between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Books 2012: 11-13


11. Amanda Downum, Kingdoms of Dust. Orbit, 2012. (1st March.)

An excellent addition to the Necromancer Chronicles. (And I'm not just saying that so stillsostrange won't hurt me.) A fuller review should be forthcoming from Tor.com in the next six weeks or so. In the meantime, I will say: you want this book. Most likely.


nonfiction


12. Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible. W.W. Norton, New York, 2001.

Arts of the Possible is a collection of Rich's prose spanning three decades, from 1971's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," to the title essay, 1997's "Arts of the Possible." Rich writes as a woman, a feminist woman, a socialist woman, writing to other women. This collection is a selection of snapshots of her thought, moments in the evolution of the lifetime of a poet and woman of letters. Rich is a thinker, and one of the themes that connect these essays is her belief in the validation of women's intellectual and artistic possibilities.

I went to the library seeking Rich because I found her quoted in Joanna Russ. Reading her for herself, I found myself both fascinated and annoyed by the American-ness of her milieu. I will not say that Rich's voice is narrow - I can't say that. But her location in time and space restricts, I think, the power of her vision to affect me, an Irishwoman.

There is an assumed universality in much American topical writing. An assumed frame of references and experiences. American voices make up a large body of modern writing in English, so much so that it can be hard to disentangle one from the other. But for those of us who stand outside the American frame - and also the English one, too - the experience can prove alienating. We speak the same language, but we don't share a native tongue.


13. Akbar Ahmed, Suspended Somewhere Between: a book of verse. PM Press, US, 2011.

A poetry collection by an academic ambassador. Read for review for the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Interesting, occasionally striking, but very uneven.

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Thursday was Geek!Fest day. I have the kind of friends who watch Xena:TWP and criticise the Greek. (We finally decided: actually, the Greek in the chapter titles from "A Day in the Life" is mostly sort of grammatical ancient Greek. But damn, did they screw up the orthography. Nu in place of upsilon and vice versa? Somebody forgot their copyeditor.)

I'm pretty sure there were other things I meant to say. But I'm sleepy.

Dinner parties (for certain values of dinner party) successfully hosted: one.

Lamb kleftiko, fried sweet potatoes, honey chicken drumsticks, and cucumber, with stewed peaches (and stewed apple and blueberry with cinnamon) and custard and homemade caramel for after. I don't think I poisoned my guests. Well, I hope not, anyway.

We watched two-thirds of the BBC's (quite good, actually) Ivanhoe, which has Ciaran Hinds as Brian de Bois-Gilbert and Christopher Lee (worth the price of entry alone) as Grand Master of the Order of Knights Templar. Hack! Slash! Smash! But the series is all of six hours long, which is a bit much for one sitting.

(I'm still surprised that I can cook. And like cooking for other people.)

I shouldn't be hungry again. But it seems that I am.

Tea Night appears to have been a success. Let's do that again, preferably when I'm not dizzy and strange.

So last night, there was socialising.

Fortunately, despite the fact I knew nobody, it turned out to be the kind of crowd where one does not need to try to pass for normal. (Friends, I can has them.)

This morning, climbing. I have a licence to use the wall now. Fear me!

...Sooo sleepy now. And hungry. Maybe I should get food and curl up by fire?