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.

Bright blue interludes between grey and white

As someone described it earlier this week, this January has felt like a super sleepy month. Grey, wet, and a feeling that it's moving really slowly. At the same time, it's already nearly over :). Yeah, so what's new, right? :D But there have definitely been some fun bits in between!

The snow for instance. As expected, we returned to some fairly nice amounts of snow, but more followed soon after! Which meant we going get going with the cross-country skiing! A couple of trips later though, the temperatures rose unseasonably and it turned to rain instead of snow :/. One lives in hope however, as the winter is long.

night-time, daytime!

In many ways this is already a pretty nice time of the year, because the lengthening of the day is already becoming noticeable. I think for me personally, the earlier dawning of light as I'm heading to work and the light staying longer as I'm heading back from work feels like quite a big deal. On top of that, despite the rain, most of the world around us is still covered in snow, so happy days.

and again!

Except the bits when enough of the snow melts and then refreezes overnight as ice, so I find myself slip-sliding down the hill on my way to the train in the morning semi-dark :|. Oh well, I guess you can't have it all :).

I think part of why I find myself in quite a good mood today is that a break is coming up! Next week we have family visiting, and while the time we spend here may well not yield much cross country skiing, the plan is to then head off to the mountains for half a week of downhill! Which I'm looking forward to a lot! Hopefully everything we've been getting as rain has been falling as snow there :D.

On the books front, despite my concerns, I did manage to finish The Game in time to be able to return it without too much delay! However, the ending really didn't sit well with me! I mean, I was really getting into the story towards the end there! Fast paced, tumbling through one twist after another. But the way things got resolved (or not!) in the end felt like a major let down.

Turns out I was not the only one! There was quite a long and spirited discussion around the book at our book club meeting, and turned out that one of our number had already read all three books in the trilogy. The general feeling however, was that he had potentially wasted his time, and no one else was going to bother, myself included :). I suppose that's part of the fun of the book club though, being able to share opinions and find out how others reacted to the same story.

Before getting into this month's book though, I thought a bit of a break from book club books was in order. I'd offered Altered Carbon as one of my options in the past, but it had never been picked. The blurb seemed interesting though, so I decided to give it a go. What an excellent choice!! :) I practically devoured it in a week!

I think I really liked how the characters came across. Yes, Takeshi isn't the most likeable chap, but there's a definite pull to how his story plays out. There was a really good mix of action and contemplation. The Hendrix was particularly fun and reminded my a little bit of some of the space ship AIs from the Culture series :).

Would I read the rest of the trilogy though? Seeing how I'd have to order them from other libraries, maybe, but I'm in no rush.

In the mean time I've been first plodding, then rushing, and finally dragging my feet through Cod. I mean, it's alright I guess, but I'm really not that into non-fiction. And while the whole ecology and conservation angle blended in with the broad arc of historical consequences does play well together, somehow, I find it difficult to feel too enthusiastic about it.

I'm almost done though, so while waiting for the next book to arrive, I'm contemplating a dive into one of Mark Lawrence's completed trilogies while waiting for the last book of The Library Trilogy to appear :). The author comes highly recommended, and I've heard absolutely nothing of him previously! But hey, recently, that's worked very well for me, so why not try :).

As for the rest, there's the sort of semi planning of potential trips for Easter and early June. Road trips no less. In Norway though. It's nice to have things to look forward to, and even more fun when that involves seeing friends. In the mean time, here's hoping for more snow!

So here we are again :). You, my (mostly) imaginary reader, and me, attempting yet again the exercise in futility that is trying to sum up the year that has been, in some sort of sensible way, within the confines of a single blog post :). But hey, that's never stopped me in the past, so why bother now :D.

Another end of year post from the UK, a bit of an extended Christmas break this time. Partly because I was left with extra days off because of bad planning (or serendipitous oversight, depending on how one looks at it), and partly because of the way the days of the week matched up with the days off. We've been here exactly two weeks now, and don't head home till the end of this week :).

Apart from the complete and much needed break from work that this has allowed, it's also been particularly good timing with respect to a partial hip replacement situation that came up :/. Fortunately that has meant maybe even more time spent with family that may otherwise have been possible.

As for the rest of December, it actually snowed!! Not huge amounts, but enough to make it feel like proper winter. It would appear that as I type this more snow has arrived back home, so who knows, maybe it'll be cross-country season when we get back!

Speaking of, last season wasn't really much of a cross-country skiing one for us. And for a change, this was not for lack of amazing conditions! It was just that this time last year we were trying really hard to get the new flat ready to move into! Feels like an absolute age ago now :). Not only did the move go like a dream (with a lot of help from some friends), we've had quite a lot of our close family visit since then, from India and the UK, which has felt really fun!

I guess travel was a bit more limited this time around, although the train trip to the west coast of Norway with my parents in the summer was a highlight. Do I wish for more travel in the coming year though? Not really. Maybe a bit more adventurous cycling might be fun, but if not, I'll be happy if we can just keep up the rhythm of cycling to and from work once or twice a week in the summer :).

When it comes to reading, it feels like an oddly off and on year. I think I've spent a lot of my spare time on NFS No Limits instead... which, I guess has been a lot of fun. But do I miss spending more time reading? Not sure. I mean, I did manage to get totally mesmerized by two completely different types of fantasy in The Murderbot Diaries and The Invisible Library. The book club books, as usual, were a bit of a mixed bag. Maybe a few too many non fiction choices this year, oh well.

Speaking of book club books, I'm currently sort of meandering my way through The Game. It's the first book of a trilogy originally written in Swedish. I was having a hard time locating a copy in English, so decided to go for the copy in Norwegian from our local library. Hmm. Possibly a mistake. I think when I do get into it, I really enjoy reading the book. But the language is definitely more complex and dialect-wise heavy. Definitely a step up from anything I've read in Norwegian before. So maybe I should have given myself some more time, really :/. I have been enjoying it so far, but there's a very real chance that I'll end up not being able to finish a book for the first time, not because I gave up, but because I'd run out of time!!

Before that though, I had no issues racing through The Library at Mount Char in no time! With the possible exception of the logic behind the title, there were absolutely no let downs! The plot twists, while sometimes almost literally outlandish, always kept me engaged. The characters were interesting enough, but mostly it was the world mechanics and the plot that kept me glued to it.

So there we have it. A year where the beginning feels so far away as to almost defy belief, yet one that has simultaneously run by way too fast for me to really catch my breath. I can hear the fireworks going now :). As we drove the rental car back from helping babysit our niece (yup, right-hand-drive for the first time in a while, was good to keep the habit alive I guess) we did notice some going off pretty early on in the evening, but feels like things are now properly picking up around here. The other thing I can hear is the wind howling :).

So, fireworks and storms. Interesting way to start a new year I guess? Who knows. I'll hope to keep a more even keel than maybe I've been able to this last year. Continue to be grateful for the amazing blessings I can count. Beyond that, I guess it's just a case of strapping in for the ride :).

Bright shadows and a cold sun

It's been an oddly mild winter so far. I mean, it's dark and miserable, but until fairly recently, it's stayed above freezing. And even after did freeze for a bit, the temperatures seem to be headed up to high single digits (°C that is). Weird. What it also means of course, is that there's no snow to ease the general darkness and misery. Oh well.

November seems to have come and gone without me really noticing. It hasn't helped that I feel like I've been tired or ill or both for a lot of it. Despite my best intentions of not letting life pass by and just wishing for some point in the future when it'll all be alright, I feel like I may have done exactly that. Hoping for the Christmas break that's less than a fortnight away now.

I have to say though, having sunlight coming straight into the flat for about as long as it's up at this time of the year is a massive blessing! And by a quirk of geometry the low sun is perfectly posed above the next door hill, but below the edge of the balcony above, meaning I get a nice direct dose of it whenever I'm working from home :). (Assuming the world isn't all engulfed in fog or low clouds of course, but hey, it's best to look for the positives!)

On the book front, it's oddly somewhat like last year. I find myself not really making as much of a headway through Milk Teeth as I'd hoped. The writing continues to be very good. But I think the subject matter tends towards the heavy. And given the general state of my mind, I find myself shying away from it. But what better weather than to be at home and reading right? So I decided to park MT and explore further afield.

Volume eight of the Monstress series has been out for a bit, so I got that out of the library. Also got volume seven, just to get a bit of the immediate background :). They were both fun enough reads. I noticed various bits in Devourer (vol. 7) that I didn't remember. Although whether that was because I'd not noticed the first time around or just forgotten, I do not know.

Inferno (vol. 8) was entertaining enough, set as it is almost entirely in a different world. I feel though, that reading these one (or two) at a time with long gaps in between doesn't get me as excited about the story or the characters as the first proper run through the first six volumes. And now I see volume nine is out (although unavailable through the library). Maybe I should look up how many volumes are planned, and just wait till they're all out :).

Since then though, I've gotten rather sucked into the weird and wonderful The Library at Mount Char. Recommended to be by a colleague off the back of how much I enjoyed The Murderbot Diaries, I'm already about a third of the way in! It is definitely weird though! Ultraviolent isn't maybe the best way to describe it, but is certainly one aspect. The plot starts off intriguing, and then gets somewhat layered and convoluted, but now I'm beginning to think the twists are beginning to make sense?! I guess we shall see.

Ah! Almost forgot! Have I mentioned Lucifer? It's what's brought some level of fun to the dreary evenings lately! Based (loosely, if at all) on the Sandman offshoot graphic novel series, the TV series does seem to have just the right amount of fun to lighten these times :).

As for rest of life, hopefully the next couple of weeks will bring more bright spots than dreary ones, and then I am very definitely looking forward to the work Christmas party which would herald the beginning of my end of year break :). Until then.

Of the colours of autumn that came, then went

It feels like the end of summer was just a few days ago. And yet autumn's practically come and gone. I mean, the leaves are mostly mulch by now. And yet, it's not gone below zero at all. Time is flowing in fits and starts. It pauses, takes a breath and then just dashes forward a few weeks.

It's crazy to think that the "mini-cruise" to Denmark was actually the beginning of this month! Feels like absolutely ages ago! So basically running the Holmenkollen relay in May gave us all free vouchers for Oslo-Copenhagen return trips on one of the ferries, so we thought, why not :). A first in about six or so years.

It was quite fun being on a ship again, mainly because it was all fun and no work :). As we sailed down (and eventually back up) the Oslofjord, it was really nice watching the land on either side sailing by. Noticing details of the landscape, some of it ridiculously familiar, others new.

The six or so hours in Copenhagen were also really fun! We just mainly walked around. Enjoyed some of the coastline, the castle, some churches, some parks. Lunch at a really nice little cafe with a very short, but nice menu :). Getting up close to a heron! (Until the dog came by that is.)

Strictly speaking I suppose the trip was mostly still September, I just posted my previous post before we left I guess. And since then the world feels like a bit of a blur. The autumn colours did show up in earnest. Although briefly. Then it got kinda wet and extremely windy, so they disappeared. The days started getting shorter, the mornings darker. Then the hour changed, and things briefly got brighter...

In between I ended up adding another new country to the visited list. Switzerland. Another work trip. This time to Zurich. We did manage enough time for a guided walking tour around the centre of the city, which managed to mainly whet my appetite for a more thorough exploration at some point in the future!

Zurich felt like a fantastically old city, but in a way where it's all still very much alive and vibrant! There seemed to always be a lot going on! We even got a brief view of the Swiss countryside through a train trip halfway across the country into the French part. Briefly the seasonal clock seemed to have been turned back, with the colours and leaves very much back in evidence.

Unfortunately I returned with a fairly annoying cold. Fevers are never really fun. Particularly when you can tell your thoughts are bordering on the delirious. But you're just aware enough to notice, not enough to stop...

I think it's fair to say cycling is over for the year :/. It was definitely fun while it lasted, even though the most cycling I did was to and from work :).

It's been relatively quiet on the book front. I finished reading Srinath's book. And it certainly was an eye opener. I don't know that there's a lot more to add from my post last month, except I guess to add that I learnt much about my country of birth that I had already known, but had somehow lost, or forgotten. some things that I'd never known. But it was all wrapped in a comforting sense of familiarity that made even the bizarre approachable.

When I moved on to Starry Messenger, it was quite a shock. I'm not sure if it was mostly the writing style, the switch in subject, or just the fact that after a month of reading books written in familiar rhythms, this was altogether more foreign, and the adjustment required was significant. 

I think over all I was left with a positive impression of the book. The beginning and end felt a bit too rushed and breathless. Almost as if Tyson was trying way too hard to make his point. With the rest of it he seemed to calm down a bit more, which made reading more pleasant :).

It was a pretty quick read, and since next month's book club book arrived from the library a lot sooner than expected, I thought I might as well read Free sooner rather than later. To be perfectly honest, I knew very little about Albania or its history other than the existence of Enver Hoxha (and how to pronounce his name thanks to a particularly memorable section of Inside Man).

To say it was illuminating would be an understatement. Honestly, I'm still coming to terms with it, having finished it earlier this week. The writing is fascinating. I found the difference in tone between the first part, prior to the collapse of the socialist "Party" and the second part that came after the curtains were parted, so to speak, stark and particularly poignant given that it marked the before and after of a sort of loss of innocence. A "growing up" of sorts.

In the midst of the almost hyper lucid portrayal of a country and generation in flux and upheaval, it's almost easy to overlook the personal upheavals of the four generations of the author's family. I guess to some extent that does provide a vivid canvas on which she paints the broader story.

I have to say though, two in a row was enough non-fiction for me. So I've picked up the final book of the written-by-friends trio. Amrita Mahale's Milk Teeth. I'm just getting into it, barely a few pages in, but I'm enjoying the atmosphere so far :).

I realized earlier this week that I've got some extra days off that I'd been hoping would turn into a week or so off during the autumn. But said holiday didn't materialize. I guess I'm too tired to even really think about planning anything. So I'm just going to be lazy and take a longer end of year break instead. The trouble is, that's still a month and a half away.

Yeah, total dejá vu :/. End of year, running out of energy trying to stay afloat. Too tired to actually plan a break. Well, you'd think by now I'd have figured this out, but clearly, you'd be wrong :D.