silver

(and I'd like to say that I have my computer screen half-and-half with this Create Entries on the right, and an Excel spreadsheet of this year's reading on the left, for reference).

*I think I talked about Mary Beard's SPQR and...uh...I just went back. No, I did not talk about that.

Mary Beard - SPQR
- I really liked this. I only have a glancing, overview knowledge of classical antiquity, so this was extremely helpful. It's a very high level overview, starting all the way from the mythical beginnings of Rome.

- One of the things I really appreciated about SPQR is how clear Beard was about presenting the evidence (this is the observations we have from archaeology) and then presenting her interpretation, as well as other scholars'. I can turn off my brain for fiction, mostly, but it's hard to do in non-fiction that wants to teach, so I appreciate how she really laid out the evidence. Not to mention it's interesting to me to see what kind of evidence exists, how we use it, etc.

Robin Lafevers - Dark Triumph
-This is a YA about young women in a convent dedicated to Mortain, the god of death. They are trained as assassins, and play silent roles in the medieval Brittany in which they live. This is basically so many things I love all bundled up.

- Alas that it is YA. I don't know what it is, but it's some combination of this writing style that seems to be so uniform across the genre, and shallow treatment of everything. I've spilled enough e-ink on how I don't think grittier = realer, but I feel like maybe the length isn't enough, or there just isn't enough treatment, because everything feels superficial. I've mostly given up on YA at this point.

- Also. ( SPOILERS as this is the third book )

- However. Obviously, considering that I read all three books....Can we make these medieval assassination convents a trope themselves? I would read so many...

Seth Dickinson - The Traitor Baru Cormorant
- One of the best fantasy novels I've read this year. Baru Cormorant sees the invaders come to her island as a little girl, sees her mother and two fathers torn apart, goes to the colonists' boardingschool at her island. And she scores exceptionally, and is granted a post as Imperial Accountant at distant Aurdwynn. Aurdwynn is full of rebellion, and she intends to forment it, and use her position to destroy the Empire of Masks.

- It's hard to describe all the things I loved about this novel, not least because there are a lot of twists, and it would ruin the novel if I talked about them in my enticement.

- I thought it was a very clear, unflinching look at imperialism and its expansion. Baru herself is clear-eyed too, and pretty much prepares herself to be just as hard. Such a good character - it's from her perspective, but you don't get that softening as you see the internal thoughts the way you do with a lot of "from the perspective of villain" stories. Which isn't to say Baru is a villain. It's complicated.

- It's also quietly beautiful in prose. It was written in a way that induces rapid page turning because OMG WHAT JUST HAPPENED i can't turn pages fast enough, but there was an understated, unshowy gorgeous prose.

- That ending was hard to read. It hurt.

- I'm a huge nerd and enjoyed that monetary policy got a look in. Though...if your economy isn't very developed (as Aurdwynn's is, because it's still mostly agrarian without a ton of loans, the loans are to the nobility mostly), I'm not sure how much of a lever monetary policy is. But I digress. The one part I totally call BS on is Baru reconciling the accounts of a country in one day. I'm sorry HAHAHAHAHA NO. oh my god especially since they're all on paper do you know how long those columns of numbers to add up are?

- But really. I loved the politicking, the characters, the plot, the writing, solid 10/10 would recommend.

Elizabeth Wein - The Winter Prince
- About Medraut, and his relationship basically to Arthur's son.

- Somehow my copy had these illustrations at the heading of every chapter, and they were distracting; they were black and white pen drawings, and they looked amateur. The net result on me was that I would go from emotionally quite engaging and fraught scenes, to un-skippable drawings that reminded me of angsty teenagers, which meant I got taken out of the novel every chapter.

- There's more incest than I expected. And it being Arthurian lit, I expected incest.

- I don't know. I don't feel very motivated to read more Elizabeth Wein, to be honest. I know people rave about Code Name Verity, but meh.

Chris Hadfield - An Astrounaut's Guide to Life on Earth
- Chris Hadfield - Canadian astronaut, commander of the ISS - wrote an autobiography.

- Mostly what I've come away with is that I would love to meet Chris, he really does come across as an incredibly good and humble and persevering person. I also enjoyed learning about what kind of training the astronauts get, mentally and physically, in the real world. I like space opera! It's neat to see what actually happens outside stories. It's as much a story about what happens before anyone can go to space as it is about the fun quirks of what life in space is like. Staggering amounts of work.

Dorothy Dunnett - Niccolo Rising
- Historical novel about Nicholas de Fleury, a dyer's apprentice, set in 15th century Bruges to start. It's part of an eight-novel series that follows him - mind like a whip, full of schemes and ambitions, but irrepressibly cheerful despite the beatings.

- One reviewer described it as "pungently historical" (paraphrase) which I agree with. It's obvious Dunnett did her research. There are also real life figures that appear as minor characters - I saw one of them's portraits in the Met on Saturday! That was like an unexpected Easter egg in real life.

- I also found this to be a slog initially. Until about 40%. You're left to draw your own conclusions a great deal, and there are a lot of names and places and relationships to keep track of, and if you read it piecemeal like at lunch in 5 min snatches between getting distracted, it's kind of hard to enjoy. But then the plot picked up and it flew. Some very good twists, especially with Katalina.

- On the other hand, the next seven books are daunting. I'm not sure I want to start one any time soon...

- These also tie into her more famous Lymond series. Niccolo is an ancestor, I believe.

Agatha Christie - And Then There Were None
- Murder mystery, where ten guests are summoned to an island, each by a different person they'd answer a summons for, to attend a party. The host just doesn't show up and the whole party is marooned on the island - deliberately, apparently. And then one by one, they all begin to die...

- I am a wimp and it totally gave me the creeps. It's very much the locked room mystery - one of those characters is a murderer!!!

- If you read too many Christie mysteries (actually, golden age mysteries in general) you notice a lot of character archetypes that crop up frequently. Young society miss, red-faced colonel who rather wishes he was still in the war, the misfit only American there, etc. I offer this observation not as an insult or accusation, but just as an observation.

all of Prospero's War, Dirty Magic to Volatile Bonds by Jaye Wells
- Think police procedural except in novel form, and instead of the war on drugs, potions and magic have taken the place of cocaine and heroin. Kate Prospero is a beat cop that patrols the magic side of the city, but her position is somewhat precarious and unusual; she grew up as the niece of Abraxas Prospero, who was gang leader of one of the three strongest covens that operated in the city. Abraxas is in prison now, she refuses to touch potion cooking, and is raising her younger brother. But her strong desire to do right by the city draws her into conflicts about all this.

- I actually really like Kate as a character. She's complicated and has a lot of conflicting loyalties. She's very against using magic - she attends an AA style magic-rejecting group (people get addicted to potions) - she was a very talented potion cooker as a girl - the police force use 'clean' magic to operate more effectively - 'clean' magic is just what mainstream drug companies use, 'dirty' is street, there's regulation but really it's magic anyway. And her little brother wants to cook potions...

- The internal police politicking sounds quite realistic. And exhausting.

- But let's be real. I am desperately awaiting the next book because I am so interested in Volos/Kate becoming a thing. It's the emotional core of all this, and it's a hell of a magnet.

Nate Silver - The Signal and the Noise
- Non-fiction, about statistical modelling. Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, which rose to fame during the 2008 American presidential elections run-up; his modelling of the electoral college was both very accurate and fairly precise.

- It is a book written to appeal to a broad base of people, so there really was not much math in it. Some graphs, which was nice, but I wanted more statistical treatment (ugh go read a textbook.) He focuses heavily on Bayesian statistics, which, to prosify and simplify hard, means you should make a prediction initially based on your knowledge, then incorporate further evidence and weigh it more heavily depending on how confident you were in your initial prediction and how un-like your initial prediction was.

- Some of the cases, like epidemiology and economics, I found much more interesting than the poker and baseball bits. I just don't care that much about poker and baseball...but Silver does, and sabermetrics is how he got interested in statistics in the first place.

- Silver also references some very random things, and will allude at intervals to isolated historical facts or incidents or pop culture, and I don't really think it adds much to the credibility of the book. It doesn't discredit but I've always hated the way that introductions to subjects - like accounting - must always dive into a poorly researched and not terribly interesting historical diversion to pull as an example 15th c Italian double-bookkeeping as The First Accounting, or worse, pull even more loose examples like shopping lists etched on stone tablets... Stick to your own damn expertise, I am not interested in Your Thoughts On Something You Do Not Study.

Michael Scott Rohan - The Hammer of the Sun
- The third book of the original trilogy, it's a high fantasy set in an interglacial period. The protagonist is Elof Valantor, a smith, and other than the interglacial setting, it's otherwise quite standard high fantasy in technology levels, magic presence, fantastical species, etc. It picks up seven years after the previous Forge in the Forest - I do love the evocativeness of the titles - and Elof tries to chain his love to him. Oh, he has his justifications, he fears the influence of an evil Louhi over his wife, but that's what he tries to do, and it backfires on him spectacularly. She shapeshifts into a bird and flies away, and he takes a boat and pursues...

- This is the third book that I read, so obviously it was not intolerable. But I read this book in a fit of apathy. By which I mean, I would open up Moonreader on my phone, and The Hammer of the Sun would be already loaded and open to the last page, and I wasn't feeling like reading it but also without enough emotional energy to start something new...so I kept reading.

- Seriously, the part where he tries to chain Kara bothered me so much. Obviously the narrative doesn't agree with his decision, since she kind of just flees, but...he also just goes and pursues her, which was eyeroll-inducing.

- The most interesting thing about these books is actually the glaciers and their inexorable advance. It's weird to read it today, because climate change seems to be happening also inexorably, in the other direction, and it's been hot, and in temperatures like this I feel like packing up and moving to Nunavut.

- I do not like Elof. He has never interested me in the slightest. I wish there was a more personable and interesting character to center the books around. I can't believe I read three books' worth of mediocre fantasy for glaciers...

- The prose, bless it, tried so hard. It used big words and grown-up constructions, but it never actually clicked properly. There's an incredibly satisfying feeling you get when you read someone like Diana Wynn Jones' writing, for example - it's a little tongue in cheek, but not arch, and the words and descriptions fit so perfectly, and so unerringly describe sensations and sights that it's a pleasure to just take in the words. Or authors who can give their work a sweeping depth that transports you. This was none of this, and the subtly not quite there constructions were distracting instead.

- It's so trying after Tolkien it's just embarrassing instead. After I finished the book, I went onto Goodreads. I didn't mean to - I just googled first. There's a reason I'm not on Goodreads, and I speedily remembered why. There are many people that I would sincerely like to take a look out their eyes sometime, because I don't understand. So many white men writing glowing praises of the prose and how it's like Tolkien and I think we have read different copies. Oh yes, it's like Tolkien, in that it's a heavily watered down attempt.

- Oh my god it was so slowwwww, the first half, the sea-journey. I just did not care for Elof. I did not care for his journey. I thought his companion Roc was a fool for coming with him. I thought Elof's total fear for the Ice vaguely ridiculous.

OK, I've done a bunch. Gotta sleep. Still a few more to go, including DOROTHY SAYERS ♥

I've been reading these (Penguin 1990's edition) and I've now read Erec & Enide, Cligès and half of The Knight and the Cart (Lancelot).

(I included the book cover because it illustrates beautifully why I love medieval art. The era of photography and photo-realistic art [and understanding/importance of perspective] makes that image delightfully weird. The artist just doesn't care about any of that. The guy on horseback has literally stuck his sword into that other guy's face. And that's a lion, fighting alongside. But what a story!)

I thought that Erec is such an ass. He was fine at first but at a very innocuous remark, he basically drags Enide all over the country because work-life balance? That's not balancing marriage and knightliness, Erec. Telling Enide to not say anything, Enide then twisting herself into knots over whether Erec would get murdered by the next three knights trying to sneak-attack him and whether she should warn him and get verbally thrashed, or not warn and potentially see him killed, was so frustrating. She's so devoted to him too, even after all that; she faints after this random count tries to forcibly marry her not only because of the forcibly-married part but because she thinks Erec is dead and she can't stand to be married to anyone else period. Erec & Enide was also written rather episodically, in three parts, so I kept expecting pieces of the past bits to be picked up, but they never really were. I'm guessing that they were probably told episodically--come back tomorrow night to hear the second installment!--but it's not obvious in text.

Cligés was a lot better. A lot easier for me to follow, too. There's one part I want to talk about though: about midway through Fenice and Cligès decide to try to get married 'the right way', i.e. Fenice is already married to Cligés' uncle and so they can't just run away, no, that would destroy Fenice's reputation ¹. No, instead, Fenice decides to literally play dead, with her nurse Thessala helping by feeding her a potion which would make her seem dead. Then they would dig her up afterwards and no one would be the wiser, see. This was such a Romeo and Juliet plot that I stopped reading, thought about chronology, and then went back to reading, but couldn't help think this was going to end badly. And oh my god, IT DOES. (Other examples: Les Misérables. Lesson: don't literally play dead). Three wise doctors arrive and they infer correctly she's alive and then they start torturing her to make her speak. But the potion's effect means she can't speak or move and they literally get to the point of ( torture ) before the bereaved court ladies shatter the door barring them and rescue her. Things which I was no expecting: THAT.

I'm struck by how sometimes you can almost hear Chrétien saying some of the stuff. I mean, in the beginning of many of the tales he slips into the narrator role, and he says "written for my lady Marie [of Champagne, his patroness]". But in some of the knightly parts, where whichever knight is the hero is laying about and fighting so hard he splits weapons with the force of the blows, you can almost feel Chrétien's glee, like a little boy's, over how so-and-so is the best knight in all the land, unequalled, etc. Some of it is perhaps idealization for his audience, who would have been knights; knights becoming an actual noblish class is just beginning around this time, and they probably don't have people opening their doors and getting lavish hospitality everywhere they go. That's the dream or just an enjoyable fantasy, like our own fiction genres.



¹: For some reason it is better to pretend to die and then marry Cligès than to run away. I'm pretty sure either way you're committing bigamy.... Oh! And also it's okay to do this (perhaps not in "real life morality" reasons, but in "audience will root for you" certainly) because there's a complex plot in which Cligès' uncle essentially stole Cligès' inheritance by marrying Fenice, whom Cligès then immediately fell in love with while they were retrieving her in Saxony (or thereabouts). Trying to explain how these stories work takes so much ink because they're basically stories with most of the description taken out, although there is always description of riches (oh the furs!) and the battles, of course, with the lance splitting and being knocked off horses and all that.

*looks over all the half-finished reviews of novels, gives up temporarily*

[Farenheit 451, Till We Have Faces, Spindle's End, Freakonomics, The Floating Islands]

I finished reading a book of fabliaux today!

In case you've never heard of them, they're "short stories" told in the high Middle Ages--most of them are dated to the 12th to 14th centuries--that are generally extremely bawdy, satirical and humorous works about ordinary people. They're not really fables; most of them don't have morales to impart at all. No one is really immune to criticism, but in particular social strife (the cheating wife and/or husband, the deconstruction of the courtly ideals) and priests especially are made fun of. Despite the rather misogynist vein running through the tales, there's a certain gleeful support for the wife when she schemes to hide her infidelity or gluttony, like in The Partridges, where she plays off her lover (the priest) and her husband, to hide the fact she's eaten their partridges already. Some of the jongleurs like the author of The Widow clearly have an axe to grind (Gautier de Leu), but other tales incorporate tricksters (like the peasant who was mistaken as a doctor, and 'cured' others by threatening to kill the sickest, whereupon all the sick men left) as well as authority figures like Aristotle (his depiction is not exactly flattering.)

Some of the fabliaux are prefaced with the teller's notes, like Beranger Longbottom. Its author, Garin, says that he's made up and told many fabliaux but this will be his last one, and haven't you heard it? No? Then he'll tell you right now, don't worry. Other authors claim that their stories are truthful. Henri d'Andeli lashes back at the obscenity of the genre, saying "Nor do I...wish to be the inventor of anything that smacks of baseness, but I will make my tales after the true originals". Despite these introductions, authorial intrusion is kept to a minimum; it's really the plots that are important, and the characters and settings are often archetypical. (Can you have archetypical settings? Well, they are ordinary--the peasant in field or his house, the miller in his lodging, etc.) Interestingly the poor are still looked upon favourably (the student who had to leave Paris because he couldn't afford to stay, and the two friends who are penniless are clearly sympathetic), but men and women in power are frequently satirized--the lady of the house, the priest, the lord of the house.

The edition I have¹ is translated and presented mostly in prose form, except for The Knight Who Conjured Voices. Because of this barrier--I don't read Old French, unfortunately!--I can't comment about the actual writing, although the afterword (an afterword, instead of a loooong introduction! Amazing!) does discuss language.

I think if you are interested in secular works of medieval France, or like short tales of trickery and deceit and don't mind crudeness, you'll like these! But I am not joking when I say they really don't beat round the bush. On the other hand, if you like bawdy tales that make fun of everyone, these are excellent.

¹Hellman, Robert and Richard O'Gorman, eds. Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old French. Trans Robert Hellman and Richard O'Gorman. New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1965. Print.

I've been reading about European history (I read through the section about WWII, a bit beyond, then skipped around to the early fifteenth century) and I have two things to say.

1. What a huge mess. Peace is an elusive thing, I guess, and the constant reshifting of borders and alliances, new leaders and religions, conflicts exploding from all sorts of places makes everything incredibly complicated.

2. No wonder the EU is having so much trouble with being unified...some of the countries were so set against each other, I wouldn't have believed that sort of alliance would work. (Frankly, I'm still amazed France and Great Britain got over their historical differences and worked together in WWI. But that's me.)



It is also snowing. Today, *checks calendar again*, is May 27th. *facepalm* The heating is back on, and I guess the shorts and miniskirts that people have been sporting will disappear for awhile.