feng_shui_house

It's Sunday afternoon, and I've got one more day of holiday tomorrow before heading back to work on Tuesday. It's been a good, restful, and much-needed break, and I'm hopeful that the aftereffects will remain for some time once everyday life resumes. (I'm resolutely trying to redirect my mind every time it contemplates global politics, because the panic spirals are intense.)

This weekend has in many ways been one in which I gradually reset myself to standard weekend routines: two hours at the gym yesterday (after a month without attending either of my classes due to illness and then Christmas holiday closures; my legs hurt), trundling around the market with Matthias to get the week's fruit, vegetables, and other groceries, 1km in the pool this morning. I've kept up swimming and daily yoga pretty much throughout the entire holiday, so apart from the absolute arctic temperatures when walking to and from the pool, that wasn't too much of a shock to the system.

Last night Matthias and I watched our first film of the year, Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Benoit Blanc mystery. As with the previous two, this one is tropey good fun, stealing gleefully from just about every famous locked room mystery, and involving the murder of a truly unpleasant Catholic priest in a small American town. If anything, the skewering of contemporary US politics is even more blunt than in previous films in the series, but given — with the mystery solved, and everything revealed — the various unpleasant avatars of the far-right malaise get their well-deserved comeuppance, I was quite happy for this element to be front and centre. I felt as if Daniel Craig wasn't quite as invested in this third outing, so I wonder if it might be the last, but still found it enjoyable enough.

This year's reading is off to a good start. I deliberately saved Murder in the Trembling Lands, the twenty-first (!) book in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series of historical mysteries so that it would be the first book of the new year, and I'm glad that I did so. If you've not picked up this series by now (or lost interest at an earlier stage), there's not much here that will convince you to change your mind, but if you love it as much as I do, you'll find all the familiar elements present and correct: the great sense of place in Hambly's evocation of 1840s New Orleans, the complex network of relationships in Ben's family both by blood and by choice, the tenacity with which Ben and his besieged community of free Black residents of the city try to build and preserve and sustain their lives of fragile safety in the face of all the individual and systemic pressures trying to overwhelm them, a mystery that takes us back into buried secrets of Ben's, and other characters' pasts that refuse to remain buried and threaten to bubble up to destroy them, etc. In other words, a solid contribution to what is now a sprawling series — but one to which I am always happy to return.

I followed that up with a slender little book, The Wax Child (Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken), which is a lush, lyrical, almost dreamlike account of a horrific series of witch trials in Denmark in the seventeenth century. The writing is powerful and lush, interweaving the unfolding catastrophe rushing towards the accused women with excerpts from contemporary Danish books of witchcraft.

That's it in terms of reading and viewing for now (except to say that if you have access to the BBC, I highly recommend David Attenborough's latest documentary, which is a single, hour-long episode focused on the urban life of animals in London — with some surprising creatures and moments!). I've filled a few prompts for fandomtrees, I've caught up on both Dreamwidth and AO3 Yuletide comments, and I'm going to try to keep the remaining day-and-a-half of holidays slow and gentle. We're getting takeaway tonight, and will spend the evening vegetating in front of the TV. Tomorrow, I might wander into town to visit the public library, and then take the Christmas decorations down, and then the year will start to rush on, unfolding in front of me.