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I haven't read a lot of books lately, and have both read short things online (blog posts and Discord conversations and news stories) and played little games online, like Quordle and Metazooa and Infinite Craft). I have been advised to step away from my computer screen at least an hour before bedtime, but on the days I do that, am as likely to pick up a puzzle book as to read either a hardcopy book or on my kindle. But I finished a book about books last night, so here's a Wednesday reading post. I liked both these books:
Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer, is a novel that I think started as a series of related stories about Beck, a girl growing up on a "seastead," a group of artificial islands outside any government's borders. She lives with her father, who is powerful within the not-called-a-government structure of their seastead. Along with going to school, Beck earns some spending money by finding things for people, like brown shoelaces or a pair of size 9 black sandals: an unofficial barter system for things people brought with them from the mainland and discovered they could do without. The book is narrated by Beck, which I think works well for world-building, as she figures out more of what's going on under the surface. Starting with those small-scale errands, Beck gradually discovers more about the seastead, angering her father in the process: he is definitely the sort of Libertarian who might say "the government doesn't own the children, the parents own the children," and sees no need to explain the orders he's giving to his teenaged daughter.
I'm going to cheat here, and quote from Naomi's annual guide to "gifts for people you hate": The book includes mystery, danger, the IWW (International Workers of the World) union, reality TV, an epidemic, and an atheist humanitarian aid group with a ship called the Mary Ellen Carter. If anyone you have to give gifts to flies one of those “don’t tread on me” flags, this book would be the perfect gift for pretending that you 100% sincerely assumed they would like it (they will likely be thoroughly annoyed by the time they’re done reading).
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, by Irene Vallejo, is broader than the subtitle implies. This is a history of books, and paper, and of reading and kibraries and bookstores, with some discussion of modern and contemporary librarians and censorship. It's also part memoir. The "ancient world" here is mostly Europe, the Middle East, and the parts of Asia that Alexander the Great conquered. One of the things Vallejo is interested in is how shared literature helped create and maintain a culture in Hellenistic times, and afterwards. Vallejo discusses the long hard work of keeping books alive when they had to be recopied every couple of hundred years, and the difficult decisions librarians faced, of which of their books were worth the time and effort for that sort of preservation. Vallejo also talks about the spread of literacy, and who was allowed or required to read: in ancient Rome, enslaved people were expected to read aloud to their owners, because the Romans believed that reading, unlike listening, put the reader under the author's control.
[My ebook of the Vallejo is badly overdue, and now that I've finished it I can sync my kindle and go on to something else.]
Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer, is a novel that I think started as a series of related stories about Beck, a girl growing up on a "seastead," a group of artificial islands outside any government's borders. She lives with her father, who is powerful within the not-called-a-government structure of their seastead. Along with going to school, Beck earns some spending money by finding things for people, like brown shoelaces or a pair of size 9 black sandals: an unofficial barter system for things people brought with them from the mainland and discovered they could do without. The book is narrated by Beck, which I think works well for world-building, as she figures out more of what's going on under the surface. Starting with those small-scale errands, Beck gradually discovers more about the seastead, angering her father in the process: he is definitely the sort of Libertarian who might say "the government doesn't own the children, the parents own the children," and sees no need to explain the orders he's giving to his teenaged daughter.
I'm going to cheat here, and quote from Naomi's annual guide to "gifts for people you hate": The book includes mystery, danger, the IWW (International Workers of the World) union, reality TV, an epidemic, and an atheist humanitarian aid group with a ship called the Mary Ellen Carter. If anyone you have to give gifts to flies one of those “don’t tread on me” flags, this book would be the perfect gift for pretending that you 100% sincerely assumed they would like it (they will likely be thoroughly annoyed by the time they’re done reading).
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, by Irene Vallejo, is broader than the subtitle implies. This is a history of books, and paper, and of reading and kibraries and bookstores, with some discussion of modern and contemporary librarians and censorship. It's also part memoir. The "ancient world" here is mostly Europe, the Middle East, and the parts of Asia that Alexander the Great conquered. One of the things Vallejo is interested in is how shared literature helped create and maintain a culture in Hellenistic times, and afterwards. Vallejo discusses the long hard work of keeping books alive when they had to be recopied every couple of hundred years, and the difficult decisions librarians faced, of which of their books were worth the time and effort for that sort of preservation. Vallejo also talks about the spread of literacy, and who was allowed or required to read: in ancient Rome, enslaved people were expected to read aloud to their owners, because the Romans believed that reading, unlike listening, put the reader under the author's control.
[My ebook of the Vallejo is badly overdue, and now that I've finished it I can sync my kindle and go on to something else.]
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Oh, I need to read that.
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The more I hear about PApyrus, the more I need to read it.