Wednesday Media Consumption Roundup

[mousetrappling]

Books

Fiction: Finished "2010: Odyssey Two", Arthur C. Clarke - enjoyed this, not sure I remembered very much of the story at all, not even a sense of familiarity so I can't've read it often as a child. I should track down the next two in the library and read them - pretty sure I've read 2061 but not 3001.

Read "Childhood's End", Arthur C. Clarke - one of my favourite books as a child, and although I wouldn't say that any more I'm still fond of it. I do now think he shouldn't've written an extra chapter 1 for the new edition in the 90s which punts the setting out into the 21st Century without also editing the rest to stop it being a very 1950s society that the plot happens in.

Read "The Lion of Comarre & Against the Fall of Night", Arthur C. Clarke - two stories which aren't connected except thematically. Lone young man with a thirst for knowledge pushes against the decaying grandeur of his world to find truth or bring change. Something about Against the Fall of Night really struck me this time, I found it very evocative & it conjured up a mood of nostalgia and of people who were aware they were living after the best days had been & gone. (I'm also pretty sure I've read "The City and the Stars", which is a re-write of it, but I don't seem to own it)

Read "Expedition to Earth", Arthur C. Clarke - a collection of short stories, some of which worked for me & some didn't. Covered quite a lot of genres/common tropes whilst all still being SFF - like a war story told by a retired soldier (but the action set on Phobos), like a version of The Cold Equations, another was explorers/surveyors visiting a new planet & meeting the inhabitants who are revealed to be our distant ancestors. And an earlier version of 2001 ("The Sentinel").

Read "Islands in the Sky", Arthur C. Clarke - boys own adventure story IN SPAAAAACE! Contains mild peril. It's definitely a kids book, I think I used to find it rather fun when I was closer to the protagonist's age but now it's just a bit childish.

So I read almost all of the above whilst feeling miserable with a stomach bug on Monday, that's why the sudden surge of books. Obviously this is a tiny part of Clarke's oeuvre and it seems to skew towards the early but I'd forgotten how different in mood Clarke's fiction feels to Asimov's or Heinlein's (to take those he's often on a pedestal with). He's definitely a Brit born at the end of World War One - a theme running through much of what I just read was of life after the Empire has gone, after the Golden Age is over. But other things reminded me of Heinlein in particular - like in passing world building details of polyamorous relationships and fixed-term marriages. Though in Heinlein such things are fetishised but Clarke seems to just drop them in in passing to illustrate how this isn't our society.

Started "Coma", Robin Cook - continuing reading the fiction on our shelves, I'm just a little way in to this book and despite assuming I had, I'm pretty sure I've never read it before. J bought it and I must've just got used to seeing it on the shelf. Medical thriller, made into a film I believe, set in the "present day" of 1976.

Non-fiction: Still reading "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East", Robert Fisk - read quite a bit of this on my travels during the last couple of weeks. He's up to the aftermath of the first Gulf War & the uprising (encouraged by the West) which failed to overthrow Saddam and was then betrayed by the West.

Listening

Podcasts: ep 116-122 of The History of England - just covered the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, and the brutal aftermath, and now starting on Wycliffe. Continues to be both interesting & entertaining.

Sunday Podcast: ep 21-22 of Living with the Gods - one looking at how having many gods shapes one's society & authority structures, and the next looking at how having one god does.

Music: While running I listened to Imagined Village "Imagined Village".

BSS Study Day: "Tombs and Temples of el Kab: Current Fieldwork & Research" - 4 talks by different people:

"The Major Decorated Tombs: introduction and review", Vivian Davies - overview of all the decorated tombs in el Kab, who they were for & what they tell us about the history & society of the time.

"The Tombs and Temples: recovering history from visitors’ graffiti", Luigi Prada - the best talk of the day, a fascinating look at the Ancient Egyptian graffiti on the tombs & temples at el Kab and what it told us about the people who made it.

"Monuments from the Tomb of Ahmose-Pennekhbet and the Ramesside Shrines: a project of reconstruction", Susanne Woodhouse - a discussion of the bits of stone monument in one of the tombs & where on the site they'd originally been. Followed up with a joint talk from her & Prada about a new decorated tomb that's recently been discovered there.

"Elkab in Oxford", Liam McNamara - many of the archaeologists who did the work at el Kab from the late 19th Century onwards have been associated with Oxford and this was a look at what there is in the various archives & museums to do with this.

Talk: "The Tomb of Tatia at Saqqara", Vincent Oeters - the excavation of a small, relatively recently discovered tomb at Saqqara dating to the 19th Dynasty. This is what Oeters did his Master's thesis on, and he'd done things like figured out a plausible genealogy for the tomb owner (and subsequently revised it when they found something new).

Museum

A brief look in the Bolton Museum & Aquarium which is being refurbished - so the aquarium is (I believe) properly open but the Egyptian stuff is shut. The aquarium was fun, if a little odd to find in the basement of the library. The temporary display while the rest was shut was heavy on the stuffed birds and the gosh-wow child oriented labelling. We'll have to go back some time when the new Egyptian galleries are open.

Had an afternoon in the recently refurbished Egyptian galleries at the World Museum, Liverpool. Rather well done, I thought, with a lot of interesting stuff - worth the visit.

Watching

ep 5 of Secret Agent Selection: WW2 - finishing up the series/training scheme with a mock operation. I'd been dubious going in as it looked like it might be all a bit too reality TV, but it was really good.

Jeff Beck: Still on the Run - biopic of the most famous man I didn't know about. Well, I exaggerate for effect, I did know Jeff Beck was a famous guitarist but he also turned out to've been involved in more music that I knew than I realised and to be a pretty interesting chap. Did feel a bit like a programme the Beeb is banking for when he pops his clogs tho - it's the obituary/retrospective done with his input.

ep 1 & 2 of Pompeii's Final Hours: New Evidence - Channel 5 documentary with Bettany Hughes, Raksha Dave and John Sergeant. The last of whom could've been completely dropped from the programmes & nothing pretty much would've changed about the information presented - he's there as the "pretty face" or "glamorous assistant" whilst the other two do the serious history/archaeology. I've been sniping back at the TV a bit during this but actually it's pretty well done - a straightforward run through of how we think events progressed from T-2days through to the eruption, and a look at new archaeology on the site & scanning of the casts etc.

ep 1 of Africa's Greatest Civilisations - presented by Henry Louis Gates Jr, first of a 6 part series about African history running from the origins of humanity onwards. Felt a bit like he was over-egging the pudding at times, but some of that is that in this ep I'm hearing stuff I already know about only with the opposite biases to "normal".