Somehow I was under the impression that I didn't do much travelling in December. Making this video reminded me that I went to London twice as well as Harwell and then Norfolk for Christmas. I didn't fly, but I certainly spent a lot of time on trains and in the car.

The full year video reminded me that I flew to new places for conferences: Hamburg (Germany), Nicosia (Cyprus) and Larnaka (Cyprus). I visited my parents in the USA. I went to Paris (France), Darmstadt (Germany), and Frascati (Italy) for workshops. We travelled as family by train across Western Europe to go to a conference in Vienna (Austria). We holidayed in Wales and Norfolk. I went to Maui (USA) for a conference. It was an incredibly busy year.

( Full year - 12 min 30 sec )

De vuurwerk-traditie die ik ken is dat je naar buiten gaat even na middernacht, nadat je iedereen binnen een gelukkig nieuwjaar hebt gewenst. Daar wissel je gelukwensen uit met de buren, misschien schenk je de buurvrouw nog eens in uit de champagne-fles die je net hebt open gemaakt. En dan zet je drie bierflesjes met een laag water onderin op de stoep en dan ging je vuurpijlen afschieten uit het pakket dat je samen met je vader die middag bij de fietsenmaker had gekocht. (Zijn oudste dochter zit bij jouw zus in de klas, ze kennen jullie, dus hun wens je ook alvast een gelukkig nieuwjaar.)

Dat afschieten ging voorzichtig, met een sigaret die je van je vader kreeg bij wijze van lont. (Als je oudste nichtje er ook is, dan neemt die stiekem een paar trekjes tussen de bedrijven door.) Pijl neerzetten, lont buiten de flessehals. Zorgen dat er niemand in de buurt is. Dan de lont aansteken en zelf een paar passen achteruit gaan. Dan ging de pijl omhoog en dan volgde een knal en een kleurige vonkenregen.

Dat deed je dan een half uurtje. Soms waren er ook wat van die ‘potjes’, maar die mocht je pas aansteken als je wat ouder was. En dan was het op, en dan ging iedereen weer naar binnen. Soms was er nog een huis op het pleintje waar ze wat meer uitgegeven hadden en die gingen dan langer door met vuurwerk afsteken, maar dat vond je eigenlijk maar een beetje sneu voor ze: iedereen was al naar binnen.

Voor mensen met huisdieren was ook dat niet gezellig. Bij een vriendje die aan de overkant van het pleintje woonde, hadden ze zo’n grote Deense dog. Die zetten ze in de keuken, die aan de achterkant van het huis was, maar alsnog raakte het arme dier in paniek. Elk jaar vernielde hij de keukendeur in dat halve uurtje, best zielig.

Dat is de vuurwerktraditie die ik ken, en alhoewel dat niet perfect was, was dat nog te doen. Voorzichtig met vuurwerk, een leuk pakketje er doorheen draaien in een half uurtje, en dat was het dan. Maar dat is niet wat er deze dagen gebeurd in het land. Steeds meer en steeds zwaarder vuurwerk, hulpverleners die met vuurwerk bekogeld worden, al dagen van te voren zwaar geknal.

Dat is niet die gezellige vuurwerktraditie, het is gewoon niet meer te handhaven. Als je al weken van te voren hoort dat hulpverleners en handhaving zich schrap zetten, dan is er echt iets aan de hand. En ik verwacht niet dat volgend jaar er niet geknald wordt, er zullen vast types zijn die zich er niks van aantrekken. Maar het gaat om het principe: weet je nog dat het volkomen normaal was dat er in restaurants werd gerookt? Maar dat doet niemand meer, de cultuur is gewoon veranderd. En ik verwacht dat dat ook gaat gebeuren met vuurwerk: mensen die per se vuurwerk willen afsteken zullen gezien gaan worden als sneue types, met hun zinloze rebellie.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

I’ve written about picking up reading again before. With the end of the year, it’s time to look at the stats page and reflect on my reading.

I read 40 books with a page total of 17.551 pages. I have been reading a lot, and not doing a lot of other things I could have done. I might tone it down a bit next year, I also have a writing project that I want to kick off. Let’s take a look at some of the other stats:



I’ve been relatively consistent in reading, and the number of pages per book is largely the same across books, because the two lines largely overlap. In January I read the four thinner books of the “Tale of Shikanoko” series, so there the pages line is below the books line. And in December I finished the Dragonlance Chronicles Collector’s Edition, which collects the three books in one volume, so there the number of pages is over the books like. But other than that, the number of pages per book is pretty consistent. I think that’s an interesting average.



I get a lot of my books from the local library, which has a good selection: those are all the print books. But there are also ebooks that I loan through the ‘online library’ and get from elsewhere. I prefer print books for relaxed reading, but my little tablet with a ebook on it is easier to take with me when traveling. And if the print book is not available in the library, I get the digital release — our bookcases are filled to capacity already, and I don’t feel often that I have to own books anymore. Certainly there would not have been space for these 40 books!



The print books I get from the library are in Dutch, ebooks are usually English. So it’s not a big surprise that the language distribution largely mirrors the print versus digital distribution.



Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels add up to 7 books, and I read her historical/fantasy novel The Familiar after that, so she comes at 8 books read this year. The Glass Throne series is also 7 books, but I’m not reading anything from Maas after that, so she is stuck at 7 books. Lian Hearn wrote the “Tale of Shikanoko”, so I technically read 4 books by her, but they’re thin books so it’s kinda cheating… I am 3 books into T. Kingfisher’s Paladin series, which is very enjoyable, and I will be sure to read the fourth as well.



I have a lucky draw for deciding what to read: my average rating is 3.53 with 4 stars being the largest number of ratings, so I tend to enjoy the things I read. 5 books (so 1 in 8) got a five star rating from me. The first I gave was my review for Six of Crows, it is so adventurous and had the perfect pacing. The second was my review of Ruin & Rising, also by Leigh Bardugo — this is the third and final book of the Shadow & Bone trilogy which actually precedes Six of Crows, but that’s not the order in which I read them. It’s such a satisfying end to a grand adventure!

The third is my review for Project Hail Mary. Pure semi-hard SF, really interesting how captivating a story set in a confined environment can be! Fourth was my review of Dungeon-Crawler Carl which is as wacky as it sounds, but with very serious undertones. And the fifth is for a book I finished yesterday, my review of The Fifth Season. That book just has everything I love about fantasy.

I set out to read mostly Young Adult fantasy, and while 10 books (so 25%) are tagged with ‘Young Adult’, the conclusion must be that 75% of what I read was not YA. And the majority of my 5 star ratings are also OA books — I guess my taste is for more mature stories. But the ratings for the books tagged YA are towards the higher end of the spectrum, so I do enjoy reading them. My to-read pile is 79 books now, so there’s plenty to choose from. And it’s fun to breeze through a book and enjoy the perspective of a younger protagonist. And 34 books (so a full 85%) are tagged as fantasy, so at least I am reading lots of fantasy as was my intention.

I do not set goals for myself — reading is a hobby, not a competition for me. That being said, I did join the StoryGraph’s January Pages challenge to read at least one page each day, just to see what it is like to have a goal like that.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

"[Surrealism is] the belief that nothing is ordinary; that everything in life is extraordinary. And being old is no more, no less, extraordinary than being young." - Leonora Carrington (Surreal Spaces)

I have always liked reading fantasy, from a young age. Maybe it started when I got the Dutch edition of Tanith Lee’s The Dragon Hoard? (Which is hilarious, by the way. If you have a young child in your life, this makes for a great book to read together.) I read a lot of the SF and Fantasy in the local library, especially as a teenager.

My parents put me in the “homework club” at secondary school. My grades were not good, because I was too lazy to really do any homework at home. The homework club convened every day (except the Friday I think) after school hours, and you’d sit there for two hours to do your homework. You were not allowed to leave before the end time, but if you had nothing left to study, you could read a book. I’m sure the intention was for the students to read books for their literature lists, but in the end we could just read whatever we wanted.

One of the boys at the homework club was reading something that was obviously fantasy, because it was titled “Dragonlance”. I think it was “War of the Twins”? Of course I was interested and I asked him about it afterwards. He described tabletop roleplaying games to me (which I thought was very strange and abstract) and how the books were like a description of what happened in the game. (Modern RPGs call this “the fiction”, which, in the case of Dragonlance, it literally is.) We got to talking about fantasy books and became friends in the easy way that boys can decide someone is a friend if they share an interest. Some time later, just before the autumn break, he told me that he was going to host a group to play these mysterious games at his house and that I should come too.

So I went there on the first day of the break (I think it took me two hours by bicycle to get there, he lived in a village at the other end of the city!) and I played my first tabletop RPG. So basically the Dragonlance books are responsible for getting me into RPGs — which they were designed to do, to get more people interested in Dungeons & Dragons. Except that we didn’t play D&D but Rolemaster, and it would take me another six years to play D&D in earnest. And I never read those Dragonlance books either, because I moved completely outside of the D&D “ecosystem”.

So when I came across the Collector’s Edition of the Dragonlance Chronicles, which are the first three novels to be released in the setting, I thought it would be interesting to finally read them. And it’s indeed interesting — but it’s not good fantasy. Be aware that the following will contain spoilers.

As I understand it, the books were written to sell more D&D by showing what kind of adventures you could have when playing D&D. And it is indeed a rather faithful recreation of the fiction that is created by playing D&D, if you squint you can see the rules systems operate just under the surface. That in itself is not bad, but it is also a faithful recreation of the kinds of adventures you’d have in an “epic” campaign played out by teenaged boys. It really has it all. The “you all meet in a bar…” beginning. The janky inconsistencies in background events because nobody remembered clearly what happened last session. The plot immunity, because as a GM you don’t want to kill off your PCs too easily so you have to insulate them from the worst combat results. There are all-powerful “GM NPCs” where a GM just wanted to play a cool guy (or gal) and basically used this NPC to overshadow the PCs.

The first novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, was written in 1984, well into the second feminist wave. But the way women are written and their relationships with the male characters is… not good. The romance (if you can even call it a romance) between Riverwind and Silvermoon make me wonder if the writers ever met two people who were in love. And for some reason they find it very important to let the reader know that all of the women are virgins. There may be a bit of fooling around, but obviously there is no sex before marriage! The single exception is Kitiara, who, to nobody’s surprise, turns up as an “evil” enemy commander. Much is made of how she takes men to her bed, and it takes only one night to turn a “good” character to her evil side. The message is obviously that sex does bad things to people!

There’s some sexual violence casually mentioned too. Some of it is in the past and not really dwelt upon (Tanis’ origin story), some of it is passed off as “just the way things are” (Tika having to deal with drunks pawing at her) and one bona fide attempt at rape that thankfully doesn’t get anywhere (when Laurana gets kidnapped). Yes, the 80’s was a different time etc, but it sure left a bad taste in my mouth.

D&D has a bad case of biological essentialism: all kender are child-like in demeanor, all dwarves are grumpy, etc. That is reflected in these books as well: Tanis is a half-elf, which means he is some kind of diplomat because he straddles two “races”, making him the leader of the group of course. And we only really see a single dwarf, and he’s grumpy… On one hand you know what to expect, on the other hand it makes the non-human characters a bit predictable and as the story progresses a bit tiresome.

The characters are supposed to be good friends, but they spend an awful lot of time full of mistrust of each other, very angry or outright fighting. Maybe this is also modeled on how teenage boys form friend groups? Raistlin deserves a special mention — we’ve all played in a campaign with an asshole who played an asshole character under the guise of “that’s what my character would do!”

The trilogy compares itself to the Lord of the Rings: the back flap even has a quote from Dragon Magazine, which names it “…a trilogy that should at last satisfy the old demands for ‘something to read after the Ring books.'” They don’t name the books by name, perhaps because TSR (the publisher of both D&D and these novels) had been sued by the Tolkien estate 7 years earlier for using names from Tolkien’s works and they tread more carefully after that. And of course Dragon Magazine is full of praise for the trilogy, because that was published by TSR too!

But that’s where any comparison has to end. Tolkien’s works are epic in the classic sense: there is a rich world with a rich history, some of which we get a short peek at. Things are going on just out of sight and the characters make a plan on how to achieve their goals in the middle of that. In these novels, by contrast, everything is just a set piece that is there, waiting idly for the characters to arrive. At no point did I have the feeling that there was a world off-screen (if you can call it that for a book) that was believable and in motion. It’s all so… pedestrian.

The scale certainly is meant to be epic: a world-spanning war with the evil side using dragons! And the first dragon we meet is terrifying! But soon, they’re relegated to being merely flying mounts with teeth and an attitude, and the whole thing feels cheapened. It’s like “oh, yeah, the dragons are also around somewhere…” and I feel that if you call your novel cycle “Dragonlance” there should be more dragons and more lances in it than this cycle has. We only see a dragonrider using a lance against another dragon, and it’s turned into some kind of slapstick with a kender and a dwarf crawling all over their dragon mount…

And yes, there are “funny” moments in there as well, whole scenes turned into some kind of slapstick. That certainly doesn’t help with setting an “epic” mood! Another gripe is how whole episodes are just skipped. “Oh, when we re-join our heroes they went to the ice wall and retrieve a piece of a dragonlance from a dragonrider encased in ice, and are now on their way back.” I mean, how is that not a big part of the story!?

Is it all bad? I mean, it’s not good, but I did read the whole thing and gave it 2 stars. Because it is interesting. You want to know what happens next, how the story develops, what new set piece is next. I did not read the whole thing through in one go — I had to read a little ‘palate cleanser’ in between the second and third book because it was getting to be a bit much. But if you frame it as pulpy fantasy aimed at teenaged boys, then it’s enough to keep your attention. That being said, I will not seek out any of the other books in the Dragonlance setting. Once was enough for me.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.