All of the books below have received some sort of review on my GoodReads site so I'll confine myself to a few brief notes. Note, too, that this certainly doesn't exhaust the list of stuff I read between June and December 2008, this is the cream of the crop:
The Fiction Roll -
The January Dancer, Michael Flynn. Probably the best new SF I've read all year.
The Nature of Monsters and The Great Stink, Clare Clark.
Toll the Hounds, Steven Erikson. Book 8 in The Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Dark Sleeper and The House in the High Wood, Jeffrey Barlough. A mixture of Dickens and Lovecraft; the former predominates in Sleeper, the latter in House (whose ending is one of the most profoundly creepy I've ever read).
The Coroner's Lunch, Colin Cotterill. A mystery series that follows the adventures of a Laotian coroner under the Communist regime. I can also recommend the second in the series, 33 Teeth.
Un Lun Dun, China Mieville's stab at young-adult fiction. Very good.
The Nonfiction Roll -
The Horse, the Wheel & Language, David Anthony
Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?, Brett Kahr. A look at "normal" people's sexual fantasies.
The Geese of Beaver Bog, Bernd Henrich. One of the best nature books I've ever read.
The Singing Neanderthals (Steve Mithen) and Inside the Neolithic Mind (David Lewis-Williams). I put these two together because they're complementary texts in my mind: The first looks at the origins of music and language; the second looks at the origins of spirituality and religion in modern homo sapiens.
The Ruin of the Roman Empire, James O'Donnell
How Fiction Works, James Wood
Barbarian Tides, Walter Goffart. A dense book, not for the faint hearted but well worth the effort.
The Suspicions of Mister Whicher, Kate Summerscale
Young Stalin, Simon Montefiore. Stalin's life before he became Stalin.
Showing posts with label Roman history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roman history. Show all posts
31 January 2009
16 November 2008
A few books to recommend
I just finished reading two marvelous books and thought I would share:
The first is James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire, which I mentioned in a previous post. The review is still on my GoodReads site here. What I like about it is O'Donnell's attempt to strip away the detritus of historiography and his incorporation of the latest archaeological and prosopographic evidence to create a "truer" picture of the period than any I've read before. It's not perfect and suffers from the author's own prejudices but it shakes up a reader's perceptions of a period that many would think has been mined out.
The second book to recommend this Sunday a.m. is James Wood's How Fiction Works. It's a very readable and interesting look at a noted critic's opinion about what makes good writing, and its review is here.
I've also been directed to a potentially hugely interesting site known as the Internet Archive, and I owe it all to my presence on GoodReads. It came about because someone read my review of J.B. Post's The Atlas of Fantasy, where I mentioned an interest in Thomas Malkin. Thomas was a young prodigy who unfortunately died at the age of six. Before he died, however, he created a fantasy world called Allestone - a history and culture, a calendar and maps, as well as a number of stories. His father wrote a biography, A Father's Memoirs of His Child, in 1806 appending all of the Allestone stories and maps. I despaired of finding a copy of this 200-year-old book but the wonders of modern technology and the Internet came to my rescue. The Internet Archive scans well known and obscure texts, videos, audio, etc. to a common database anyone can access. And there, in a variety of formats, lay A Father's Memoirs. I haven't had the opportunity to read the entire tome; I've only skimmed it since printing it out. From what little I have read, though, I think Post's opinion is sound - we lost a remarkable mind when we lost Thomas Malkin.
On that same site, I've found many of James Branch Cabell's work as well. I've already downloaded Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship. The formatting is straight text, nothing fancy but I'm not interested in Cabell for the packaging so that's not a great impediment.
Finally, I'm taking this opportunity to declare (strictly on my own authority) November 18 Collateral Damage Day (see previous post). I'm working on a suitable memorial for this Tuesday.
In a related vein and before I go entirely today - I was reading a reader's review of Peter Mansoor's Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq (on GoodReads, where else?) where he (the reviewer) made the comment that Mansoor opposed going to war but believed that, now that we were there, we couldn't leave without victory. This opinion (if it accurately reflects Mansoor's) struck me as another example of the insanity of war. It's as if the Germans overthrew Hitler in 1942 but continued to prosecute the war because they hadn't "won."
The first is James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire, which I mentioned in a previous post. The review is still on my GoodReads site here. What I like about it is O'Donnell's attempt to strip away the detritus of historiography and his incorporation of the latest archaeological and prosopographic evidence to create a "truer" picture of the period than any I've read before. It's not perfect and suffers from the author's own prejudices but it shakes up a reader's perceptions of a period that many would think has been mined out.
The second book to recommend this Sunday a.m. is James Wood's How Fiction Works. It's a very readable and interesting look at a noted critic's opinion about what makes good writing, and its review is here.
I've also been directed to a potentially hugely interesting site known as the Internet Archive, and I owe it all to my presence on GoodReads. It came about because someone read my review of J.B. Post's The Atlas of Fantasy, where I mentioned an interest in Thomas Malkin. Thomas was a young prodigy who unfortunately died at the age of six. Before he died, however, he created a fantasy world called Allestone - a history and culture, a calendar and maps, as well as a number of stories. His father wrote a biography, A Father's Memoirs of His Child, in 1806 appending all of the Allestone stories and maps. I despaired of finding a copy of this 200-year-old book but the wonders of modern technology and the Internet came to my rescue. The Internet Archive scans well known and obscure texts, videos, audio, etc. to a common database anyone can access. And there, in a variety of formats, lay A Father's Memoirs. I haven't had the opportunity to read the entire tome; I've only skimmed it since printing it out. From what little I have read, though, I think Post's opinion is sound - we lost a remarkable mind when we lost Thomas Malkin.
On that same site, I've found many of James Branch Cabell's work as well. I've already downloaded Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship. The formatting is straight text, nothing fancy but I'm not interested in Cabell for the packaging so that's not a great impediment.
Finally, I'm taking this opportunity to declare (strictly on my own authority) November 18 Collateral Damage Day (see previous post). I'm working on a suitable memorial for this Tuesday.
In a related vein and before I go entirely today - I was reading a reader's review of Peter Mansoor's Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq (on GoodReads, where else?) where he (the reviewer) made the comment that Mansoor opposed going to war but believed that, now that we were there, we couldn't leave without victory. This opinion (if it accurately reflects Mansoor's) struck me as another example of the insanity of war. It's as if the Germans overthrew Hitler in 1942 but continued to prosecute the war because they hadn't "won."
11 November 2008
Hail, Caesar!
This post is for all those Roman history geeks like me.
While reading James O'Donnell's marvellous book, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (my review of which can be read here), I came across reference to a web site called De Imperatoribus Romanis, where the interested can read various imperial biographies, view genealogies and maps, and read up on the major battles of the Roman era.
Very cool.
While reading James O'Donnell's marvellous book, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (my review of which can be read here), I came across reference to a web site called De Imperatoribus Romanis, where the interested can read various imperial biographies, view genealogies and maps, and read up on the major battles of the Roman era.
Very cool.
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