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.

I valued my creature comforts too much to go to the photo meetup yesterday, but I made up for it today. One of the most valuable parts of a meetup is that someone has scouted out a great location – and I don’t need to be there on the day in order to use that! So I just drove to the same place today on my own.

Stendörren turned out to be a popular and much-photographed nature reserve right on the sea coast. A very civilized kind of nature reserve, with amenities everywhere – from bridges and walkways to loos and benches and picnic tables. The bridges and walkways are one of the main draws of this place: they take you to small islets just off the mainland, so you can get that archipelago experience without a boat.

Adrian would have liked this place, I think. It’s the kind of place where walking feels more like exploring. Any time you turn a corner, there’s something new. Even the largest islets are so small you can circle them in half an hour.

Off the rocky coast in one spot I found a whole bunch of jellyfish of all sizes. The smallest would have fit in the palm of my hand; the largest ones were like dinner plates.

They were hard to photograph – the water was anything but clear, and a wobbly, semi-transparent jellyfish is hard to focus on.


The forest was full of large mushrooms, especially some kind of boletus-like ones. The largest ones were often lying in pieces – I guess their size and shape invites kicks. But I also found this lovely family of fly amanitas. With actual flies on them (in the last photo)!

In Soviet Estonia, you didn’t go to the supermarket and come home with fresh fruit and berries. You could buy fruit and berries in the market, when they were in season. But mostly you got them in your grandmother’s garden. Everybody had grandmothers, and all grandmothers had gardens with fruit trees and berry bushes. Because even in Soviet Estonia people wanted fruit, and that was about the only way to get any.

Fresh fruit doesn’t keep all year, so most of it was preserved as jams and squashes, or in syrup.

Jam was for everyday use. On bread, porridge and pancakes; stirred into water to make a drink; in crumbles and cakes. Fruit in syrup was dessert. Raspberries in syrup (vaarikakompott) were my favourite.

During berry season, I think my mother and grandmother were nearly always either picking fruit, cleaning fruit, or cooking it into jam. There were often jam jars cooling in the kitchen of grandma’s cottage.

Most of my childhood’s jams were made of fruits that Swedes know about, even if they don’t grow them much. Quince jam is an exception; I don’t think most people here know that quinces exist or that the fruit are edible. Aronia berries are another oddity. They’re tart and astringent when raw, just like quinces, and sloe for that matter. But they make a great squash, and aronia and apple jam is lovely.

Jam was stored in glass jars. There were no preservatives available (apart from sugar) so it was important to thoroughly sterilize the jars and lids, and then close them so they were airtight.

The simplest kind of lids were made of blue rubber. I’m no expert but I don’t think those were very good.

There were glass lids that had to be fastened with a special kind of clamp. You put the clamp across the lid, and then you twisted the clamp so that its ends gripped the lid to the jar. There were ridges on the lid that pushed the clamp tighter the more you twisted it.

Later a third, fancier kind of lid became available – single-use metal lids. A special tool was used to tighten those. This kind of lid is still used, apparently. I’ve never seen them in Sweden, but googling in Estonian brought up stores that sell them.

I have no photos of any of these things. But I found this photo of raspberries in syrup, made in Estonia, with the right kind of lids on the jars. Click to visit the original Estonian blog post.

I did not go to the photo meetup. Too unappealing.

Instead I picked the Japanese quince bush clean from all fruit. There was more than ever on the largest of the three bushes; some branches were chock-full. The others barely had any. I guess they are still young.

Not that we need much more quince than the 4 litres I picked! I spent two hours chopping and de-seeding and cleaning them. They’re small, and hard. And there are so. Many. Seeds. Everywhere. I actually gave up before I’d cleaned all the fruit and threw the smallest ones away.

Eric will be turning some of the fruit into marmalade. I love quince marmalade – it has been my favourite since I was a child (along with cherry jam).

The rest I asked him to candy. I bought some candied quince at the airport in Riga some years ago and both Adrian and I swooned over them until we ran out. Hopefully now we can recreate that treat.

I had been planning on attending a nature photo meet tomorrow morning. The gear is packed, the camera is charged, the breakfast is prepared.

Now that I’ve seen the weather forecast, I’m not so sure I want to any more. I can handle rain but in these amounts I definitely don’t enjoy it. And it’s an hour and a half to drive there in good weather, and the same back of course. Do I want to get up at 6:30 on a Saturday to spend 3+ hours driving in order to get soaking wet? Hmm.

Met some colleagues for banh mi and pétanque. It was nice to see some people.

Four teams met each other, two and two, and then swapped. Our team won the first round and was then annihilated in the second one, 13 to 1.

I cycled there and back. An hour each way – a good workout. I like cycling fast enough to work up a sweat, so I turned up in sporty trousers and a tank top. Thought I might feel underdressed, but with all the dust from the gravel, and the wiping of hands, the others in their somewhat dressier black trousers were soon looking far grimier than me.

Sometimes a day goes by and fades into evening and I realize I haven’t done a single photo-worthy thing. I have sat at my desk, behind my computer. I have worked out (yes!) and read a bit of the Economist while eating lunch. I have cooked and eaten dinner. That’s it.

In the evening it is dark outside and I cannot take photos of anything in the garden. It is dark inside as well, and the rest of the family are all sitting in their dim corners of the house.

Occasionally this is enough to give me a gentle kick and make me do something physical that I can take a photo of. Which is backwards in a way – doing things just so I get a photo – but since these are things that I’ve been wanting to do anyway and simply procrastinating about, it’s not so backwards after all. The photo is just an odd kind of motivational carrot.

So this evening I darned a hole in a sock that has been waiting for my attention for a week or so.

It is sock darning season, because it is sock wearing season. The house usually starts getting cold enough for socks in the middle of the day around mid-September.

This fresh darning looks crisp and smart compared to the ones I did half a year ago. Almost too crisp, in fact: it doesn’t blend in. The older ones have become slightly felted by wear (even though the darning yarn is a wool mix rather than pure wool) and look a lot more cosy and natural.

It’s nearly always the spot under the big toe that wears out first on my indoor socks.

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.

The hydrangeas are going purple all over now – not just the flowers but the leaves as well. It looks quite cool. I’m not sure if they’re normally supposed to do that, but they look healthy otherwise so I assume all is well.

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.