And just like that, summer's over :). I mean, September's upon us, and the Norwegians are very particular about their seasons lasting three months each. Which never actually matches up with reality, but so what :D. Anyway, I'm not actually in Norway at to moment, back in the UK! Just this last week though, and about to head back home.
But let's rewind a bit to the beginning of the month. So, important things first, I did manage to keep all the plants alive!! To be honest, the rain every second or third day helped no end :). But generally looking for new flowers and enjoying watching new leaves was a fun part of each day.
The weather was actually very helpful, because in between the rain and thunderstorms there were beautiful days of sunshine, which I tried to make the most of. The cycling once a week to Oslo continued, and I even managed a couple of additional trips around.
Although company seemed hard to come by, and the one time I did manage to find a friend to go cycling with, their bike decided to misbehave and it ended up being a bit of a stop-pump-go sort of thing for half the ride. The other half was fun though! :)
The one time the weather did not cooperate was the day of the office summer party :/. Lots of rain and wind, and we were headed off to a restaurant on one of the islands at the top of the Oslofjord :D. Well, it was entertaining, to put it mildly. And all that for cold shrimp :P. (For the uninitiated, this is a highly sought after thing for Norwegians, cold boiled shrimp, the more recently caught the better, on bread with a bit of butter, mayonnaise and lime. The height of Norwegian summer. Supposedly :P.)
In between all that, I've been happily reading my way through The Invisible Library! Finished The Untold Story (book 8) just before heading over to the UK. With mostly happy feelings. As with these sort of series though, the story towards the end got more and more hectic almost. Too may threads to tie up, too much jeopardy. Which leaves one almost with a sort of a breathless feeling at the end.
All in all though, I was very happy with the series. Light, but entertaining. You could see that the author really enjoys books, and writing. And I really enjoyed seeing this coming through in the writing, in the library in jokes and Irene's side tracks under particular duress :).
As far as the characters go, I think Irene was the clearly outstanding one, but that's not really surprising because for the vast majority of the time hers is the perspective you get. I have to say, Cogman's take on dragons was a particularly different one from what I've read in the past, and I did rather enjoy!
Since then I decided to take up the book club book for this month, Killers of the Flower Moon. Another non-fiction offering, this time covering a particularly sordid part of American history involving oil and Osage. Well, we'll see what others have made of it next week when we meet for book club!
So then we come to the point of the year where I'm usually happy to have had the nice summer, even though it's waning. It'll probably be a bit of a shock heading back to Norway after a week here, seeing how the sunlight really starts disappearing fast around this time and a week makes a big difference. But hopefully autumn will be nice, hopefully not too wet at at least somewhat colourful :).
