‘The Mercy of Gods’

I’m going to try to talk about this without giving anything away since you too might want to read it. It’s worth it. Science fiction.

It definitely took me reading this tome twice before I could be sure that the title says what it says for a reason. And remember that if you’re a fast reader … like I am … it will probably need twice through before you get both the title and the reason for the incredibly detailed viewpoints. It did me.

Those were the two main things I took away from the second time through. I found the incredible nit-picky detail quite irritating the first time. Usually when I pick up a book for the first time, I consume it for its story. It’s a make or break reading and if it doesn’t come up to my expectations I’ll be leaving it in the laundry.

Lol, “leaving it in the laundry” is a euphemism for getting rid of it. Back in my youth when I lived on the road for three years, books were regularly left in a camp-ground’s laundry for swapping. You’d leave your excess luggage in the form of books and magazines there in exchange for things you hadn’t read yet. No mobile phones in those days. The really good books that I found in that way and that I couldn’t abandon like that, I would post home. Still have a couple that I collected that way.

Here at the retirement village, there’s quite an extensive library of books left by people not wanting to store them in their apartment shelves, I assume. I’ve left a few of my acquisitions there too. I’d say that’s the primary method of acquisition. Detective fiction is the most popular genre here.

The second time reading a book, since I already know the plot and outcome, I can concentrate on the detail. And in The Mercy of Gods there is a lot of talk and thinking by various characters. Some that irritated me first time round became a necessary flow-of-consciousness to enable me to negotiate–along with the character thinking the verbiage–the extremely difficult situations presenting themselves.

Situations that I might have glossed over first time round. [Yeah, I know. Glossing a novel is wasteful on a number of counts. What can I say? Chasing an outcome is my addiction.] The primary situation is a bunch of humans in a very alien situation. I take my hat off to the authors’ world-building and ability to explain what is happening in the extreme environments they’ve invented.

Another really great process … not topic, not event, not character … what’s left? Process? So, another really intricate and interesting process is the way the humans are made to pit themselves against what they think is the target which turns completely on its head. You just will not see that result coming. Even me telling you like this won’t help you, because if you are a normal human being you’ll be reading along waiting for something to happen. It’s dense, opaque and a great read! Go read a book review somewhere if you need spoilers.

My very first five-star read this year!

Gesso’ing …

Starting a large new project with a four x A3 length of gesso and tissue paper …

In other words, laying down a landscape and at the same time attempting to camouflage the joins.

The whole thing sodden with a mix of water and gesso. And that is a jar of medium strength watered-down gesso still possible to use as paint. s

A econd jar with a jellified gesso that had to be scooped out and softened to a paintable sloppiness … glad I got to it when I did as next week or month it mightve been to dry/hard to use.

As usual, I’m re-using remnants of an old project. I’m sorry to discover that the joins are very obvious in a photo.

The hope for this first stage is that the paper backing dries flat and I get rid of the big vertical … what would you call them? Not creases. Give me a hint? I can only think of a couple of Dutch words. ‘Rimpels’ and ‘golven’ spring to mind.

One of the things about old age is that ‘mother tongues’ IE the language a person grew up with, tend to come back. And I’m definitely noticing that. If I can’t think of an appropriate word in English, I’ll come up with a Dutch one.

About Blogging: Drafts …

Today my Drafts folder contained a list of ten titles. It’s the place where I’ve got in the habit of keeping ideas for future posts but looking them over today, I am disappointed at how many just aren’t current anymore.

At least one is dated back to May last year and since there have been eleventy-five articles about it in the press, anything fresh I might have had to say about it has gone into oblivion.

A problem with about a third of the ideas/titles that I bothered to record, is that they have no accompanying notes. I want to go back and ask myself, huh? What was that about? And as not-very-good-titles give me no clue. Useless in the here and now.

Third are the ideas where I pasted a link that I intended to discuss. Several of those apparently had a use-by-date and now show up with error messages.

So there are three recommendations for your—and my—Drafts folder … stay current, make more notes and don’t let anything hang in your drafts folder for longer than maybe 6-8 weeks.

Lol, one good thing about not finding any inspiration in my drafts folder is that it gave me a topic to write about.

Two for the price of one, in this instance …. searching for an appropriate image … and none to be had … thought I might as well catch up on some of the books I’ve been reading. This one over the Christmas – New Year break.

I often have more than one book on the go and this one, a calm read, was a great contrast to The Mercy of the Gods.

My interest in Ancient Egypt was kindled when in my teens one of my brothers had to have his tonsils out—which necessitated a hospital stay—and any child having to go to hospital got a book as a get-well present.

My father didn’t always pick the right book and the Tutankhamen one seemed to have fallen flat with the patient. Some of us at home gobbled it up.

Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt is more an acount of the tombs that Egyptologists have expected to find and haven’t yet. It’s amazing to me that with all the digging that’s been done people still expect to find anything new.

This book also explains the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, how they relate to each other, and lists all the known pharoahs. Even Alexander the Great gets a few pages. It’s possible he was buried as a pharoah, somewhere in Egypt. One of the tombs still to be found.

It’s a book that can be thought of as a reference book but belongs to the in-house library. I enjoyed it, as I said. Definitely worth reading for Ancient Egyptophiles. Chris Naunton’s style makes it an easy and interesting read.

Cat Diary 28

When I was totally mellowed out the pernickety old woman vacuumed up all my catnip that I have fallen in love with!!

This pic of me mellowed out before she did the vacuuming. See the leaves?

Why would she do that?

She said you’re not eating.

I didn’t feel the need to eat and she worries?

But last night she spread out a brown pillow case for me that had the rest of the catnip supply in it Tthat she had whip-stitched shut, she said. For me to spend the night on. Which I did.

This morning she took it away. To air it, she said.

What for? I like it the way it is. But anyway, she laid out the usual track of breakfast kibbles for me and I set off finding them, eating them along the way, and keeping body and soul together.

Cat Diary 27

What happened yesterday is I fell off the palace. A shock to the system I tell you. The old woman’s too. So then I was crabby and when she touched me … well you guessed it.

The structure might’ve been made for smaller cats than me and the floors on it are all hard and slippery.

But probably she forgave me because today she spread a bunch of dried catnip leaves on the floor and I’ve been having fun rolling around in it.

The pillow case was meant to contain the leaves but spilled as soon as I had my way with it.

She said nevermind we have a vacuum cleaner.

Cat Diary 26

Well she did something stupendous! See this thing? All my evening meal spread over it and she expects me to engage with it!

She got it from a cat living on the sixth floor, a certain Dolly. Apparently Dolly didn’t like it and neither do I so far.

Of course I’ll be eating all the kibbles off it. I’ll eat kibbles however and whenever they come.

Nope, I’m telling a lie there.

One Saturday the old woman came home from shopping with a blue top. There’s a couple of holes in it where she pushes a few kibbles into the top of the top. And there’s this gold tingaling thing hanging in it.

That’s me studying it. So far it’s just easier to force the old woman to work it, and eat the kibbles as they roll out.

She’s wising up to me, though. she’s letting me starve, not reacting to any of my hints about getting more kibbles out. Soon I will have to ‘engage’ either with the blue top or with the castle.

Or with her. Her feet, for instance. Make her run to the kibble tin.

Fireworks …

_{As you can see this is an embroidery of fireworks. I had a go at prompting the resident AI but result looked nothing like} _{what I imagined.}

Somewhere in the post below I burst out laughing. “Good to meet you, friend. Cleaning out the cat’s litter tray? I did that too sometime that night as I too was ‘resisting the advent of the new year’.”

I didn’t even watch any fireworks this year. Just recalled the most amazing display I … I’m going to have wrote about this on my laptop because apparently on the mobile I’m limited??? To two paragraphs? A busy night maybe. The data centers running hot.

OK, now on my laptop and the day after where I can spread out.

I just recalled the most amazing fireworks I’ve ever experienced. It was the turn of the millennium, back at the moment when 1999 turned int 2000. Everybody was doing something special. I was driving in my little old car hurrying back to town after picking up my young teenager from friends in the country-side. Hurrying to town to pick up my mother and drive to the nearest seaside fiesta and fireworks.

Was never going to make that. A doof (feral music festival) in the district straddling the road network had all the single lane roads gnarled up with parked cars. (In that country side, at that time, all tarred roads were single lane. When you met someone going the opposite way, you both had to drive with your left-side on the grassy road shoulder … in Australia we drive on the left… to pass each other before continuing again in the middle of the road.)

I was having to take byways and dirt tracks, and finally knew I would not make it back to town in time. My teenager was asleep by then probably with a bit of clandestine alcohol in his system. I stopped the car, the uselessness of what I was doing giving way to wanting to see something, anything, celebratory on this momentous night.

Even sitting in the car I was high enough that I could see a long way south along the coast … maybe 30 kilometers and north a similar distance. The dark, moon-glittering ocean worried at the eastern horizon. Across the track, a bunch of ghostly people gathered in the long grass. They stared into the valley at their feet, the deep doof-doof of the bass drum beat reached me easily in the car.

When I joined the locals, and looked down into the valley too, I saw a huge heart pounding down in there, red and swirling pink fog pulsing to the techno drum beat. Then, far down the coast, a rush of fireworks rose and hung like a huge sparkling teardrop forever imprinted onto my mind. Then the town nearer us lit theirs. Another huge tear climbed up the sky and hung there for a long second before dying to embers that fell and died.

Four or five of the small seaside towns lit their fireworks one after the other all the way north. One after the other. As if calculated that way.

I’ve never again seen anything like it.

coffeenovelist.blog/2025/01/01/resisting-the-new-year/