Liz Bourke

@hawkwinglb

Ph.D Classics. Reviews @ Reactor Magazine (ex. Tor.com) and Locus Magazine. Ireland. Patreon: Wordpress: Mastodon:

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Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· 22d

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Jun 9

Anyone got a clue what kind of butterfly this is? @irishwildlifetrust.bsky.social? It is black with red wing stripes and two red spots at the end of each wing. It looks faintly like a racing flag. I cannot match it up.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Jun 3

Have you seen the latest fashion in vibrating scarves?

A black cat lying across the shoulder and chest of me, a white person wearing glasses.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· May 28

I have done my bank account grave harm in the Princeton University Press sale.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Apr 1

Working on getting that pullup. Still a long way off but my tricep pulldowns are getting better.

Picture of me, in sleeveless vest wearing black mask.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Mar 9

#tinyjoys Walked up the Great Sugarloaf today (elevation about 500m) on a walk that amounted to about 11km, carrying my four year old in a backpack sling for at least half of it. Gorgeous albeit damp when the cloud came down.

Me - a short haired breasted person - on the summit of the Great Sugar Loaf, clad all in blue and holding hiking poles. The summit is a small outcrop of grey rock. In the background green fields rise to blue-brown hills across the valley, under a sky full of clouds.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Mar 2

#tinyjoys Saturday's walk at Glendalough.

View of the upper lake at Glendalough, with a tree branch in the foreground and the lake narrowing to the waterfall over a hillside in the distance.

View of the waterfall above the stony path by the miners' village, a grey sky above brown bracken and stone.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Feb 23

#tinyjoys Ten (at least) vociferous sparrows in a tree.

Sparrows in a leafless bushy tree. At least ten of them.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Jan 16

Wanker blocked the whole footpath and part of the bike lane.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Jan 16

Can't fit it all: there's a picture. "So it is required; so we bear witness, Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us, Each distant sphere of harmony forever Poised, unanswerable. If it is without Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or If it is not, all echoes are the same In such eternity."

Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us—or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Nov 25

These are pictures of an experimental baked blueberry almond white chocolate cheesecake. I have no idea how it tastes - no eating until after dinner - but it looks about right.

From a different angle. Cheesecake topped with a handful of blueberries.

Homemade cheesecake! Same as the other pictures.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Oct 28

And here is the one book by an Irish author, Ruth Francis Long's The Lore of Silver, which I am looking forward to reading very much.

Image of a book, The Lore of Silver. The cover is blue with detailing in red, gold, and white.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Oct 28

Here are three from Tor Books (or, well, one is from Bramble): Hell's Heart, Stephanie Burgis's Enchanting the Fae Queen, and Rebecca Thorn's This Gilded Abyss.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Oct 28

Here are the definitely sapphic ones, Tasha Suri's amazing The Isle in the Silver Sea, Rebecca Thorne's This Gilded Abyss, and Alexis Hall's Hell's Heart.

The three books named in the post, stood upright.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Oct 28

Here are the ones from Orbit, looking really good: I can attest The Isle in the Silver Sea is amazing; The Book of Fallen Leaves is, I believe, a retelling of the Tale of the Heike, and Aicha concerns itself with Aisha Kandicha of Moroccan folklore.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Oct 28

Good morning. Let me show you some recently arrived review copies. I have put the definitely sapphic ones beside each other.

Two rows of books on a laminate wood floor. Top row, left to right: The Gilded Abyss, The Isle in the Silver Sea, Hell's Heart, We Dance Upon Demons, We Call Them Witches. Bottom row, left to right: The Book of Fallen Leaves, Enchanting the Fae Queen, Aicha, The Lore of Silver, Before We Collide.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Oct 9

My haul from Routledge's 20% off sale. Three of them have the texture of print-on-demand covers, which is always a bit odd, but I'm looking forward to reading them anyway. (Yes, I keep going head-first down the Read More Interesting Research warren.)

Picture of two books braced on an open laptop, from the Routledge Archaeologies of the Viking World series. Left, Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland. Right, A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain, by Tom Horne.

Picture of two more books from Routledge Archaeologies of the Viking World braced on an open laptop: Rebecca Boyd's Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes, and Viking Camps: Case Studies and Comparisons, edited by C. Hedenstierna-Jonson and I. García Losquino.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Sep 18

This is what the sky looks like today. The solar app says our array is still meeting more than 40% of our energy consumption from the sun ANYWAY.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Sep 16

The solar panel lads have come and installed the solar panels, and gone away again. It took them less than two days. Eir Solar: very easy to work with, very neat, very friendly. We're paying about €11.5K before the grant (€9.6 after) for a ten-panel array.

A very nice readout from my solar panels app, saying I have generated power (5.8kWh) from them already and consumed (3.2 kWh) less since it turned on than it generated.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Aug 22

Arrived today from @solarisbooks.bsky.social, for which many thanks: CRY VOIDBRINGER by Elaine Ho, which sounds fascinating, THE DOOR ON THE SEA, by Caskey Russell, which also sounds interesting, and THE SALT ORACLE by Lorraine Wilson, which sounds like fantasy university murder-mystery.

Two books with a third balanced on top. The top book is Elaine Ho's Cry, Voidbringer. The books acting as pillars are Caskey Russell's The Door on the Sea and Lorraine Wilson's The Salt Oracle.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Aug 20

Two books I'm really excited to read: Leszek Gardela's Women and Weapons in the Viking World, which I have wanted to read for several years, and Matthew D.C. Larsen & Mark Letteney's Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (which is open access currently I think, and which I heard about on here).

Image of Leszek Gardela's Women & Weapons in the Viking World: Amazons of the North, stood up in front of a stack of books on a desk (the books include Codes of the Underworld and Honeyeater)

A copy of Matthew D.C. Larsen & Mark Letteney's Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration, stood up in from of a stack of books on a desk beside Leszek Gardela's Women & Weapons in the Viking World. The Larsen & Letteney book is resting on top of Dick Davis's translated collection of Shirazi poets, Faces of Love.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Aug 12

On a beach with a child, throwing stones in streams.

Blue sea blue sky seagulls shingle stream.

A misty sea under a blue sky, foreground a stream and shingle. Seagulls in the water. Wrack.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Aug 6

So, you have heard of Canadian author Chinaza Bado's Birth of a Dynasty? This is page 15. O the next page the person who'd been stabbed through the heart was still talking. That's me out, then. harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk/products/bir...

BIRTH of a DYNASTY
13
they would be able to track him if he kept running. In the bush, hidden behind the roots of a half-fallen tree, he saw a small burrow of a hole and crawled inside just as the red soldiers broke through. Despite his distance, he could see it all, the six of them surrounding her like a pack of beasts.
"Now, what is a beautiful lady like you doing with such a sharp sword?" The one who asked laughed, and the other five just chuckled. "I can show you," she answered as she spun like a whirlwind before him, slitting his throat and then jumping back. The air shifted, feeling colder as the others stood in stunned silence before rage filled them, and all five charged her at once. But she did not stop, even as they cut into her, one by one. She reminded M'kuru of their father as she took one of their arms and dropped down, ripping through a soldier's stomach. But when she turned back around, one of them drove a sword through her heart, and M'kuru felt it in his. He felt his throat rumble and placed both hands over his mouth to swallow his screams, his horror, his rage but all of those things
broke through the dark of night anyway.
Only, it wasn't from him.
"Neema!" a voice echoed through the forest.
M'kuru could see just the hooves of the person's horse above as

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Aug 6

Two exciting "wolf" books arrived today: THE LAST SOUL AMONG WOLVES by @melissacaruso.bsky.social and @finnlongman.com's THE WOLF AND HIS KING.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Jul 31

Shiiiiiny.

Sky on Fire beside several other books: Idolfire, House of Dusk, House of the Beast, Red City, Rose/House, Bright Than Scale Swifter Than Flame, Fate's Bane, The Advocate, Daedalus is Dead.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Jun 16

Bloody hell, Derrida. Spectres of Marx, pp99-100: "The same media power accuses, produces, and amplifies *at the same time* this incompetence of traditional politicians: on the one hand, it takes away from them the legitimate power they held in the former political space..." (cont'd)

p99 of Derrida's Spectres of Marx: highlighted:
"What can no longer be measured is the leap that already distances us from those powers of the media that, in the 1920s, before television, were profoundly transforming the public space, dangerously weakening the authority and the representativity of elected officials and reducing the field of parliamentary discussions, deliberations, and decisions. One could even say that they were already putting in question electoral democracy and polit- ical representation such at least as we have known them up until now. If there is a tendency in all Western democracies no longer to respect the professional politician or even the party member as such, it is no longer only because of some personal insufficiency, some fault, or some incompetence, or because of some scandal that can now be more widely known, amplified, and in fact often produced, if not premeditated by the power of the media. Rather, it is because politicians become more and more, or even solely characters in the media's representation at the very moment when the transformation of the public space, precisely by the media, causes them to lose the essential part of the power and even of the competence they were granted before by the structures of parliamentary representation, by the party apparatuses that were linked to it, and so forth. However competent they may personally be, professional politicians who conform to the old model tend today to become structurally incompetent."

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Mar 31

And since I had my camera out, when Daniel M. Ford's Advocate and Necrobane came through the door, I took pictures of them too. His "Warden" series is fun fantasy adventure so far.

Two books by Daniel M. Ford, Advocate and Necrobane. The covers are reminiscent of the cover art for a fantasy RPG: there are three central humanoid figures on each, but they are active, busy, styled like an animated television show rather than naturalistically.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Mar 31

Arrived today, also care of the good people at Orbit UK, the paper editions of some my favourite romantic fantasy adventure novels from the last few years: @tkingfisher.com's Paladin's Grace, Paladin's Strength, Paladin's Hope, and Paladin's Faith. If you haven't read these books, GO GET 'EM.

Four books, two up two down, on a laminate wood floor. They're T. Kingfisher's Paladin's Grace, Paladin's Strength, Paladin's Hope, and Paladin's Faith. The covers are old-fashioned fantasy or romance cover-paintings in style (art by Anna Moshak), set in a plain single-colour frame containing the title above and the author's name below. The frame is decorated with vines and small images related to the contents of the book. The capital P of each title is styled like the P of an illuminated manuscript.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Mar 31

Between the good people @torbooks.bsky.social and the good people at Orbit UK (hey @gambit589.bsky.social!) I have two ARCs of The Incandescent, Emily Tesh's stunning next book. The covers definitely share a theme, but they're strikingly different in their colour schemes.

Two books facing out on a bookshelf. US edition for Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, left: black background, orange-gold line drawing (etching style) of a mythological bird dominating, line drawing of astrological chart (?) behind. Title and author's name in white text (Hugo Award winning author Emily Tesh). UK edition of same book right: intense pink background, title in yellow text, author's name in white (Sunday Times bestselling author EMILY TESH), black ink-painting style image of a mythological bird dominating, yellow line drawing of symbol very like the so-called "Great Pentacle" from Bodleian Aubrey MS. 24, or a variant of John Dee's Sigillum Dei.

Liz Bourke@hawkwinglb· Mar 24

Through the door today, Sarah E Bond's Strike: Labor, Unions and Resistance in the Roman Empire. I'm looking forward to reading the arguments.