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Chivalry - Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran: a lovely graphic novel version of Gaiman's short story about an elderly widow who buys the Holy Grail in her local Oxfam shop.

Legendborn - Tracy Deonn: I read this because Deonn was shortlisted for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Legendborn is a YA take on King Arthur where the reincarnations of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have migrated to the USA and become a campus secret society in Carolina. I thought it was entertaining enough, with some interesting commentary on race and privilege, but it was very, very YA and I didn't find it entirely convincing.

What Souls Are Made Of - Tasha Suri: postcolonial reworking of Wuthering Heights, exploring how Cathy and Heathcliff's story might have been changed through the acknowledgement of a racialised context. Aimed at the YA market, and occasionally a bit kids' adventure story, but I liked it much more than I ever managed to like the original.

A Prayer For the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers: the sequel to A Psalm For the Wild-Built is even more delightful; a gentle and charming exploration of a gently utopian world where people are still people, and still have problems, and learn to resolve them by connecting with each other. I really hope that Chambers is going to write more Monk and Robot books.

Heartstopper vol 3 - Alice Oseman: just as lovely as the first two, as Nick and Charlie and their friends go on a school trip to Paris.

Take a Hint, Dani Brown - Talia Hibbert: the second in Hibbert's series of romance novels featuring the three Brown sisters. Dani Brown is a junior academic who is looking for no-strings sex and definitely doesn't want commitment; Zaf is a former professional rugby player and incurable romantic who works as a campus security guard. Fun, fluffy fake dating romance.

Lands of Lost Borders - Kate Harris: I really enjoyed this account of the author's cycling trip along the Silk Road, from Istanbul to northern India via China and Tibet; Harris managed to capture the mixture of gruelling slog and utter joy of undertaking a long journey entirely under one's own steam perfectly, alongside describing the varied landscapes she and her friend travel through and their encounters with locals along the way. (There's also a Facebook gallery of photos which I enjoyed working through after I'd finished reading the book, because it turns out that I can't actually imagine how high the Himalayas are.)

How to be Brave - Daisy May Johnson: a modern take on the classic school story, featuring rare ducks, nuns with helicopters and lots of biscuits. Great fun, and I think I need to buy a copy for my nieces.

A Pig of Cold Poison - Pat McIntosh: the seventh of McIntosh's Gil Cunningham mysteries set in medieval Glasgow. Enjoyable whodunnit though, as often with this series, a basic familiarity with the murder mystery genre makes it much easier for the reader to tell whodunnit than poor Gil, hampered by lack of genre savvy and modern scientific understanding.

Penric and the Shaman - Lois McMaster Bujold: the second of the novellas about Penric and Desdemona sees Penric on the track of a missing shaman who is implicated in a murder. Bujold's world of the Five Gods is a fascinating setting, and this was another nice gentle story (and also features a Very Good Doggo, which is always a bonus).

Husband Material - Alexis Hall: the sequel to Boyfriend Material (why yes, I do seem to be reading a lot of books in series at the moment, it's almost as if the world is terrible and I want the comfort of known quantities) picks Luc and Oliver up two years into their relationship, when suddenly everyone around them seems to be getting married. This is just as hilarious and delightful as the first book; the structure is, basically, Four Weddings And A Funeral, just much less heteronormative, and it is an utter joy.

The Green Man's Foe - Juliet E. McKenna: yes, another sequel, this time to The Green Man's Heir. This one takes Daniel Mackmain to the Cotswolds, where he is employed to project manage the conversion of a stately home into a luxury hotel, while also trying to get to the bottom of the unsettling secrets of the woodland on the estate. I'm still enjoying this series a lot.

Having come to the conclusion that I've probably read everything I was going to read, I thought I should probably submit my first ever Hugo ballot.

( Details behind cut )

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within - Becky Chambers: the last in the Wayfarers series is a gentle novel about a group of sentient beings of different species who find themselves stuck at an interstellar service station when a communications failure stops travel for a few days, and how they get to know each other better, despite their many differences. A lovely relaxing read.

Bitch Planet (vols 1 and 2) - Kelly Sue Deconnick and Valentine De Landro: a graphic series set in a dystopian future where women who don't comply with patriarchal expectations are sent to an offworld prison. Not entirely cheerful but plenty of feminist black humour, and I rather enjoyed it.

A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine: the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, wonderfully thoughtful and chewy space opera, asking questions about language, identity, colonialism and who gets to count as civilised, while also featuring a charming queer romance and a host of wonderfully likeable and engaging characters. I was delighted to be able to immerse myself in the universe Martine has created again and quite sorry to leave it.

Something Fabulous - Alexis Hall: an entirely ridiculous and incredibly fun queer Regency romp.

The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson: set in a world where travel between parallel universes is possible, but only when the traveller doesn't have a living counterpart in the destination world, this is a fantastic novel which has a lot to say about capitalism, privilege, race and class, as well as life on a post-environmental-collapse Earth. It's not always easy reading, but it's really, really good, and not as downbeat overall as I feared it might be.

Thirsty Mermaids - Kat Leyh: graphic novel about three mermaids who magic themselves human to go to a bar, and then find themselves stuck on land in a world they don't understand. Fun and very queer, although the kindle edition is not fantastically formatted and I'd advise anyone who's interested to get the print copy instead. (The pages are formatted as a double-page spread, and won't rotate to landscape, so it's only really readable in frame-by-frame mode which I'm not a fan of.)

Record of a Spaceborn Few - Becky Chambers: I wasn't terribly keen on the first two books in Chambers' Wayfarers series, but I rather enjoyed this; it's a gentle read, following the day-to-day lives of a handful of members of the Exodus Fleet, a group of generation ships which carried the last human refugees from a dying Earth into the galaxy, where they travelled for centuries before settling in orbit in a star system given to them by a galactic civilisation which views humanity much as contemporary Western societies view refugees from the global South.

I do wish Chambers didn't keep referring to "veggies", though, but I realise that's an entirely irrational linguistic prejudice of mine.

The Past is Red - Catherynne M Valente: I read this because it's nominated for the Best Novella Hugo. It had a nagging sense of familiarity which was explained when I got to the end and saw that the first part was published as a standalone short story some years ago, as I'd obviously read that. It's a darkly comic post-apocalyptic story set among the inhabitants of a giant floating city made of garbage on a flooded earth. I found the contrast between the comic tone and the grim subject-matter pretty jarring, and am not sure that expanding it from a short story to a novella really added much.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 3 - Ryan North: This was a relaunch of the series, with a slightly different style for the character which I found incredibly jarring, though other than that it was a fun time-travel romp.

Radical Sewing - Kate Weiss: less about the radical possibilities of making your own clothes and more about how to do it, which I mostly knew.

A Master of Djinn - P. Djèli Clark: steampunk fantasy detective novel, with a fabulous heroine who walks around in Western-style three-piece suits and bowler hats and a sidekick who is equally kickass despite wearing hijab. Slightly clunky in places, but terrific fun.

Across the Green Grass Fields - Seanan McGuire: the sixth of the Wayward Children series tells the story of horse-mad Regan, who has spent her life trying desperately to fit in, until she walks through a door into a world populated by hoofed animals - centaurs, unicorns, kelpies and many more. Rather charming, though also quite slight.

Welcome to St Hell - Lewis Hancox: fantastic graphic novel memoir about a trans boy growing up in north-west England.

A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik: I loved this novel, the first of a trilogy set in a magical high school where there are no teachers and the students are under constant attack from magical monsters which mean that normally only one in four actually survive to graduation. It's kind of the anti-Harry Potter (though it also reminded me quite a lot of Buffy's "high school is hell"). The narrator is a cynical outcast in school society, which imbues her narrative with a lot of dark humour; there's also a strong through-line interrogating privilege and class as well as a compelling plot.

Elder Race - Adrian Tchaikovsky: this novella alternates the points of view of two characters, one of whom is experiencing the story as an epic fantasy and the other who knows they are actually in a lost colony SF story. I found it rather reminiscent of some of Ursula Le Guin's early Hainish novels.

Iron Widow - Xiran Jay Zhao: a futuristic mecha SF novel based on Chinese history, this was everything I'd hoped that She Who Became the Sun would be and wasn't. Its heroine powers her way from peasant girl to empress fuelled entirely by a towering rage, initially at the man who killed her sister and then at the whole system which allowed this to happen; it's not necessarily a particularly subtle or nuanced story, but I thought it was terrific fun, and there is also a lovely OT3 (and I am an absolute sucker for an OT3).

I seem to have got completely out of the habit of book reviews recently. (I have got out of the habit of a lot of things I quite enjoyed, actually.) Anyway, in the hope that I might restart at some point, a quick roundup of the last couple of months.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers: I really liked this novella about a tea monk whose desire to step off the beaten tracks leads to the first meeting between a human and a robot in centuries. It's sweet and hopeful and dedicated "To everyone who could use a break", and as someone who could definitely use a break, I loved it.

Rivers of London: Monday, Monday - Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel: the most recent of the Rivers of London graphic novels, good fun as always.

The Feast - Margaret Kennedy: recently republished, this delightful1950 novel is set in a Cornish seaside hotel populated by a disparate cast of beautifully-drawn characters, and I really enjoyed it.

Heartstopper vol 1 - Alice Oseman: the first volume of the original graphic novel series the recent Netflix series is based on, a lovely romance between two teenage boys.

Are You My Mother? - Alison Bechdel: graphic novel memoir, a bit too much psychoanalysis for me.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 - P. Djèli Clark: steampunky mystery set in an alternate Cairo, great fun.

Amongst Our Weapons - Ben Aaronovitch: the new Rivers of London novel. I enjoyed it but several weeks later find myself struggling to remember exactly what happened in it.

May Day - Josie Jaffrey: urban fantasy murder mystery set in Oxford, which begins on May Morning and which I started to read because I was at a loose end on the first of May. Plotty and rather enjoyable.

She Who Became the Sun - Shelley Parker-Chan: Chinese historical fantasy, though quite light on the fantasy. I know lots of people who loved this but I wasn't keen, or at least, I loved the first section (where the heroine escapes poverty by adopting her dead brother's identity and joining a monastery) and then lost interest when the rest of it was pretty much all military campaigns, including some pretty gruesome violence, with a lot of time dedicated to the point of view of a second character who I wasn't terribly keen on.

Spellcracker's Honeymoon - Tansy Rayner Roberts: frothy fantasy romance, just what I needed after the rather gloomy slog of She Who Became the Sun.

Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities - Nick Walker: an interesting collection of essays looking at neurodiversity as an identity and a rejection of normative ideas.

Swordheart - T Kingfisher: a hugely enjoyable fantasy adventure-romance.

Digger - Ursula Vernon: a webcomic about a wombat who finds herself a long way from home, and her adventures while trying to find a way back. Features vampire pumpkins and is generally delightful.

Heartstopper vol 2 - Alice Oseman

Gifts - Ursula K Le Guin: the first in the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, a coming of age story set in a bleak and inhospitable land. Thoughtful and interesting.

Chaos on CatNet - Naomi Kritzer: YA technothriller featuring a benevolent AI with a penchant for cat pictures and a bunch of determined queer kids with parental issues.

Sandman: The Kindly Ones - Neil Gaiman

Sandman: The Wake - Neil Gaiman

Fireheart Tiger - Aliette de Bodard: sapphic fantasy novella with a background of diplomatic negotiations and colonial politics.

This is how today went:

8:05 arrive at office. Unpack bag, switch on computer, make tea.
8:20 sit at desk with tea. Read emails.
8:45 decide I should probably stop ignoring the emails telling me my password is about to expire. Spend ten minutes trying to think of a new password that conforms to the rules but that I can also (a) remember and (b) type.
9:00 multiple apps pop up notifications saying I need to log in again. Try new password. New password refuses to work. Give up and go to buy coffee.
9:15 get back with coffee. Drink coffee. Log in to multiple apps with new password which now works.
9:30 ring someone for brief chat about potential temp.
9:45 go to say hello to team. Spend 15 minutes talking to new office manager about various things.
10:10 stop on the way back from saying hello to team to ask most vulnerable colleague if she wants people to wear masks in in-person meeting. Spend 15 minutes catching up about various things.
10:30 regular senior staff meeting.
11:30 go and make more tea
11:40 sit down and start working through email. Remember I need to read papers for meeting at 2. Skim-read papers while also keeping an eye on inbox.
12:45 go and have lunch. Manage brief walk in parks.
1:45 get back from lunch. Answer teams message.
2:00 committee meeting.
3:15 committee meeting ends, teams call with another person who was in the meeting because we had arranged to talk afterwards.
3:30 look at email.
3:45 realise I need a wee. Decide to make tea while I'm up.
4:00 get back to desk with tea, contemplate actual work that needs to be done. Also contemplate state of utter exhaustion which I have already reached.
4:10 person turns up wanting a quick word about something. By the time they go, tea is cold.
4:30 drink cold tea. Have several parallel teams message conversations about various things while trying to write an email.
4:45 send email. Start reviewing documents which have to be submitted by tomorrow.
5:15 submit documents. Write and send another email. Start reading papers for meeting tomorrow morning.
5:30 person sticks head round door to say goodbye and catch up quickly on stuff that's happened today.
5:35 go back to meeting papers.
6:10 finish skim reading 153 pages of meeting papers for 10am tomorrow. Realise I'm not going to catch 6:20 bus. Spend 20 minutes on email.
6:30 stagger out of door and in direction of bus stop.

And this is not actually an atypical day...

Lois McMaster Bujold - A Civil Campaign and Winterfair Gifts. AKA The One Where Miles Vorkosigan Goes A-Courting. Delightful comedy of manners, featuring what may be the most cringeworthy dinner party scene in the whole of literature. Winterfair Gifts is a follow-up novella which shows Miles and Ekaterin's wedding from the point of view of one of Miles's Armsmen; it felt disconcertingly like fanfic for actual canon, but was very charming.

Marie Brennan - The Tropic of Serpents. The second in the Lady Trent series about a Victorianesque Lady Explorer with bonus dragons. I remember being a bit underwhelmed by the first one and didn't find this one really managed to hold my attention. I probably won't bother with any others in the series.

Charles Stross - The Bloodline Feud. I've always felt vaguely bad about not having read much of Stross, but found the Laundry Files just not really my kind of thing (too much horror). On the other hand, this (a compilation of the first and second books in the Merchant Princes series) really is my kind of thing; portal fantasy for grown-ups, with business shenanigans, complicated family politics, and a level-headed heroine who ends up teaming up with pretty much every other woman she meets. I enjoyed it a lot.

Kay O'Neill - Princess Princess Ever After. A short and sweet middle-grade graphic novel romance between two princesses. Fluffy and fun, even if the femme princess having the same name as me was a bit disconcerting.

I took Friday off so we could drive to Norfolk, where we were looking after my dad while my mother went to my uncle's funeral. This was slightly nerve-wracking but actually went fine; food and cups of tea were produced at appropriate intervals, we managed to find the cheeseboard for the second lunch and coped without it for the first, and my dad makes enough noise negotiating the stairs that I woke up when he got up and was able to leap out of bed, relieve him of the cup he was trying to carry (he is using two sticks now, rather than one, so carrying things doesn't really work) and make him a cup of tea before he started trying to do it. It was really nice to spend the time with him, actually, and we probably talked more than we have done in years.

My mother got back yesterday afternoon, and shortly afterwards heard from one of her brothers that his pre-flight covid test had come back positive, so we just have to hope that they weren't in contact enough for her to have picked it up. (One of my cousins whose dad's funeral it was is also just getting over covid, but my mother gave her a wide berth.)

And then today we drove back, and by the time we got home it was mid-afternoon on Sunday and I didn't feel like I'd had a weekend at all. I did manage to spend an hour piecing together fabric for the jacket I'm making out of two pairs of old trousers and a top that didn't really work out, and then went for a swim, which has helped a bit. And at least next week is a short week (I'm probably taking Thursday off, and definitely taking Friday.)

Juliet E. McKenna - The Green Man's Heir. Basically, urban fantasy in a rural setting. The novel started off looking like it was going to be a supernatural police procedural, with the hero (the son of a dryad and a human man, and therefore possessed of some supernatural abilities and able to see and speak to fey creatures) stumbling into a crime scene and trying to bring the killer to justice while avoiding the police's suspicions, but wrapped that storyline up about halfway through; it felt a bit like two linked novellas rather than one novel. I definitely enjoyed it, though, and will read the rest of the series.

Liz Williams - Comet Weather. I absolutely loved this fantasy novel about four sisters who grew up in a house full of ghosts and star spirits coming back together to search for their missing mother. It felt like a grown-up version of the children's fantasy novels I grew up with - The Children of Green Knowe, Narnia, and others, as well as a generous helping of Pratchett's Lords and Ladies - with its own engaging characters and wonderful sense of place.

Victoria Whitworth - Swimming with Seals. A lovely book, structured around a sea-swim off the coast of Orkney and punctuated by Facebook updates describing other swims, part memoir, part history, part nature writing, part meditation on life and faith. Less swimming than I had expected but I enjoyed it very much nevertheless.

Alan Garner - Treacle Walker. It's hard to find the words to describe Garner's latest novel. Treacle Walker is poetic, absorbing, profound in places and extremely funny in others. On the surface it seems slight - the story of an encounter between a young boy recuperating from an illness and a mysterious rag-and-bone man - but its depths go down for miles, and I don't think a single reading got me even halfway down; I was so wrapped up in the glorious way Garner uses words that I don't think I had much space for plot. Absolutely wonderful.

Daisy Johnson - Everything Under. A watery, elliptical book, telling the story of a mother and daughter who have been estranged for many years, with lots of shifting times and points of view. The mythical underpinnings were perhaps more obvious than they were meant to be, and I'd forgotten just how bleak litfic can be, but I still found it hauntingly original.

Seanan McGuire - Beneath the Sugar Sky. The third in the Wayward Children series, about what happens to the children who travel to other worlds in fantasy when they return. As always, the series is really strong on acceptance and diversity, but I found this one just a bit too whimsical for me.

Rainbow Rowell - Fangirl. The protagonist of this YA novel, Cath, writes fanfiction for a fictional book series which is clearly basically Harry Potter; Fangirl is about her first year at university, and how she adapts. I found this a really compelling read, and it was quite sweet, but I didn't love it; the plotting felt a bit too pat, sometimes, and often the characters' various Issues felt a bit shoehorned in to be convenient. (And in a novel set in 2011, why the hell did one character clearly have undiagnosed dyslexia?)

The Lake District was lovely. We did a fair amount of walking, including a couple of reasonably strenuous if not terribly long (5-6 mile) walks and a guided walk with alpacas, I swam in Loweswater and Buttermere, read books and admired the views.

Being at home feels odd, like I've forgotten how to live here in the space of a week. (Being on holiday properly for the first time in two and a half years also felt very odd to start with, so I'm sure it'll pass.)

I think I do feel much less tired, and properly relaxed for the first time in ages.

Also, I have come to the conclusion that if I want to avoid burning out again, I need two things: first, I need to stop trying to be responsible for everything and start making my staff take some of that on, and secondly, I need to feel like I have someone who has my back can help me work through problems. The first one is doable, for values of doable which involve consciously changing the way I manage and getting people who have got quite comfortable with the way things have been to accept that; the second is more difficult, when I currently have a part-time interim line manager who I only see once a month (and missed this month's, as it was the week before last when I was off sick), and my new head of department, as far as I can tell, basically thinks I am the person who solves the problems. (I assume that at some point I will have a new permanent line manager, but I'm not sure they've even advertised the post yet, so I have no idea when that might be.)

As of this evening, I am officially On Leave, and we are off to the Lake District tomorrow morning for a week. I really hope that will be enough to get some of my energy back.

I thought I'd try working from home today to try to tidy up some loose ends before going away. By 9am I was fairly sure this hadn't been a great idea. By 10am I knew that I would not be able to make it through a full day, so I shuffled meetings around to allow me to catch up with the key people before logging off just before 1pm and spending the afternoon resting.

I suppose if I don't feel rested by the time I get back I will need to get my GP to sign me off...

Kim M. Watt - A Manor of Life and Death. The third in the Beaufort Scales series of cosy mysteries with dragons, this sees DI Adams joining the Toot Hansell WI (and the Cloverly dragons) on what is meant to be a relaxing spa weekend. Sadly, when the sous-chef is found dead it all becomes rather too much of a busman's holiday. Light-hearted fun, with bonus cake recipes at the end.

Stephanie Burgis - Frostgilded. This epilogue to the Harwood Spellbook series sees Cassandra and Wrexham celebrating their second winter solstice at Thornfell College of Magic, surrounded by family and students, but Cassandra just wants some time alone with her husband. Short and very sweet, and a lovely ending to the series.

G Willow Wilson - Ms Marvel, Vol 2: Generation Why. Kamala Khan is settling into her secret superhero identity and trying to find out more about the mysterious "Inventor" and why he has been kidnapping teenagers. Fun and clever, and I am surprised how much I am enjoying this series given that I'm not a superhero comics fan.

C.L. Polk - Soulstar. The third in Polk's Kingston Cycle trilogy shifts narrators again to wrap the series up with a sweet romance between long-separated spouses and a no-holds-barred push for political changes in the Jazz Age fantasy realm of Aeland. I've enjoyed this series a lot, and this is a great finale.

It's been a while since I last read any Patrick O'Brian, but this week I found myself in the mood for Aubrey and Maturin again and picked up where I'd left off with The Reverse of the Medal. It sees Jack and Stephen returning to England after their voyage to the South Pacific in The Far Side of the World, where Jack is persuaded to make an investment that he hopes will solve his ongoing financial woes, only to find himself in deeper trouble than he has ever been before.

By this point, it's very clear that the Aubreyad is less a series of separate novels and more a single story in multiple instalments; The Reverse of the Medal skilfully pulls together threads of plot from several books earlier in order to move the overall story on. As always, it's an utter delight, and I really shouldn't leave it so long before reading the next book.

***

Borderlands is the self-published debut collection of short stories from Luke Slater (who, for full disclosure, happens to be my middle brother). The fifteen stories here range from science fiction to fantasy with a touch of horror thrown in for good measure. There are two obvious fairytale retellings, though both with a twist. In others, a pair of hapless drop-outs deal with ancient gods and forgotten indigenous inhabitants of the Moon and Venus; the army of Imperial Soviet Russia pursues a fugitive across the Canadian snows in an alternate 1938; a school trip to a provincial museum turns out to be more dangerous than anticipated; and in the title story, the Nine Worlds of Norse myth are translated into a science-fictional reality. These stories are vividly imaginative and atmospheric, often incorporating the weird and uncanny but never uncomfortably dark, bringing fifteen different worlds sharply to life with humour and the immediacy and forward momentum more often found in more visual media than in prose.

I didn't intend to read the book in a day, but each story was such a delight that I kept yielding to the temptation to read just one more, until suddenly there were no more stories left. I definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys SFF short fiction.

Olivia Dade's All The Feels is a follow-up to Spoiler Alert, which I read and enjoyed in 2020. All The Feels centres Alex, who appears as Marcus's best friend in Spoiler Alert, and the slow-burn romance between him and Lauren, who is assigned as his minder by the showrunners of their series after he gets into a bar fight during location filming. It's a fun, fluffy romcom, though it has its more serious moments (content warning for mention of past domestic abuse); it has a hero who has ADHD and a heroine who is struggling with burnout and has multiple t-shirts with slogans and #cronegoals on; it's set in sun-drenched California; and it was exactly what I needed to read right now.

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices is an anthology of short stories inspired by the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table by diverse writers. I've never been able to resist an Arthurian retelling (seriously, that or Sherlock Holmes), so obviously I had to get a copy.

Ranging from the early middle ages to the far future, from Britain to outer space, the stories in Sword Stone Table bring women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people to the forefront. There's a woman swordsmith who makes the finest of blades; a lesbian knight rescuing a damsel in distress; a lonely mixed-race teenage girl spending the summer with family; two young gay men at the height of the AIDS pandemic; a Martian take on the Green Knight; and even a coffeeshop AU. My favourites included Maria Dahvana Headley's 'Mayday', a story in the form of an auction catalogue, set in late nineteenth century America; Silvia Moreno Garcia's 'A Shadow in Amber', which transplants the Lady of Shalott to near-future Mexico City; Nisi Shawl's 'I Being Young And Foolish', which reimagines the Lady of the Lake as a Uganda sorceress, but in general the quality of the stories in this anthology is high. There were a couple of stories that didn't quite work for me, and one based around baseball which is a sport I really know nothing about, but other than that I enjoyed them all, and would definitely recommend this to anyone else who enjoys Arthurian retellings.

Arkady Martine's debut novel has been on my to-read list since it was published three years ago, but somehow I never quite managed to get round to it until now, I think because I was worried it would need concentration and my brain wasn't really up to it. And now I am not really feeling up to writing a review which does it justice, but A Memory Called Empire is as good as everyone said it was: postcolonial space opera which I found very reminiscent of Le Guin in places, considering questions of individual and national identity, empire and not-empire, as well as an interesting mystery plot and delightful, engaging characters.

I spent yesterday alternating dozing and reading. This seemed to do me enough good that by today I felt moderately human again and managed to find enough energy to finish the trousers I started last weekend.

A white person with short grey hair and glasses stands in a rainy garden holding a large green and white umbrella. They're wearing a navy t-shirt with DISCO printed on it in white and dark denim trousers with large pockets and a button fly.

(I'm very pleased with these trousers. I used the Lander Pants pattern I used to make a pair of yellow cords over the Christmas break, but with the legs narrowed following the pattern for the 100 Acts of Sewing Pants No 1, and the result may be my perfect trousers.)

I am still tired enough that I'm really not looking forward to having to get up at 5:45 tomorrow morning, and am quite worried about my ability to make it through five days of work. (I really prefer working in the office - I struggle to focus on work at home - but commuting just feels exhausting right now.) I am looking at booking a week off as soon as I can (and maybe even booking a Real Holiday, possibly in the Lake District, and have started looking at cottages and the potential for not-too-strenuous walks for people who are badly out of practice, especially with hills), but we've still got three weeks of term left so realistically that's not going to be for another month yet.

Thanks to Storm Eunice, the rather dilapidated remainder of the corrugated plastic roof over the end bit of our back garden between the end of the garage block and next door's fence is no more. It managed to take several bricks and the rather substantial timber the guttering was attached to with it, but by some miracle didn't actually hit someone's car that was parked out the back. Getting something done with the now entirely roofless space will cost a bit of money, but not nearly as much as paying to fix a car that has had a solid beam dropped on its roof, or even contesting a claim for same.

Other than that we appear to have got off lightly. We had a brief power failure in the morning (only about a minute, but long enough to knock the router out so it took me ten minutes to get back online and into my meeting), but all our fences are still standing and the only other damage I could see from the windows was one wheelie bin on its side. I was very glad that we live in a mid-terrace house which was sideways on to the wind, though.

The forecast for the weekend is still looking pretty windy, even if nothing like today, so we're erring on the side of caution and planning not to swim. Which is a shame, though on the other hand, it means I can just stay in bed all weekend if I want...

I am currently feeling exactly as exhausted as I did a few weeks ago, just before collapsing with what tests suggested wasn't actually covid.

I also have the same on and off headaches, brain fog and general malaise. Last lateral flow test was this morning, and was negative (though I have had more contact with people this week than I have done since pre-Omicron this week - half an hour or so unmasked at a coffee morning to remember the former colleague who was killed last week, an hour and a half unmasked in an in-person meeting yesterday, and someone I had a masked meeting with yesterday morning's spouse has just tested positive).

Do I have covid this time? Do I have something else? Am I actually just suffering from Proper Burnout and am back at collapse point after rallying briefly due to sick leave? (I have been managing to stick to 40-hour-ish weeks, though this is awful for my ability to actually keep on top of my inbox and probably doesn't really work well with my tendency to struggle to actually get down to anything major until all of my meetings are out of the way.)

Meanwhile I am stockpiling lateral flow tests in anticipation of the government deciding to stop providing them, and have been being vocal in meetings about thinking that it would be a jolly good idea if the university strongly encouraged people not to come to work with covid, or indeed any kind of infectious illnesses, even if self-isolation is no longer a legal requirement. (I got quite irate with the chair of the health measures advisory group who said we couldn't tell people they had to stay at home, and pointed out that actually, if we employ them, we bloody well can.)

I am working from home tomorrow, and find myself idly thinking that maybe if Storm Eunice knocks out our wifi so I can't make any of my meetings it would be quite nice, really.

When Zinnia Gray, the heroine of Alix E. Harrow's novella A Spindle Splintered, pricks her finger on the spindle of an antique spinning wheel at the Sleeping Beauty-themed birthday party her best friend throws her, she isn't expecting anything to happen. She certainly isn't expecting to find herself pulled from her Midwestern home to a fairytale kingdom where another young woman is about to prick her finger on another spinning wheel, fulfilling a curse laid on her at birth. Armed only with a degree in folklore and an arsenal of pop-culture references, Zinnia sets out to save the princess and change her story. This multiverse take on fairytales is great fun, and very funny in places. It's also illustrated throughout with Arthur Rackham-esque silhouettes for a real fairytale feel.

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white_hart

May 2025

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