Reading Diary: Armitages
Jun. 27th, 2023 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtree8/05/2023
I am continuing not to get around to much reading, and even less writing about it! This has been a stressful and busy couple of weeks. However, in the days before I have to return it to the library, I'm dipping into Joan Aiken's collection of Armitage stories, The Serial Garden. This is about a family to whom peculiar events happen, but only on Mondays. The stories' strength is the way they blend the mundane with the fantastic. I just read a story in which a witch tries to bake one of the Armitage children in her new electric oven. After a while the boy realises that the witch, unfamiliar with the technology, only turned on the temperature switch and not the 'bake' switch, so the oven is actually staying cold. 'I've had the same problem as that witch!' I thought.
I don't really expect 'blends mundane with fantastical' to be a very interesting goal these days, I feel like the number of wizards who ask their neighbors for sugar and dragons who do income tax is pretty well up there at this point (and maybe that's why I put off these stories till nearly too late). But again and again the practicality of the details observed got to me. A recurrent, 'Well of course it would go that way.'
I am continuing not to get around to much reading, and even less writing about it! This has been a stressful and busy couple of weeks. However, in the days before I have to return it to the library, I'm dipping into Joan Aiken's collection of Armitage stories, The Serial Garden. This is about a family to whom peculiar events happen, but only on Mondays. The stories' strength is the way they blend the mundane with the fantastic. I just read a story in which a witch tries to bake one of the Armitage children in her new electric oven. After a while the boy realises that the witch, unfamiliar with the technology, only turned on the temperature switch and not the 'bake' switch, so the oven is actually staying cold. 'I've had the same problem as that witch!' I thought.
I don't really expect 'blends mundane with fantastical' to be a very interesting goal these days, I feel like the number of wizards who ask their neighbors for sugar and dragons who do income tax is pretty well up there at this point (and maybe that's why I put off these stories till nearly too late). But again and again the practicality of the details observed got to me. A recurrent, 'Well of course it would go that way.'
