Then and Now #56 (16/10/23 - 22/1-/23)

Happy Sunday!  The Sunday Post is a blog news meme hosted @ Caffeinated Reviewer. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.  It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads!

Last Week

Last weekend I was in Oslo, so no time to blog and post. But now I'm  back! Oslo was amazing, I flew in from Germany and my sister from the UK and for a few days we just wandered around and saw as much as possible while also having quality downtime. We went to the Munch Museum, did a Fjord cruise, saw the Folke Museum on Bygdoy, which is like an open air museum where they've reconstructed how villages and towns looked in previous centuries, and saw Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour concert film in a packed cinema. We also took the metro out to a lake and wandered around, which was beautiful. Overall, a very successful trip, although I was absolutely knackered by the time I got home Sunday night. It also dropped below 0 here that night, so I was freezing by the time I got home, but thankfully the heating came on shortly afterwards. 

The week at work has been good, the university semester has finally started here, so we had some induction events and I prepped class for next week. I'm really looking forward to getting back into the classroom! I also have to finalise some grades for the assignments I received and the next part of my teaching course also starts next week, so I need to prepare for that. Aside from that, spending four days wandering around a city and then chatting to my sister means I haven't done as much reading as I normally would, but that's fine. For the first time in years I'm waaay ahead of my Reading Goal of a 100 books, so as long as I can catch up on the new releases this month I'm meant to review, I'm good.

I've also started watching The Fall of the House of Usher by Mike Flannagan on Netflix. I do enjoy Flannagan's work a lot, especially his two The Haunting of... and Midnight Mass. What I love about this new series is how he uses so much of Poe's work throughout, with each of the episodes named after one of his famous works, which means that I had some clues here or there about where the episode would go. But overall Flannagan keeps surprising me with his work and what it represents. So solid recommend, except if you're not big into thrillers/horrors because from the second episode onwards some things get very explicit.

Posted since the last T&N:

• Review: Lie With Me by Sabine Durrant
• BC - Let's Get Medieval - 'Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts'
• Friday Friyay: Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction, edited by Margrét Helgadóttir
• Review: Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction, edited by Margrét Helgadóttir

Recommendation

Now for something completely unserious! Despite the fact we're moving into Winter and the end of the year, I've had this summer banger from like a decade ago stuck in my head so enjoy Asereje with me!

Mailbox Monday

I got two audiobooks during a sale last week, so I'm sharing those here! Aside from that I have been very good about not buying books or requesting ARCs!

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill, narr. by Kimberly Farr and Mark Bramhall (Hot Key Books, 2022)

In a world where girls and women are taught to be quiet, the dragons inside them are about to be set free ...

In this timely and timeless speculative novel, set in 1950s America, Kelly Barnhill exposes a world that wants to keep girls and women small—and examines what happens when they rise up.

Alex Green is four years old when she first sees a dragon. In her next-door neighbour's garden, in the spot where the old lady usually sits, is a huge dragon, an astonished expression on its face before it opens its wings and soars away across the rooftops.

And Alex doesn't see the little old lady after that. No one mentions her. It's as if she's never existed.

Then Alex's mother disappears, and reappears a week later, one quiet Tuesday, with no explanation whatsoever as to where she has been. But she is a ghostly shadow of her former self, and with scars across her body—wide, deep burns, as though she had been attacked by a monster who breathed fire.

Alex, growing from young girl to fiercely independent teenager, is desperate for answers, but doesn't get any.

Whether anyone likes it or not, the Mass Dragoning is coming. And nothing will be the same after that. Everything is about to change, forever.

And when it does, this, too, will be unmentionable...

The desperate way in which I want to turn into a dragon cannot even really be put into words, so of course I was intrigued by Barnhill's book! I've also heard interesting things about it in the blogosphere and on Book Twitter, so I'm excited to dive into this during the semester. 

Lore by Alexandra Bracken, narr. by Fryda Wolff (Quercus Children's Books, 2021)

From the No.1 New York Times bestselling author of THE DARKEST MINDS comes a high-octane story of power, destiny and redemption. A lifetime ago, Lore Perseous left behind the brutal, opulent world of the Agon families - ancient Greek bloodlines that participate in a merciless game every seven years. A game that is about to begin again ...

For centuries, Zeus has punished the gods with a game called the Agon, which turns them mortal for one week, and at the mercy of being hunted by those with godly ambitions. Only a handful of the original Greek gods remain, the rest replaced by the mortals who killed them and ascended. 

After her family's sadistic murder by a rival bloodline, Lore escapes and vows to repay her parents' sacrifice by doing one thing - surviving. For seven years, she has pushed back dark thoughts of revenge against the man responsible for their murder, a man by the name of Wrath who has attained unimaginable power. Except for one week, every seven years. A week that is fast approaching ...

When Lore comes home on the first night of the Agon to find Athena gravely wounded on her doorstep, the goddess offers her an alliance; they have a mutual enemy, after all. But as the world trembles under the force of Wrath - a god with the power to destroy all of humanity - will Lore's decision to bind her fate with Athena's come back to haunt her?

Lore has been on my list almost literally since it came out in 2021. While I'm a bit iffy about it coming from Quercus' Children's Book division (?), I'm still excited to dive in, especially because the cover just keeps drawing me in. I will be using the figure of the Medusa in class in two weeks time, so the timing is perfect!

And that's it for me this week! What are you reading? And how has your week been?