Sword boy: Brienne v The Hound

Probably my single favourite one-on-one combat in the whole series, because it starts off as a decent sword fight between two masters of the form, and degenerates into two characters just beating the fuck out of each other until the most feral wins.

The best bit is when the Hound says he's not a knight, and Brienne's response is to immediately punch him in the balls, because she isn't either. But I can barely watch the part where the Hound grabs onto her sword with his bare hands. In all the gore of Game of Thrones, the sight and sound of his hands slicing apart is one of the very worst.

Sword boy: The Mountain v The Viper

How do you beat a huge giant who is also a total fucking psychopath? You keep your distance, and you keep moving, and you chip away at him until he comes down under his own weight.

And you don't get too overconfident, and too close to a fallen foe, and oh shit Oberyn, hope you didn't need that face.

Sword boy: Bronn v Ser Vardis

An episode after Ned and Jaime had their short, sharp exchange, you get this full-on duel between Bronn and poor Ser Vardis in the Eyrie, with the sellsword proving that smarts beats high-handed confidence every time and rising above his station to become one of the best characters in the whole show. 

Bronn's tactics aren't even that smart - he just wears the other man down until he can get in the mortal blow. He keeps moving, and does whatever it takes to get the upper hand, and Ser Vardis never stands a chance.

It would be easy to assume that Bronn proves that armour is a waste of fucking time, but later in the season, the old bear Jorah Mormont shows how you can properly use armour to your advantage when he uses it to take down a Dothraki fighter, so the lesson from this one is to adapt to your situation, and just take down a lofty bastard when you can.

Sword boy: Stark v Lannister

I've always fucking loved a good sword fight, whether it's Errol Flynn going completely apeshit in The Adventures of Robin Hood, or some of the spectacular light-sabre battles in the various Star Wars (The climactic Phantom Menace face-off is objectively the best), or Ash doing some crazy shit in the final battle of Army of Darkness.

But my favourite sword fights in the past decade were all on Game Of Thrones. It's become extremely fashionable to take a dump on all things Thrones in the past year - largely due to excruciating levels of audience entitlement that still fucking infuriate - but one of the great appeals of the show for me was always the fight choreography, which was often completely brilliant, right until the end.

So after a couple of weeks of taking a literary focus at the Tearoom of Despair, all I wanna do for the next week is highlight seven of my favourite sword fights from the show. They are all largely one-on-one affairs - none of the big battles really count - and while they are all beautifully choreographed, they all have something different to say about character or skill or thematic elements of the whole damn story. And I could watch all of them over and over again.

So let's start with one of the earliest efforts:



There had already been some swordplay in the first half of the first season, but this short, sharp exchange between two of the main characters set the standard for two blokes trying to hack each other up for swords. Even ignoring the long and strange history between the two characters - both had nothing but contempt for each other after the king-slaying - everything you need to know about them is there in the way they thrust, block and move around each other.

Ned is all brutish and to the point, with no fancy flourishes, while Jaime is nothing but fancy floruishes, and is genuinely delighted to finally have a crack at a Stark, and actually face a proper challenge for the first time in years.

It comes to a brutally early end with Ned getting stabbed in the leg from behind, but for a minute or two, Game of Thrones showed that sword fights were more than just action, and could contain multitudes that reams of dialogue could never deliver.

Isolation reading: Not only, but also

I've had to give the 'new novel at the start of the month' thing a miss this time because I wasn't able to get to the bookstore before they closed in the lockdown, but I've kept it up almost every other month. So as well as the 13 books I've highlighted in the past couple of weeks, here's another 13 I tried out, mentioned here for your own consideration:

The drive to read books outside my comfort zone mean I somehow ended up reading a number of books about slightly autistic women working in menial jobs, which is a whole new genre for me. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata might be the zenith of the form, because there isn't anything else to the story than this concept, but is still a breezy look at life through somebody else's eyes. And Halle Butler's The New Me looks like it's going to get extremely dark as eternal temp Millie pursues a hollow vision, only to pull back from the edge. But Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax proved to be the best of the bunch, partly because it had the added hook of a robot-drenched future, and partly because it also goes back a century in Japanese to tell a completely different kind of story. But mainly because it features a woman trapped in a foreign land as the outside world tears itself apart, and that just feels incredibly prescient right now.

So many of the books I browse past have a blurb that sounds overly familiar - a ridiculous amount of them start with a sudden death and the promise of hidden truths bursting out - and sometimes all it takes is a decent hook to get the attention. All it can take is something like Trinity by Louisa Hall, which has a number of stories revolving around the life of the man who built the first nuclear bomb, and how people in his orbit get absorbed his genius and obsession. Jac Jemc's The Grip Of It All is a straight-up haunted house story, which are always welcome, even if it eventually fizzles out into anti-climax. After Me Comes The Flood by Sarah Perry has the classic 'stranger shows up at a crumbling mansion inhabited by a weird old family', but is never quite gothic or decayed enough for my tastes. And the hook of Emily Ruskovich's Idaho is the simplest - a tiny action becomes a monstrous act of violence - but never offers any simple answers for what happened, even if it's obvious how the effects destroy the lives of the people involved.

And sometimes the novels I choose because they sound like the weirdest thing on the shelf, and I'm always down for that. Consent by Leo Benedictus gets as dark as the cover is white, and might only work as a reading experience if you know absolutely nothing about it going in. It does feature a character detached from society, and so does Katherine Kilalea's Ok, Mr Field, where a concert pianist slowly loses his mind in splendid isolation after impulsively buying a South African villa and shutting himself off from the world. In The Terrible, an autobiographical long-form poem by Yrsa Daley-Ward, the author does want to fit into the world far more than those others, but doesn't has an easy path to get there, and Daley-Ward's beautifully-written tale sings with truth and righteousness.

Finally, I did originally plan to read a lot more non-fiction as part of this new reading spree, but only read a few science and history books before switching to just novels, because novels are just more fun. But they were still hugely entertaining and informative - The Swerve by Stephan Greenblatt covers a lot of territory, from ancient philosophies to medieval monks digging those ideas up again, and it's all fascinating (if a little existentially troubling), while Brenna Hassett brought a deft human touch to the business of digging up ancient dead people in her Built on Bones. For a change of pace, the last non-fiction I tried was incredibly local - Scott Bainbridge's The Great New Zealand Robbery - which takes place on the streets I walk on every day (or at least did, until the Covid-19 lockdown kicked in last week), but is also set in a 1950s New Zealand which is barely recognisable as the same city today. The bit where a recent mayor showed up as the dodgy kid of a career crim was aces, though.

And that, apart from a few books I've loaned away over the months, is all the books I've been reading as part of my one-person book club. I'm looking forward to ramping it up again when we come out of the other side of this coronavirus crisis, because it's incredibly rewarding, intellectually stimulating, and a shit-tonne of fun. Highly recommended.

Isolation reading: Meddling Kids

Meddling Kids
By Edgar Cantero

This is another book that is, despite my best efforts, totally in my wheelhouse, because it's a post-modern examination of the Scooby Doo gang, wrapping them up in the slimy tentacles of a Lovercraftian horror. And that's exactly the kind of book I've enjoyed since I was 12 - a clever hook with the added emotional baggage of unearned nostalgia.

Luckily, Meddling Kids is also a hell of a lot of fun - it's genuinely funny, and also genuinely not afraid to really dig into the concept. It can also occasionally be quite brutal, and no-one is safe, not even vaguely anthropomorphic dogs.

Fortunately, Cantero doesn't just rely on that nostalgic kick to give his characters life, and they still come across as real people in an incredibly fucked-up situation. They might be total analogues, but you do want them to triumph, and eventually pull the rubber mask off to reveal the eldritch horror beneath.

Isolation reading: The Natural Way Of Things

The Natural Way Of Things
By Charlotte Wood

Any book with a cover that is overwhelmed with breathless quotes promising the ultimate in shock and horror is going to have a hard time living up to it, and to its credit, The Natural Way Of Things almost gets there.

It does get pretty hardcore, pretty fast, as a group of women find themselves being held prisoner on a remote camp in the Australian outback, where they are being punished for fucking with the patriarchy, with the patriarchy fucking back

All the different levels of misogyny that modern women face are all present and correct - there is the mindless thug, the male ally who turns out to a complete shithead, and a fellow female who subsists on hypocritical disgust.

But it's not really as shocking as those quotes make it out to be - anybody who is actually surprised by the day-to-day bullshit modern women suffer for just existing really haven't been paying attention, and the symbolic punishments the women go through are awfully familiar.

And yet, there is some hope, because some women don't bend, don't break, and don't let these arseholes get away with this crap. Beyond the shock and horror, there is a message of survival that is even a little uplifting as they fight their way through the constant institutional sexism that tries to beat them down.

Isolation reading: Ghost Wall

Ghost Wall
by Sarah Moss

When 17-year-old Silvie head off to the woods somewhere in Northumberland with her brutish father and a group of archeology students, everything starts sliding slowly into darkness, and there's only dread down there. This isn't going to end well.

Because when that father's obsession with folk history that slide slowly, inexorably into folk horror, Silvie can't get away. She can avoid the group's total Bronze-age diet by ducking out to the local supermarket with a sympathetic student, but she keeps getting dragged back to the camp, and almost becomes a willing sacrifice to some pagan need.

Moss' novel isn't long - it's barely 150 pages - but it has long and deep links to ancient history. Silvie's fate becomes more than a matter of minor mass hysteria, it's the continuation of a cultural nightmare that stretches back to the earliest days of Britain, one that is still hiding somewhere in the deep woods.

Whether Silvie will be able to wake up from that nightmare is the main tension throughout the slim story, but some nightmares can appear impossible to escape.

Isolation reading: Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl

Paul Takes The Form Of  A Mortal Girl
By Andrea Lawlor

Paul can shape-shift between man and woman, an Orlando in the 90s queer scene, always looking for a new thrill. But the shape-shifting twist doesn't define the story in Paul Takes The Form Of  A Mortal Girl at all, which is as undefinable as the main character's gender.

At first, Paul's just another disappointing fuckpig, just another dumb boy in his early twenties - possibly the most arrogant and dumb age for anybody - sizing up everybody and fucking his way through life, oblivious to the carnage left behind. He's the kind of guy that takes acid and spends four pages expounding on his grand theory of gay music as seen through gender-switched covers, which is just as irritating as it sounds.

But then the book shifts, and Paul tries to settle down as a working-class lesbian, and when rejected from that life, goes and becomes the absolute cliche of a gay man in San Francisco and takes that all the way, and even finds a reflection of himself (and he's always a he, even when he takes on a woman's form).

Paul's story really comes into its own with the gritty details of setting up a new life in a new city, and becomes a lot more identifiable as a stranger in a strange city, watching his meager savings quickly dry up, and it certainly works a lot better than the pieces of harmless fairy tale nonsense spread throughout the book (it's little surprise that Paul is a big fan of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic...)

The novel does try a bit hard, that music rant goes on too long, especially when somebody is listening to it in apparently genuine awe, and there is a bit towards the end when Paul spends more pages remembering all the mundane details of his life with a character who has just died after lurking in the background of his story, which doesn't pay off at all.

But the book also never overpays the gender-swap stuff. Paul uses it to delight friends and run away into new lives, but it never becomes a major plot point. He never uses it to pull off a heist or murder a rival or anything like that. It's the kind of restraint that Paul himself would probably sneer at, but a fuckpig would always think that.