What cast my mind, what hue my thoughts as I open the book of the Fallen and breathe deep the scent of history...

Autumn is well and truly upon us, bringing mixed feelings :). On the one hand there are the beautiful colours as the leaves gradually turn fiery. On the other hand the hours of darkness come marching on, making mornings feel dreary and evenings melancholy. Some days though, the sun shines in a bright blue sky, giving enough warmth to make it feel like there's still a little bit of summer left :).

And we had visitors, so we made the most of the brighter days and actually explored various bits. Some nearer, some a little further afield. One of the most fun trips was to Blåfarveværket, the Cobalt mines and associated blue pigment manufacturing site that produced the majority of the world's Cobalt blue through the 19th century!

Only an hour's drive away we had somehow never visited before. With an avid geologist in our company though, this seemed like too good an opportunity to let slip :). Not only did we get to explore the museum and gallery installations, but also got taken on a guided tour into one of the networks of mining tunnels!

There were also trips to Oslo and various points along the fjord. Even managed a trip to Asker museum and it's collection of local art and cultural heritage. Another one of those places we'd never actually been inside before. Funny how visitors bring out the inner tourist in us when it comes to things right on our doorstep :).

Over the last few weeks I'd also been trying to make my way through In the Lives of Puppets. With limited success. The premise seemed interesting. But for almost the first two hundred pages (nearly half the book), nothing much seemed to happen. Or rather, things did happen, but at a glacial pace.

Which in and of itself isn't necessarily always a bad thing. I mean, there's some cool stuff I've read where it takes time for things to happen, but in the mean time you get some nice character development, or atmospheric build up, or just general musings or philosophical explorations. 

In this case, there seemed to just be a very slow and somewhat repetitive attempt at establishing that yes, these characters really do care for each other. Oh yeah, they are also mostly machines, kinda alone in the middle of nowhere and there might be something not quite right with the world.

And then around about halfway through all hell breaks loose! It almost felt like the editor just went - right, that's it, I've had enough and now I'm just going to cut out 80% of everything.. I mean, probably not, but yeah, super weird. Of course the story itself got really weird. Eventually things sort of calmed down, but I was mainly left wondering, why? 

Why go through the whole exercise of fleshing out that first half so slowly and then race through a bunch of events, why not just make it a much shorter book? It's not like the points being made wouldn't have come across. Yes, human beings can do great harm, to themselves and everything around them. Yes, they can also be amazing, loving, empathetic and kind. The exploration of what it is to be human in the context of machine intelligences is obviously a theme of our times. And yes, love can come in various shapes, many of which it's futile to try and give names to.

I just can't help thinking that all of this would have been much better served by something much closer to a short story. Or maybe a long story, but no more than a short novel. I think another thing that bugged me was somehow the writing seemed quite bland. Maybe that was the point, to make the interrelationships between the characters take centre stage. But yeah, I just found those first two hundred pages very frustrating.

And then there was the afterword. Clearly, even the author wasn't completely satisfied with the published version. Maybe it was just me, but there seemed to be a lot of angst bleeding through.. So who knows, maybe there was an awesome book somewhere in there, I just never found it.

But now that's done! And finally, finally, I've started re-reading Gardens of the Moon!! I have to admit, while struggling through Puppets I spent a not insignificant amount of time on the Malazan Wiki and subreddit. Sort of getting back into the feel of things a bit. For now I've decided against a read-along with the Reread of the Fallen. Maybe I'll change my mind :). I've also decided to follow a mixed reading order with at least the Book of the Fallen and the Novels of the Malazan Empire and basically see where it takes me :).

Barely into the first chapter and I'm already happily sinking into that familiar feeling of being mesmerized by a world steeped in history, mystery, secrets and oh so many layers! Happy days!

Leve kongen!

This week the leaves have started changing colours around here. So summer has officially moved on and autumn has arrived :). As it does each year. And yet there's something sombre about it. Maybe this time around the passing of His Majesty King Harald V of Norway has put a different spin on things.

One has to make only a cursory acquaintance of Norwegian media from the last week or so to gather than Norwegians themselves have widely varying opinions on the role of the monarchy in modern Norwegian society. Yet almost no one would deny that Harald was their king. That he was a good king. That he was the whole nations grandfather.

Having grown up in a republic, he was the only king I'd ever known as (politically speaking) my king. I feel that King Harald was a particularly comforting king for those with roots beyond Norway. He seemed keen to be seen by his country, and to serve. He had a broad and inclusive view of what it is to be Norwegian.

I have been wondering, in this day and age, what does it really mean to be a king, let alone a good king? Given the examples I have seen, I think it is an important institution of national identity and unity, but only if the person who is king can transcend the paradox of being at once something apart, someone who can be put on a pedestal, yet at the same time be one of us. It's something King Harald and Queen Sonja seem to have done with great success.

I wish King Håkon VIII all the best.

Speaking of that other very Norwegian thing - the weather's been predictably unpredictable. Going from mid 20s and really warm to wet, gloomy, windy and cold then back again at the drop of a hat! It feels almost a relief to think consistently colder weather might be on its way, at least we'd know what to wear! At the moment what you freeze in in the morning could very well make you overheat in the afternoon.

We have managed to enjoy a few outings though, walks along bits of the coast, the odd concert in the castle. But mostly it's been quiet times.

I've been reading a bunch. Once I'd worked through my feelings about the rather unexpected and frankly odd ending to the Foundation series readthrough, I read the book club book of the month. The Guest List. I was happy to find that my broadly negative view on the book wasn't an outlier at the meeting last week. .ᴖ.

I've heard of the "summer beach holiday read" or the "quick and uncomplicated crime thriller", and both of those descriptions could be used for this book, but like, what's the point? The story starts off interestingly enough. The characters start off intriguing. But the further I read, and the closer we got to the end, the more everything started turning into tropes and stereotypes.

Spoiler alert! Basically, a very short summary of the plot would be: All the characters are awful, with the occasional redeeming feature. And doesn't really matter if it makes sense or not (or however obtuse the logic), they probably want to kill Will. The sad thing is, there was such a good set up to make this into one of those "ships passing in the night" sort of scenarios with interesting characters with different origins and destinations that just happen to all briefly cross paths on one bizarrely opulent and weirdly over the top wedding on an imaginary island somewhere off a dark, cold and moody coast.

Anyhow. Luckily, just as I was getting to the end of that painful experience, my long awaited library copy of the latest Murderbot appeared! To properly get into it, I decided to re-read Network Effect and System Collapse as a lead up to Platform Decay. What an absolute blast! :) I mean, at this point I think it would be really hard for me to not like a book in that series.

The characters continue to develop in what feels like an organic and genuinely believable way. There are very fun new characters. And we get to explore more of this sprawling universe with it's strange and wonderful history, culture, geography, (does that term apply if we are talking about space stations, planetary tori/toruses and such like?) society and politics in all its glorious variety!

I was having so much fun that I decided to grab the first five books and read them again for good measure :). By the way, discovered this in the copy of Platform Decay - Network Effect is finally no longer being described as a "standalone novel". I mean, as soon as System Collapse came out that was just wrong. But almost more exciting, the order of Murderbot Diaries entries now has Fugitive Telemetry before Network Effect and not after, i.e. in the proper chronological order and not publication order! Yes! Thank you!

So now that's done, and I'm trying to coax myself to get on with what should be the last book club book I read for a while. (Well, after Platform Decay I actually started reading In the Lives of Puppets but then decided to retreat to Murderbot for a bit longer.) Basically, lately I've been feeling like I'm spending too much time reading stuff I don't necessarily want to and it's stopping me from reading what I actually want.

And for a while now, what I actually want is to re-read the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Yeah, last time that took me most of a year with no distractions, so... I'm not sure yet if I want to include the ICE series (plural) and if I do, if I would bother reading them in the so called "ultimate order" or just do one series after another. Questions, questions.

Mostly though, I want to really get to Erikson's The Tales of Witness series and feels remiss to not refresh my memory on the rest :). And maybe, seeing how Walk in Shadow seems to be closer to publishing than ever, one might even start on The Kharkanas Trilogy! Much excitement :).

The enemy within?

Do you ever have that feeling where everything was going so well, and then out of nowhere, seemingly, it wasn't. Of course, putting it like that it feels obvious that it happens to everyone in all sorts of situations. Or maybe that's just me :).

Anyhow, finally finished my many month journey through Asimov's Foundation universe, spanning the Robot, Galactic Empire and Foundation series. For the most part it was fantastic! It had been over fifteen years since my last read through, and there was so much I enjoyed. And of course a lot that I discovered this time around that felt new.

But then there was the end of Foundation and Earth.

The thing is, I don't didn't remember at all what I thought of it last time around. So I went and looked it up. Turns out in one way it was a familiar feeling, I didn't recall any of the end from the read prior. Doesn't seem like I was left with the same sort of feeling of being let down though.

Is it another one of those things where you feel differently about similar things at different times because you're a different person in some ways? Lived experiences do change us don't they? I mean, that's one of the benefits of life I think, the opportunity to evolve.

So what is it that's left me somewhat, shall we say, disgruntled? Without going into specifics, I think the first thing to consider is how the ending of Foundation and Earth seems to clearly set up some sort of new direction. A new source of crises to the galaxy from beyond the boundaries hitherto explored.

I have always wondered a bit why Asimov decided, having given humanity the ability to blithely bypass the challenges of faster than light travel, to confine them to a single galaxy. But for the most part that's been part of the story, galactic empire and all that. It's only at the very end that he looks beyond, and that feels quite jarring. Particularly as he looks beyond with a distinct sense of belligerence and disquiet.

I think that's the problem I'm having. For the majority of the books, accounting for the time when particular stories were written, there is a sense of looking forward with positivity. A sense that despite everything, a positive outcome is worth fighting for, because it is possible to bring about.

Through most of the last book though, there's a sense of foreboding. The decision has been made, now we are engaging in some monumental amount of navel gazing to justify our actions. And what a crap justification we are left with in the end!

OK, it's not actually possible to leave this entirely spoiler free, so be warned. I think another thing (or maybe this is the main thing) that really annoyed me was having come so neatly full circle with Daneel's lunar hideaway, why is he turned into such a cardboard cutout of a character?!

It feels genuinely bizarre to me that Asimov in fact wrote what I consider the absolutely most enjoyable books of the entire lot - The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation - pretty much around Foundation and Earth, just before, or just after. How could those others have turned out so differently?

Maybe the mistake really is mine. Maybe the best way to read these books are really in the order they were published. Although, given that I did read it in in-universe (or should I say in-galaxy) chronological order, I did get to read all my favourite ones all together. So there is that :).

Looking at life through a window

And just like that the month is almost over. In a way I guess it's not a surprise, another month flying by, but it's usually not quite the same in the summer holidays. July is almost over, and I'm finding myself thinking, did I make the most of the quiet(er) time? But then what is "making the most of" anyway :).

We had a pretty chill time, enjoyed the weather when we could. Relaxed. And generally managed to take life a little bit slower. Which was rather nice. Somehow though I feel a slight bit of apprehension thinking about the coming weeks. Everyone returning from their holidays, full of beans, wanting to get things done. Blah.

Well, the properly interesting bit for me in the last few weeks was the week with temperatures upwards of 30°C! For almost half a week, we felt what it's like to not actually be just a little bit on the cold side all the time :D. I had great fun! I mean, 32°C is still a good 4 degrees colder than body temperature, so it's not like it's properly uncomfortable or anything. 

I guess it says something about my travel habits that it felt genuinely novel :). Not everyone else around was enjoying things quite as much :P. But then it was, as I said, barely half a week. Then things went back more or less to the normal mid to low twenties.

I did end up watching a few football matches. I think the Norwegian team did very well, all things considered. Could have gone even further if a few things had fallen a bit differently, but hey, that's sport. There's a family in the neighbourhood who must be Spanish, and their flags are still up! :D Bit sad to see Messi's potentially last World Cup match end in ugly scenes though.

On the books front, a bit more headspace meant I could take my time with my reading more than in recent months. Foundation's Edge had somewhat more unknowns than the original trilogy, and since then Foundation and Earth even more! The thing I find myself thinking, having read all the way through from the Robot books to here in the last nine months or so, is how Asimov seems to have been having second thoughts about his earlier works :).

We get further and further away from the Seldon Plan and the Foundations. And I sort of remember where we are heading and who we meet, (particularly, given that Prelude.. and Forward.. were written soon after these two books means it's quite easy to see how things were being tied together) but it's hard not to wonder if Asimov really saw the world (or galaxy) quite differently in the '80s than he saw it in the '50s. Almost impossible not to really, I suppose.

What would it really have been like? Going from the immediate aftermath of the two great wars with a certain weariness but also a sense or relief and optimism, thorough the paranoid schizophrenia of the Cold War and finally the fall of the Berlin wall and the renewed sense of hope and optimism of that time. Which makes me wonder what people who last saw the world around the turn of the millennium would think of where we find ourselves a quarter century later... who can say.

I'm only about halfway through Foundation and Earth though, so there's a couple of hundred or so more pages to enjoy :). In the middle I also read this month's book club book, Flowers for Algernon. Great writing. The main reason I say that is because at no point is it particularly unobvious as to what sort of an end the protagonist is headed towards. And yet, once I got there with Charlie, I could not help but be quite emotional.

It's also clearly much more of an exploration of the anatomy of relationships rather than any sort of deep dive into the science of psychology or neurochemistry. Which I very much liked. The use of diary entries, or rather the "progress reports" was particularly powerful in conveying all sorts of things, from the state of Charlie's intelligence, his emotional development or state of mind, but equally the feelings and thoughts of those around him.

I also rather enjoyed the fact that it didn't feel like the author needed to tie up all the threads in a neat bow or anything. Once I learnt that Flowers for Algernon had started life as a short story and then been expanded upon, I wondered what the original was like. Maybe a more abbreviated version would carry the emotional message across even more powerfully?

Hopefully it'll make for an interesting discussion next week. And hopefully we'll manage to get out on our bikes before the weather turns too chilly. Either way, there's quite a bit more of the summer to enjoy really.

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream

Summer is finally upon us :). Well, seeing how this is the end of June, that's not surprising, but what is surprising is that we've actually seen a nice amount of rain as well. Makes for the first properly green summer for a few years!

Happily, there have been enough periods of nice weather, particularly on the weekends to allow the cycling to continue. In fact, it's been on the edge of too warm on occasion, but nothing like what the rest of Europe is going through.

We did experience a bit of the proper warm weather on a short trip to the UK. 38°C isn't anything to be scoffed at. But honestly, the air was still pretty cool, so as soon as you got out of the sun, things were pretty manageable. I guess depends a lot on what you're used to :).

It was great to see the newest nephew! Which was mainly why we were there. But there turned out to be an opportunity to also go watch a live cricket match! The Women's T20 World Cup match between South Africa and The Netherlands. (Yes, you probably didn't even know that there was another world cup on! :D).

Given the small ground it was great to catch the action from pretty close! Close enough to be able to easily tell if the batter had made good contact by the sound off the bat! :) It was quite warm, but a really fun afternoon.

Now the summer holidays are beginning to roll in, which means Norway sort of empties out a bit. As usual, we're staying put, and hoping that the weather will stay nice and we'll get to keep enjoying it :).

And keep reading :). It has actually been quite nice to just settle back into the Foundation series. The travels were a good opportunity to complete the re-read of the original trilogy and then I started on Foundation's Edge. 

Given the gap of fifteen or so years since I last read them, there was a lot that I didn't remember. The broad strokes were there, but the details were great fun to discover again. I've also read a lot of varying science/speculative fiction in the mean time, which gives a different perspective. Some of the writing, particularly the older books, definitely shows its age. But the underlying themes continue to be thought provoking as ever...

Then there's the other world cup. The one that's hardly possible to miss seeing how Norway has qualified for the first time in nearly three decades :). Well, we'll see how long the fun lasts!