Rambling Down the Boulevard,

As I've mentioned in previous posts, this summer left me completely physically and mentally exhausted, and regularly posting to Dreamwidth has been one of the things that suffered. This exhaustion is mostly due to good things (my sister and mum visiting, lots of fun travel) or things that are a temporarily unpleasant symptom of otherwise good things (needing to work in the office full time while new colleagues hired in the wake of my promotion are trained up, after which point I'll go back to working two days from home), so it's a good problem to have had, but still left me very tired for weeks on end. As you can presumably tell, my mum — the last of the family visitors — went home to Australia earlier this week, and (after I spent two days home sick recovering from illness) things have restored their previous quotidian equilibrium.

This weekend I elected to skip any lap swimming or classes at the gym to ensure I was fully recovered, and took the time to fully reset the house. So far, I have:

-Dusted all hard surfaces
-Cleaned both bathrooms
-Vacuumed all carpeted floors
-Wet dusted all hard surfaces in the kitchen
-Swept and mopped all hard floors
-Done two loads of laundry
-Swept the front patio and the back deck
-Swept the area around the vegetable beds and restored all the mulch (which resident blackbirds hurl all over the ground when digging for insects and worms) to the garden
-Watered all the houseplants by sticking them in a bathtub of water overnight

I've also done all the grocery shopping, cooked a bunch of stuff, picked loads of tomatoes from the garden, and started making apple cider vinegar from some of the windfall apples. We've eaten extremely well this weekend, and tonight's dinner — which is marinating in a mixture of garlic, shallots, lemongrass and fish sauce in the fridge — should be equally delicious. The house is clean and airy, and I feel relaxed in a way that I haven't done so for weeks — I need my surroundings to be like this, and a sense of enough hours in the day to get all this done, or I just feel grindingly stressed.

Last night Matthias and I resumed our Saturday film nights with the Antony Mackie Captain America film, which was about the level of cinema that our brains could cope with. We have a Disney+ subscription and I've reached the point that I'm not prepared to pay to see any Marvel films at the cinema again (and I've hit my limit completely with the TV series), and I have to say that this latest offering practically confirmed the validity of my choices. It's been a long time since I've been excited about any Marvel offering, and my response is just complete exhaustion; this film felt plodding, cynical and tired — almost like a roll call in which every actor sauntered in in order to get their name ticked off another contractually obliged appearance. There was never any sense of risk or danger — since we know most characters are due to appear in a plethora of sequels — and no one seemed particularly pleased to be there. There were a few emotionally affecting moments around the storyline relating to Isaiah Bradley, but beyond that, the cash cow was milked, and more pieces were moved into place for the next film or TV show in the production line.

As for reading, it's been a lot better. On the basis of a not exactly recommendation (but rather a description that made it clear the book would be extremely Relevant To My Interests) from dhampyresa, I picked up Cruel Is the Light (Sophie Clark). Indeed, it was everything I'd hoped: tropey enemies-to-lovers in an alternative version of the Vatican in which exorcists are at perpetual war with demons, ostensibly adult characters behaving in a very YA-ish way, and Surprising Plot Twists unlikely to surprise anyone. In other words, I can't really recommend it either, unless you like the specific things I like and have a high tolerance threshold for this sort of thing. It's frothy nonsense, but it's my kind of nonsense.

I've also just finished reading The Bewitching (Silvia Moreno Garcia), a gothic fantasy novel with three intertwined timeframes and perspectives: a Mexican postgraduate student at a liberal arts college in 1998 writing her thesis on the horror short stories of a female American author, the student's grandmother on a Mexican farm in 1908, and the horror author's time at the same liberal arts college in 1938. The book draws both on Mexican folklore and the broad corpus of New England gothic literature, and each strand focuses on its respective young woman character experiencing the slow, creeping horror of a targeted, supernatural campaign of haunting, their defenses slowly being eroded and the psychological torment ratcheting up the closer each woman gets to uncovering the identity of their tormentor(s) and finding the means to overcome them. The book is adeptly written, with lots of affection for the tropes of the genre, all of which were fairly recognisable to me by osmosis, despite the fact that the only author in this canon that I've read is Edgar Allan Poe. I imagine if you've also read Jackson, King, and cosmic horror like Lovecraft, even more would be familiar. Moreno Garcia is hit and miss for me, but this latest book definitely worked well for me.

It's now mid-afternoon, and I've finally felt that I've caught up with everything I wanted to get done this weekend (including the four Dreamwidth posts I wanted to make), so I will finish things up here. I'll leave you with a link (via vriddy to a post by sunsalute on fanworks exchanges — all the logistics and unspoken rules and potential for friction participants might not understand, but be too afraid to ask about. I know most people reading this are fairly old exchange (and Dreamwidth) hands, but it's the sort of thing that could be useful to point the perplexed towards, and I'm glad someone made the effort to write all this up. For something that's meant to be a fun hobby, exchanges can definitely cause their share of drama!

I've been terrible about logging my reading (and to be honest, comparatively slow in terms of the number of books actually read), so this is a mega round up representing the past couple of months. Most of these books were read on trains (to holidays, or on my commute to work), on ferries, or on planes — in other words, as I was getting from A to B. Opportunities to just sit down and read in an uninterrupted manner have been rare (until this weekend, but more on that in a later post).

( Eleven books behind the cut, mainly fantasy literature )