(no subject)

There have been a lot of hills to climb, many of them fortified. Although the signs called it closed, I walked up the switchback stair of the Citadel over Nauplion, getting glorious and more and more acute views down on the lower fort on the peninsula, and though the gates of the Citadel itself were locked, i could go up the stair on the Bastion of Robert, which I wouldn't recomment to anyone more afraid of heights than I am. Wall with arrow slits to left, fall of some metres down to the main stairway on right.

The next day there was a thunderstorm in the evening. Louder, longer peals than I've ever heard - and though I spent most of it indoors, when my roommate came in soaked to the skin and described the lightning I went out to see. It was windless, such that a borrowed umbrella kept me almost completely dry despite heavy rain. That wouldn't work in Wellington, where the rain likes to come in sideways. And I saw one bolt go across the sky over the Citadel from one end to the other. I hadn't really stopped to consider why Zeus was a stronger god than Poseidon, and now I don't really have to. (Although I have also swum in the waves off Kommos, which are the largest I've met in a long time. I felt slapped and buffetted by them, if I didn't ride them. At the West Coast beaches I'm most used to I simply wouldn't swim where the waves were that high. Ruapuke Beach does not love to let its swimmers go again).

I made the mistake of climbing all the way to the fort above Mystra, too, having been so pleased by the Citadel and Acrocorinth. The gates of Mystra were closing at three, no matter which side of them a given tourist was on, and the climb was longer than I and a bunch of others expected. Some of the wiser of us peeled away early to spend a leisurely time walking through beautiful Byzantine churches. I saw most of those churches as I hurtled past downhill half an hour later, in my heavy boots again, avoiding a twisted ankle as much by luck as judgement.

I wrote all the above at Delphi, in a hotel room looking out over the mountain valley. When we got there the sun was going down to the right of the far slope, but if you raised a hand to hide the glare you could see the faintest possible snowfall, uncatchable, like dust. And all of the twenty-five of us had rooms on that side of the hotel, so we could see each other on our balconies below and above as we all separately came out into the view.

That was a few days ago. Now I've left that travelling micro-world, its jokes and patterns, and though it was a social situation I found stressful as well as pleasant, I'm missing it more than I expected. But I'm not missing my partner Charlotte any more, which is very very good. We're in Prague, and she's asleep early, having arrived yesterday from Wellington instead of Athens. Today we mosied around getting our bearings, and for dinner ate some of the best food I've had in weeks. No more ten-person decisions to negotiate means easier better results. Czech food is winter-heavy. Venison and bacon dumplings in red wine sauce felt like being courteously coshed by a professional.

Now I will let myself fll unconscious, and tomorrow, the old city.

The books I've been reading in Greece, part one

Sleep was the plan. Additional journal entry is what actually happened. I should never say, "I'll just spend another ten minutes writing" while believing I migt mean it. But instead of writing about the other books I've read on the trip just now, I will, in fact, go to bed.

What's Bred in the Bone, by Robertson Davies. The only book I brought in hard copy, because I'd just started it when I left on the trip, and because I didn't want to have absolutely nothing in the event of my kindle's untimely demise on the umpteen-hour flight. If I'd liked it less I'd have discarded it in Athens, but I think it'll make a good circuit of the family, so I carry it still. Set partly in bits of the world I've newly come into contact with: Canadian high society and art culture, relevant to my earlier post about forgery in Classics and the experts who try to resolve it. (I seem to be accidentally reading an awful lot of books set in places I've been travelling to - I suppose the number of books Montreal, New York, Boston, and Athens shed light on is just very high). Detailed descriptions of the craft of art restoration, in the biography of a man served and disserved by various forms of Christianity, as narrated by his recording angel to the daemon who had charge of making him just a little larger than life. A very rich book, sentence by sentence and incident by incident. A book, alas, that isn't good about its female characters. It has good female characters, with wants and lives, but their positions relative to the main male character are not all they could be, and when the narrating immortal spirits start making incorrect generalisations about them it's particularly jarring.

I read that on a plane trip, and I also watched Ocean's Eleven, I forget in which order, but the combined result was to make me splutter "So much maleness! So much George Clooney!" and reach for:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. When I went to buy this on kindle I found I already had it in my library. Yours, leaflemming? Have you read it? I can see you starting it and being instantly deflected by its tendency towards heavy stylistic emphasis, one-sentence paragraphs and italicised phrases. Those are things I've learned to see as the equivalent of spelling errors in a text, things to weed out, and they annoyed me a lot in the first few chapters, but this is so good. (By the end about two thirds of the emphases had won me over as part of a successful style. The rest I'd have weeded). This is a very dark book. It's not a spoiler to say that it begins with the ending of a world which has ended mutiple times before. It's only a slight spoiler to say that the world which ends is one so dark that the question of whether its not ending would have been better is complicated. If the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist deals seriously with the common metaphor of superpowered group as oppressed minority, The Fifth Season does that without cheating, without having 'standard comic book superhero universe' as the target its worldbuilding has to hit. But it's neither hard nor unpleasant to read. It zips along, faster than I expected, what is horrible in it is also fascinatingly logical, there are many worldbuilding questions I very much want the answers to, which is to say nothing of my questions about the characters. I finished it thinking, 'Oh dear oh dear where's the next one...?'

Didn't instantly buy the next one. Instead, started Open City, by Teju Cole. In some ways this reminded me of Rachel Cusk's Outlines. (Which is set in Athens and which I read en route to Montreal thence New York. Open City is set in New York and I read part of it in Athens. This is what I mean about accidentally relevant books). A highly skillful yet dry prose style. A main character who is something of an absence in their own life. A focus on the details of part of a traveller's day to day life instead of a plot in which apparently large things happen. A resulting partial absence both from my memory and from my desire to keep on reading in the moment, due to shortage of the things I'm best at remembering, but certain bits which made very strong impacts. These books together make me realise how little literary fiction so-called I read. They feel like books I don't have the map to, or perhaps only books I'd need to reread but may or may not want to, to fully get a view of the images they're working with. (Though I'm saying that about so many books recently, for various reasons, that I may just make it a general principle that a fully read book is a reread book. The Fifth Season, now, like Too Like The Lightning, is a revolutionary book, a book which sketches a society and that society's change or collapse at the same time, and at high speed. Which again leaves part of me saying, "Wait, wait," at the same time as the rest of me says, "Oh, this is so good!")

Open City has a lot in it about New York, and the complexities of being a black man in New York, and the ways 'black' is used as a category for good and bad and irritating - the main character has complex feelings about his own frequent assignation to that category by people who feel comfortable within it. (This and The Fifth Season are both from a list seahearth and I put together of books by non-white writers to read together. On my side, that was partly because of a conversation I had at Scintillation after the John M. Ford panel - I was enthusing about it and someone said, "Yes, he sounded interesting, but I know what I'm reading for the rest of this year and next year I'm not going to read any white men I don't know personally." I've always resisted or decided against any sort of self-imposed reading rule, because I like reading through recommendation and free-association. But I had that conversation at the same time as I was noticing how very many African-American people there were in Montreal, compared to the bits of Wellington I'm usually in. It bothered me that that felt odd, and that the whiteness of Scintillation itself felt normal. A list of titles is being a good method for this, working with active enthusiasm instead of the kind of sense of duty which made me dawdle over any book English class ever set me. I'd have read The Fifth Season, but this meant I read it now. I would not have read Open City. And though that's only two books, it's changed my thinking - for example, my instincts about varieties of hair. Slightly scary that my free-associative reading hadn't already given me language to describe hair diversity. I have been narrower than I noticed). What was I saying before those brackets? My entries look hugely long on this kindle screen. Oh yes. Open City also has a sting in it, which I feel I should indicate the presence of but can't, I don't think, describe. I will reread the book, though it has no pull to it, it isn't a raconteur like The Fifth Season or What's Bred in the Bone. I want to mull it. I may or may not be glad I mulled it.

But because of the lack of pull I put it down halfway through and read Ancilliary Justice by Anne Leckie before picking it up again to finish. Tis the season for beginning sf trilogies I've been vaguely meaning to read ever since people were enthusing about them, apparently. Liked this a lot. What it does with gender would probably have been new to me when it was published. Not now. But that makes it nice to read in another way. It has a good world, just sufficiently inspired by Rome to make me go 'Neat' while reading it the day after Jeff the Roman history lecturer talked to us about soft power and architecture, and it has good characters in a way which makes it feel more than usually about what having a character means. This is a book whose plot hangs on the choices people make in split seconds without having any idea why they make them, and on the choice one character in particular has deep-rooted difficulty making.

Sometime on the bus ride between Athens and Thessaloniki I reread the end of Komarr, by Lois McMaster Bujold - I forget quite what made me want to, whether it was before or after I thought the above about Ancilliary Justice. I often used to read little bits of books in isolation, but it's a long time since I have. Anyway, one of the things Bujold is extremely good at, in general but in Komarr especially, is the nonlinearity of choice. She dramatises the process of thought up to and across the moment at which it produces change - which should be unexceptional, since books in which characters make important choices aren't exactly rare, but it's often not done or done badly. The balance between a choice just happening and a choice being fully reasoned can look so much like 'the plot made me do it', but if done well feels so different. (Why am I still reading Brandon Sanderson? The answer may now be 'I'm not'). As someone in Ancilliary Justice says, the reason to give AI emotion is to prevent every choice from devolving into a maze of inconsequential factors. ("How shall we satisfy when we meet, between 'shall I?' and 'I will', the lion's mouth, whose hunger no metaphors can fill?" - writes Auden, approximately). This stuff is useful to bounce about i my mind, as reading family members may guess, partly because I've always had a talent for letting choices devolve into mazes of inconsequential factors. It started when I was first asked to selected baked goods from a shop counter, and has only grown subtler with age.