![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I wasn't feeling well for several days, and it was a kind of not-well that meant I was more comfortable in my recliner than in a desk or dining room chair, so I spent a lot of time reading. [No medical advice please: I'm feeling quite a bit better, and also have an appointment with my doctor on Thursday.]
Books I've finished since my last post:
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson: This is a mystery/science fiction novel, and the viewpoint character works as a translator for an extraterrestrial cultural attache in Manhattan. The translators work by communicating telepathically with the aliens, and then translating into ordinary spoken or written English (or other Earth languages). Communicating with the aliens makes the translators drunk, very much like drinking alcohol, with the same risk of not remembering things they said, did, saw, or heard while translating. When the narrator's employer is found dead in the consulate building, she genuinely doesn't know what she did the night before, making her an easy/obvious suspect, and of course making it harder for her to figure out what really happened. I liked this, and I think there's enough world-building here to support more books in this milieu.
The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The authors have taken on a very large project, which they realize, having started with the question "what was the origin of inequality?" and then decided that it was the wrong question, in two or three different directions.
The book covers, or touches on, a lot of topics, and frequently claims that other people (most other people) are arguing from unstated assumptions about early history and prehistory. some of which we know not to be true. I don't know whether the authors are similarly arguing beyond, or in contradiction of, known facts.
The first chapter is mostly about the Wendat (Huron) intellectual Kandiaronk, his and other Native North American critiques of western (especially French) culture and society, and European attempts to answer them. covers, or touches on, a lot of topics, and frequently claims that other people (most other people) are arguing from unstated assumptions about early history and prehistory, some of which we know not to be true. I don't know whether the authors are similarly arguing beyond, or in contradiction of, known facts.
One problem with the question "when/where/how did inequality start?" is that it assumes a nebulous past when everyone was equal, and similarly assumes that before a certain stage of (somewhat teleological) history, everyone was living in the same sort of vaguely egalitarian way. The authors go back tens of thousands of years, pointing out that there's no time we're aware of when everyone on Earth was living in the same way, and giving some examples. Also, as the authors talked to each other (often in email) over several years, they decided equality was a less interesting question than freedom.
A lot of this is about Eurasia and Africa. But there's more about North America before European settlement than appears in most "world history" books, including the somewhat different ball games that were important to the Aztecs, the people of Teotihuacan, and the Maya; and the Mound Builders of the Ohio Valley.
I liked this book, but your mileage may vary, depending on whether you're comfortable with "it's all more complicated, and a lot of what you were told is wrong," when following the threads might involve doing a lot of fact-checking.
I think the authors were planning to write another book or three based on this, but Graeber died before this was published.
Dead Man's Folly, by Agatha Christie another Poirot novel, and another where the solution to the crimes is that one of the characters has been masquerading as someone else. I may read more of these, but not for a while.
A Case of Murder in Mayfair, by Clara Benson, is a light (though neither funny nor "cozy") mystery set in 1920s London. It's part of a loose series, but I don't think it matters whether you read them in order. (So far, I've read volumes 1, 3, and 2, in that order.)
All that Remains, by Sue Black Black is a forensic pathologist, and this is her talking about "death, mortality, and solving crimes", in a series of loosely connected chapters that go back to her schooling. It's very good, and was a faster read than I expected. Black originally studied pathology in part because she wanted a final-year biology project that didn't involve rodents of any kind. (The author is Scottish, and the book was published in the UK, so she glosses a few Scottish usages that might be unfamiliar elsewhere in the UK, but Americans are on our own for more common British terminology.)
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: a weirdly multilayered fantasy story about fiction and fictional characters interacting with real people, and influencing them, often via weird doors into and out of the secondary world (?) of the Starless Sea. It's very good, and I was well into it before I noticed that the book is told in the historical present, with only a few "here is a story being told within the story" sections in past tense.
A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian: an f/f romance novella, set in the late 19th century. One woman is a "companion" to a rich woman who took her in after her brute of a father threw her out, and who is trying to figure out what she's doing and what her patron wants her to do. The other is the patron's maid, who has managed to move from small-scale crime to a legal job that pays better as well as being safer. "Together, they commit crimes."
Books I've finished since my last post:
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson: This is a mystery/science fiction novel, and the viewpoint character works as a translator for an extraterrestrial cultural attache in Manhattan. The translators work by communicating telepathically with the aliens, and then translating into ordinary spoken or written English (or other Earth languages). Communicating with the aliens makes the translators drunk, very much like drinking alcohol, with the same risk of not remembering things they said, did, saw, or heard while translating. When the narrator's employer is found dead in the consulate building, she genuinely doesn't know what she did the night before, making her an easy/obvious suspect, and of course making it harder for her to figure out what really happened. I liked this, and I think there's enough world-building here to support more books in this milieu.
The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The authors have taken on a very large project, which they realize, having started with the question "what was the origin of inequality?" and then decided that it was the wrong question, in two or three different directions.
The book covers, or touches on, a lot of topics, and frequently claims that other people (most other people) are arguing from unstated assumptions about early history and prehistory. some of which we know not to be true. I don't know whether the authors are similarly arguing beyond, or in contradiction of, known facts.
The first chapter is mostly about the Wendat (Huron) intellectual Kandiaronk, his and other Native North American critiques of western (especially French) culture and society, and European attempts to answer them. covers, or touches on, a lot of topics, and frequently claims that other people (most other people) are arguing from unstated assumptions about early history and prehistory, some of which we know not to be true. I don't know whether the authors are similarly arguing beyond, or in contradiction of, known facts.
One problem with the question "when/where/how did inequality start?" is that it assumes a nebulous past when everyone was equal, and similarly assumes that before a certain stage of (somewhat teleological) history, everyone was living in the same sort of vaguely egalitarian way. The authors go back tens of thousands of years, pointing out that there's no time we're aware of when everyone on Earth was living in the same way, and giving some examples. Also, as the authors talked to each other (often in email) over several years, they decided equality was a less interesting question than freedom.
A lot of this is about Eurasia and Africa. But there's more about North America before European settlement than appears in most "world history" books, including the somewhat different ball games that were important to the Aztecs, the people of Teotihuacan, and the Maya; and the Mound Builders of the Ohio Valley.
I liked this book, but your mileage may vary, depending on whether you're comfortable with "it's all more complicated, and a lot of what you were told is wrong," when following the threads might involve doing a lot of fact-checking.
I think the authors were planning to write another book or three based on this, but Graeber died before this was published.
Dead Man's Folly, by Agatha Christie another Poirot novel, and another where the solution to the crimes is that one of the characters has been masquerading as someone else. I may read more of these, but not for a while.
A Case of Murder in Mayfair, by Clara Benson, is a light (though neither funny nor "cozy") mystery set in 1920s London. It's part of a loose series, but I don't think it matters whether you read them in order. (So far, I've read volumes 1, 3, and 2, in that order.)
All that Remains, by Sue Black Black is a forensic pathologist, and this is her talking about "death, mortality, and solving crimes", in a series of loosely connected chapters that go back to her schooling. It's very good, and was a faster read than I expected. Black originally studied pathology in part because she wanted a final-year biology project that didn't involve rodents of any kind. (The author is Scottish, and the book was published in the UK, so she glosses a few Scottish usages that might be unfamiliar elsewhere in the UK, but Americans are on our own for more common British terminology.)
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: a weirdly multilayered fantasy story about fiction and fictional characters interacting with real people, and influencing them, often via weird doors into and out of the secondary world (?) of the Starless Sea. It's very good, and I was well into it before I noticed that the book is told in the historical present, with only a few "here is a story being told within the story" sections in past tense.
A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian: an f/f romance novella, set in the late 19th century. One woman is a "companion" to a rich woman who took her in after her brute of a father threw her out, and who is trying to figure out what she's doing and what her patron wants her to do. The other is the patron's maid, who has managed to move from small-scale crime to a legal job that pays better as well as being safer. "Together, they commit crimes."