posts interesting only to me

Books read April

Published on May 10, 2014Leave a comment

As I seem to be complaining each time I do these, I still read too little. This time it’s only been five books.

Blood Trail — Tanya Huff
The second Blood urban fantasy novel, where ex-policewoman Vicki Nelson is hired by a family of werewolves to find out who is killing them.

A Biography of No Place — Kate Brown
The 2oth century history of the historical borderlands between Poland and Russia, now in the heartlands of Ukraine and how they were shaped from multi-ethnic borderlands into largely Ukrainian lands.

Zero Sum Game — SL Huang
Debut novel of a blogger who kept saying sensible things on her blog, so I got this from Kobo Books; first ebook I’ve ever bought. This is a technothriller about a math savant whose math skills are so instinctive that they allow her to dodge bullets.

A Soldier’s Duty — Jean Johnson
Yes, I have a weakness for even dodgy mil-sf. I know literally nothing about this book or its author when I picked it up, but it looked interesting. A precog fifteen year old girl sees a future in which the entire galaxy is laid to waste and the only chance of humanity’s survival is if she becomes an interstellar marine.

Blood Lines — Tanya Huff
Third novel in the Blood series. After vampires and werewolves, what is more logical than to feature that other classic Universal monster, the Mummy?

Grief again

Published on May 7, 20141 Comment

From the first page Peter Bach’s story of dealing with his wife’s illness and death felt familiar. For a doctor he has a great turn of phrase: “we started to live less and fake it more”, yes, yes, exactly. That way that optimisim and the will to fight slowly drains away but you keep on keeping on, the point where that’s no longer possible and you just want to “just get on with the sorrow”. When he talks about his wife and how she “set about her business, as if taking fistfuls of pills and slathering on foot cream, intended to prevent a skin reaction from her chemotherapy, was just something anyone does in the normal course of their lives”. But it is.

That desire to shelter her from the worst realities of her cancer, that he talks about as lying, of “switching into doing mode” himself to keep some of that reality away himself, been there. I was lucky though; I didn’t have the same deep knowledge of what Sandra’s own illness meant as Bach, as a cancer doctor himself, had of his wife’s disease. I didn’t see the future.

Where Bach really nails it is grief, as tried to explain yesterday and how it pops up when you least expect it:

It turns out that Hollywood has grief and loss all wrong. The waves and spikes don’t arrive predictably in time or severity. It’s not an anniversary that brings the loss to mind, or someone else’s reminiscences, nor being in a restaurant where you once were together. It’s in the grocery aisle passing the romaine lettuce and recalling how your spouse learned to make Caesar salad, with garlic-soaked croutons, because it was the only salad you’d agree to eat. Or when you glance at a rerun in an airport departure lounge and it’s one of the episodes that aired in the midst of a winter afternoon years earlier, an afternoon that you two had passed together. Or on the rise of a full moon, because your wife, from the day you met her, used to quote from The Sheltering Sky about how few you actually see in your entire life. It’s not sobbing, collapsing, moaning grief. It’s phantom-limb pain. It aches, it throbs, there’s nothing there, and yet you never want it to go away.

This.

Grief comes in spurts

Published on May 6, 2014Leave a comment

Tomorrow it will be exactly 21/2 years since Sandra died, so it’s no wonder she’s been on my mind the past weeks. It’s funny about grief, it stays away for days or weeks on end and then suddenly it stabs you in the heart again. in popular culture it’s supposed to be this massive, all overpowering emotion, something that hits youn in the guts and keeps you down for weeks, then mostly disappears apart from late nights spent with the whisky bottle and the handy portrait of your lover whenever it’s convenient for the plot.

Real life is different. What I remember emotionally from the weeks just before and immediately after her death was sadness, but also peace and even a bit of relief that it was all over. For three-four years we’d been living with her illness and the hope that finally her health would improve. When that hope turned out to be futile and Sandra choose to put an end to it, after denial came relief. An ending was better than more sleepless nights listening to her crying out in pain and anguish. The week after she died there still wasn’t that grief the movies had taught me would be there; instead I had to be relentlessly practical, set myself to tying off all the loose ends her death left behind.

It’s only in the months and years after that, when life had turned back to normal again that the emptiness hit. Four years fighting for Sandra’s health, always with that goal of getting her better in mind, not to mention over a decade of having been with her and suddenly it had all ended. Suddenly there wasn’t anybody I needed to take into account anymore, suddenly it was just me and the cats and being able to everything I want but nothing really to come back home for. I’ve never been as comfortable as i’m now, but what’s the point when you’re just living on your own, day in day out without purpose?

That’s how I feel whenever the reality of living without Sandra hits me again; late at night going to bed with just the cats, in the supermarket staring at the vegetables, every now and again seeing something she would’ve Had an Opinion About. That’s when the knife hits. It hits with the little things, remembering the small touches of living together, of having somebody other than cats to talk to.

(There isn’t much pop music that does well with grief, but Sinéad O’Connor comes close.)

Books read March

Published on April 2, 2014Leave a comment

I struggled with my reading this month, starting but not yet finishing several novels (The Creative Fire, Deathless), “Wasting” a lot of reading time. Two fantasy novels, one science fiction, two non-fiction books this week. The Shadowed Sun — N. K. Jemisin
Second in a duology of Egyptian inspired fantasy set on a world orbiting a gas giant, this one deals with the consequences of the end of the last one.

Dark Eden — Chris Beckett
This won last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. It’s a decent enough sf heartland adventure story, but fell somewhat flat for me.

The European Colonial Empires 1815 – 1919 — H. L. Wesseling
An overview of the height of the European colonial system.

What Makes this Book So Great — Jo Walton
What makes this book so great is Jo Walton, who gets you passionate and interested in books you may never have considered otherwise.

Blood Price — Tanya Huff
First in an urban fantasy series. Not normally my cup of tea, but everything I’ve read of Huff I liked, so I bought more or less the entire series in one go.

Moar book loot

Published on March 27, 20141 Comment

slightly too many books bought

So on a whim I decided to go to my favourite secondhand bookstore in Amsterdam, only to find they’d just gotten a shedload of science fiction/fantasy in as well as added a new comics section. This led me to getting slightly more books than I’d counted on.

But at least I got a lot of books I’d been looking for for donkeys. Tricia Sullivan’s Maul for one, as well as Dreaming in Smoke, sound Mind and Someone to Watch over Me. There’s Justina Robson’s Mappa Mundi and Robert Reed’s Down the Bright Way, as recommended by Jo Walton, several Bruce Sterling books (Crystal Express, Zeitgeist and A Good Old-Fashioned Future), the last in a John Meaney trilogy (Resolution) I needed, two Greg Egan books: Quarantine, Oceanic and one of K. W. Jeter’s steampunk novels (Infernal Devices).

I also got Tanya Huff’s complete Blood … series, a lot of Elizabeth Bear’s Promothean Age novels (as well as her science fiction novel Undertow) not to mention some more Gwyneth Jones books: Rainbow Bridge, White Queen and Divine Endurance as well as a Juanita Coulson novel, Star Sister to try out and perhaps review for SF Mistressworks.

Comics wise it was a mixed bag: two Pete Bagge collections of early, Neat Stuff work, an Marvel Essential Hulk collection, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, two volumes of Russell: the Saga of a Peaceful Man, A Smithonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, a thick slab of Strontium Dog, Oscar Zarate’s It’s Dark in London, a Samuel Delany adaptation, Bread and Wine and finally, Kyle Baker Cartoonist Volume 2.

And then I got home and the latest volume in Kevin O’Neill and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was waiting for me…