It's nearly May! Where is this year going?! Like seriously? :) It's not all bad of course :D. Take the skiing season for example. Since my last blog post we managed to nearly double the distance skied for the season! Mainly because there was some extremely unexpected, but highly appreciated snow at Easter!
Since then the snow all but disappeared, aided in no small part by a beautiful few spring days with nearly 20°C. Then somewhat shockingly new snow appeared. Then that disappeared again, as one would expect at the end of April! And now there's more snow forecasted tomorrow. Seriously, what's going on with the weather? I suppose we all know these are ripples of the effects of climate change gathering pace in the not too far distance...
Sometime during the much needed Easter break though, we decided to book another cycling holiday. Having not done one last year, it felt bold. Well, it feels even more bold now that we finally got the bikes out of storage and went for a short exploratory trip this afternoon :D. Ah well, it'll be fine :P.
I'm getting a bit tired of saying work's been crazy actually. So some incidentals to ponder. The less time I have to sort through the thoughts and feelings in my head, the less nice I am to be around I think. Sure, I feel bad afterwards, but that's usually too late to stop me from snapping at people. Deserved really has nothing to do with it, because caring is a habit. And once one starts losing it, inevitably, undeserved hurt follows. (Of course you could argue any kind of hurt is undeserved, but that's neither here nor there.)
The underground golf was a lot of fun though, it has to be said :).
As usual, I've been taking refuge in books whenever I can. Got through the whole Ex-Machina series in pretty much no time. And overall, I don't think my opinion changed much from what it was after reading the first two last month. However, it was indeed interesting to see a graphic novel take on issues of politics, race, gender in quite such a way and deliver a genuinely gripping story.
While I did want to get on to Middle Earth, I was waiting for this month's book club book to show up at the library, and while I waited, I thought, what would be a good graphic novel to pick up that would tide me over in the interim. It had to be a graphic novel, because my head was in too much of a jumbled space to focus on just written words. I settled on The Sandman: Overture.
What an absolute masterpiece! I've read it a few times now, and each time there's new things that pop up. As with a lot of Gaiman stories, to be honest. I suppose the writing leaves so much space for the reader to fill it with their own imagination, each time is a new experience. Because, after all, each time I'm a slightly different me, with a different set of circumstances, thoughts, experiences in my immediate past giving me a slightly different perspective.
And then finally The Winter Fortress did arrive, and in many ways it was quite a good book! Both in and of itself, and for me to get back into words-only books given my state of mind :). It's a journalistic work digging through some parts of Norway's history during the second World War. It also follows a handful of Norwegians through the years of war in a very personal way. A lot of the material was collected from diaries and interviews.
I could personally relate to a fair bit of the landscape. A lot of the events from the book took place on the other side of one of mountain ridges I posted photos of last month. Familiarity with the Norwegian weather, landscape and lifestyle does give a particularly interesting perspective on things.
There's also the fact that Norway, while very much in the periphery of the main theatre of war, was deeply affected. But because it was not maybe seen as so thoroughly tormented as say France, and maybe to some extent because of the speed with which the country was invaded to start with, there is a deep reluctance on the part of those that saw those years first hand, to share their experiences.
There are many layers to the story of course. But overall I think a good balance is struck in keeping a lot of it very personal. I for one appreciated the author's choice to keep much of the focus on the people caught up in the churn of events bigger than themselves, and doing what they could.
So that brings me up to the present more or less. I finally started reading Unfinished Tales. And I continue to be fascinated, as much by the depth of JRR Tolkien's creation, as by the care with which Christopher Tolkien unfurls the mythology and presents it as a world to explore and experience. Given the latter's tendency to reference The Silmarillion, especially in the stories of the First Age, I ended up getting that book out too and reading them more or less side by side as appropriate :).
It's fun for a change to be able to sink into a story/world/universe/myth/legend without actually needing to know the "what happens next". I already know. I'm now wandering the many meandering paths of "what else is there to discover". Makes for a more relaxed pace of reading.
Which of course, is a much appreciated change of pace at least in one part of my life at the moment, while other bits continue to run headlong into an uncertain future.
PS. Watched Everything Everywhere All at Once. Was amazed, mesmerized, confused, shocked and generally amused :D.
PPS. Watched A Man Called Otto. Was moved.
