Week 189: Dark Water
We had a very relaxing week in Türkiye, I spent most of it doing absolutely nothing except reading by the pool, occasional swims, and making use of the swim-up bar. It was 32–47℃ nearly the whole time which is just too hot to do anything else. I managed not to burn 👍
I did manage to injure myself in the process of stealing extra towel cards – a resource you can never have too much of. Instant karma got me and I spent a lot of the week with some nasty rib pain and popping painkillers.
I swam quite far out of my depth in the sea which I was quite proud of, not being a very confident swimmer and being scared of deep water 😅
Towards the end of the week, we went to Land of Legends which was a lot of fun. The Hyper Coaster there holds the world record for the largest rollercoaster loop, very fun, and the Turtle Coaster is one of the world’s longest water slides. The air was so hot that it felt like you were being attacked by an army of hairdryers.
I’ve read a lot in the last two weeks, particularly while we were away. I reached my target for the year and treated myself to a Kindle which I’m already in love with.
I finished Ubik which gets weird but it was good; not my favourite Philip K. Dick but short and worth a read.
I read Early Riser and loved it. Jasper Fforde is great at building a world over a long series and it was nice to get one just as rich in a single book. Early Riser is set in a world where humans hibernate over the winter and follows some of the few who don’t bed down.
Then I picked up How to Stop Time by Matt Haig, which might be my favourite book so far this year. The protagonist is a man who ages far slower than regular humans and it explores his life over centuries, it’s gripping and a little heartbreaking.
I then carried on with my Jasper Fforde catch-up with The Constant Rabbit, I enjoyed it but it didn’t grab my imagination in quite the same way as Early Riser. It’s got a nice but blatant anti-fascist message and is quite funny.
The Prestige (now a major motion picture) was way better than I expected tbh, it follows a feud between two 19th-century stage illusionists from the perspective of their modern relatives reading diary entries.
Finally, just before sitting down to write this, I spent the day finishing The Devil and the Dark Water. It’s more of a straight mystery than The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (also by Stuart Turton). I really loved some of the characters and the setting, mostly onboard a Dutch East India Company ship, was both interesting and educational.
We’re back home now. The lads seemed to enjoy spending the week with Gallal and we got lots of cute pictures of them being friendly with him. They’ve been extra sweet today ❤️
