The last warmth of summer?

So what's been happening this month? Feels like a lot actually! Some great, some not quite as great.. but I suppose such is life. The end of the Norwegian summer holiday seems to always unleash a great bursting wave of activity and general restlessness that crashes against the peace and calm of the preceding months. Causing chaos. Well, not chaos, but that's what it often feels like to me anyway.

Which is why, I usually take my summer holiday just about when everyone is coming back :). As mentioned earlier, this year we went for another nice long cycling holiday. Along large parts of Peer Gynt vegen this time! The weather, while proving extremely unpredictable, was nonetheless very kind to us! Only actually raining on us a couple of the days and even then not particularly hard :).

Distance-wise this trip was about half what we did last year, but was in no way less spectacular! And each day turned out to be of a somewhat different nature. The first day a lot of time was spent climbing up into the hills as we left the Gudbrandsdal valley behind us, and as such the landscape twisted and turned to reveal new vistas every so often, with farms and lakes sprawling in the sometimes wide, sometimes narrow valleys. A rather long and slow day of cycling, but it got us to the highly recommended Ruten Fjellstue hotel. It turned out, actually, to be the first of a couple of very nice places we stayed at during the trip!

The second day was a story of basically two valleys. Cycling mostly downhill along the first one, enjoying the mesmerising views of Espedalsvatnet at the bottom of it. And then up the next one along more narrow meandering streams that occasionally broadened out into decent sized lakes :). Eventually, we reached Peer Gynt country. So for those not in the know, Peer Gynt is an iconic play by Henrik Ibsen that gets performed every summer by the stunning lake Gålåvatnet, and we were spending the next couple of nights at Gålå overlooking said lake!

Luckily, this was soon after the Peer Gynt festivities, and the place was pretty quiet. We got to enjoy the beautiful views and some walks in the vicinity as we took a break from cycling. But the next day, we were off again, this time cycling one of the more frequented stretches of Peer Gynt vegen through landscape that was more high plateau than valley. The views were correspondingly wider, more open, but no less enchanting :).

It didn't take us too long to make our way down to Skei, even though we tried to take as long as we could, making small detours and stopping often :). Skei is very much the popular-ish skiing town not too far from Oslo and in my opinion this makes it a bit less pretty. Still, we enjoyed our stay as well the best breakfast of the whole trip!

The final day was spent climbing over into the valley next door for the first part, skirting lakes, dodging thunderclouds, enjoying the last of the properly wild views and paths till we finally hit proper tarmac and a reasonably sized river. Which we proceeded to follow all the way to Lillehammer and our train back! Via a very nice dinner at a café in a very pretty park in the middle of town :).

Back home, this time I'd decided to take a few extra days off to not feel like it was straight back to the daily grind after lots of cycling :). So there was enough time for some relaxing and enjoying the fact of being on holiday while more or less everyone else all around was not :D. There was also time for a visit to Oslo for a very enjoyable day consisting of a chamber orchestra concert, a long walk along various waterfronts, watching some exhibition diving off the Oslo Opera House (!!) and a very nice dinner!

Feels a bit crazy that all this was only a few weeks ago as the Covid numbers since then have not been pretty. But then, vaccination numbers here have been correspondingly very good. Which leads me to this weekend. Got my second dose Friday evening, and that was that for the next day or so :|. But having come out of it the other side, things are looking better :). A bit of a waste of absolutely stunning weather during the weekend though :P.

On the books side, I guess rather as expected, I haven't quite been devouring them one after the other as I had been earlier in the summer :). It was quite a fun experience finally reading Three Men in a Boat in it's entirety! I did really enjoy Jerome's way of describing the world around him, especially the historical anecdotes, which take on a more layered meaning read a century and a half later :).

The book club book this time was pretty awesome as well! Ignorant as I am of Eastern European authors in general, I was entirely unaware of Bohumil Hrabal. But reading his I Served the King if England was an absolute treat! I felt like I managed to not rush it, to savour the telling, and yet ended up reading it quite quickly. The layers to the story just kept getting added to as one went along till at the end everything was transformed... rather like the snow covered landscape on the last pages. Definitely looking forward to the discussion :).

After a somewhat wet and extremely blustery few days or weeks, I can't quite remember which, it's been lovely weather these last few days! Sunny, temperature in the twenties. Will this prove to be this summer's last hurrah? Who knows. There is much to hope for in the weeks that come, but will everything we hope for come to pass? Again, who knows :).

Of revisits, rediscovery and finding new in the old

It's been a pretty nice July this year! Mostly dry and warm, except for the last week that is. And seeing how most of Norway (including most of my colleagues) has gone on holiday, things have generally been nice and quiet :).

One of the things we managed to do a fair bit of was go cycling! Mostly revisiting the usual routes, but also on occasion discovering some new ones. We've also booked the cycling holiday for next month, so it was good to build up towards that. Nothing as crazy as last year's week-long trip though :D. Relatively chilled out though the trip is, there is some threat of rain, so here's hoping the weather holds out.

After months and months of not being very social, there have also been a few barbeques, making good use of the nice weather to be able to congregate outdoors. There are all the obvious differences from pre-covid times of course, the general tendency to keep physical distance, making sure the group isn't too large, and also keeping the overall number of people interacted with limited. None of which seems to be too difficult for me...

On the book front, this has been another amazing month!! I realized why my general memory of American Gods is one of dark brooding. Of the three parts (Shadows, My Ainsel and The Moment of the Storm) it is the first that is the most quirky and relatively light hearted. Once Shadow arrives at Lakeside, things start getting altogether more serious and by the time he leaves, things are really coming to a head. So it's no wonder really that the quirky funny bits are something of a distant memory by the time on washes up on the shores at the end :). What an amazing read though! And as I find usual with Gaiman, many things appear in a new and different light with each re-read.

Stardust was just as entertaining as I'd remembered, even if many of the plot twists I discovered anew :). Comparing the book with the film, I always find the ending so much more satisfying in the book. To be honest, with most (if not all) of the differences between the book and the film, I favour how the book goes. There is much more of a sense of depth to the book and a feeling that they tried to turn the film into some sort of children's affair, oversimplifying some bits and adding unnecessary drama in others.

Having thus far re-read Gaiman novels I had previously read multiple times, I came across my copy of Anansi Boys and realized I'd only ever ready it once, almost nine years ago. I couldn't quite figure out why I'd given it a miss during my '15-'16 Gaiman re-reads, so thought I'd go with that next. If anything, I remembered even less of the story than in the other books. The experience was highly entertaining! It felt quite different from either American Gods or Neverwhere, which were the stories it felt closest to in some ways.

Having read practically all the other Gaiman novels in one go, it felt bad not to finish it with The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Somehow I feel a little apprehensive of this book. Maybe that's still the after effects of my first read. There was however, a greater level of equanimity with which I finished this latest re-read. There were fewer nightmares. And an entire section of storyline that apparently I'd imagined into the book, or transposed over from something else I'd read, that never actually happens! Overall, I feel I've come to terms with the shape of this story more that I had before... whatever that might mean :).

So finally, just to end on a proper high, I decided to re-read The Graveyard Book. And I loved it :). It's just so beautifully crafted! Every character, the coincidences that aren't, meetings and partings... It left me feeling light and hopeful :). A casual reader might take this to mean that the book is some sort of happy light pop-fantasy, and I would remind them, this is Gaiman we are speaking of :).

Then, after seven books and two and half thousand odd pages, I figured this was enough of a rush of Gaiman to my head. For now :).

As I may have mentioned, it's been raining. A lot. And I think somehow my headlong plunge into books is coming to an end for now. (The two may or may not be related. Probably not.) It's not like I'm going to stop reading or anything, but I guess that feeling of spending every possible moment buried in books has abated somewhat :). It's been fun though, while it's lasted!

PS: Highfire ended up being quite the hit at the book club this month :).

From Shadowthrone to Shadow Moon via kitchens and Door

It feels like June has kinda passed me by somewhat. I couldn't really tell you if more of it has been sunny than not. I couldn't tell you what sense I have of what's been happening in the world. Work has been busy. And when I've had some space, I've been buried in books. One after another.

So, not a bad month then, really :). To be fair, there's also been other stuff, like a trip to Håøya, the biggest island in the Oslofjord. With some friends! That was a first in over a year, practically. And we've been walking around the neighbourhood every now and then, especially when the sun's been out :). Ooh! And how could one forget the awesome milkshakes!!

But in my head, it feels like it's all been about the books :D. So, The Path to Ascendancy first I suppose. By the end of Deadhouse Landing I was beginning to miss the light-heartedness of Dancer's Lament a bit, ironic maybe, given the respective names. By the end of Kellanved's Reach I felt the tone had morphed ever so gradually into more of the timbre of the other Malazan series. 

Which is not a bad thing. I still enjoyed reading both books immensely! Discovering once again how some truths can bend depending on the point of view, and things are never quite what they seem :). I definitely respect not tying up all the loose ends a lot more nowadays...

Having finished with that series, I then figured it was best to get going with the book club book of the month, Kitchen Confidential. I'm not really sure what I was expecting. I'd voted for it as the one I didn't mind the least, which isn't the case every time, but feels like is an occurrence more often than not lately. (Not always to a bad end, of course. Not judging a book by its cover and all that.) I'd definitely heard of Anthony Bourdain, but unlike Paul Hollywood, Gordon Ramsey or Jamie Oliver, I don't think I've ever seen anything with Bourdain in it.

Feels like I've missed out in a way :). And in other ways I'm left feeling very relieved. It's that sort of a book. He definitely was a real character, and it totally comes through in the pages. It's a narrative style I found rather enjoyable for the most part. I suppose yes, the underbelly of restauranting is less pristine that one might like, but that's not that much of a surprise really, is it? Did remind me a little of working on ships... the shared lingo, the hyper macho behaviour (although I feel that dwindled a bit over the decade I worked in seismic), the apart from the world (aka weird) way of life in general that makes it hard to settle into the "normal".

Reading up on his life (and death) in the more than two decades since the book came out though, I felt a lot of the optimism drain out from the reading experience. Because at the end of the book, he'd made it! He'd gone through hell and come out the other end, more or less in one piece. But I guess that's the thing with real life. The story isn't really over till it's over. So yeah, interesting book, especially when read in the context of his life after.

Then I thought, well, I've got time, I've managed to get the club to accept Highfire for next month (it was my turn) which I've read more or less recently, so I can run wild some more, so to speak :D. And guess what I hadn't read in a while? A proper Gaiman novel. So I started with Neverwhere (well, I actually read How the Marquis Got His Coat Back first).

What an awesome, awesome story! It had been five years or so since my last read, so I'd conveniently forgotten a lot of the details but remembered the broad arcs and it was soooo much fun re-discovering the nuances of the world of London Below! I think I read Gaiman with a bit more awareness of the author's voice now. 

Hmm. That was vague. Not actually sure if trying to explain what I mean will make things any better, but why not :). So, I feel like there have been times where I've read Gaiman, especially in the longer form, and been so completely and utterly immersed in the story and the world that I wasn't paying any attention to the author behind it all. But this time around, either because I'm more familiar with the stories, or because I've read more of his non-fiction (I feel like I'm repeating myself here, from some older blogpost), I had enough headspace to think, this guy wrote this. Some part of me wondering what he was thinking, feeling, seeing...

Anyhow, reading Neverwhere was just as awesome an experience as I ever remember it being in the past :). And for once at the end I wasn't left going, "Was that it?!" :)

PS. I keep forgetting that How the Marquis Got His Coat Back happens after most of Neverwhere, and so should be read after, not before. *sigh* Maybe I'll remember next time.

So what does one follow that up with then? But of course, American Gods! What else?! :D.

I'm probably about a third of the way through at this point, and the storm is definitely gathering some momentum. Having read the book twice in quick succession in 2012, this is actually the first time since! (In fact, I've had a paperback for the last three or four years I think, but hadn't picked it up.) I had definitely forgotten that this was a signed copy (!!!!!) so that was a great start! Since then, I've really been enjoying how much fun and quirky stuff there is hidden in between all the iron grey storm clouds and what not :).

I think I have, over the years, mainly remembered the more sombre and gut/heart-wrenching aspects of this story. But there is definitely so much more to it! Or maybe the level of serious stuff encountered through my Book of the Fallen journey means a lot of other stuff feels lighter in comparison? Who knows. 

(As an aside though, I cannot help feeling as though my year reading Steven Erikson on trains to and from work was something of a watershed in my reading life. There seems to be a clear before and after. A bit like when I first read Gaiman, by which I mean stuff like Neverwhere and American Gods, and again when I read Sandman for the first time. And longer ago, Tolkien and Asimov. The world of words parts, to reveal something more, something altogether transcendent...)

I'm definitely looking forward to the rest, becoming reacquainted with the contours of this extraordinary tale. And then who knows, maybe read Stardust again. Or maybe something altogether different :).

(Another aside, reading Gaiman alone in long form is definitely different from reading Gaiman with Pratchett :). Very much so.)

So there we have it, the weeks have been passing. A steady progression of different plants flowering in turn, filling the world in a succession of different colours. And through it all I've been enjoying exploring other worlds. Maybe it'll be time soon to do some more physical exploring.