Wednesday reading —around the world
Apr. 8th, 2015 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayhapWhat I've been reading
I read The Doctor of Thessaly and The Lady of Sorrows, the third and fourth Hermes Diaktoros mysteries. People in the Goodreads reviews keep describing these as "light mysteries", and I'm not entirely sure what they mean by that, but these two books in particular involved disturbing things that I don't normally associate with light reading.
I read How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, the companion to the excellent PBS series. There's a lot of overlap in the subject matter, but it's not completely redundant. If you consume only one format, I recommend the TV show, though: it's extremely engaging and charming and visually impressive.
I reread The Murders of Richard III, mostly because Richard being in the news again lately inclined me to grab it off my shelf. On reread, it's not one of my favorite Elizabeth Peters books. It does, if I recall correctly, a similar thing to the first Jacqueline Kirby book, where the POV character is someone who is not Jacqueline so they can be suitably surprised by her unsuspected range and breadth, but this time he's a dude who would very much like to hook up with her and keeps getting turned down, and even though he's not particularly obnoxious about it there's still a certain low-level unpleasantness about this ongoing interaction.
I read England Have My Bones, which is T. H. White's account of the year after he quit teaching, when he adopted a rural existence and attempted to work through his issues by hunting, fishing and learning to fly. I vaguely thought that it had been edited into more of a book, but it appears to be pretty much just a reproduction of his diary from that year, with a few footnotes with a retroactive perspective. The cover art and blurb attempt to strongly imply that the book contains magic of some kind, which is hilariously false advertising.
I reread Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal for Easter, as one does. I laughed, I cried.
I read The Doctor of Thessaly and The Lady of Sorrows, the third and fourth Hermes Diaktoros mysteries. People in the Goodreads reviews keep describing these as "light mysteries", and I'm not entirely sure what they mean by that, but these two books in particular involved disturbing things that I don't normally associate with light reading.
I read How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, the companion to the excellent PBS series. There's a lot of overlap in the subject matter, but it's not completely redundant. If you consume only one format, I recommend the TV show, though: it's extremely engaging and charming and visually impressive.
I reread The Murders of Richard III, mostly because Richard being in the news again lately inclined me to grab it off my shelf. On reread, it's not one of my favorite Elizabeth Peters books. It does, if I recall correctly, a similar thing to the first Jacqueline Kirby book, where the POV character is someone who is not Jacqueline so they can be suitably surprised by her unsuspected range and breadth, but this time he's a dude who would very much like to hook up with her and keeps getting turned down, and even though he's not particularly obnoxious about it there's still a certain low-level unpleasantness about this ongoing interaction.
I read England Have My Bones, which is T. H. White's account of the year after he quit teaching, when he adopted a rural existence and attempted to work through his issues by hunting, fishing and learning to fly. I vaguely thought that it had been edited into more of a book, but it appears to be pretty much just a reproduction of his diary from that year, with a few footnotes with a retroactive perspective. The cover art and blurb attempt to strongly imply that the book contains magic of some kind, which is hilariously false advertising.
I reread Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal for Easter, as one does. I laughed, I cried.
