between the rock and the cold, cold sea

So, last night my good friend whitewaveraven talked me into going to see the Dublin Shakespeare Festival's performance of "The Indian Tempest," an energetic two-hour version of "The Tempest." Costumed festival promoters were crying the play all day on campus - occasionally complete with hear ye, hear ye! - and one of the lads doing the housekeeping announcement (mobile phones, fire in the temporary open-air theatre set up in Front Square) looked vaguely familiar. whitewaveraven pointed out that this is probably because I'd seen him as Joffrey.

I have in general mixed feelings about the production, but the audience responded with foot-stamping and much applause upon its conclusion, drawing the actors back for a musical number.

---

Books 2012: 99-105


99. Phyllis Ann Karr, Frostflower and Windbourne. Wildside Press, 1982.

An interesting, if quiet, fantasy adventure. Recommended.


100. Caitlin Brennan, The Mountain's Call. Luna, 2004. Ebook.

I could have done without the rape. And the incomplete rape. And the rampant cultural sexism. And the odd-sided both of these men are bad for you not-a-love-triangle. Not for me, this book. NOT FOR ME.


101-104. Cate Culpepper, The Clinic, Battle for Tristaine, Tristaine Rises and Queens of Tristaine. Bold Strokes Books, various dates. Ebooks.

My not-so-secret vice, lesbian fantasy romance. The world-building is inconsistent and some of the characterisation - particularly of the antagonists - is baaaaad in a hilarious way. Actually, in general they're hilarious, and the first book in particular has a weird BDSM vibe in it. But so very amusing.

(Romance without men. It's refreshing.)


nonfiction

105. Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-1944. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001. First published 1993.

Humanitarian considerations of any kind are a crime against the German nation. - Field Marshal Keitel, 16 December 1942.

Perhaps 40,000 people died of famine in the Athens-Piraeus conurbation following October 1941. The Red Cross estimated that 250,000 people in Greece died directly or indirectly of famine between 1941 and 1943. Even leaving aside deaths from the andartiko - the guerrilla war in the mountains - and German reprisals, Greece suffered horribly between 1941 and 1944.

Drawing on archival sources and personal letters, diaries etc., and paying attention to the social rather than strictly military dimension of history, Mazower writes a lucid and compelling book. He charts the experience of war and occupation in Greece from the funeral of Venizelos to the opening salvos of the Greek civil war after the German withdrawal in 1944. An immensely readable and informative book, well worth reading.

Going to P-Con in Dublin on three hours' sleep may not have been the most sensible thing I ever did in my life. But getting out of the house and meeting new people is worth a little lost sleep.

It was excellent to meet mizkit and her husband and nhw and others whose names I never caught or else have failed to remember. So, yeah. Doing that again, if ever un-broke.

There will be sleeping now. Tomorrow is for packing, and Monday is for travelling. Alas, I am still waiting on Hodges Figgis to get in the copy of Steven Brust's Five Hundred Years After (among sundry other books) that I ordered, so I won't be reading that on the plane. I'll be reading Jim Butcher instead: I sprang for the next three books in his Harry Dresden series last week, despite my lukewarm reaction to Storm Front. I dare not travel anywhere without reading material. It would be unthinkable.

I read a mystery by Barbara Hambly on - Friday? Thursday? I can't remember - some day last week, anyway. Graveyard Dust. I wish I was taking some more of that series on the plane with me, but the Murder Ink bookshop had only that book (though three copies thereof) of aforesaid series.

Enough talking. Sleeping now.