Adrian still likes us to read him a good night story. We’ve left children’s books behind a while ago already. We just finished an old Estonian translation of Karel Čapek’s Nine Fairy Tales. I can make myself speak Swedish to my children when others are in the room, so as not to exclude anyone, but good night stories just have to be in Estonian.

We’ve run out of suitable books in Estonian. I usually buy piles of books every time we visit Estonia, but we’ve had to skip our annual trips for two summers in a row, so we had a bit of a book crisis. I’ve got a few boxes of children’s books we haven’t read yet, but we probably never will – Adrian has outgrown such stuff.

Luckily my mum still has many of our old books, some from her childhood, some from mine. I called her, and here’s what she lent us to read next: an old Estonian edition of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

In the Soviet planned economy, things had fixed prices. This book cost 7 roubles, according to a printed price on the rear cover. That was before the 1961 currency reform; book prices were in kopeks (1/100 of a rouble) when I was a child.

The front cover has a dramatic scene of a dinosaur threatening a man wielding a firebrand. Clearly drawn in a different era, when artists’ knowledge (along with everybody else’s knowledge) of dinosaur anatomy wasn’t what it is today. That dinosaur holds itself like a large human in a dinosaur costume. It will be interesting to look at more illustrations – and to see what kind of mental picture Sir Arthur had of dinosaurs, pterodactyls and other prehistoric creatures. I haven’t read this book for a good 30 years at least.


I am so bored with my life. Nothing happens, and nothing will happen, and it’s just the same house and the same work, and the same neighbourhood to walk in. The most exciting thing in my week is a walk to the recycling containers in central Spånga.

The lack of any external stimuli drags my energy levels down. I don’t even want to do any of the things I usually enjoy. I cook dinner without really enjoying it. I knit without really enjoying it. I blog without really enjoying it. The only thing I do is sit in my corner of the sofa and read silly, fluffy, unchallenging books: fantasy romances and werewolves and such.

The good thing (which is maybe also slightly a bad thing) about reading on digital platforms is that I can always just click to get one more. I don’t even need to make the effort of ordering a book and waiting for it.


No, there is no bingo square to “read under the table”. I think this is for “read after dinner” – the spot under the table must simply have been cosy.

The bingo challenge requires 15 minutes of reading per day. Adrian has already finished the book they read for school and had to find something else to continue reading. He loves comic books but is otherwise not much of a reader – but halfway through the book he told me “this wasn’t so bad”.


Catching the last edge of daylight in the west-facing window, while engrossed in a good book.

Quite often I want to read a book with a certain kind of feeling – not a particular genre, nor type of plot. But book recommendations are all based on genre and plot elements and other such parameters that are easy to evaluate but not relevant to me. I could easily find, say, standalone books in the fantasy genre by female authors, and with some reasonable effort narrow it down to, say, books that have or don’t have magic/romance/battles/mysteries/fairy-tale inspiration etc. There are blog posts and recommendation lists galore, on Goodreads and elsewhere.

But I often want books where the mood is of a certain kind, and the writing style is like that, and I can’t even really describe that mood and that writing style very clearly, so it’s very much hit and miss. I’ve come to love the “sample” feature on Kindle and often go through many, many samples before actually buying a book.

That might be the feature that ends up converting me to preferring e-books: browsing physical books has to be done in a book store and there’s a limit to how many hours I can stand in a shop, sampling books, before I get hungry and tired.

But right now I have stumbled upon a series of books that hit just the right spot so I’m glad I have several more days to enjoy them before going back to work.

I started with Swordheart, based on a recommendation. Having devoured that one I immediately looked for more books by T Kingfisher and went on a bit of a binge, finishing all four books in four days. Paladin’s Grace literally kept me up until 3 in the morning because I had to finish it.

Swordheart: Halla, a middle-aged widow, comes into an inheritance. Her relatives are plotting to marry her off to a cousin to get their hands on the inheritance. One of the things she inherits is a magic sword which turns out to contain a grumpy middle-aged swordsman, now oath-bound to serve and protect her. The two go off in search of help to get Halla her inheritance, free of encumbering relatives. Complications ensue.

Paladin’s Grace: Stephen is a paladin, a god-touched berserker warrior. But his god dies, snatching away the meaning of his life and leaving him with his berserk rages but without the god’s power to harness them. He meets Grace, a perfumer, and they accidentally get tangled up in someone else’s assassination plans. Complications, as usual, ensue.

Clocktaur War: The city-state is under attack by near-indestructible clockwork monsters, sent by a neighbouring city. Attempts to infiltrate that neighbour to find out what’s going on have ended in disaster. Now a new group is hand-picked to have another go. The previous groups were military; now the city’s rulers take a different approach – with an ex-paladin, a forger, an assassin and a scholar. They’re bound to their mission by magic and not exactly happy about the mission, or about having to work with each other.

What I liked about all the books:

  • The characters. Some I loved more than others, but all had so much depth and detail that they felt real and relatable, and I came to care for all of them.
  • The down-to-earth manner of writing which made everything feel real. People get blisters and stiff necks; they run out of clean socks and shirts; inns run out of hot water. And the entirely believable observation that an itchy nose that you cannot scratch can bother you more than your impending probable death.
  • Straightforward language, fast pace without feeling rushed.
  • Humour. Lots of funny dialogue! More of it in Swordheart than in the others, and perhaps more than I would have chosen (I’m not a big fan of comedy) but it never got too much. I kept laughing out loud as I read Swordheart.
  • The two paladins, and the idea of close contact with a god followed by abandonment. I’ve read that some reviewers find Caliban (the paladin in the Clocktaur War books) annoying, but I liked the exploration of paladins as a concept. How does one end up as a paladin? What might it actually feel like to spend your days slaying demons (hint: not glamorous)? How would it change a person?
  • Romance. Not what I had expected – I hadn’t read any reviews in advance – but it was well done and credible. There were a few sex scenes in each book, all of which exceeded my expectations. Realistic, touching, without any cringey euphemisms.
  • Themes.
    In Swordheart: friendship and humanity. The swordsman in the magic sword has been used by his owners as a killer for hundreds of years, and now he meets someone who actually treats him as a human being.
    In Paladin’s Grace: finding your footing again after loss, realizing that you’re perhaps not as irretrievably broken as you thought.
    In Clocktaur War: empathy. The forger and the paladin are both touchy and proud, and especially the paladin needs to come down off his pedestal to the level of normal people. (Which he does.)

My only quibble is about slightly weak plotting. Halla’s reaction to learning about the real story of the sword felt overly melodramatic, as if put there only to make the plot go in a certain direction. And the deus ex machina resolution in Paladin’s Grace felt rather improbable.

I have no such complaints about the Clocktaur War books – they’re more plot-focused than the others, and all the pieces came together really well in the end. As a bonus, they end with a very well-described final battle. I often have trouble visualizing battles as they are described, but this was a rare case where I really felt I could follow the details of who was where and what they were hitting.

New York, 1899.

A merchant orders a golem to be his wife. He barely has time to wake the golem before he dies of appendicitis, on board a ship to New York. The golem is left masterless and alone in the strange city.

A tinsmith in Little Syria, also in New York, accidentally lets out a djinni from a copper flask where the djinni had been imprisoned centuries earlier by a sorcerer. The djinni is still bound to human form and unable to access most of his powers.

The two now struggle to find a place for themselves in this city full of humans. They both wear human-shaped bodies, but neither of them feels at home among humans.

The golem was made to serve and obey. Now that she has no master – whose wishes she would fulfil before he even utters them – she is buffeted by the wishes and desires of everyone around her. She is lost, fearful, alone. She is stronger than humans, tireless, but also very aware that if people knew what she is, they’d be so frightened of her that they would destroy her.

The djinni is the opposite. He used to be the master of everything he could see, flying freely across the Syrian desert, constructing fantastical palaces on a whim, entering people’s dreams. Now he can do none of that, and he chafes at his limitations. And like the golem, he cannot let anyone know what he is.

Neither of them needs sleep. They both look for something to fill their empty waking nights with, in order to not go mad from boredom, and this is what causes them to meet. They recognize that the other is something not-human, and they are intrigued.

The golem is newly made, innocent and ignorant. The djinni is hundreds of years old.

The golem is feminine servility. The djinni is masculine arrogance.

The golem is earth, heavy and stable. The djinni is fire, flighty and sizzling.

Both are forced to live in a human body, to live among humans and follow human conventions. With time, pretending to be human makes each one more human. The golem learns to want things for herself, and to dare to feel. The djinni learns to care about humans, and to want things for others. They learn to make friends.

There is a plot behind all this, and it’s interesting and well-crafted and comes together nicely in the end. Perhaps there is a touch too much action and excitement in the end for my taste – it doesn’t quite fit in with the more moderate pacing of the rest of the book. I think I could have read this book even if there was no plot and no denouement at all. I would be happy to just follow these two around and look inside their heads while they figure themselves out.

There are plenty of supporting characters, whom I also enjoyed getting to know. Some reviewers complain that the author spends too much time on their back stories, when the characters only fulfil a very brief role in the main story. I loved those parts. The bit players are essential, and for me, this was a way of honouring their importance.

The writing style is uncomplicated, unassuming, quietly elegant. The tone is warm-hearted: people may argue and disagree and sometimes do stupid things but they’re all fundamentally decent and kind. It’s no light-hearted feel-good story, but definitely a hopeful one.

Altogether I enjoyed every aspect of this book.


Meanwhile, my browser’s spell check wants to correct “golem” to “google”. What an uncultured browser it is.

Baru Cormorant is born on a backwater island paradise. When she is a young child, the island is annexed/colonized by the Imperial Republic of Falcrest.

The empire brings trade and modern medicine, but also strict ideas about “social hygiene” – eugenics and sexual mores. Homosexuality is outlawed; one of Baru’s two fathers is killed so she is left with the regulation two parents. The imperial staff also brings epidemics which kill many locals. The empire barely bats an eyelid. These things happen.

Promising island children like Baru are coaxed away from their families, inoculated against the epidemics, and brought up in boarding schools.

Baru, realizing that the islanders cannot fight against the empire, decides to subvert the system from within. Excels in her schoolwork, shows special aptitude in mathematics and aces the final exam. Is posted as chief imperial accountant to another colony.

Her plan to get to a position of power within the imperial bureaucracy in order to change it is the obvious betrayal of the book’s title. Getting there requires more betrayals, and betrayals within betrayals. This is a pretty bleak book.


The book excels in terms of technical execution. The plot is clever and intricate and detailed. Surprises aren’t telegraphed in advance and truly take me by surprise. The underlying idea itself really appeals to me: conquest by culture and administration, rather than armies with weapons.

But the book lacks soul. With the exception of the first few chapters about Baru’s childhood: those were immersive; I felt like I really got to know Baru as a child. Those got my hopes up, and the rest of the book really, really did not live up to them. This is a book about an accountant but it almost feels as if it was also written by an accountant.

Baru herself never convinces me, and neither do the other characters (with one or two exceptions). I kept mixing them up even to the end, because they were so flat and alike.

So was the world. I have no idea what any of it looks or feels like, apart from the volcanic mountain on her island. Oh, and the winter up north is cold. Who’d have guessed.

Baru is playing the long game, aiming to somehow [subvert/overthrow/remake] the empire. We don’t know what her goal is, and perhaps even she herself doesn’t know yet. This kind of decades-long commitment is only believable if we can see some kind of fire in Baru, something to propel her onwards through these long, soul-crushing years. Yet she never thinks about the things she should be doing this all for – her childhood island, her murdered father, her forlorn parents. All she does is plan and scheme and perform tasks.

And she is portrayed as too clever, too skilled to be credible. An eighteen-year-old math prodigy I can accept. But I really don’t think that this eighteen-year-old (who has lived half her life within the small world of a boarding school and never even set foot in a city!) would also be a genius plotter who outwits all the aristocrats and bureaucrats of an entire country, and plays them like chess pieces for years, nearly always winning. It just does not work.

The book sounded so promising. The basic idea was intriguing, and Baru sounded like someone whom I could identify with. (Which is generally not an important criterion for me when picking a book, but would have been a bonus.) Instead I really didn’t care about her, or any of the rest. Finished, but will not continue with the series. Would not recommend.

Book 1, The Riddle-Master of Hed, begins with Morgon, Prince of Hed, finding out that the golden crown he won in a riddling contest with a ghost is a token. The King of An has sworn that his daughter Raederle will marry no one but the man who can present that crown. Morgon leaves his country for An and the princess. Things happen on the way, dangerous riddles and mysteries appear, and he re-aims his quest instead at finding answers to those.

Book 2, Heir of Sea and Fire, starts a year later. Morgon has been missing for that entire year. Through a kind of land-magic his brother knows that Morgon is still alive. Princess Raederle goes off on a quest of her own to find Morgon, together with Morgon’s sister and another princess.

In book 3, Harpist in the Wind, Morgon and Raederle set out together to figure out what’s going on with all the wizards and shape-changers and other assorted dangers in the realm. Throughout all three books, Morgon gradually gains magic but loses much of his carefree innocence and becomes ever grimmer and harder.

There were aspects of the books that I liked. The poetic prose, the sometimes dreamy quality of the story, the nature scenes with bare moors and endless pine forests. The world itself, with its riddles and strange magics and long-lived kings who all seem to be friends with each other. But the more I read, the more annoyance started to outweigh enjoyment.

Already in book 2 the story gets too unrealistic for my taste. Three young princesses somehow decide that running off to rescue a prince is the most logical thing to do – even though two of the three have barely left their homes before this. And this story is told entirely seriously, there is rarely even a touch of humour.

I realize I sound a bit snarky here, but the whole idea just feels so contrived and stupidly heroic, in the worst sense of heroic. If you love someone, of course you should run off to find and rescue him, even though you have no clue what you’re doing! Your love will be enough!

The whole world is all so noble and poetic. People aren’t real people but… what’s the opposite of a caricature? Symbols, perhaps. They fulfil a role in the story, but I never get the sense that they are real people with real lives. I can almost feel them posing in ther dramatic settings to quietly utter portentous phrases.

People in these books swear grand oaths and commit themselves (and others!) to radical action with very little thought. Princess Raederle eloquently swears that she will never abandon her beloved prince Morgon and is determined to follow him wherever he goes, and that is somehow presented as a noble thing, even though she slows him down and puts him in danger all the effing time. He needs to get from A to B, and B is a long way away. She isn’t much of a walker, but she refuses to use her magic to change into a bird (although she could) and she also won’t let Morgon to change into a horse and carry her (although he could), because that would go against her feelings of what is right.

I also really dislike the amount of fate and destiny in this series, and how much Morgon is being pushed by mysterious forces towards a grand goal. Someone has A Grand Plan, and poor Morgon’s story is mostly about following that plan while simultaneously struggling against it and trying to understand it.

Some of all this pushing is more visible to us than to Morgon. But other things are just left as unexplainable fate. For example, Morgon has three stars on his brow that early on turn out to be signs of his grand and dangerous destiny. But even by the end of the story we have no idea how the stars got there, or why it should be him and nobody else. I have a really, really hard time accepting this level of hand-wavy “it just is like that” predestination in a story.

Around the middle of book 2 I realized that this series was not for me, and speed-read it to the end just to find out how it ends and confirm my suspicions about some of the plot points. By the end I almost actively disliked the meandering, dragged-out story. Even the poetic prose and endless lyrical similes started to grate and feel quite overdone.

I was extra disappointed because I came to this book so ready to love it, after The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.


I have been on a reading binge, neglecting just about everything I can neglect without feeling really, really bad about it – including workouts, blogging and laundry.

I still like paper books – old dog, new tricks, all that – but I am gradually getting more comfortable with the Kindle reader. It no longer feels like second best. Binge reading, for example, is an area where the Kindle beats paper books hands down. I saw a book recommendation, downloaded a sample, and bought the book within an hour. When I finished that book and wanted more, a few taps got me the next one, and then the next one after that. No searching, no waiting for days for a delivery.

The Kindle also handles better with one hand, for example when I’m reading lying down and need the other hand to support my head. Or with no hands at all, when I balance the book on my thighs because my hands are busy knitting. Some books don’t deserve my full attention but I still want to finish them. Can’t do that with a paper book. (Am I still “handling” the book when no hands are involved?)


I read differently with the Kindle.

It’s harder to skim backwards and forwards. With a paper book I can easily flip back a few chapters to look up some detail. I can usually remember roughly how far back that part was – how many centimetres back in the book. With the Kindle I have much less context about where I am. The e-reader can show some metrics for this – how many percent I’ve read, for example. But I would never have an intuitive feeling for how many percent or pages I’d have to scroll backwards to get back to something I’ve already read. So I’m less likely to do so.

Recently I turned those percentages off, anyway, so that they wouldn’t constantly remind me how much I have left of the book. You can’t do that with a physical book. The constantly diminishing amount of pages to read is always visible and tangible.

I’m more likely to re-read a page with the Kindle. Sometimes when the action is exciting and I just want to see what happens next, I only skim parts of the page. With the Kindle, I am more likely to notice this and read the page one more time, more slowly and carefully, before flipping to the next page. There’s nothing stopping me from doing the same with a paper book, but it just doesn’t happen. I think it might be because the Kindle page is less dense and contains less text, so one page is just the right amount of text to re-read. Paper book pages are denser and have too much text – re-reading an entire page would be too much.


When I’m a week behind with my blogging, as I am right now, catching up looks hard and blogging becomes a slightly icky task. I want blogging to be fun rather than icky, so I’ll leave the gap for now and catch up later. You’ll have to check below this post to see if and when I succeed.

Plus I now have a whole virtual pile of books that I want to review. The binge was most enjoyable but it’s a good thing that I ran out of books because otherwise I’d never get anything else done.

The Steerswomen are repositories of knowledge. They wander the world, wherever their curiosity leads them, learning things and sharing their knowledge with everyone else. They are sworn to answer any question from anyone, and in return, everyone is expected to answer theirs. Whoever doesn’t is banned and no Steerswoman will ever answer their questions again.

Rowan, the titular Steerswoman, is curious about a particular kind of rare blue jewel. She traces the jewels back to a particular area, and notices similarities in where and how the jewels are found. But someone powerful seems to take a dislike to this line of exploration and tries to have Rowan killed, repeatedly. The story follows her investigations and explorations into what this all means.

I rather like the Steerswoman concept, and several other ideas in this book. I like the way the world gets uncovered – how small but astonishing differences between that world and ours come up in asides.

Although sometimes the asides are quite contrived. “Do you remember anything else about that ordinary, unmemorable event 15 years ago? – Oh yes, I remember looking up at the sky and noting the position of the Eastern Guidestar.” Admittedly Guidestars are important navigational fixtures in this world, but who remembers that kind of detail 15 years later?

It’s not a bad book, really, but not a particularly good one either. The plot is a straightforward mystery, and every new revelation is so gradual and slow that none of it feels surprising. Maybe it’s meant to make readers feel good about being ahead of the game? To me, it just made the book feel really slow.

And for a book so focused on knowledge and logic, this one has logical gaps in the plot that are just too big to ignore.

That banning thing, to begin with. It would work for more or less famous people, but how would the Steerswomen enforce their ban for ordinary folks? How would they identify the people, keep track of the bans and communicate them to each other? “Hey everyone, that brown-haired peasant guy in that village a hundred miles away is banned now.”

To take another example: a young boy in a small village discovers explosives (probably gunpowder) by trial and error, using no prior knowledge. Just happens to mix a few things together? That he just happens to find, with no need for processing or refining?

The characters are likeable but there is no depth to any of them. They all have predictable reactions to everything and make trivial observations. “Oh look, this boy no longer annoys me, now that I don’t lie to him all the time.”

There’s one exception, though, and that’s their reactions to people being violently hurt or killed. From all that happens, I don’t get the impression that this is a violent world, or the people particularly cruel or fatalistic. Quite the opposite. And yet Rowan has no problem letting her sidekick torture someone, while she herself just zones out and thinks about some maths problem. When that boy with his gunpowder blows up a fortress with hundreds of people, none of them seems concerned at all.

The writing isn’t anything special, either. Not bad, but bland.

I don’t understand all the great reviews this book has gotten. It’s part of a series, the mystery is nowhere near resolution by the end of this book, but I don’t care enough about it to read more of this.