Aurora's Sundry Notes

Oh, hello, hello. I am still around, and healthy and well and all, I'm just kind of bad at getting around to doing things, so this journal has suffered as a result. I've thought about posting on many days, but turns out just thinking about it doesn't make it happen!

But here, let's have that my recent culture round-up (maybe I need to call it that instead of "culture consumed". The latter sounds so... consumer-like).

Books

I'm still slower at reading than usual, brain just doesn't have the usual energy to focus on reading so I to read in much smaller chunks, and so books are getting read slower. But at least I can read and enjoy it, so that's good. I finished the reread of my beloved This Is How You Lose the Time War. It's one of those books that I only love more, the more I read it, and keep discovering new layers as I read it again.

I'm currently reading The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow, and I've liked it quite a bit. Beautifully written, and I really like the concept of doors between different universes, and the role stories, storytelling and writing play in this. Though I will say this is not maybe the best time ever to be reading a book about a woman of colour written by a white woman (January is mixed-race). But at least I really like the fact that her problems are not primarily because of the colour of her skin, though oppression and racism play into her experience of the world and why some things go the way they do - it's all very much present in the story. As a white person from an overwhelming-majority-white country, I'm not qualified to say how well the book does by race. So far it hasn't raised major red flags for me, but obviously my perspective is limited.

I've also been reading some nonfiction - still continue to mainly get my dose of my own language in writing by reading nonfiction books written in or translated into Finnish. I've recently started a book on astrobiology, and I've been inspired to pick up again the book I was reading earlier in the year about how weather and climate have affected human history, which is really interesting.

I keep trying to write something about Black Lives Matter, but it's hard, because it's so easy to get into topics that my mental health doesn't like. But suffice it to say: while I've been intentionally diversifying my reading for some years, and have only had excellent results - so many great books and authors I've discovered, such a richer world of cultures, thoughts, histories etc. - I've realized now I still don't read enough by Black authors. It's probably partly because they're not promoted as much, and partly because they're often about really painful and traumatic topics, because that's what publishers will publish from Black writers. Plus goodness knows what internalized racism I've picked up from living in a white society with plenty of racism even if it often isn't acknowledged. So I've been going through the book rec lists that have been coming out / linked to lately, looking for books that look like they'd be my mind of thing to read, and placing them on hold in the library or, so far in one case, making a successful request for the library to buy the book so I can then borrow it. Hopefully I'll find some gems as I get to reading these.

Justina Ireland's Dread Nation, which has been on my TBR for ages anyway, has just arrived to me at the library, so I hope to pick it up soon! It also fits my plan of reading as much queer stuff as I manage during June, since no offline Pride stuff is happening. (My city postponed the Pride Week until September, hoping that big events can happen then. Otherwise next week would have been Pride Week. It's really hot here now, though - at least for my poor heat tolerance - so honestly I don't even mind that it's only in September.. Hopefully it works out then.)

I haven't got much money to buy books myself, but at some point I'm going to pull together enough scraps of money to buy P. Djèlí Clark's novellas, because they're amazing. If you want a book rec from me for amazing books written by Black authors, I highly recommend his alternate history fantasy/steampunk stories, they're some of the best stuff I've read. And somewhere I saw the Tor.com folks say he's going to have a full-length novel coming out next year set in the alternate history Cairo that's depicted in A Dead Djinn in Cairo and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. I can't wait!



Podcasts

Uh, where was I the last time I did this? Let's see the main things:

The Penumbra Podcast: I've listened to The Sportive Nymphs and started on Juno Steel and the Long Way Home... Which means that, incredibly, I'm getting closer to the end of S2. Still quite a few episodes to go, what with the last Second Citadel story of the season being something like 5 or 6 episodes, but not many stories left! Of course there's already plenty of S3 to go before I'm anywhere near caught up - at the moment I'm something like 1 3/4 years behind.

I finished re-listening to The Far Meridian, and have now progressed to the minisodes that have been published lately. The show makes me feel happy and seen with all its complicated human emotions and very-slow-burn queer female longing and connection. Also on a re-listen you notice so many things that you didn't notice the first time around because then you didn't know what would be significant later.

I'm starting to dive back into Wolf359, and finished listening to the very long special episode, Change of Mind, which is past!Lovelace and I loved it very much. (I continue to have a massive crush on her.) It connected interestingly to the end of S3/what will probably be the beginning of S4. So I'll get to S4 at some point soon, if I dare...

I've been trying out some new fiction podcasts; so far I've made the most progress with Under the Electric Stars, which is a cyberpunk drama by and with queer people and people of colour (and queer people of colour - I have the impression most are both, at least character-wise) and I really like it so far. Another story I've started listening to is Valence - it's an urban fantasy thingie and it has Ishani Kanetkar (Arkady on The Strange Case of the Starship Iris) on it which was honestly all I needed to want to check it out (plus, Jordan Cobb who's Kathy on Among the Stars and Bones!), but also all the others are really good and the story seems really interesting. Contains honest treatment of mental health stuff, I'm kind of having to take it slowly because the main character's negative inner voice is rather effective at times. But it's good!

In terms of nonfiction podcasts, I found Exolore on st_aurafina's recommendation, it's about worldbuilding science fiction planets based on all the sciences the host and the guests can possibly bring into a single podcast, and it's just what I needed. And connected to the topic I mentioned earlier, Heather Rose Jones's Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast just did an episode on f/f historical fiction by Black authors with at least one Black protagonist. There's a transcript on the page I just linked to, so check it out if you don't feel like listening, and get some book recs that way.

Other culture

I'm super slow at watching any TV series, but I'm halfway through Gentleman Jack now, so yay? I really need to just turn off my subscription, though, either try to speed through the rest of the series before my current month runs out, or just buy it, it'll be cheaper. I'm still liking it lots, I don't know why it so hard to focus.

And last night was Midsummer's Eve, which is kind of a big deal in Finland, and I had exactly zero plans beyond food, so I watched some of the Finnish National Ballet's A Midsummer Night's Dream ballet online. I find it a lot easier to focus on ballet than on TV shows, so maybe I should just switch to ballet. Should check out how opera works for me at the moment.

Museums have opened here, so I hope to get around to visiting one soon.

Okay, I've been meaning to manage these "culture consumed" posts for a while. Seriously, I'm probably just going to have to go back to trying to do a Reading Wednesday and then pick other days for doing other forms of culture because I apparently find it too much work to list them all at once. And then I delay for weeks and then it especially is too much work. But I just want to chatter about culture things so now I'm doing it.

Books

This is going to be fast, because I'm not managing to read much now. Pretty much ever since the whole global-pandemic-with-lockdowns-and-social-distancing thing started, my concentration has been really bad for reading. I don't know why. Normally reading is my way of escaping from bad stuff, of comforting myself when things are hard, but now I mostly can't. It's not like I can't focus on anything at all, either, but somehow reading isn't working, or only works for small amounts of time. When I try to read for a long time, or when I'm too anxious, I can't focus, or I just get so tense it's awful. I'm really envious of everyone who can keep reading through this because I miss that.

This is to say that since I last posted about books, the only books I've managed to finish are T. Kingfisher's The Raven and the Reindeer and a re-read of Martha Wells's second Murderbot novella, the latter because I figured rereads might work better. The evidence about that is inconclusive, because it's a 150-page novella, and I took at least a week to read it. Pretty sure that the first time around I read through it in a day, and I had high fever then. But I did generally enjoy it, in the small bits I managed to read it in. However, there was maybe a bit too much, uh, murdering going on for my current state of mind. Maybe the next reread should be a Becky Chambers or Red, White, and Royal Blue. But now I've started reading a Finnish YA fantasy novel by one of the only current Finnish authors that I love just as much as my favourite foreign ones (Siiri Enoranta). I really like it, and it's in my own language, so I'm hoping that makes it easier to read.

To go back to The Raven and the Reindeer for a bit, it's a feminist f/f retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and I enjoyed a lot. I mean, it's a feminist f/f retelling of The Snow Queen, so we're doing pretty well already, and it had awesome animals, like a proper smart-ass raven and reindeer some magical flying otters. But I got inordinately distracted by the fact that there were a lot of hints she was setting it in the Finnish culture, or a Finnish-based one - references to uniquely Finnish folklore and myths, especially - but wasn't aware that in Finnish, we don't have gendered third-person pronouns. Whether someone is "he" or "she" is not a conversation you can have in Finnish. (Of course you can otherwise have conversations about whether someone or something is male or female, but they wouldn't rise out of conversations that the he-or-she question would rise out of. Also, it seems weird, if we assume they're speaking/thinking in Finnish, that a raven would not like being called "it" because "it" is a totally proper pronoun to use of animals even if we think of them as intelligent and personable, for example with pets, and it wouldn't feel particularly demeaning/objectifying. In fact, in colloquial speech we use that pronoun for humans as well, because, huh, I don't know, we just do. I tend to always feel I'm being particularly official or excessively "proper" if I even use our word for he/she about a person in conversation. But I don't know if this was the case in the sort of time the story seems set in.)

Sorry, that's a long aside, and probably would literally only bother Finnish readers like me, but it just made me really confused about where I was supposed to locate this mentally, because every now and then it was telling me to locate it in my country, but then it also was clear Gerda was thinking in a language that doesn't match with the culture. Also Gerda isn't a Finnish name, but we do have plenty of Swedish names in use so that's not as much of a problem. As for Kay, though, that's not how we spell that name. But the names probably just come from the English renditions of the original tale.

Uh, I've been waiting to get that off my chest for a couple of weeks, thank you for reading this chapter and we'll move on now.

Podcasts

While I can't focus on books, you know what I can focus on? Podcasts! So many podcasts! In a time when I can't really meet anyone in person other than the occasional grocery store worker or a neighbour I pass by at the yard from a proper distance, it feels comforting to have some voices accompanying me, I guess. I've especially dived maybe even deeper into my podcast drama obsession, so I seriously need to trim this to just the main things. So I'll do those.

So, uh, maybe a month ago I started listening to Wolf 359. ( Rambling for a few paragraphs, mostly not spoilery but a bit. I've listened until the mid-season Three. )

So anyway, I've got a new fannish obsession there and it's... quite something.

Out of my pre-existing podcast obsessions, I've been slowly going through Season Two of The Penumbra Podcast, and it seems like I finally got through one really rough phase of the Juno Steel storyline (I'm sure there are still other rough things to come, but at least one arc arrived to a conclusion) and I was rewarded by a more hopeful, and truly excellent tale in Juno Steel and the Time Gone By. While there still was dark stuff in it, too, there also were some lovely things, and let's just say that I've now got a new f/f ship that I adore madly already. I might have to really write a separate entry about this, because I have lots of feelings and maybe even thinky thoughts. We'll see if I managed that!

And still with The Penumbra, today I listened to the Second Citadel story The Moonlit Hermit, both parts, because it was just so good and I couldn't stop. I love Rilla so damn much. I could honestly just listen to Rilla's research logs for ten hours, I wouldn't even need a plot, though I also enjoyed the plot and the character interactions immensely. But Rilla is brilliant.

You know, I'd rather love for all these scientist ladies from different podcasts to get together and solve some sort of a problem. I could just imagine Rilla, Violet Liu from The Strange Case of the Starship Iris, Dr. Eurys from Tides and Nora from The 12:37 getting together and being really amazing at sciencing at a problem. (Though Nora would probably be pretty unsettled since she doesn't do so great without her normal circumstances. But Rilla's good at dealing with Damien's anxiety, so she'd probably be help there, too.)

In terms of re-listening to old favorites, I've recently listened to S1 of We Fix Space Junk for the second time, and had even more fun than the first time. I've moved to re-listening to S2 of The Far Meridian, though I'm still in the early episodes - this part is a bit heavy listening, so it isn't the best time in the world for it, and I'm taking it slowly. And... I finally started re-listening to The Strange Case of the Starship Iris, and oh my goodness it's so good it's so good. I'm loving it even more this time around, maybe because now I already know everyone and I know what's generally going on and can just get more into it. I remember the first time I took a while to warm up to Arkady, but well, now I know how much I adore her, so I don't mind her being, oh, well, her general Arkady-ness. *waves* I've already listened to the first two episodes today, and I have a feeling I'll be going through it pretty fast this time around.

As I said, I've listened to plenty more podcasts, but I guess this covers the main things that I'm the most obsessed with.

TV Shows

Recently I got an HBO subscription for a bit - I'm still in the free trial period, but since I'm not a very fast watcher, it probably won't be enough. I'd been wanting to watch His Dark Materials and Gentleman Jack, and I've now watched the first episodes of both.

His Dark Materials is really excellently made and exciting and beautiful and seems to be superbly cast so far. But I remember the books pretty well, especially the first one because I read it many times while waiting for the sequels as a wee geeky girl-child, and well, now I'm watching it with this dreadful sense of foreboding because I know what's coming up, and it's especially bad with all the child characters because I know some bad things are coming and... I'm not sure if I can actually watch something like this at this time period. But at the same time it's so beautiful and well-made and it has beautiful music.

Gentleman Jack, though, is a delight, and doesn't give me the same difficult feelings. I have a feeling it won't take me long to watch it, the first episode was already so, so good. Of course there's complicated stuff that doesn't feel good, because history is history and the English class system is the English class system and yeah, that would be a whole essay. But it's more usual stuff that is easier to deal with than more epic danger. I'm going to have to write more about it when I've watched more of it. But it's really, really good.

And now I really have to stop and get on with other stuff before it's midnight in my time zone again.