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 :).