I spent Thursday in bed dozing — but both were relatively satisfying.

The first was The Rider of the White Horse, continuing my Rosemary Sutcliff reading with a big shift from her Romano-British trilogy to the time of the English Civil War, and from her resolutely male protagonists and worlds to a female protagonist: the wife of an aristocrat from the north of England fighting for the Parliamentary cause who follows him across the various battlefields as their fortunes wax and wane. As with other Sutcliff books, it has a very strong sense of place, as well as a strongly crafted depiction of life with an early modern army on the move: the muddy plains of battle, the besieged cities, with their populations' fate resting on the choices and consequences happening outside their walls, but here also with an additional focus of what this world might have been like for its women. The other feature that I've come to recognise as a Sutcliff staple — the sense of the catastrophic ending of a particular kind of world, and the disorienting horror felt by people as old familiar certainties are cast aside, unmooring them from former expectations and reference points — is also present and correct. The central relationship — between the protagonist and her husband — is an interesting authorial choice, in that it is an aristocratic arranged marriage which opens with one spouse (the wife) loving the other while knowing that this love is not returned, and over the course of the book, and all the pair experience together and separately, their feelings shift and change until their love for each other is mutual, and more mature, being based, at this point, on a deeper understanding of each other as people. In general, I found the whole book very solid, although it didn't resonate quite as strongly with current global politics as some of her previous fiction that I've read.

I followed this with Mythica, in which classicist Emily Hauser uses the women of and adjacent to Homeric epics as a jumping off point to explore the lives of women in the historical record, and in the material culture of west Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, with digressions into reception studies, and many millennia of literary criticism, historiography, and the shifting western literary canon (as well as some contemporary female character-centric Iliad and Iliad-adjacent retellings).

It's a good thing that although Hauser's name seemed vaguely familiar to me, I had forgotten that this was because she had written a Briseis-centric Iliad retelling that I absolutely detested, because if I'd remembered that detail, I would never have picked up Mythica. (In a very comical moment, she mentions her own retelling as one among many supposedly feminist recent takes on Homer's epic that restore interiority and agency to its women: you and I remember your novel very differently, Emily Hauser.) I'm not enough of a classicist or an archaelogist to know how solid her pulling together of the various threads was, but I felt that as a picture of a specific region in a specific moment in time, shedding light on its non-elite residents (women, enslaved people, ordinary artisans and traders) it did a pretty good job, although Hauser had a frustrating tendency towards certainty where I felt she could stand to be more equivocal when it came to the evidence available. When it came more to the literary and intellectual history of the many millennia of human engagement with Homeric epic, I found the book to be more superficial (is it really news to anyone that for most of recorded 'western' history, the male intellectual and political elite were either silent or misogynistic about the women of the Iliad and the Odyssey?), but possibly this is a reflection both of the type of fiction I tend to read for pleasure (I have a 'briseis fanblog' tag for a reason) and my academic background. Ultimately, I felt that the 'women of the Iliad and the Odyssey' framing of the book was a convenient structure and marketing gimmick for what in reality was an interesting and accessibly told survey of the history and material culture of the lives of ordinary people of the eastern Mediterranean (she does a particularly good job at emphasising the extent that the sea operated as a road, and how outwardly oriented everyone's lives were) that might otherwise have struggled to find a publishing foothold.

In the half-hour or so that it's taken for me to write this post, the rain has, of course, stopped, and my laundry — now laid out on every available surface of the house — is looking at me in a somewhat accusatory manner!

I'm just coming to the end of a fantastic four-day weekend, and I'm not ready for it to be over. I never travel over the Easter weekend — it always comes at exactly the point in the year when I need a lot of rest and recovery — and so, other than day trips, I stick fairly close to home. My rule is that I go the furthest away on the Friday, and then stay progressively closer and closer as the four days continue, and I find that this works well.

This time around, Matthias and I went out on the train to Bury St Edmund's on Friday. We pottered around in town for a bit, had lunch at this place (excellent), then wandered across the road to a pub that was having a mini beer festival, and sat around outside for a bit, although it was windy and cold and I had to ask them to turn on their outdoor gas heaters to keep me warm! Bury is fairly close, but I feel as if I've rarely gone there, in spite of living in this part of the world for many, many years now.

On Saturday, we had a day out in Ely — cheese platter for lunch this place, sushi for dinner at the fancy sushi restaurant, and more wandering around in between. It was again a bit too cold to be outdoors much, but the river was as pretty as ever, and dotted with various groups of people having cups of tea or rounds of drinks in the houseboats.

Yesterday we didn't leave the house at all. I did a bit of gardening, read, did yoga, and spent most of the day slow-cooking an Indonesian curry for dinner. The garden is slowly springing back to life. I have to spend much of my time chasing the wood pigeons away from the cherry trees, as if they're left to their own devices, they'll eat all the flowers and shoots and we won't have any fruit. The seedlings in the growhouse are coming along nicely, and I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of being able to make my own pickles from cucumbers I've grown myself this year.

Today began with a fairly slow start: the last of the hot cross buns, laundry, cleaning, more communing with the garden, and then a little walk through the park that rings our part of the town. After lunch, we went and sat out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar for a bit, then picked up the first gelato of the year from the place that is only seasonally open (I think the owners go back somewhere warmer and more Mediterranean over the winter) on the way home. Once I've finished off this post, I'll gather in the laundry, do a last sweep of the garden, and start winding down.

You can see from this weekend photoset that I started out with some extremely ambitious reading plans, and I'm pretty pleased that I made it through five of these books. Five out of seven isn't too shabby! Those books were a wonderful mix of new-to-me and annual reread favourites, fiction and nonfiction, short stories and novels.

I started off with Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane's latest. This is nature writing about rivers (including some of the world's last remaining chalk streams around the corner from my workplace in Cambridge), but also a look at the global movement to grant legal personhood to the natural world — in particular rivers — and the people and organisations fighting to make that happen. As with any nonfiction writing about the state of the environment, it's pretty bleak in places, although the relentless energy (and enthusiasm they have for frogs, fungi, beetles, snakes, bodies of water, etc) of the various people Macfarlane encounters is infectious.

Next up was Death and the Penguin, Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov's most famous work. Having familiarised myself with Kurkov through both his historical mysteries and his war memoirs, it seemed only fair to pick this one up when I could, and I'm glad I did. It's a blackly comic, surreal look at the chaos and disorientation of Ukraine in the early years of independence from the Soviet Union, with a hapless struggling author protagonist who winds up working for a newspaper as an obituary writer, only to realise that his obituaries (which, as is the case for all newspapers, are written in advance of their subjects' deaths) are serving as a hit list for organised crime. One of Kurkov's strengths as a writer is his talent for observing and cataloguing the minutiae of everyday life in very specific times and places, and this is on full display here in his evocation of 1990s Kyiv and the people who inhabit it.

Another author who excels at observing the specific is Elena Ferrante, whose third book in the series of novels about two girls growing up in inpoverished circumstances in post-WWII Naples, and their subsequent adult lives was next on my reading list for the long weekend. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay picks up the story in the early adult years: Lenu, the narrator, has graduated university, published her first novel, and is about to marry her university boyfriend, who comes from an educated upper middle class background, and much of the novel deals with the sense of anxiety and imposter syndrome she feels having achieved social mobility — out of place among the educated elite, but ill at ease whenever she returns to her childhood home. Meanwhile, her childhood friend Lina is dealing with the consequences of a series of spectacularly bad decisions made in the previous book. Marriage and motherhood is difficult for both women in different ways, and the book is particularly good at conveying the pain of being sort of disappeared into those roles, with no outlets for their restless, hungry, wide-ranging intelligence. As with previous books in the series, this third outing is also a vivid snapshot of a very specific time and place, although it moves beyond one single neighbourhood in Naples to take in the sweep of political and cultural change in late 1960s Italy as a whole — as the characters' worlds open up, so their view (and that of the reader) becomes wider. There's just one book left in the series, which (so far) really does live up to the extremely well deserved hype.

Easter is always the time for my annual reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, my very favourite of her Dark Is Rising series. Seaside holidays, 200-year-old Cornish smuggling history bubbling up to haunt an entire village of the smugglers' descendants, weird children's folk horror, women having emotions near the sea, and the sea having emotions right back at women: what's not to love?

Finally, I've been reading my way through Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story (and poetry) collection. I think I've read pretty much every item previously, as there is no new work, and most of it was published in online SFF magazines, or on El-Mohtar's own website, but it's lovely to see it all brought together in one place. As with all short fiction collections, I enjoy some stories more than others, but in this case everything works as a coherent whole. You can see her coming back time and time again to the same ground: language and multilingualism, the natural world (especially birds and bodies of water), books and writing and folk tales, cities and cafes and migration, and relationships between women in all their myriad forms. It's as if she picks up an idea, polishes it into an exquisite, self-contained gem, and then returns to pick it up some years later to polish again into a slightly different gem when she realises she has more to say, or a different understanding. There are few authors whose work I feel finds its most perfect expression in shorter form, but Amal El-Mohtar is one of them. This collection represents about twenty years' worth of fiction (it was interesting to see her talk in the afterward about the vanished world of SFF publishing/aspiring author Livejournal, and how this incredible community shaped her as a writer and nurtured so many of these stories into existence; I witnessed this from the periphery and it feels that this particular alchemy is an impossibility in a much louder, more crowded and fast-moving internet), and it's my fervent hope that we can look forward to a similar collection in twenty years' time — with the same favourite themes and imagery explored with even greater richness.