Oh my god, it's October already
Where did all those days go? I can't be turning 30 on Wednesday, can I? It sounds so serious and real. I have to grow up now, probably? Still, I can't say I am filled by angst for my birthday, rather looking forward to it actually. Will have a smallish party with cheap Hungarian bubbles & traditional cocktail sandwiches & nibbles. Today I made 30 really small petit choux pastries and put in the freezer. Will be filled with prawns on Wednesday.
Must bake the cake tomorrow and prepare the other stuff, and make sure my sister buys the booze. There will only be 15 people coming, but still a lot of things to do. We plan to have a second celebration up in Gothenburg later this month, a joint party with my sister-in-law before she and my brother go to Mexico in November. And that's quite good, since 15 probably is the maximum amount of people I can fit into my little flat tolerably comfortably.
So, when I haven't been panicking about upcoming birthday celebrations I've been working on my Powell essay again, but also done some lighter reading.
I finally read Bretheren - Raised by Wolves 1 by W.A Hoffman, which I did a post on in May. And what a Romantic read it was. I've ordered the second installment and Amazon shipped it yesterday, but there wasn't really that much of a cliffhanger. Instead it was a really well researched and lovely story about Buccaneers in the West Indies in the 17th century, and one young man trying to find his place among the wolves and sheep he sees around him. It's a novel about family and heritage, about fathers and sons, and being different and finding a true friend in this strange world.
There are some major Ideas going around in the book, and I don't really buy the wolves&sheep metaphor, or perhaps I just find it a bit simplistic. But I do care about the characters, and I enjoyed the action and scenes from every day life for a buccaneer, a true boucanier who has made boucan on the shores of the Caribbean Islands. All the background information and historical tidbits really made this story for me. I want to know more about this world, I care about the ships and of course about the relationships among the men.Yeah, it's a novel about gay pirates, but it's something more than that too. And even if there are a lot of buggery going on in the novel, the main relationship is extremely chaste for a long time. There it is more about the grand feelings the characters have for each other, the soul mates thing really. There is a LOT of traditional hurt/comfort in there too, and some terrible early memories that have to be conquered.
It reminded me in some ways of the one Laura Kinsale romance novel I've read, (yes, of course it's Flowers from the Storm) in some ways, not only because they have the same didactic wish to show the wrongness of how people treated madness and psychic illnesses in those days. And sometimes that didactic touch was a bit heavy. But I'm still looking forward to reading the next installment, and I LOVED the fact that the author included a bibliography for the text. Yes, I will very probably try to get hold of more academic text on pirates :-)
Must bake the cake tomorrow and prepare the other stuff, and make sure my sister buys the booze. There will only be 15 people coming, but still a lot of things to do. We plan to have a second celebration up in Gothenburg later this month, a joint party with my sister-in-law before she and my brother go to Mexico in November. And that's quite good, since 15 probably is the maximum amount of people I can fit into my little flat tolerably comfortably.
So, when I haven't been panicking about upcoming birthday celebrations I've been working on my Powell essay again, but also done some lighter reading.
I finally read Bretheren - Raised by Wolves 1 by W.A Hoffman, which I did a post on in May. And what a Romantic read it was. I've ordered the second installment and Amazon shipped it yesterday, but there wasn't really that much of a cliffhanger. Instead it was a really well researched and lovely story about Buccaneers in the West Indies in the 17th century, and one young man trying to find his place among the wolves and sheep he sees around him. It's a novel about family and heritage, about fathers and sons, and being different and finding a true friend in this strange world.
There are some major Ideas going around in the book, and I don't really buy the wolves&sheep metaphor, or perhaps I just find it a bit simplistic. But I do care about the characters, and I enjoyed the action and scenes from every day life for a buccaneer, a true boucanier who has made boucan on the shores of the Caribbean Islands. All the background information and historical tidbits really made this story for me. I want to know more about this world, I care about the ships and of course about the relationships among the men.Yeah, it's a novel about gay pirates, but it's something more than that too. And even if there are a lot of buggery going on in the novel, the main relationship is extremely chaste for a long time. There it is more about the grand feelings the characters have for each other, the soul mates thing really. There is a LOT of traditional hurt/comfort in there too, and some terrible early memories that have to be conquered.
It reminded me in some ways of the one Laura Kinsale romance novel I've read, (yes, of course it's Flowers from the Storm) in some ways, not only because they have the same didactic wish to show the wrongness of how people treated madness and psychic illnesses in those days. And sometimes that didactic touch was a bit heavy. But I'm still looking forward to reading the next installment, and I LOVED the fact that the author included a bibliography for the text. Yes, I will very probably try to get hold of more academic text on pirates :-)