Second Quarter 2021 Reading

[Zorral]

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/

How do I describe this multi-entry about what Sparta was in reality as opposed to the pop culture mythology that has accreted around what is at the apex of the worst states to have ever existed, the ruling class of which were the most non-productive people who ever lived, perhaps the only state that ever existed that was a 100% slave state (though I tend to disagree with him about antebellum Slaveocracy here in the US, but he knows far better ancient history than I do, while I likely know the history and economy of antebellum slavery far better than he does)?

Evidently this blogger, who knows and teaches ancient history courses, thinks somebody better put a correction out there to the pubic of the very many untruths, lies and non-historical facts propagated by The 300.

The link to the next entry in the blogger's series comes at the conclusion of each entry.

[dog-days]

2 hours ago, williamjm said:

Now I've started S.A. Chakraborty's final book in her Daevabad trilogy, The Empire of Gold.

I binged the trilogy in a pretty short space of time, and enjoyed The Empire of Gold, if not quite as much as the middle book. I know that some of the forum readers who'd been following the trilogy as it was published disliked the last instalment quite a bit - but my impression is that, although much of the criticism was fair, it wouldn't have been as intense without the wait that allowed time for expectations to build up. Enjoy, anyway. I know I did. 

56 minutes ago, Zorral said:

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/

Evidently this blogger, who knows and teaches ancient history courses, thinks somebody better put a correction out there to the pubic of the very many untruths, lies and non-historical facts propagated by The 300.

The link to the next entry in the blogger's series comes at the conclusion of each entry.

I liked the first entry. Definitely aimed at a certain kind of person though, who probably overlaps with the Trump voter base. (Sadly I doubt many will read this series. In fact, many may not have fully grasped that the Spartans did in fact exist). My old-fashioned tastes find the tone a bit polemical ͏͏- not that I like the Spartans, but liking and disliking seems a bit irrelevant when we're talking about ancient societies. I appreciate that I am not the intended audience for these blog entries, however. And it does give me a chance to post a favourite poem from my late teens - Norman Cameron's The Thespians at Thermopylae. 

The honours that the people give always
Pass to those use-besotted gentlemen
Whose numskull courage is a kind of fear,
A fear of thought and of the oafish mothers
(‘Or with you shield or on it’) in their rear.
Spartans cannot retreat. Why, then, their praise
For going forward should be less than others.

But we, actors and critics of one play,
Of sober-witted judgment, who could see
So many roads, and chose the Spartan way,
What has the popular report to say
Of us, the Thespians at Thermopylae?

I adored the LotR battle posts by the same author. Spent hours reading through them last year. 

[Zorral]

He's an assistant prof at the University of North Carolina, lecturing on ancient history.  Got his degree from Chapel Hill.  So one does think he probably knows his stuff.

He's doubtless dealing with students all the time who, if they aren't tRump voters, their parents most certainly are.

 

[dog-days]

6 minutes ago, Zorral said:

He's an assistant prof at the University of North Carolina, lecturing on ancient history.  Got his degree from Chapel Hill.  So one does think he probably knows his stuff.

He's doubtless dealing with students all the time who, if they aren't tRump voters, their parents most certainly are.

 

Not doubting that. And I certainly hope that his influence on his students spreads to their friends and families. 

[Zorral]

Just now, dog-days said:

Not doubting that. And I certainly hope that his influence on his students spreads to their friends and families. 

O please be right!  

[TheLastWolf]

8 hours ago, Zorral said:

He's doubtless dealing with students all the time who, if they aren't tRump voters, their parents most certainly are.

I spell it the same way 

[Iskaral Pust]

I’m doing a reread of The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, starting with Quicksilver.  It’s really interesting as it tries to cover all the major threads driving the Enlightenment forward, but it’s also a lengthy slog with very little plot or character development.  So far it’s hundreds of pages of Waterhouse and now Shaftoe observing history for us.  Eliza is a great character to root for though, and perhaps the Mary Sue I have been most tolerant of in any book.

 But I’ll definitely need some refreshing variation in between volumes here.

[Zorral]

9 hours ago, TheLastWolf said:

I spell it the same way 

Well, we might say, it's a prominent feature .... 

[ljkeane]

On 5/28/2021 at 5:22 PM, Starkess said:

I felt similarly about the Temeraire series. It was good enough to read the whole thing, eventually, but I never felt super gripped by it and was left wishing it had been just a little more than it was. Her standalone works are definitely much better!

Agreed. The Temeraire book were ok (although I don't think I finished the series) but Novik's more recent books are a real step up.

The Girl and the Stars was very good, although it did feature less badass warrior nuns than I would have liked. I'm tempted to carry straight on and read The Girl and the Mountain but instead next I'm going to read Adrian Tchaikovsky's new book Shards of Earth.

 

[Peadar]

3 hours ago, ljkeane said:

but instead next I'm going to read Adrian Tchaikovsky's new book Shards of Earth.

 

I'm also reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth. The first chapter was great. Will read more now...

[IFR]

Finished the Prince of Nothing trilogy. What an utterly fantastic, engrossing series. I honestly only planned to read the first book and move on to other works. I was also on guard due to the less than enthusiastic reception here. But I burned through all three books in a week.

Really amazing. I may even get a thread going. 

I'm not directly proceeding to the sequel series. I want savor the aftertaste of that experience. Instead I'm going to start up Tom Clancy's Without Remorse and then maybe get back to Circe.

At any rate, it's always a pleasure to have unexpected surprises such as this.

[polishgenius]

2 hours ago, IFR said:

Really amazing. I may even get a thread going. 

 

I've gotta go to work so I can't dig them out right now, but while active the series had a long-standing series of threads going iirc. The most recent one may potentially still be active should you/some other kind soul wanna find it.

A new thread will also probably get some traction, mind, especially since the most recent one thinking on it would have spoilers for what you haven't read.

[Plessiez]

My reading plans for the year rather fell apart in April, as I had a few health problems which basically left me no time for fiction.  I'm mostly okay now, but I think my goal of reading sixty books for the year is pretty much out of reach.  I did manage to read a few things this month though.

Lavinia by Ursula le Guin

This is (sort of) a retelling of Virgil's Aeneid, from the perspective of Aeneas's future wife Lavinia.  It's not played entirely straight though: at times, Lavinia is aware of the fact that she exists in a work of fiction, and when consulting with the oracles she speaks to the ghost of her 'creator', Virgil, who is rather apologetic about the role he assigned her in his poem.

I thought this was pretty solid, though I don't think it's really le Guin at her best.

Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy by Matt Ruff

First published in 1997 and set in the then distant future year of 2023, Sewer, Gas & Electric is a slightly rambling story about (among other things), environmental activism, racism, the American Civil War and the moral failings of Walt Disney and Ayn Rand.  Also there's a genetically modified shark living in the New York sewer system.

I can't really put my figure on why, but this feels very much like a book of the 1990s, if that makes any sense.  (It actually reminded me a little bit of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, though it is mercifully a lot shorter.) I think I might have liked it a lot more if I'd read it in back then.  But, to put it kindly, I don't think it's attemots at satire have aged well.

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

I read A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by the same author towards the end of last year, and liked it quite a bit.  This is rather different in tone and genre -- it's a horror story, I suppose, though it's never really much more horrifying than one of the creepier episodes of Doctor Who -- but I also quite enjoyed it.  My only real complaint was that the ending was a bit of anticlimax (which I think was also a problem with A Wizard's Guide...).

I'm currently reading Hard Reboot by Django Wexler, which I suspect I'll probably finish today (it's pretty short).

[The Wolves]

Finally finished War and Peace. I really enjoyed this book. I thought that it was a easy read and kept my interest. I did not care for many of the characters, Prince Andrey was my favorite. I thought that Tolstoy could have written a lot of the female characters better than he did and the epilogue was unnecessary long. Overall I am glad I read this and did enjoy it. 
 

Anna Karenina is up next for my June read and next Tolstoy book. 

[TheLastWolf]

3 hours ago, The Wolves said:

Finally finished War and Peace. I really enjoyed this book. I thought that it was a easy read and kept my interest. I did not care for many of the characters, Prince Andrey was my favorite. I thought that Tolstoy could have written a lot of the female characters better than he did and the epilogue was unnecessary long. Overall I am glad I read this and did enjoy it. 
 

Anna Karenina is up next for my June read and next Tolstoy book. 

Dostoevesky is better 

[HoodedCrow]

I read Kafka and I turned into a cockroach. Wait! It’s a brilliant metaphor.

[The Wolves]

23 hours ago, TheLastWolf said:

Dostoevesky is better 

I will be reading his work in a few months. 

[TheLastWolf]

54 minutes ago, The Wolves said:

I will be reading his work in a few months. 

* Smug emoji/emoticon *

15 hours ago, HoodedCrow said:

I read Kafka and I turned into a cockroach. Wait! It’s a brilliant metaphor.

That makes two of us 

[Zorral]

On 5/31/2021 at 8:12 PM, The Wolves said:

Anna Karenina is up next for my June read and next Tolstoy book. 

It's a pleasure to see people enjoying a classic work for the first time! It's funny, that for me when I was younger I preferred Anna Karenina, but in this decade it's War and Peace I now prefer.

Though nothing can compare with the experience of my first read of Anna -- in the hot summer afternoon hours of August, by the university gym's swimming pool, jumping in every 20 minutes or so to cool off.  That poor, bedraggled paperback copy of Anna!

[Zorral]

FYI -- the First Quarter 2021 Reading thread should be locked, as we have moved on to the second quarter two months ago. It's confusing, having that one still open to posts. 

 

On 5/31/2021 at 8:12 PM, The Wolves said:

Anna Karenina is up next for my June read and next Tolstoy book. 

It's a pleasure to see people enjoying a classic work for the first time! It's funny, that for me when I was younger I preferred Anna Karenina, but in this decade it's War and Peace I now prefer.

Though nothing can compare with the experience of my first read of Anna -- in the hot summer afternoon hours of August, by the university gym's swimming pool, jumping in every 20 minutes or so to cool off.  That poor, bedraggled paperback copy of Anna!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Horde: How The Mongols Changed The World (I do wish publishers would stop doing that subtitle thing of 'greatest', 'secret', 'changed the world'. etc.)  2021, by French academic, Marie Favereau.  I particularly appreciate that her Introduction includes by name big thanks for the special assistance staffs at the research facilities and archives around the world provided when she couldn't go to them herself due to the pandemic.  I cannot count how many historians have twitted and emailed and zoomed their jonesing even just for the smell of archives, how much physical digging into physical documents is missed.

Anyone who wants to know who and what the Mongols and their empire was needs to read this book.  Though, personally?  I feel she quite downplays the murder, terror and damage and cruelty to places and people the first waves out of the steppes at least, inflicted.  But yes, of course, the Horde's objectives were establishment of cities, trade, mercantilism and artisanship of all kinds and did sponsor their establishment throughout, or their re-establishment ... all of which the Horde then controlled to their great enrichment, which was the point.  It's also important to understand the different Hordes - uluses, which is why some converted to Islam, and other uluses became Buddhist, while both continued for centuries to acknowledge and honor the traditions of Mongolian people from before conversion. It also explains then, how and why they sponsored in so many way the Greek Orthodox Church, which did so much as well in shaping both Russian culture and history of these times.

The really interesting, and to me at least, revealing content is how differently this empire operated from other empires and kingdoms, as it wasn't located in a sedentary location, but the rulers traveled with their nomadic people and herds nevertheless.  This is particularly the case in the regions about which people like me know either nothing or very little, the Horde's rulership of Ukraine, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Russia, including Tatarstan and Crimea.

One of the few things I knew before was that the Icelandic equine breed is descended partly from the Mongolian horse.  It was via their time ruling Russia the Mongolian horse got to Scandinavia, no doubt along the Amber Road.  The trade routes between Russia and the nordic region are ancient, well established long before the Viking age.