Wednesday reading — kids, Kindar and Kemet
Oct. 8th, 2014 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayhapWhat I've been reading
I read The Daily Life of the Ancient Egyptians, although once I realized that one of the authors is a strong believer that Tutankhamen was very definitely murdered I started reading with a heavy dose of natron.
I read Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture, which is really cool. It illustrates a selection of important/commonly-used hieroglyphs with examples of that object or pose being referenced in art, little visual puns that you would miss if you, like most people, do not read ancient Egyptian.
I reread The Egypt Game, which was one of the things that I was thinking about when I originally had the idea that I thought I might take up this year of writing a children's book actually set in Egypt. It held up about as well as I remembered as a really realistic depiction of what it's like to play pretend.
I read The Islands of Chaldea, Diana Wynne Jones's last book, which was left unfinished and completed by her sister with nary a single note to guide her. Although I did have a vague feeling that the ending was not as satisfying as it could be, I do find, as apparently the other readers that Ursula Jones tested it on did, that I couldn't really say exactly where the unfinished manuscript ends and the invented ending begins.
I reread the Green Sky trilogy, Below the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration, which were my other favorites by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I think, in retrospect, they may have been the first really science fiction books I read, because at the time I parsed them as fantasy, but of course in the 1970s "psi" elements were often included in science fiction, and otherwise they pretty clearly belong to that genre. These books come up a lot in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
whatwasthatbook-type questions from people who remember the part about a girl who doesn't have a word for "to kill" and so talks about wanting to "dead" something.
I read The Daily Life of the Ancient Egyptians, although once I realized that one of the authors is a strong believer that Tutankhamen was very definitely murdered I started reading with a heavy dose of natron.
I read Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture, which is really cool. It illustrates a selection of important/commonly-used hieroglyphs with examples of that object or pose being referenced in art, little visual puns that you would miss if you, like most people, do not read ancient Egyptian.
I reread The Egypt Game, which was one of the things that I was thinking about when I originally had the idea that I thought I might take up this year of writing a children's book actually set in Egypt. It held up about as well as I remembered as a really realistic depiction of what it's like to play pretend.
I read The Islands of Chaldea, Diana Wynne Jones's last book, which was left unfinished and completed by her sister with nary a single note to guide her. Although I did have a vague feeling that the ending was not as satisfying as it could be, I do find, as apparently the other readers that Ursula Jones tested it on did, that I couldn't really say exactly where the unfinished manuscript ends and the invented ending begins.
I reread the Green Sky trilogy, Below the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration, which were my other favorites by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I think, in retrospect, they may have been the first really science fiction books I read, because at the time I parsed them as fantasy, but of course in the 1970s "psi" elements were often included in science fiction, and otherwise they pretty clearly belong to that genre. These books come up a lot in
whatwasthatbook-type questions from people who remember the part about a girl who doesn't have a word for "to kill" and so talks about wanting to "dead" something.