Luzula

Becoming a Supple Leopard: the ultimate guide to resolving pain, preventing injury and optimizing athletic performance by Kelly Starrett (2015)
This book has changed my life. I know I sound like I'm doing a paid promotion or like someone who's joined some weird cult, and I know the book has kind of a silly title, but it's true. My mind is blown.

The thing is, I've had problems with stiffness and muscle ache for years. I've been trying to deal with it by exercise and stretching, but while exercise is obviously good for a whole host of reasons, it doesn't solve the problem of stiffness/muscle ache. And stretching doesn't do much, either. I've also gone to a massage therapist, which does partly help, but it's temporary and also costs a lot of money. And while the guy is much better in the practical application of massage than others I've gone to, and I like him, still I'm reluctant to keep going to him because he does do some things with a large application of force and I doubt his medical judgment (to say the least). In the last few years he has begun to spout conspiracy theories about vaccines and only drinks warm water because, as a man, he needs the yang energy.

Anyway, I figured the stiffness and muscle ache was just middle age and at bottom I just had to suck it up. Turns out THERE ARE EFFECTIVE TOOLS TO ADDRESS THIS THAT I NEVER KNEW ABOUT! Also they're cheap and I can apply them myself! I honestly feel like someone prone to headaches who has just, at the age of 46, discovered the existence of painkillers. But better, because this isn't a drug.

( Read more... )

I read some fiction! Only novellas though. I nominated them for my turn at book club, and ended up reading both of them.

Clear by Carys Davies (2024)
A poor Presbyterian minister takes a job evicting a tenant from a remote island during the 19th century Scottish Clearances, while his wife stays at home (at least she does at first). He falls and hits his head and the tenant, not knowing what his errand there is, takes care of him. I liked it well enough, but while I am generally a fan of resolving love triangles with poly, I thought the resolution here was much too hasty.

Aerth by Deborah Tomkins (2025)
Meh. It sounded like the kind of ecologically minded SF that I used to read a lot of, but it felt kind of flat to me. It takes guts to reference The Dispossessed so clearly in its plot, and I feel it just did not live up to that. And come on, you can't grow apples in a climate which is so cold that you get regular frosts in June! The flowers would freeze and you'd never get any apples. *grumbles* I did learn something new and exciting from the book, though, which is that runner beans (unlike ordinary beans) are actually perennial! They have tubers which you can dig up, store through the winter, and plant again in the spring (in warmer climates you don't have to dig them up, obviously). I'm totally going to try that with our runner beans, especially as they cross-pollinate and we had two varieties, so I can't trust the seeds to breed true.

Er, sorry to make everything about vegetable gardening.

Am I reading anything? Still very little fiction, due to life circumstances. But I'm not worried--my fiction-reading has previously gone down to almost zero in similar circumstances, and then bounced back later. The books will still be there.

I think one reason I read fiction is to vicariously experience other people's lives and emotions. And when my own life is full of experiences and emotions (especially romantic emotions, but it can be other kinds of intense feeling, too), then that can leave little mental space for reading fiction. What fiction I am reading is (perhaps surprisingly) my own fic, and occasionally other people's fic. I recently reread one of my own longfics, for example. But that's good, it keeps me in fandom.

I am, however, reading some non-fiction. I made it through the pile of magazines that had accumulated; these are mostly biology-related in some way or other (like membership magazines from such things as the Swedish botanical society). During my first illness in January (covid??) I read Sandor Ellix Katz' The Art of Fermentation, which was quite interesting and gave me ideas for further things to try, though there was some repetition from the other book by the same author that I'd already read. Currently I am making my way through On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee, which is brilliant and comprehensive. I am learning so much from it! Highly recommended if you're interested in why cooking works the way it does, and learning more about various ingredients.

I've also dipped into some of housemate's books on market gardening, which (quite understandably) are a bit different from gardening books aimed at home gardeners. A reasonable way of sowing, watering, weeding, harvesting etc for someone who is growing vegetables for the household, can be a time sink for someone who is growing vegetables to make a living, because it doesn't scale up. Thus a focus on efficiency and how one can save time. I am obviously not going to be a market gardener, though housemate is, but it was interesting to read. And perhaps some methods might carry over.

Shuna's Journey by Hayao Miyazaki (1983)
Well, I see why this is not as famous as Nausicaa--it's a much slighter work, and more broad strokes both in the artwork and in the story and worldbuilding. I also didn't feel that the worldbuilding made as much sense as in Nausicaa, though I think it was meant to have a more mythic feel where things don't have to make sense. Apparently I was unable to really enjoy this on its own terms without comparisons...oh well.

You May Well Ask by Naomi Mitchison (1979)
Her autobiography 1920-1940. There are lighter sections, but on the whole it is rather grim because of being bracketed by two world wars! It ends with some ominous diary entries from the beginning of WWII, with the very last sentence But my baby died. Oof. But also it's chock full of notes on everything from her love life, to politics, various of her friends, her writing, etc. I'm sure I missed lots of references, but one I did catch thanks to people in my DW circle who like reading about spies was this: I think it was in Vienna [in 1934] that I had lunch with a nice young Englishman called Philby; no doubt we talked politics. *boggles* Also she met Selma Lagerlöf! I wonder what they talked about. Also you get passages like this: We would go to the local café or Chez Louise, where I occasionally danced with the lesbian professional ladies who came to eat and dance in congenial surroundings before they went to other bars to earn their living. Louise herself was that way, with the barmaid as her wife. I remember once in the late Thirties going there with Margaret Cole; Louise thought I had at last seen the light. Heh. Also, I am not quite sure if "professional ladies" means they were selling sex or perhaps strip-dancing or something, or are they just barmaids?

Lady Eve's Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow (2024)
Read for book club. I LOVED this! : D I bounced off The Iron Children, but this book was entirely different. It's fun and fast-paced and with a grabby narrative voice, and it turns out that f/f with two characters who don't really trust each other (until they finally do) is just what I wanted to read. Sol and Ruthi have so much chemistry together, and I also enjoy all the details of Ruthi's high society con job! It's interesting how we're so deep in the POV of the main character, and it really colors the view of the other characters. I would probably get along well with Esteban, we could talk about soil and I wouldn't mind his social awkwardness! And obviously Jules fell in love with him, so he must have something going for him. But Ruthi really dislikes him, which very much colors what we see of him.

Trädgårdsboken om jord by Håkan Wallander et al (2020)
And...a book about soil! : D As it relates to gardening, that is. We're still working on where to grow our vegetables, and my sister who has expertise in this area was here this weekend. We did some tests that were in this book, and determined that probably we should just do it on what has been the arable land in the past. Like, there's probably a reason that there was a vegetable field there before. It's fairly clayey soil, which my sister thinks is at bottom good, but in the short term it's quite compacted and will need work. We're thinking about starting out with various green manure crops with deep roots that might help us improve it. Though potatoes and some other crops can be grown in hay/compost beds on top of the soil, too. Er, sorry, this was not really a review of the book.

Aaaah. Today I am up early to go to the appointment where the house changes owners, and tomorrow I move. I suppose it's understandable that I didn't sleep well last night, but it's ironic that this happens just when I most need to sleep well.

Babel by R F Kuang (2022, audiobook)
For book club. I thought the central idea of the book (the linguistics magic) was very cool, and found the book page-turney and interesting! Perhaps it's a little on the nose about colonialism being bad, which was reinforced by the footnotes being read by a different person, so before I understood that they were footnotes, I thought it was a little voice coming in to point out all the things that were racist. But hey, colonialism is bad, and it's good to read that perspective along with the regency romances. The other things I want to say are spoilery. ( Read more... )

System Collapse by Martha Wells (2024)
Murderbot! Murderbot is much more stressed out than I am. I don't have anything deep to say about this book, but it's good to read another installment in a series you already know you like. Also, I'm impressed by Well's ability to write action scenes in a way that is 1) easy to understand, and 2) engaging. It's in the character voice, I suppose.

1793 by Niklas Natt och Dag (2017)
Listened to as an audiobook in Swedish; this book is also available translated into English as The Wolf and the Watchman. This is historical fiction set in late 18th century Stockholm, where I enjoyed the writing style, characters, historical setting, and audiobook reader--but unfortunately it is also the sort of murder mystery that has grisly details of horrible crimes, which is not my thing. DNF at 25%. (Yes, the author's last name is actually "Night and Day".)

As for DNF, I also started on Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, but did not get past the first chapter with what really could be labeled as climate horror. I wish I hadn't read that at bedtime.

Herrarna satte oss hit by Elin Anna Labba (2020) [The Lords Put Us Here]
Finally something I wanted to read! It's written by a descendant of one of the Sami families who were deported along with their reindeer in the 1920's, and has stories (lightly fictionalized, but based on interviews) from people who experienced that. When Norway separated from Sweden in the early 20th century, they developed a nationalism where they wanted the Sami to assimilate or just go away, and especially what they hated was the seasonal Sami migration across the border in the north, a form of transhumance where, unusually, the summer grazing was down by the sea and the winter lands were higher up on the Swedish side. The Norwegian state felt the reindeer were grazing lands that "ought" to be developed for agriculture or grazed by cows or sheep. So the border was closed. Sweden undertook to remove those people, who were then deported south, which created problems of its own, because there were other Sami already keeping their reindeer there. Sweden did not necessarily want the Sami to assimilate or go away, but they paternalistically believed that the state knew better how these people should order their lives and keep their reindeer.

Moving the reindeer south was difficult, because they are used to their ordinary migrations and would often escape to the north, trying to get back. It's a moving book with a lot of personal stories of dislocation, and lots of photos. One thing I thought was interesting was that there seems to have been not much conflict at the local level between Sami, Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns, or at least that was not the main problem (the main problem being the states). A Sami family usually had a "host" family among the sedentary people, a relationship which went generations back, with whom they would trade, stay with when they came to market, etc. There's a story of a Sami woman giving birth to twins and knowing she couldn't care for both infants on the move, so she left one of them to be fostered by the host family for a few years and came back for it later.

Konsten att beskära träd och buskar by Eva Robild, Georg Grundsten, and Eva Lie (2021)
This is about how to prune trees and bushes, especially fruit trees. I will take over some already-established fruit trees and hopefully plant more, so this is something I need to learn! Having read it, I still do not feel fully confident in how to do this, but at least I know more. Probably this is the sort of thing where you need practical demonstration.

Commodore Hornblower by C S Forester (1945)
It was fun to see Sweden and Denmark through Age of Sail eyes: where on the coasts would have been dangerous passage points for ships, and the English equivalents of placenames in these "barbarous northern tongues". The Skaw is obviously Skagen (the northernmost tip of Denmark), Cape Kullen is Kullaberg, and (which never fails to amuse me) Elsinore is the much more prosaic Helsingör. This book feels obviously written as a novel and not as a series of short adventures, which I enjoyed. I recognized with glee several very slashy lines about Bush which I have seen around the fandom before, and enjoyed the dynamic between them as they navigate a new chain-of-command situation. But I am baffled by Hornblower randomly sleeping with some Russian countess, which happens without him ever thinking of it in relation to his marriage. I am amused by the insert of Clausewitz as a minor character, and Forester's guts in portraying his own character as smarter than Famous Military Theorist. I haven't actually read Clausewitz, but I thought he was famous for pioneering ideas about morale and the political and psychological aspects of warfare, and here he's portrayed as doctrinaire and not used to thinking outside the box? But perhaps Forester means to imply that Hornblower has Opened His Eyes to such matters? Heh.

Fröodling by Anders Skarlind (2006) [Seed cultivation]
A slim volume about growing and harvesting your own seeds in your kitchen garden, so as not to have to buy seeds every year. This is obviously easier with some vegetables, such as peas, than with biannuals like carrots, where you typically eat the root during the first year, so that's not what I'm going to try first. Obviously vegetable gardening is shaping up to be a new nerdy interest, which plays well with established nerdy interests such as field biology and history. I can grow the kinds of peas people grew in the 18th century! Which were often "grey peas" with violet flowers, instead of the current strains of peas with white flowers which apparently taste milder. The pea soup would actually have been grey in colour!

I also read a chapter of Violet Jacob's The Lairds of Dun (1931), because regshoe tipped me off that she had based two of the characters in Flemington on her own ancestors and what they did during the '45! And yes, this was obvious, though she has really aged down James Erskine who was 75 (James Logie in the book is in his 30's). Also, I do think less of David Erskine (Balnillo in the book) for having Lord Grange, who famously shipped off his wife to languish on a remote island, as a friend.

I have also read 50 pages of Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake and am not sure I'll go on. I've read and enjoyed the previous two in the Gormenghast trilogy, but it was some time ago. I still enjoy the singular writing style, but I feel that the book somehow lost its magic when it left the Gormenghast castle setting. Opinions on this book?

Am on the way back from my forest surveying camp. It was intense, so I'm enjoying the time to myself on the train back.

The Pastor's Fire-side, Vol 4 by Jane Porter (1817)
( The thrilling conclusion! Totally did not expect this plot twist. )

The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones (1981)
It's been a while since I read a new DWJ. I spent a lot of this one being confused, but in retrospect, I think it makes sense? Whoa, those are some dysfunctional parents. Also, I like how just plain weird all the kids are, it makes them such vivid characters, and the four sisters have such complicated relationships. Still, probably not my favorite DWJ.

I am now on the train north, to do a botanical survey and then a forest survey, for two weeks.

The Pastor's Fire-side, Vol. 2 by Jane Porter (1817)
( Click to read further exciting plot developments! )

Sword Dance by A J Demas (2019)
This was delightful! It is an m/m romance set in fake!ancient Greece (or in fact one of the characters is probably non-binary). The prose style is nothing special, but it's warm-hearted and engaging. The plot is similar to K J Charles Think of England: a disabled former soldier comes to a house party, where he falls for a gender-nonconforming spy that he's not sure he can trust, and then they have to work together to defeat the shady dealings going on at the house party. But hey, it's a great plot! Glad to see that this is the first of a trilogy.