This comes hot on the heels of my notes about what I read at the cottage, so expect some duplication!

FICTION

The Feast, Margaret Kennedy I started listening to a podcast called “Backlisted” and even though I was listening to episodes about books I had already read, somehow NEW books kept sneaking on to my ‘to read’ list. This is one of those and I’m very glad it did. Post-war Britain, sly satire, a collapsing hotel, some unpleasant characters that somehow you end up liking. It was exactly what I didn’t know I needed.

Fellowship Point, Alice Elliott Dark I ended up liking this rather more than I expected. The prose was lovely and the main characters were old ladies, which seems to be right up my alley these days. I even teared up a bit at the end.

When the Whales Leave, Yuri Rythkheu. Another one from “Backlisted”. It’s a short, strange, and beautiful book based on the stories of the indigenous people of the Russian Arctic, but reflecting humanity’s seemingly universal impulse to dominance and destruction.

Where the Axe is Buried, Ray Nayler Futuristic Russia figures in Nayler’s new novel of politics, oppression, and rebellion. It might technically be SF, but the lessons are sadly timely.

Treacle Walker, Alan Garner I had read this one earlier but was inspired by yet another “Backlisted” to listen to it in audio format and I think I got much more from it that way. It was too easy to let my eye slide over the dense and rich language without really appreciating it. I definitely recommend the audio book, which is only a couple of hours long.

NON-FICTION

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, Moudhy Al-Rashid. I heard the author interviewed on the excellent “Tides of History” podcast so had been looking forward to her book. It covered territory I’d read about in some other history books, but provided a rich picture of the people we see in the ancient cuneiform records. I especially appreciated her deeply personal take on how their lives connect to hers.

Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer I listened to this as an audiobook (all 30 hours of it) but it worked quite well that way. It was a fascinating look at how the ‘Renaissance’ was perceived/created/recreated in the period and afterwards, with a focus on Machiavelli and Florence. I especially enjoyed her nicknames for the various popes, including ‘Battle Pope 1’, ‘King Log’, ‘Battle Pope 2’, and ‘Pope No Fun’. I would love to take her class and do the ‘let’s reenact the papal election of 1492’ exercise. Serious scholarship, but accessibly presented.

The Haves and the Have-Yachts, Evan Osnos. My choice for ‘best title of the year’. The essays explore the world of the super-rich and their yachts, New Zealand apocalypse bunkers, and personal concerts.

Managing Expectations, Minnie Driver. You have to love a memoir that starts with the author throwing her school uniform out the window of the car while screaming that she’s being kidnapped. Driver vividly explores some key incidents in her life, from her eccentric childhood through raves in English fields to sneaking back to her burned out Malibu house in defiance of police orders. She’s funny and fearless.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, Will Hermes A detailed exploration of New York’s music scenes in the mid-70s. The city was broke but rent was cheap, so everything was possible and Hermes chronicles the explosion of creativity: punk, salsa, hip hop, experimental jazz, minimalism, and dance. Long and detailed. Be prepared to spend a lot of time adding things to your playlists!

For various reasons, rather less reading got done this year, though much fun was had despite that. I only read/finished/started 9 books. In my defense, several of them were long! Several of my faves below.

Fiction:

Fellowship Point, Alice Elliott Dark. I ended up liking this rather more than I expected. The prose was lovely and the main characters were old ladies, which seems to be right up my alley these days. I even teared up a bit at the end.

Hemlock & Silver, T. Kingfisher. I boomed through this in about two days and thoroughly enjoyed it, as with most Kingfisher books.

Non-Fiction:

Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer. I listened to this as an audiobook (all 30 hours of it) but it worked quite well that way. It was a fascinating look at how the ‘Renaissance’ was perceived/created/recreated in the period and afterwards, with a focus on Machiavelli and Florence. I especially enjoyed her nicknames for the various popes, including ‘Battle Pope 1’, ‘King Log’, ‘Battle Pope 2’, and ‘Pope No Fun’. I would love to take her class and do the ‘let’s reenact the papal election of 1492’ exercise. Serious scholarship, but accessibly presented.

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles, Mike Davis. I found this one via the ‘Historians at the Movies’ podcast and actually had to go to the library (gasp) to get a physical copy. It was published in 1990 and explores competing ideas of Los Angeles and how the various powerful groups exert their influence over the built and social environments.

The Work of Art, Adam Moss. Former New York Magazine editor and aspiring painter Moss interviews a variety of creators (including artists, writers, composers, screenwriters, and even chefs) about their process and the creation of one of their works. As usual, such things are deeply personal and idiosyncratic and did not solve my plotting problems. But I enjoyed it.

And I caught up on British society gossip via a few issues of TATLER. Sadly, far fewer people seem to be naming their children Arabella and Peregrine…

I spent some time digging through old storage boxes in an attempt to find the cache of my old lyrics, written in my teens and early twenties when I wanted to be in a band. My hope was that were would be something decent enough to pass on to my husband to use in one of his dance/techno compositions. (You can check him out on Soundcloud or Youtube.)

Needless to say, all of my compositions were VERY word heavy (being a lyricist and not also a composer will do that to you) but some of them weren’t bad. I could definitely tell when I was in my Elvis Costello or Siouxsie Sioux phase but at least I was clever about it. I have no idea of Richard will use any of them, but I wouldn’t be embarrassed if he did.

I also found the two fantasy novels I wrote in my mid-teens to early twenties, before I switched to horror for a while. My influences were clear (Andre Norton for the older one, perhaps early Patricia McKillip for the second) and my style occasionally mannered (and it sometimes still is) but there was still good stuff there. It was clear that plot has never really been my strong point, I suck at writing swordfights and action scenes, I thought it entirely reasonable for someone to have blue skin and purple hair, and that I could endlessly recycle the names of countries and queens. Still, there were images that I thought worked quite well, dialogue that still made me smile for the right reasons, and some sentences that made me think “damn, that’s actually pretty good.”

So it could have been worse. I’m trying to keep those small pleasures and victories in mind as I go through yet ANOTHER review of the Glass World Thing I keep trying make into a novel. There’s one in there somewhere. Maybe I’ll find it in another 40 years….

And one of my dearest friends. David Keyes is a gifted musician, artist, writer, poet, cocktail concocter, gentleman, scholar, cat lover, and all-round wonderful human.

He created this gorgeous video for one of his wisest poems. I hope you like it.

P.S. You can get his writing and the forgotten classics of magic and mystery he brings back to life at The House of Pomegranates Press.

Status update #1: still no title!

Before we went away to Spain, I sent the latest draft to a freelance editor (a friend of a friend, just starting out) to get some feedback from a fresh pair of eyes with no ties to me. She came back with some very helpful comments and suggestions. In most cases, my immediate reaction was “yep, that’s what it needed” and I was able to fix things right away. In one case, the suggested new chapter was a complete failure. That’s not to say I couldn’t make it work, but clearly it’s not coming easily, so I decided to leave that aside for now and send it on to another friend (and former professional editor) to get the last round of comments.

I suspect that some more revisions will need required – and, of course, lots of housekeeping fixes – but after that, I really hope to be done.

I have no idea what will happen then. I guess I’ll wait and see what I’m prepared to do.

I actually did a fair bit of reading on the trip (or listening, in the case of my major audiobook project). There’s not much else to do on the plane and even I can only look out a train window for so long.

Here’s the best of what I read.

FICTION

MIddlemarch, by George Eliot. This was the aforementioned audiobook, all 31 hours of it. I thought it was time. And I thought the book was excellent – funny, wry, and smart. The narration by Nadia May really helped capture the characters and the emotion of the story. I think if I’d tried to read it (especially on a plane), I’d have missed some of the nuance.

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy. Climate change, a remote island, a mysterious woman, a family with secrets. All this could easily be overplayed and overwrought, but McConaghy makes it (mostly) believable. The intensely evocative descriptions of the remote island near Antarctica and of the wilds of Australia help. I was also quite excited that the backstory of one of the characters bore an interesting resemblance to a memoir I also read during this period.

In Universes, by Emet North. A cut above much ‘alternate universes’ fare, with the focus on the characters and their struggles, in all worlds, to find a fulfilling life. Bonus: alien-possessed bears and weird taxidermy.

The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne. I liked Bryne’s The Girl in the Road from 2014 and finally got around this new one. Spread over three narratives, each 1,000 years apart, the book weaves together the story of twins ascending the throne of an ancient Mayan kingdom, an American woman searching for her heritage in Belize, and a far-future society facing questions about the true nature of their past and the world they’ve built.

NON-FICTION

Wavewalker, by Suzanne Heywood. The aforementioned memoir. Heywood recounts her unconventional and often difficult childhood living her father’s dream of living a life at sea, regardless of the cost to his family.

A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. Because every woman who writes should read this. So I finally did.

I’m the type of person who starts my stories about Barcelona by saying “well, I didn’t get pickpocketed, so that’s good.” I was pickpocketed in the metro in Rome (my own fault) so I spent a fair bit of time researching ways to avoid it. My current travel purse has a wallet chained into it! But I wasn’t, and everything was fine. We took the metro and the bus without incident. In fact, the Barcelona metro is very nice: well-signed, easy to use, and mostly full of people just getting from one place to another. Just like the Toronto Transit Commission, whose trains I rode just about every day of my working life (and still take several times a week without the least worry).

With that out of the way, we enjoyed Barcelona. The Sagrada Familia is batshit and incredibly beautiful. The stained glass! That light! We heaved ourselves up the hills to the Park Guell and then took a taxi home (one of two times we broke down and took a cab – the second time was when we got hopelessly lost trying to navigate our way up to the Montjuic castle).

We took a guided day trip to Girona and the Dali Museum at Figueres. We took in a choral concert and a tour at the very lovely Palau de la Musica Catalana. We found a place to buy local vermouth to take home (this was actually quite hard. You can buy wine etc in the grocery store but if you want something special, it’s a challenge). We went to the beach, because we figured we should. We did not swim.

We ate some of the best meals of the trip here. I can highly recommend Maleducat and La Mundana.

At the Barcelona airport, you have to go through passport control to get to the boarding area. This was no great hardship, as the passport control agents all looked like actors starring in a TV show about Barcelona airport passport control.

Anyway, we had a great trip and would love to go back to see a fraction of the many things we missed.

We took the train from Granada to Sevilla, arriving in the early afternoon with some time for exploring the old city before heading to an excellent dinner at El Disparate (I still dream about that Iberian pork shoulder ….).

On the agenda over the next few days:

• a rooftop tour of the cathedral. A fascinating change from the normal cathedral tour. It also provided a great view of the city.
• A cruise on a small boat (about 10 people) on the canal. It was fun and interesting, though the highlight was probably watching the flotilla of school kids learning to kayak and paddleboard, laughing and shouting throughout.
• Real Alcazar palace and gardens. Again, very grateful the 15th century Spanish decided the Moorish architecture was just too pretty to destroy.
• a flamenco show at Tablao Flamenco Las Setas. Much more theatrical than the caves in Granada but impressive and dramatic just the same
• a good wander around the Plaza de Espana and the Parque de Maria Luisa
• acquisition of flamenco accessories (of course)

And best of all, no hills!

We only had two and a half days in Granada but we tried to make the most of it. On the night of our arrival, a fellow writer and her husband took us to their favourite bars for vermouth, wine, and tapas. This is not something we would ever do alone – we’re much more “go and sit down for dinner” types – and we had a great time.

The next day, we went to the Alhambra. (Which involves climbing a hill. Of course). It’s astonishingly, insanely beautiful. I’m very grateful that Ferdinand and Isabella didn’t decide that being Moorish made it evil and therefore should be destroyed. I like to imagine them looking at it and thinking “well, it was made by those pagans, but it’s just so beautiful — let’s keep it. We can put up a picture of a saint or two. That’ll fix it.” The world would be poorer without it.

And there were cats, one of which let me pet it. So that was good.

More hills, on the other side this time, and up to the Albaicin neighbourhood for some excellent views. That night we went (up the hill again) to a flamenco show in the Sacromonte caves. It was an incredible experience. The venue fits about 35 people, and you could reach out and touch the dancers (ok, don’t do that.) There was a guitarist, a singers, and three dancers, all of whom brought passion and nuance to their performances. If you’re ever in Granada, I can highly recommend Cueva Los Parrones.

The next day, we wandered around the town, checking out the Federico Garcia Lorca park, touring his former home, and then heading over to another park by the canal, where we watched a dog romp in the shallow water and a group practice swing dancing in a gazebo.

I thought “this would be a nice place to live” – and then I remembered that the average temperature in the summer is 35 degrees celsius.

We had a trip planned to Spain for our 30th wedding anniversary. In May 2020. Yeah, that didn’t happen. So this year, we decided to celebrate our 35th there instead. We added a few days to the original plan, added an additional city, and just after my flamenco adventures were wrapped up, off we went. It was a great trip, full of art, food, parks, food, vermut, history, wine, cats, food, incredible architecture, food….

First up, some pictures from Madrid. I quite liked Madrid, even if much of it seems to be uphill (this will be a theme for Spain). We stayed near the Atocha train station and quite near a metro line (like, right over the metro line, which did mean earplugs were required). The neighborhood was funky and relaxed, we discovered two quite lovely restaurants (Juan Raro and La Fisna Wine Bar), and we could walk to all the main places we wanted to go. These included the ‘big three’ museums (Reina Sofia, Prado, and Thyssen-Bornemisza) and Retiro Park. The metro and the local bus system got us out San Lorenzo de El Escorial (the monastery turned royal palace) and provided us a good view of the countryside on the way.

Madrid was particularly rich in interesting signs and graffiti, which always makes me happy. On the last day, we also discovered ‘public cats’, which was to also be a theme of the trip.

(Oh, and most of my books are on sale on Amazon.com US until the end of June. Just in case.)