It's such a hopeful time in Norway, April :). At least meteorologically speaking. The days are already really long, still light past nine in the evening, but still getting longer. It's starting to get warmer but still with a definite chill in the air. Actually, this is what May usually feels like, but you know, who's keeping track anyway?
And it's still not green and lush here at the end of the month in the way England was at the beginning :). But hey, geography. Anyhow, it's most definitely spring, and summer is just around the corner. Garden prepping and sorting has begun. You can already see people spending more time on their balconies and terraces than the weather strictly warrants, but there's that hopefulness.
So the England trip was really fun! Seeing family, hunting for Easter eggs, drama-free travel, what's not to like :). And since then it's mostly been weeks passing happily, if somewhat unremarkably on the whole. Except for the hail, of course! And the small matter of Artemis.
The running's is still happening, which is good, because Holmenkollstafetten is just around the corner, and for the first time in three years, we have a full team!! I mean, there's still a week to go, so fingers crossed, but I'm sticking with that hopeful theme :).
Been reading a fair bit too! Witch King didn't really throw any curveballs to speak of. Would I read the next instalment? Maybe? But given that it's not available in the local library, probably not any time soon.
Then it was back to Asimov. Prelude to Foundation, followed swiftly by Forward the Foundation. Even after a gap of sixteen years, I did remember the big reveal towards the end of Prelude :). But that didn't make it any less enjoyable. And Forward I think has always been my favourite of the whole series.
It's easy to read so much in retrospect isn't it? But it was his last Foundation book, and it's almost impossible for me to not think of Asimov looking back on nearly half a century of his work. The Hari Seldon who comes across as so distant, so all knowing, all powerful in the original Foundation stories, is just so different in the prequels.
Every single time I find myself moved to tears at the end of Forward the Foundation. And no matter what else people say about the quality of Asimov's writing, that always counts for a lot in my book. I did rather enjoy reading Foundation immediately after! As I have done in the past :). I suppose one could say that highlights various discrepancies here and there, but they always feel minor to me, in the grand sweep of history.
One thing I do have to say, I'd thought the beginning of Foundation was significantly more distant to the end of Forward than it actually is! Which makes sense I suppose. And then I started Foundation and Empire and hit a few roadblocks.
Firstly in the form of the arrival of this month's book club book, A Spy Among Friends. It's my second Ben Macintyre spy non-fic. And like the first, I did rather enjoy the book. I particularly like how the author weaves a coherent narrative through what could otherwise be a rather convoluted landscape. Naturally, liberties may be taken with the facts, but more often than not the reader is given enough room to reflect on what might actually have happened in a given situation.
The story overall seemed more about Nick Elliott than Kim Philby. The latter is of course the inescapable centre of the book, yet, Elliott seemed to me to be more the one the author wanted to explore. This may have been a matter of practicality, seeing how Philby spend the latter part of his life in Moscow, while Elliott remained in the corridors of MI6, and thus more accessible.
This feeling may well have been reinforced by the afterword by John le Carre in the copy I had. Fascinating, that - including as it did direct notes from conversations with Elliott mixed in with le Carre's observations. Overall though, the inescapable feeling I was left with was how inept capable human beings can become when blinded by their preconceptions and biases. The history of humanity in a nutshell in some ways. :/
Anyway, when I got back to Asimov, I seemed unable to get very far along. Having said that though, the original trilogy almost seems ideally read with random gaps. Maybe I'm only thinking that because I know that the book was put together after the fact, having originally been written as a series of short stories.
