✎ What's capturing your stray attention?
A subscriber thread
Hello,
So as you know, I’ve been doing lots of lovely, mind-drifiting things like jigsaws and embroidery at the moment. I think this is because I’m very focused on writing my book, and I need these stretches of not-thinking in between.
I’ve been doing some bingey reading - the complete works of Marion Milner (aka Joanna Field), after she was mentioned by Freya Rohn in her guest post the other week; the complete works of Chinua Achebe is coming next.
I’ve also just read a proof of Sarah Moss’s memoir, My Good Bright Wolf, and it’s stunning - look out for that in August; and a delightful proof of a graphic memoir (I mean graphic as in comic books, rather than ‘graphic content’) called This Beautiful, Ridiculous City by Kay Sohini. It’s gorgeous exploration of New York through a personal and literary lens - and it arrived at just the right time, as I’m heading for NYC next week! You’ll all have to wait until January, unfortunately.
So, over to you - what’s been capturing your stray attention lately? Tell me what you’re reading, watching, listening to, experiencing… I am, of course, dying to hear your take on the Olympics Opening Ceremony!
Take care,
Katherine
I thought the French opening ceremony was extremely weird and I am very glad of it. France understood the assignment and they interpreted it extremely Frenchly, and they delivered it in the worst rain I've ever seen in anything Olympical, which is extremely impressive. Using the whole of riverside Paris as the stage was extremely ambitious, and I could feel myself starting to pick holes in bits of it without realising the reality of how difficult it must be to set up cameras and move them around etc. - so, the fact they pulled THAT off (in THAT rain) is so impressive too.
You've reminded me that a copy of Things Fall Apart has sat on my bookcase for over a year and all I've done is look at the spine of it. Time I did more.
My stray attention has been captured by Ursula Le Guin. I've been a fan for decades but I've still read a lot less than half her output - which is truly daft, since she's the fantasy/scifi author whose work has spoken to me the deepest, especially with her fascination with what gets misnamed "ordinary life", the little profound moments that patchwork up our days. Now I'm finally finishing her Earthsea cycle I'm ready for everything else she wrote, including her less well-known novels, her essay collections, her lectures, her rants and her asides. It's a project that will take me years, and I'm ready to begin.
Also, I've racked up over an hour on this side by side map viewer from the National Library of Scotland, which can show you what anywhere in the UK looked like a century ago: https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/ Absurdly addictive. (Hat-tip Alastair Humphreys.)
I thought the opening ceremony was a delightfully quirky and outstanding production. Celine Dion's performance had me welling up, considering how much it must have taken her to perform. At the end, I felt a kind of solidarity with others that I haven't felt in a long time. I appreciated the speech about athletes supporting each other even when competing against each other.
My family has been doing a deep dive into Harry Belafonte's music. It's been great fun and easy listening.
Where I live has had unusually generous weather compared to the last few years so I've taken advantage of hiking more instead of being in my usual reverse hibernation during summer. It's been lovely to hike in the prairies when the wildflowers are blooming.