Beyond Selidor

I said on Friday that I was looking forward to a weekend with no social obligations, and lots of cooking, and broadly speaking, that's been the case. It's been great!

I went for a little walk this morning, and was pleased to note slight hints of the change of the seasons towards autumn — hues of red and yellow in some of the trees around the cathedral, and the smell of woodsmoke emanating from several houses. I'm still hoping for a winter filled with foggy, frosty mornings. There's no sign of that yet, but I have at least been able to content myself with photos of such weather in other places — in Vilnius, Kyiv, and Ærø in Denmark. (As an aside, I highly recommend — if you use social media — following accounts that focus on photography of places around the world you love and have visited or want to visit in the future. It's like a way to travel, virtually, and expand the landscapes of your mental geography.)

As I hoped, there was a lot of cooking this weekend — slow, flavourful meals for dinner (oliahercules oven roasted stuffed capsicum yesterday, Burmese curry currently roasting in the oven today), plus a lot of preserving. I picked over two kilograms of green tomatoes that I don't think will ripen, and turned half into green tomato chutney, and started the other half to ferment. I've always aspired to be the kind of person who has a pantry full of pickles and preserves, and although I don't have the storage space to do this on a massive scale, I've liked my attempts this year, and will continue adding to my repertoire as I grow a greater variety of vegetables.

Other than cooking and wandering, and the usual weekend personal maintenance, I've spent a lot of time reading — a mixed bag, but on balance mostly good. The books are as follows:

Honey (Isobel Banta), a novel following several aspiring pop stars in the Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera etc mould in the 1990s and early 2000s. The book does a fantastic job of capturing how truly messed up that moment in time was — how it ate up young women with big voices and big dreams, and sucked them dry and spat out the bones like a piece of old rubbish. As someone who was a teenage girl during that time period, the depths of the abuse and cruelty — that toxic nexus of the last gasp of print tabloid media and the rise of internet gossip columns — just seemed like the fabric of the universe, but looking back, it was its own breed of horrifying. Banta conveys this with empathy and understanding, and although her characters and their music is entirely fictional, there are a lot of echoes of real-world stars and music industry figures, recognisable to anyone who paid passing attention to that pop cultural moment. The only false note to me was the pop music starlets' depth of awareness of all the toxic structures around them, which didn't ring true (I feel that in reality, the real-world equivalents of these characters maybe understood subconsciously how they were viewed and being treated by the industry, but not in a way that they would have been able to articulate).

All My Rage (Sabaa Tahir), Tahir's first foray into contemporary (non-fantasy) fiction. The novel interweaves the stories of Salahudin and Noor, the only two Pakistani-American teenagers in a remote Californian desert town, as well as flashbacks from Salahudin's mother's early married years back in Pakistan. It's a story haunted with grief and pain — the intergenerational trauma and racism experienced by the characters is dealt with in terrible, unhealthy ways. This is a book about people who are incapable of giving voice to their regrets or pain, instead sealing up everything inside, where no words will reach them. Tahir herself grew up in a similar environment — like Salahudin, her parents were Pakistani immigrants running a small-town desert motel — and she writes with experience of the sense of being trapped in a tiny, insular community where you do not fit in, and see no way out.

Lady Macbeth (Ava Reid), the book that sparked my Friday open thread prompt about satisfying and dissatisfying retellings. As is probably obvious, this is Reid's attempt at a retelling of Macbeth, focusing on Shakespeare's most acclaimed female character. Reid's usual thing (and what made her an insta-read for me to begin with) is to write a story about teenage girls and young women whose experiences of abuse and trauma render them monstrous in the eyes of the wider world, with a relentless emphasis on the fact that abuse survival is not soft or pretty. While this has served her well in earlier novels, you may be able to see why this approach is not a good one for the character of Lady Macbeth. Instead, Reid has done what I've often seen criticised in the glut of supposedly 'feminist' retellings of Greek myths: written a traumatised, abused, frightened young woman who is utterly blameless of any of the bad or even controversial actions perpetuated by the character in the source material. To top this off, the story is a historical, geographical, and linguistic mess (the constant, grating use of the word 'Scots' to describe what is presumably meant to be Gàidhlig is merely the most glaring) — and while Shakespeare was obviously no paragon of historical or geographical accuracy, Reid's defensive author's note on the fluidity of her treatment of language, history, and cultural and national identity only serves to emphasise the lack of care in this regard. (As an irate Goodreads reviewer commented, 'what has Scotland ever done to Ava Reid?') A female character-centric Shakespeare retelling, use of Breton lais and the folkloric trope of the three impossible tasks, in the hands of an author whose previous work I've enjoyed immensely? I've never been so disappointed.

Where the Dark Stands Still (A.B. Poranek), a gorgeous blend of Polish folklore, Howl's Moving Castle, and Beauty and the Beast. This, on the other hand, was an absolute delight. If you like Uprooted, you'll probably like this. Our heroine is a misfit teenage girl with magical abilities, there's a creepy, sentient forest, and an immortal supernatural boyfriend. Poranek isn't doing anything particularly original with these building blocks, but the heart (at least my heart) wants what it wants, and quite frequently, what it wants is this, done well — and Where the Dark Stands Still delivers.

Today, I am bouncing around in anticipation of tonight's TV viewing:

The season finale of Falcon and the Winter Soldier — I don't think I fell in love with this show as much as some other people (Captain America and adjacent characters were always my least favourite parts of the MCU), but I've been enjoying it a lot and look forward to seeing the conclusion.

The first episode of the Shadow and Bone adaptation — I'm only really in this for the Dregs, and for Darklina content, and the whole Grishaverse is deeply silly, but it's my kind of silly, and that's enough.

The season (and series) finale of Deutschland 89 — probably one of my top ten TV series of all time, and I'm feeling unexpectedly emotional about the whole thing ending.

I'm also bookmarking this link to an episode of a podcast by the Globe Theatre about the second-greatest movie ever made, Ten Things I Hate About You. Podcasts and video essays are not my favourite way to absorb information (I'm always like, 'why couldn't you have just written this as a blog post or essay?'), but given the subject matter, I'll make an exception for this one!

Onwards to the books meme:

23. A book that made you bleed

( My answer )

( The other days )

The weather broke with a violent thunderstorm and torrential rain on Thursday night, which was such a welcome relief from the relentless heat that I ran outside into the courtyard and stood in the rain, letting it pour all over me. Although my office has air conditioning, not every part of my library does, and in any case it is a forty-five-minute walk from my house. It's been exhausting working these past few days as a result. But after the thunderstorm, things cooled down — it rained all day yesterday (trapping me in the house with an excellent book — what a hardship!), and for much of today, so other than unavoidable errands I've stayed at home as much as possible.

Given I'm about to go away on holiday, I tried to read all the remaining library, and otherwise borrowed books in my collection, finishing two lent to me by notasapleasure, and one that Matthias had borrowed from his own workplace. The former were Helen Oyeyemi's collection of short stories, What is Not Yours is Not Yours, all of which are strange, unsettling magical realism tales, linked by the presence of keys which unlock various physical and metaphorical things, and a short, lyrical story by Mathias Énard called Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants (translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell), which is about Michelangelo in Istanbul, designing a bridge for the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, but is also about creation, immortality, and memory. The final book was a collection of essays by Alice Bolin entitled Dead Girls, and I found it mixed in quality. The title essay — about that genre of American story that begins with a dead, murdered white girl, and exposes the dark heart of a town and community (think Twin Peaks, Veronica Mars, Pretty Little Liars, True Detective, etc) — is excellent, as is the one on survivalists, fundamentalists, serial killers, and vast, unsettling American landscapes. The other essays, mainly concerned with Bolin's aimless years living through a series of dead-end jobs in LA, wondering what to do with her life, are less interesting.

We also managed to make it out to one of the outdoor Cambridge Shakespeare Festival performances, of Henry IV, Part 1. These happen every year, and are a nice way to spend a warm evening, although I do find myself wishing they'd be a bit more adventurous with their choice of plays. They normally do the usual suspects: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a handful of the most well known comedies and tragedies. That was partly why we opted to go with a history play. In any case, the production was fine, the evening was warm, and we ate a very nice picnic in the garden of the college where the show took place. They're doing Part 2 in August, and we'll probably go to that too. Given I saw Henry V at the Globe earlier in the summer, it seems to have been a year for Shakespeare's history plays.

Other than that, and watching (finally) the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix (which had me raising my eyebrows and clapping my hand over my mouth in horror from the very first minutes), I've voted in the Hugo Awards (I have very strong opinions in some categories, and in others I really don't mind which finalist wins), cooked a bit, and tried to venture back onto Twitter without having a panic attack about the ongoing catastrophe which is British politics. So far my mental health is holding firm, but we'll see...

I know some other people here are Hugos voters. Have you made your decisions yet? Which categories are proving the hardest for you?