This is a strange time. Here in Perth, even for winter, it\u2019s cold and wet. The east coast of Australian is locked down and Delta rages. I find myself rather nervously watching that and wondering when\/if it will impact here. People are watching Olympics and making\/plans and we\u2019re doing a census. And we\u2019re doing house stuff and I\u2019m busy. It\u2019s weird.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And it is weird. I check the news constantly, flit from this to that, and, all of a sudden, I’m turning from visual media back to reading (which might seem odd, given my reviewing and editing commitments), but I am reading novels.<\/p>\n
I’ve mentioned here that I’ve been reading Lavie Tidhar’s The Hood<\/em>, the second in his Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet following By Force Alone<\/em> from last year. It comes out in October and it’s an interesting, dark, violent fantasy novel set in England toward the end of the Crusades.\u00a0 I need to decide if I’m going to actually review it here, but I think it’s a book that Tolkien — the Tolkien who looked at the destruction of the forests as they were fed into the fires at Isengard and saw it as part of a coming tide — would have at least grokked, if not dug.<\/p>\n While I ponder that, I think I’m going to re-read the 2019 Hugo winner A Memory Called Empire.<\/em> Not been re-reading much at all these days but we are talking to Arkady this weekend for Coode Street and I’d like it fresh. And after time in Shelley Parker-Chan’s China, Zen Cho’s Malaysia, and Tidhar’s Nottingham, a little off-world time sounds tempting.<\/p>\n Just wrote this elsewhere on social media: This is a strange time. Here in Perth, even for winter, it\u2019s cold and wet. The east coast of Australian is locked down and Delta rages. I find myself rather nervously watching that and wondering when\/if it will impact here. People are watching Olympics and making\/plans and we\u2019re … Continue reading The next day, early in morning, exiting a polder, same pandemic<\/span> ![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.jonathanstrahan.com.au\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/tidhar_the-hood_hb-410x640.jpeg\")
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