Looking outside today, it feels strange to think that less than three weeks ago we were slaloming through soft fresh powder snow! Yes, it was at a ski resort, but barely a couple of hours away, and even around here there was enough snow to happily go cross country skiing. Now, on the other hand, after a week or more of positive temperatures and not a little amount of rain, the world looks rather different...
It's not like all the snow's gone, but there's a lot of bare surfaces around. Definitely no cross country skiing, and we've even escaped the melting and refreezing ice on the footpaths. Which is certainly a positive :). Somehow though, if this was to be it, and we were heading into an early spring, it wouldn't be all bad.
A big part of that is probably the amazing few days at Norefjell! For most of the time it was quite cold, but beautifully sunny! To the extent that while the night time temperatures would drop below -15°C, once the sun had warmed things up by midday, it would climb up nearly to 0°!
The conditions were gorgeous for some relaxed snowboarding. Not least because we seemed to have picked a week when very few other people had decided to visit those particular slopes! With an under two year old in tow who had only very limited prior exposure to skiing, or indeed snow, we mostly took turns heading out to the slopes. But there were definitely fun times had with all of us just sledding down short declines :).
Sadly I ended up ill at the end of the week, so when the gorgeous weather followed us back to Asker, accompanied by the perfect amounts of snow for cross country, I didn't really get to make any use of it :(. At least we'd done some trips earlier, because by the time I felt fine enough to venture out, things had changed. Such is life though.
The other good thing this month has been the reading! Once I'd manage to get through Cod I started with Prince of Fools, the first book of Mark Lawrence's The Red Queen's War trilogy. Pretty quickly I found myself warming to the irreverent, fast talking, swindling, broke prince :).
As it happens in such situations, I proceeded to dive headlong through the whole series! (With a brief diversion into The Future, but we'll come back to that later.) Which I'm not sure was the best thing to have done to be honest :/. (The rapid pace of reading, not the detour.)
The trilogy covers a period of time that is nominally about a year. But because of the nature of the tale and the effect it has on the main protagonist, it may have been better to give it a bit of time. Get used to the changes as they happened. Well, that's all retrospective wisdom. But the end result is that while I really enjoyed the first book a lot, the subsequent two, The Liar's Key and The Wheel of Osheim, never seemed to hit the same heights.
For one thing, the stories are told in varying cadences, there's the baseline of the nominal adventurer on a journey where things happen, then there are flashbacks told by fellow travellers, then there are magic induced dream sequences which may or may not be memories, and finally, the adventurer's own memories resurfacing at unwanted moments possibly as dreams? I wasn't totally certain of that last one. But the general feeling I was left with was a bit stop-start.
The premise itself I found to be really enjoyable, and novel, I must add. Unlike the usual fantasy that seems to generally be set in the past, compared to sci-fi which is generally set in the future, where past and future are obviously relative to the author's time, the world of the broken empire seems to be set squarely in the future, in fact, it's set in a sort of post sci-fi apocalypse future, which makes this almost sci-fi in a fantasy skin? Not that genres matter too much, because in this case the result was excellent :).
I particularly enjoyed the random bits of past surfacing in this future. (Spoiler alert) like the grenade that's the cardinal's holy stone and the defunct smart phone that's his holy tablet, dead relics of a forgotten past. Well, not quite so dead in some cases as it turns out. There's also builder's stone (concrete), builder's suns (fission bombs), plasteek armies (mannequins), silver steel (steel) that never corrodes and so on.
I think I generally enjoyed the stumbling, haphazard run that was the plot. I certainly liked the stretches where Jalan and Snorri were together. On his own, Jalan tended to be a bit too much. In the end I was mostly left with a feeling of having rushed through too much too quickly and finding it hard to digest it all. Would it have been better if I'd read slower? Who knows :).
I do think I'd like to read more from Lawrence. Not sure the next thing is going to be Broken Empire though, given how bloody and dark that one's expected to be. Maybe Book of the Ancestor would be better, we shall see.
Coming back to the other book I read this month, The Future was certainly an interesting experience, and for very different reasons than The Red Queen's War. It's a bit of a weird book in some ways, and I felt the best way to read it was to think of it as a satirist's take on the current state of the world. So, not so much a plot driven or even character driven book, but an idea driven book.
Once (if) one accepts that oversimplification of the techno-commerce empires and their influence on the rest of the world, it's not too hard to follow the lines of thinking being presented. The whole philosophy around the fox and rabbit was a bit overdone, but does raise some interesting questions around the pros and cons of controlling our environment to increasing degrees. The good thing I suppose is that I never felt the author tried to push the fox or the rabbit as the "right" approach.
As with some of these sorts of books though, if the author is not willing to just leave the reader with a lot of unanswered questions to ponder, the endgame gets a bit messy. There were clearly holes in the timeline, some things happened, but then they couldn't have happened. It's that thing of twists in the narrative only working when going forward, if one stops to track back and check if this still fits with everything else we've been told, then things stop making sense.
The weird thing with this book I think is that I definitely remember having an overwhelmingly positive emotional response to it at the point when I'd just finished reading it, late one night, because I was so gripped by the narrative. But the next morning, and each time I've thought about it since, I remember less and less the reasons I liked it and find more things that don't quite add up :|. I guess that maybe says more about me than the book though?
So now I've decided to take a bit of a break from rapid reading and started slowly working my way through a thriller I'd been given some years ago, but never really gotten around to :).
PS. Switching phones seems to have come along in leaps and bounds even compared to four years ago! Especially if one sticks to the same sort of phone. I find myself wondering more about how to make things a bit different rather than having it just how it was! Battery life's a lot better though, unsurprisingly :D.
