I loved it when I read it.. and was deeply horrified with the coolie exploitation in South America, I had not learned about that before then.
Oh boy… I need to put my nose to the grindstone and my hand on the antacids and get reading!
Finished both, and really liked 'em. The novel is a real page-turner with a satisfying ending. The memoir is very interesting and funny.
I’m now about two-thirds of the way through Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford, an alternative-history detective story in which the Cahokia culture endured into the 1920s and was strong enough to resist the westward tide of Manifest Destiny for decades before becoming part of the United States. The lead character is a Native American police detective who investigates a ritualistic murder and comes to realize it has an important political dimension. There’s police corruption, Prohibition, the Klan, labor unrest, overbearing Feds and, of course, jazz. It’s not bad.
Finished Things That Are Funny on a Submarine–But Not Really, by Yannick Murphy; and When Animals Rescue: Amazing True Stories about Heroic and Helpful Creatures, by Belinda Recio. I thought they were both excellent.
Next up: SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build, by Jonathan Waldman; and Just Like Always, by Elizabeth-Ann Sachs.
Finished SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build, by Jonathan Waldman, which was excellent. (The parts about bricklayers were more interesting than the stuff about the robot, though, in my opinion.) Also finished Just Like Always, by Elizabeth-Ann Sachs. Not recommended.
Next up: The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Sidney Poitier; and Wall, Stone, Craft by Walter Jon Williams.
I finished Trad Wife…eh. The writing was okay. I might try the author again if she put out a story that piqued my interest.
I started today on Redwall by Brian Jacques, a children’s book about a war between good mice and evil rats. I like children’s books, and a friend recommended this one, but truthfully I’m bored stiff. I’ll choke it down and try to say something nice about it.
I read Mossflower, the prequel, and was pretty much bored stiff as well.
Nuts. I was hoping it might improve.
I finished Ken Follett’s Circle of Days, about the construction of Syonehenge. As with most such books – Follett’s own Pillars of the Earth (about building a medieval cathedral) or L. Sprague de Camp’s The Bronze God of Rhodes (about the building of the cOlossus of Rhodes) or Harry Harrison’s Stonehenge, the bulk of the book is about the circumstances and people involved in the construction, and explaining where they acquired the needed skills and (more important) why they should go to all this effort to build a monumental structure. The actual building of Stonehenge only occupies part of the last 200 pages in an almost 700 page book.
He comes up with believable people and a plausible story. The language they use seems far too refined for Neolithic people, but it’s much better than having them inarticulate grunters. Definitely a good and surprisingly quick read.
Not sure what’s next. On audio I’m re-reading Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthr’s Court. My bedside reading is The Penguin Book of Mermaids
Oh – I had to add this. I suspect Follett of commenting on modern politics in this book. The name of the Big Bad Guy bully, who’s insecure and trying desperately to cling to power, has five letters and the first two are “Tr..”
Depends on how you feel about endless descriptions of food and feasts…
Finished it. Pretty good, and reminded me a lot of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, as a police procedural set in a quirky but highly-detailed parallel universe.
I’ve now started Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro, a collection of short stories. I know several hardcore readers who love Munro and thought I’d give her a try. I’m on the first story now, with the same title as the book, and am enjoying it so far.
Redwall ditched! I don’t have enough reading time to waste on this crap.
Started today on Spoiled Milk, by Avery Curran. Girls at a boarding school hold a séance in hopes of solving a murder. Oh yeah! I’m much happier now.
Finished Murder at King’s Crossing, the last of Andrea Penrose’s eight (so far) ‘Wrexford and Sloane’ Regency mysteries, and started Cahokia Jazz, a noir mystery set in an alternate 1920s MidWest. Only a dozen or so pages left in When America First Met China, after which I’ll start rereading Black Chamber, the first in a series of alternate-history secret-agent type stories by S M Stirling.
I finished listening to The Payback by Kashana Cauley. A quite quirky novel that was entertaining to read. The narrator is a 30-something Black woman, who, along with her two colleagues, is working in a Southern California mall clothing store. All 3 of them are working there because of career failures and they need the job to pay off their massive student loans. But when they all fall behind on their payments and are physically assaulted by the turquoise-clad ‘student-debt cops’, they decide to take matters into their own hands. The results are, well, unexpected.
Not sure what’s next on my reading list, but it now appears that Libby is using some AI magic to suggest a new read for me.
Finished The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Sidney Poitier; and Wall, Stone, Craft by Walter Jon Williams, both of which were okay.
Next up: Dinosaurs, by Walter Jon Williams, and Clay: A Human History, by Jennifer Lucy Allan.
Started listening to The Locked Ward by Sarah Pekkanen. An hour in, and it’s shaping up to be a good psychological murder mystery.
I started Starling House by Alix E. Harrow, last week. It wasn’t really grabbing me at first but I picked it up again today and am fully enmeshed in it’s web. (I’ve been sick the last 5 days and haven’t read much).
For regular reading, I’ve gone back to the Loeb Classics edition of Julian Volume III. This is the one that contains Against the Galileans, which is the reason I bought it. I’ve already read that part, and am going trough the surprisingly large number of letters.
Against the Galileans (362-3 CE) , I’m surprised to learn, wouldn’t have survived centuries of Christian antipathy (these manuscripts were, after all, copied by monks), were it not for the fact that someone had written a detailed response to Julian, and had quoted practically the whole thing. So we can recover it. Something similar happened in the case of the anti-Christian writer Celsus, whose attack on Christianity The True Word (circa 170 CE) has not survived, but a reply to it was written by Chirch Father Origen, Contra Celsum (circa 250 CE) , and we can reconstruct Celsus’ arguments from Origen’s response. The major difference seems to be that Origen didn’t quote Celsus at length.
The source for most of Julian’s Against the Galileans is Contra Julianum (434-441 CE) by Cyril of Alexandria, which hasn’t survived in its entirety, so we’re missing a lot of Cyril and a lot of Julian.
All of that is understandable. What amazes me is that we have so much other stuff from Julian – mostly speeches and letters to people (often not otherwise known). Presumably this survived because monks copied and recopied it – but why? It’s as if someone went into Julian’s fliling cabinet (or whatever Roman emperors had that served in place of one), pulled out all the manila folders of correspondence from one drawer, and that’s what the monks copied, ignoring the rest. I mean – it’s useful (every little bit of history helps)l, because it tells us of the workings of the Empire in those days, and who the people were and what they thought – but why save these randoms bits of ephemera and recopy them over the centuries? Interesting stuff, though. It’s like listening in on the office switchboard from the fourth century.
I wasn’t really looking forward to Spoiled Milk, because I didn’t like the cover art. However, it turned out to be a very nice little horror novel, and it hardly mattered that the ending left some unanswered questions. I enjoyed it and hope the author is going to give us more.
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global Laura Spinney
The story of the Proto Indo European (PIE) language, spoken 5000 years ago on the steppes of Eastern Europe*, which diverged into various language families that are spoken by half the people in the world. The book shows how linguistics, genetics, and archaeology together enable us to piece together ancient movements of people and something of their social habits and attitudes.
Interesting and well-written book.
*There is some dispute about this, with some experts putting the PIE homeland in Anatolia. The author leans to the steppe hypothesis.
I started and then gave up on Claire North’s Slow Gods. It was a fairly interesting sci-fi tale until my brain broke by every.single.planet. having their own pronouns. S/hé, qe, te, fa, sol, la, mi, do…I just can’t. I was already irritated by the xe/xyr pronouns in Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers* series which I just finished, but at least that was consistent among all the species and there was a good reason for not using they/them.**
*A superior sci-fi series that’s a lot of fun. Read that instead of Slow Gods.
*They/them is used for a species that has a symbiotic relationship with a virus.