posts interesting only to me

Books read May

Published on June 2, 2013Leave a comment

Still not reading enough, just not in the mood most of the time. And when I did read, the only thing I wanted to read was science fiction.

Hammered, Scardown, Worldwired — Elizabeth Bear
This is Elizabeth Bear’s debut trilogy of novels, which starts out as streetlevel cyberpunk but quickly evolves from that. Each novel in the series ups the stakes and opens up the stage in which the story takes place through the sort of conceptual breakthrough science fiction does best. Apart from this, Bear is also very good at creating believable, realistic characters including the main protagonist Jenny Casey, a disabled middle age war veteran with a cyborg left arm and eye.

Dragondrums — Anne McCaffrey
Third in the Harpers Hall trilogy. An entertaining read but nothing more than that.

Remnant Population — Elizabeth Moon
Moon usually writes well done mil-sf or fantasy, but this is more ambitious. A failing human colony is recalled, but Ofelia, who has grown old there, does not want to leave. When the ships have left she’s the only remaining human on the planet, but then it turns out there is indigenous sentient life…

Eighteen months

Published on May 7, 2013Leave a comment

Time flies even when you’re not having fun. This time last year it had been half a year since Sandra died and I’d just come back from Plymouth to scatter her ashes. My youngest nephew was still a couple of days from being born; he’ll be one next Sunday, coincidently being born on the same day as his aunt’s birthday and a week after his daddy’s. It’s a cliche, but the world moves on even when you stand on top of it screaming for it to stop.

Grief lessens over time of course and eighteen months of being alone is starting to feel normal. To be honest, the two years before that, which Sandra mostly spent in hospital, didn’t feel like a normal relationship anymore either, but more as if everything was on hold until she got better, or not. It’s hard to get out from under that holding pattern. Not sure I quite want to yet either.

Books read April

Published on May 1, 2013Leave a comment

Another month, another disappointingly small pile of books read. Nobody to blame but myself.

Invented Knowledge — Ronald H. Fritze
A slightly disappointing overview of pseudohistory, looking at Atlantis, ancient discoverers of America, racist pseudohistory and Black Athena. All a bit of a mismatch with nothing to tie it all together.

Calcio — John Foot
A nicely chatty history of Italian football.

Valor’s Trial — Tanya Huff
Another Mil-sf adventure for gunnery sergeant Torin Kerr, who has to escape a prisoner of war camp.

The Truth of Valor — Tanya Huff
Now civilian, Kerr has to stop a band of pirates who have kidnapped her lover.

Gabriel’s Ghost — Linnea Sinclair
A science fiction romance adventure, which has some consent issues but is better than it needed to be.

Last ever Queensday (for now)

Published on April 30, 2013Leave a comment

Queensday loot

No, I refused to take part in the whole abdication/crowning spectacle. I didn’t go out to witness it, avoided the telly and only went out to the local freemarket to do some traditional Queensday shopping. You never know what you might find after all. In this case there wasn’t that much, but I couldn’t be bothered to get into town proper. Still managed to score 11 DVDs and some classic Dutch comic strip Kapitein Rob compilations.

Apart from this annual ritual of cleaning out our attics and selling them to our neighbours for them to store it in their attics, I’d rather have a republic.

Ouch

Published on April 29, 2013Leave a comment

So I woke up this morning and tried to get out of bed only to find out I had pinched a nerve or something during the night, just above my buttocks and could barely move. There was that intense pain in the small of my back that makes it hard to breathe trying to sit up and I had to stumble around the apartment like an old man, moving stiffly, actually having to hold on to the wall trying to bend down enough to sit. It took about an hour of going back to bed with several paracetamol, a very hot shower and copious amounts of tiger balm to get rid of some that stiffness.

While I was going through all that, I couldn’t help but think that now I knew a bit of what Sandra had been going through for so long, that feeling of having to be careful all the time not to hurt yourself more. Even before she really got ill and had to go on dialysis she always lived in an unstable equilibrium, where a little nudge in the wrong direction could sent her into yet another health crisis. Which is why she had her little routines and tricks to keep a “normal” life going.

She was always a bit stiff and in pain in the mornings; I could always see when she was in pain as she would be hunched over, drawn into herself. It was her stomach and digestive system that mostly gave her these troubles, for various reasons. So that’s what she needed to stabilise first when she got up, often much earlier than me, even when I was getting up at 6AM to get to work early. She’d move slowly from the bedroom to the kitchen, turn the radio up slightly, put her stool by the door and smoke a cigaret, brew a cup of tea, start on the various pills she needed to get her guts calm (codine phosphate, loperamide, etc), then smoke a phatty to really get it under control. She smoked enough dope to impress even the most stoned teenager, but I’ve rarely seen it affect her; it went all into pain control.

So yeah, when I found myself doing the stumbling in the kitchen this morning, that called up memories of Sand.