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 :).