Old stories and new

And just like that summer is over! Well, not really, but let me elaborate :). Like I mentioned last time around, the start was excellent, if a bit overenthusiastically early. This actually continued into May, particularly the second and third weekends! This was quite useful, as on the first of those we had the Holmenkollen relay in Oslo, and on the second was the Norwegian national day! Since then though, it's been significantly chillier weather and rain, basically :/.

I have to say, in some ways, I was more apprehensive going into the Holmenkollstafetten weekend this time around. Which is weird, because last year was the first time I was organizing, the first time we'd ever run as a company, and the first time running in seven years. So having managed that with some success, you'd think that the second time around everything would be easier! Well, that's not quite how life works.

Luckily, despite the complete lack of fitness on my part personally, several injuries and other reasons leaving most of last year's runners unable to participate, more last minute drop outs and a general feeling of being down on enthusiasm, probably because of the above reasons... So yeah, despite all of that, it was great fun! And yes, the weather definitely helped! We even managed to get the post run dinner off to a much better start this time, in that, the food actually arrived right on time! :)

I have to admit I did feel the after effects of that run for a while. But then it was time for the 17th of May. We did the usual thing of joining the local parade and watched the band and general excitement in the morning and then joined some friends for a very relaxed barbeque the most of the rest of the day. And yes, midway through the week after, the weather turned.

Which means that between stressing out over running and the weather being horrible for outdoor activities, I still haven't managed to get out on the bike even once this year :/. Oh well, other things have been happening :).

Speaking of which, books! I did in fact manage to finish reading ...Sheep well in time for book club, and a fun occasion it proved to be :). This turned out to definitely be one of those books that grew in my mind through the discussion. Would I have picked a nice good work of fiction over this though? Oh yes.

So as I went back to the library to return ...Sheep, I decided to pick up a couple of books more my speed. One of the relatively new Miles Morales graphic novels, and Hyperion. More on the latter in a bit. I enjoyed With Great Power quite a lot! The style seemed thoughtful yet pacey. I have to admit that had I known this was the second in the series, I might have tried to acquire the first, still, it was no great impediment.

And then I started on Hyperion. So the odd thing is that someone at work had mentioned it within the last month or so, but I'd completely forgotten that when picking the book up. I read the blurb on the back, but didn't notice that this was merely a newer edition of an book first published in 1989 rather than a more recent work altogether. All of which is to say that when I started reading it, it was a bit of a shock to my system more attuned (at least recently) to the Mark Lawrence, Richard K Morgan, Martha Wells end of speculative fiction!

Don't even get me started on the horror show of an introduction. I mean, really?! It spoils part of the ending to start with. Then proceeds to talk down the sequels in a bizarre attempt at talking up the first book (Hyperion). It launches into random philosophical tangents and makes strange leaps into literary history. So basically when the next book club book arrived once I'd gotten about ten pages into the actual book, I just stopped.

My Sweet Orange Tree only really got picked because it was the only fiction offering last time around :). Yup, I'm not the only one getting a bit tired of the deluge of non-fiction. Having read it, it's certainly an apt question to ask, how closely can fiction need to follow real life and still remain fiction? Which is not to say I didn't enjoy reading it :).

As a pretty significant piece of Brazilian literature (or so I'm told), I managed to get the local library to order a copy. And it must be of general interest, because there's already reminders telling me to return it on time as there are others waiting for it! Yay!! OK, slight diversion incoming. I feel libraries are excellent ways of accessing vast amounts of books, music, films, whatever, in a fun and socially responsible way. So if I've asked for a book, and I find that others are also interested in it, I find this extremely gratifying :).

Anyway, back to My Sweet Orange Tree then. Turns out it is autobiographical. But with such beautifully lyrical storytelling with overtones of magical realism, that it really is quite something. Much of the subject matter covering parts of the author's childhood is quite painful. Growing up in a Rio favela in the 1920s, particularly when there's unemployment involved, seems heartrending in many ways. The book never drowns the reader in its obvious sorrow.

I'm curious how others found the book. Particularly because of some comments from fellow book-clubbers in the mean time related to the way the story unfolds, and how much focus there is (or not) on various characters. I found the way of storytelling immensely relatable, enjoyable and familiar. To me, the whole book was about inviting the reader into a particular life experience. Not about guiding them along a particular plot. Given the emotional toll it took on me though, I took my time. For a very short book, it took me a while to finish :).

When I then returned to Hyperion, I think I was in a much better headspace :). Or at least my expectations had been appropriately adjusted. And while I can't put the entirety of that annoying introduction out of my head, most of it has happily faded. 

I'm probably about a quarter of the way through, and rather enjoying the often wild ride! Parts of the storytelling is deeply unsettling I'm finding, but in a way that raises questions about wider societal and cultural norms. Things we take for granted. Space travel has for decades provided authors license to selectively remove, add or adjust aspects of life on earth, with often thought provoking results. This definitely does that!

For the next week and a half or so though, it will be back up in middle Norway! Visiting some friends this time. The question is, should I take something other than Hyperion with me on my travels?

Of memories, musk ox and an early start to summer

April has practically flown by, and there's a lot to write about! There was the highly anticipated Easter road trip, some interesting reading and number twenty! But through it all, the odd sense of displacement. On the one hand, I kept feeling like this must be May already, the weather being as warm as it is. On the other hand, it feels like there hardly was an April, so it can't possibly be May already!

I guess it's not a total surprise, this early start to summer, but while last year the snow at least lasted into April, this time around it's been gone almost mid March! I mean, is there actually anyone still left actually believing that anthropogenic climate change is not a thing? Oh well. 

But it did mean that the Easter trip to middle Norway with some visiting friends went a bit differently that it might have done! Given that one of said friends was a lot happier to not have to deal with too much snow, this actually worked out quite well in the end :).

So the plan had actually been theirs to start with, spend a week in Norway, focus on exploring the mountains and fjords, scenery over urban experiences. Which was perfect seeing how they'd also picked Easter week, when most of Norway pretty much shuts down :). 

The trip ended up being a visit and stay at Åndalsnes, a place we'd been to nearly eleven (eleven!!) years ago, and then a stop on the outskirts of the Dovrefjell national park on the way back. It ended up being a really nice relaxed holiday, just what we all needed :).

My memories of the last trip to Åndalsnes are rather heavily dominated by the Romsdalseggen hike, but also the beauty of the landscape. What we had not done last time was spend any sort of time in the town itself! Something we remedied thoroughly this time around :). It's a really pretty little town, nestled at the head of a fjord and surrounded by towering mountain peaks on all sides. Given the holiday week, it was quiet, but with enough going on to keep us entertained :).

We did do a bit of hiking, however there had never been any thought of repeating the whole hike to the top. We spent a bit of time exploring the paths near the bottom, and then decided to use the new installation since our last visit, the gondola to the edge of the ridge!! A lazy but quite spectacular way to enjoy the views! There was even a nice restaurant at the top! We did spend some time actually hiking the ridge, and yes, the views were just as dramatic as I remembered :).

One of the days we decided to head over to Ålesund, get a bit of the city experience, but also explore more of the fjord landscape that can be so breath taking in that part of the country! Having been there no a separate trip about seven years ago, it was fun to see how much of the navigation could be done without help of GPS :). The answer turned out to be mostly, but not quite entirely :D.

One big source of anticipation throughout the trip was our planned musk ox safari! Seeing how we were going to be passing Dovrefjell, and the only place in Norway (and indeed one of the few anywhere in the world) where one can see mux oxen in the wild, it seemed like an opportunity too good to pass on. There was, as I say, much anticipation, particularly from one of our visitors :).

I am happy to report, that not only did we get to see some of the magnificent beasts, it was a wonderful day to be out! We didn't even have to venture too far to get to the point where a heard of more than twenty were happily grazing, play-fighting and generally lounging about. Our guide proved to be quite the character as well, full of entertaining, and occasionally weird and wonderful anecdotes and pieces of information :).

All in all, the trip, as I said was a success. We even managed a quick pitstop at Lillehammer on the way down south to the much tamer landscape. To be honest, even the landscape in the area hear around the Oslofjord is pretty spectacular if one were to compare it to other parts of the world, but the majesty of the landscape is just on a completely different level once one ventures a bit further north :).

During the holiday and otherwise during this month, I also explored Abeth! Book of the Ancestor proved to be great fun! Partly because, I imagine, this being the second Mark Lawrence trilogy I read, I did go in a bit better prepared :). For one thing, once I'd noticed the sometimes disconcerting changes of pace and shifts in the passage of time, I decided to take my time, and not rush headlong through the three books :).

There are definitely some great lines in this series :). Here's one that lends itself very easily to being quoted:

It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size.

I mean, seriously?!! :D. Yes, totally badass. Having said that, it's not all about action, as usual. There's as I said, a lot of variety to the pace. Once you get used to it though, I feel it's easy enough to navigate. There's a very different tone to this series compared to The Red Queen's War. There's isn't the same level of grimness, although it still is pretty grim, and neither is there the layer of almost forced mirth.

The ending did feel a tad predictable, in that the hero/heroine unlocks power of ancient advanced sci-fi tech buried on planet stuck in a medieval fantasy social structure while battling personal evils and a society on the brink because aforementioned sci-fi tech is failing. Also, unlocking of power happens in a way unlike that anticipated by everyone... You get the idea. Still, very much worth the read :).

Now I'm finally trying to make my way through the book club book of the month, the appropriately named A Short History of the World According to Sheep! I have to say, after the entertaining and frankly wild ride of the short history of Nona Grey's life, this is a hard one to get properly into :P. I'm about halfway through (which is good, because book club is in less than a week, so maybe actually not so good, but anyway) and so far it mainly feels like a long string of entertaining but rather random facts about sheep. Or things related to sheep. Sometimes rather tangentially.

Anyhow, the other big one, number twenty!! At the start of the season, there was no other word to describe how I felt other than cautiously optimistic, meaning, top four finish and hopefully deep runs in the cups. Then in January, it was suddenly this surreal situation of being on top of everything! At which point the inevitable thing is to remember that LFC is the club with the record of number of seasons where they've topped the table at Christmas/New Year and not won.

Then of course we're in the middle of March and the cup losses meant that there was a proper sense of loss. I was speaking to a fellow Liverpool FC supporter the other week, how at the start of the season, being top of the league in April would have felt like the best thing ever! And yet there was a sense of what might have been. Last week though, and I think the game in particular, blew all that away, and it was just pure joy :).

Who knows what'll happen next season, but as a sports fan, you've got to enjoy these moments :). YNWA

From snow to slush and beyond

It feels sort of fitting that I spoke about snowboarding last month, with my lasting memory from that trip being of the fresh, soft powder snow on the last day. And now, a month later, I'll talk about snowboarding again, except this time, it was on slush :).

So like last year, work organized an afternoon of downhill (or uphill if you wanted to hike) activity at the local ski centre in Oslo. It was the same time of year as last time too, except, this March has been unseasonably warm. In fact it almost feels like summer's arrived early! The end result? A fun, but rather wet afternoon on my snowboard :).

Otherwise, it's been a month of surprisingly warm sunshine interspersed with cold wind. There was the rather late snow once most of the older snow and ice had disappear, the thing that normally happens at the end of April or in early May. It disappeared just as quickly as the late snow usually does.. In a way I guess the winter was disappointing. But on the other hand, sunshine is always welcome :).

Haven't managed to get out on the bikes yet, although they have been sorted out, so now it's more of a case of using them. I keep thinking I should go out running in the mean time. Holmenkollstafetten is coming up in about a month, and getting a team together has begun. Will I show up any more prepared than last year? I guess time will tell!

On the reading front, I wasn't particularly thrilled by the choice this month, plus (in?)conveniently the copy I'd ordered from the library still hasn't arrived after more than a month of waiting, so I turned to the unread section of my bookshelf, and found a book that had not been picked for book club some years ago, but a friend had thought it would be something I'd like!

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore did turn out something I sort of liked, more than most murder mystery thrillers anyway :). I rather liked the style of writing, oddly floaty and atmospheric. And there were parts of the plot that held rather a lot of promise. As with a lot of these things though, the overall feeling I was left with was somewhat meh. But a positive meh, if there's such a thing :D.

Now I've gotten my hands on The Book of the Ancestor trilogy, and am nearing the end of Red Sister (aka book one). It's good fun! In fact, I think I'm enjoying it rather more than I did the last book of the previous trilogy. One thing that has not changed is the rapid, and often sudden, variations of pace! The style of writing also seems somewhat different, but then again, it's a rather different sort of story :).

What stays the same is the sci-fi fantasy blend which rather fascinates me :). I am trying, and will continue to try to read these books at a somewhat slower pace to try and not tie myself in knots like I did the last time. Let's see how that goes!

Leaving wakes of powder snow clouds

Looking outside today, it feels strange to think that less than three weeks ago we were slaloming through soft fresh powder snow! Yes, it was at a ski resort, but barely a couple of hours away, and even around here there was enough snow to happily go cross country skiing. Now, on the other hand, after a week or more of positive temperatures and not a little amount of rain, the world looks rather different...

It's not like all the snow's gone, but there's a lot of bare surfaces around. Definitely no cross country skiing, and we've even escaped the melting and refreezing ice on the footpaths. Which is certainly a positive :). Somehow though, if this was to be it, and we were heading into an early spring, it wouldn't be all bad.

A big part of that is probably the amazing few days at Norefjell! For most of the time it was quite cold, but beautifully sunny! To the extent that while the night time temperatures would drop below -15°C, once the sun had warmed things up by midday, it would climb up nearly to 0°!

The conditions were gorgeous for some relaxed snowboarding. Not least because we seemed to have picked a week when very few other people had decided to visit those particular slopes! With an under two year old in tow who had only very limited prior exposure to skiing, or indeed snow, we mostly took turns heading out to the slopes. But there were definitely fun times had with all of us just sledding down short declines :).

Sadly I ended up ill at the end of the week, so when the gorgeous weather followed us back to Asker, accompanied by the perfect amounts of snow for cross country, I didn't really get to make any use of it :(. At least we'd done some trips earlier, because by the time I felt fine enough to venture out, things had changed. Such is life though.

The other good thing this month has been the reading! Once I'd manage to get through Cod I started with Prince of Fools, the first book of Mark Lawrence's The Red Queen's War trilogy. Pretty quickly I found myself warming to the irreverent, fast talking, swindling, broke prince :).

As it happens in such situations, I proceeded to dive headlong through the whole series! (With a brief diversion into The Future, but we'll come back to that later.) Which I'm not sure was the best thing to have done to be honest :/. (The rapid pace of reading, not the detour.) 

The trilogy covers a period of time that is nominally about a year. But because of the nature of the tale and the effect it has on the main protagonist, it may have been better to give it a bit of time. Get used to the changes as they happened. Well, that's all retrospective wisdom. But the end result is that while I really enjoyed the first book a lot, the subsequent two, The Liar's Key and The Wheel of Osheim, never seemed to hit the same heights. 

For one thing, the stories are told in varying cadences, there's the baseline of the nominal adventurer on a journey where things happen, then there are flashbacks told by fellow travellers, then there are magic induced dream sequences which may or may not be memories, and finally, the adventurer's own memories resurfacing at unwanted moments possibly as dreams? I wasn't totally certain of that last one. But the general feeling I was left with was a bit stop-start.

The premise itself I found to be really enjoyable, and novel, I must add. Unlike the usual fantasy that seems to generally be set in the past, compared to sci-fi which is generally set in the future, where past and future are obviously relative to the author's time, the world of the broken empire seems to be set squarely in the future, in fact, it's set in a sort of post sci-fi apocalypse future, which makes this almost sci-fi in a fantasy skin? Not that genres matter too much, because in this case the result was excellent :). 

I particularly enjoyed the random bits of past surfacing in this future. (Spoiler alert) like the grenade that's the cardinal's holy stone and the defunct smart phone that's his holy tablet, dead relics of a forgotten past. Well, not quite so dead in some cases as it turns out. There's also builder's stone (concrete), builder's suns (fission bombs), plasteek armies (mannequins), silver steel (steel) that never corrodes and so on.

I think I generally enjoyed the stumbling, haphazard run that was the plot. I certainly liked the stretches where Jalan and Snorri were together. On his own, Jalan tended to be a bit too much. In the end I was mostly left with a feeling of having rushed through too much too quickly and finding it hard to digest it all. Would it have been better if I'd read slower? Who knows :). 

I do think I'd like to read more from Lawrence. Not sure the next thing is going to be Broken Empire though, given how bloody and dark that one's expected to be. Maybe Book of the Ancestor would be better, we shall see.

Coming back to the other book I read this month, The Future was certainly an interesting experience, and for very different reasons than The Red Queen's War. It's a bit of a weird book in some ways, and I felt the best way to read it was to think of it as a satirist's take on the current state of the world. So, not so much a plot driven or even character driven book, but an idea driven book.

Once (if) one accepts that oversimplification of the techno-commerce empires and their influence on the rest of the world, it's not too hard to follow the lines of thinking being presented. The whole philosophy around the fox and rabbit was a bit overdone, but does raise some interesting questions around the pros and cons of controlling our environment to increasing degrees. The good thing I suppose is that I never felt the author tried to push the fox or the rabbit as the "right" approach.

As with some of these sorts of books though, if the author is not willing to just leave the reader with a lot of unanswered questions to ponder, the endgame gets a bit messy. There were clearly holes in the timeline, some things happened, but then they couldn't have happened. It's that thing of twists in the narrative only working when going forward, if one stops to track back and check if this still fits with everything else we've been told, then things stop making sense.

The weird thing with this book I think is that I definitely remember having an overwhelmingly positive emotional response to it at the point when I'd just finished reading it, late one night, because I was so gripped by the narrative. But the next morning, and each time I've thought about it since, I remember less and less the reasons I liked it and find more things that don't quite add up :|. I guess that maybe says more about me than the book though?

So now I've decided to take a bit of a break from rapid reading and started slowly working my way through a thriller I'd been given some years ago, but never really gotten around to :).

PS. Switching phones seems to have come along in leaps and bounds even compared to four years ago! Especially if one sticks to the same sort of phone. I find myself wondering more about how to make things a bit different rather than having it just how it was! Battery life's a lot better though, unsurprisingly :D.