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This includes my holiday reading (some of which was thematically appropriate for Palermo).
Fiction: finished Neil Stephenson's "REAMDE". In the end I was a bit ambivalent about it, on the one hand I liked most of the characters and the plot pulled me along as I read, but on the other hand when I finished it felt like just a sequence of events or an attempt to see how many plot twists he could put in one book and still have people keep going with it.
Read "The Godfather", Mario Puzio as the first of my thematically appropriate novels for Palermo. I don't think I've ever seen the film but I have enough of a sense of the genre/style/plot from cultural osmosis that I knew I was going to like the book. Tho I was surprised that the horse's head showed up that early in the story, given how iconic an image it seems to be! I liked this a lot - it's a tragedy in the classical sense, you see the flaws & circumstances of the protagonists bring them to their doom, and the slow motion inevitability of it all is well done & compelling.
Read "The Leopard", Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa - this was the other thematically appropriate novel, a tale of the late 19th Century as Italy (including Sicily) is united as seen through the eyes of a middle-aged aristocrat whose world is slowly & inevitably vanishing. I'm glad I read it, and it was neat to read references to places I'd been to (like the street our hotel was on, and the Capuccini Catacombs, as just two examples). But I'm not sure I'd say I enjoyed it, and had it not been thematically relevant I probably wouldn't've persevered - in part this is because it was heavy on mood & evocative description and rather slow moving because of it. And in part because I didn't find any of the characters sympathetic at all.
Read both "The Better Part of Valour" and "The Heart of Valour", Tanya Huff - complete change of pace, fairly lightweight military science fiction, books 2 & 3 in a series of which I read the first one earlier in the year. A lot of fun, and in book 3 the series arc starts to properly blossom. They're also relatively unusual in having a female protagonist whose femaleness feels real but irrelevant to the plot.
Read "Provenance", Ann Leckie - new, standalone novel in the same universe as the Ancillary trilogy, but the whole story takes place in different cultures. I found it lighter weight than Leckie's previous work, it didn't give me as much to think about tho I did wonder if I perhaps just don't have quite the right cultural touchstones for the story to get under my skin in the same way. Still good tho, just not superlative (if that makes sense).
Currently reading "Patriot Games", Tom Clancy as part of my re-read through all the fiction we own. I bought this after seeing the film something like 25 years ago, and I enjoyed it enough then as candyfloss reading material to pick up another half a dozen of his books over the next 15 years (mostly when I finished a book in the morning on my way to work and was hanging about in the train station wondering what to read on the way home) and I probably haven't read any of them since I stopped commuting. My book reading criteria have changed somewhat in the meantime, so it feels a bit like listening to a cheesy pop song that was a hit when I was a kid so I know all the words - big nostalgia hit, but I'm not sure that if I'd come to it cold that I'd keep reading. Can't remember if these get better or worse as the series continues ...
Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - read the chapter on religion as experienced by the lay people (following on from the chapter on the institutional Church). In many ways the experience of a lay person was of being excluded from the mystery, and this was a deliberate choice on the part of the Church. You can see the seeds of the Reformation being sown in this era (most notably by Wycliff, but also by an increasing desire on the part of the culture to merge the secular and spiritual life & stop it from being a dichotomy where either you were a cleric/monk or you were a lay person - the writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are a manifestation of this). Now into the final third of the book, about the events & the people, starting with "losing the peace" in the 1360s.
Maps: 650-1206 CE - the meteoric rise of Islam & the Caliphate reshaping the world before fragmenting politically. The Vikings come & go (or rather raid then settle). New Zealand finally inhabited c.1200 CE.
Podcasts: ep 33-43 of Renaissance English History podcast. Quite a few interviews with historians, interesting for different perspectives.
Sunday podcast: ep 9 & 10 of Our Man in the Middle East - the effects of sanctions on civilians in Iraq, plus tragedy as Bowen was reporting from Lebanon about the Israeli withdrawal in the same time span (they stopped to film a segment in what they thought was a safe place, but an Israeli tank shelled the car & killed the driver).
Music: while running I've mostly listened to Maxïmo Park & Voice of the Beehive.
Live music: a variety of Palermo bands playing on the street as part of the gelato festival happening hear our hotel, some quite good, none terrible.
Bit of Diablo 3, but mostly watching J playing The Witness and helping figure out the puzzles. I thought the end was rather anticlimactic, and the game itself gave me motion sickness if I watched while J was moving the character around, but I enjoyed it. It's in essence a series of puzzles and in each one you have to trace a route through a maze fulfilling the conditions imposed by the symbols/cues on/nearby the maze - you start knowing nothing about any of the symbols & figure out the rules & possibilities as you go on. The key is to experiment, observe your surroundings and use the data you get to deduce the rules.
ep 3 & 4 of The World's Busiest Cities - Moscow & Delhi respectively. It was a bit of an odd series, Dan Snow and Anita Rani were clearly filmed on location at the same time, but the third presenter almost certainly wasn't and it felt a bit like he'd been added later and I'm not sure why. I did enjoy watching it, but it did feel a bit shallow.
Goodbye Cassini, Hello Saturn - a brief history of the Cassini mission, with highlights of the findings and filming the final moments as the probe dives into Saturn (I mean, filming the people on Earth watching the data & instruments that told them what it was doing, not filming the actual event of course!). Programmes like this are part of why I wanted to be a scientist as a kid, even tho I ended up wanting to be a biologist.
Egypt's Great Pyramid: The New Evidence - new documentary on Channel 4 that's one of the better Ancient Egypt things I've seen. Looking at how the large outer casing blocks for Khufu's pyramid were transported to the pyramid site. Close to no sensationalism yet still telling a compelling story about what they've discovered, what the evidence is and how they found it. I think J & I had actually found out about everything that was in this previously but we're no longer quite the target audience for this sort of thing, and it was nice to see it tied together coherently.
Letters from Baghdad - biography of Gertrude Bell who was a contemporary of Lawrence of Arabia & worked for the Foreign Office in the Middle East in the early 20th Century. Told mostly through her own letters, and those of her contemporaries. Very good.
ep 1 of Russia with Simon Reeve - Russia getting the Simon Reeve treatment, so far travelled across the easternmost parts of the country, looking at Chinese gamblers in Vladivostock, reindeer herders in the far north east, melting permafrost due to global warming in Siberia (amongst other things).
Reformation: Europe's Holy War - David Starkey telling the story of the Reformation, with lots of modern cultural references. He was focused mostly on the immediate story of Luther and then the effects on England, so could skip a lot of the complexity. Good, tho I didn't really learn anything (again, see not quite the target audience).
Books
Fiction: finished Neil Stephenson's "REAMDE". In the end I was a bit ambivalent about it, on the one hand I liked most of the characters and the plot pulled me along as I read, but on the other hand when I finished it felt like just a sequence of events or an attempt to see how many plot twists he could put in one book and still have people keep going with it.
Read "The Godfather", Mario Puzio as the first of my thematically appropriate novels for Palermo. I don't think I've ever seen the film but I have enough of a sense of the genre/style/plot from cultural osmosis that I knew I was going to like the book. Tho I was surprised that the horse's head showed up that early in the story, given how iconic an image it seems to be! I liked this a lot - it's a tragedy in the classical sense, you see the flaws & circumstances of the protagonists bring them to their doom, and the slow motion inevitability of it all is well done & compelling.
Read "The Leopard", Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa - this was the other thematically appropriate novel, a tale of the late 19th Century as Italy (including Sicily) is united as seen through the eyes of a middle-aged aristocrat whose world is slowly & inevitably vanishing. I'm glad I read it, and it was neat to read references to places I'd been to (like the street our hotel was on, and the Capuccini Catacombs, as just two examples). But I'm not sure I'd say I enjoyed it, and had it not been thematically relevant I probably wouldn't've persevered - in part this is because it was heavy on mood & evocative description and rather slow moving because of it. And in part because I didn't find any of the characters sympathetic at all.
Read both "The Better Part of Valour" and "The Heart of Valour", Tanya Huff - complete change of pace, fairly lightweight military science fiction, books 2 & 3 in a series of which I read the first one earlier in the year. A lot of fun, and in book 3 the series arc starts to properly blossom. They're also relatively unusual in having a female protagonist whose femaleness feels real but irrelevant to the plot.
Read "Provenance", Ann Leckie - new, standalone novel in the same universe as the Ancillary trilogy, but the whole story takes place in different cultures. I found it lighter weight than Leckie's previous work, it didn't give me as much to think about tho I did wonder if I perhaps just don't have quite the right cultural touchstones for the story to get under my skin in the same way. Still good tho, just not superlative (if that makes sense).
Currently reading "Patriot Games", Tom Clancy as part of my re-read through all the fiction we own. I bought this after seeing the film something like 25 years ago, and I enjoyed it enough then as candyfloss reading material to pick up another half a dozen of his books over the next 15 years (mostly when I finished a book in the morning on my way to work and was hanging about in the train station wondering what to read on the way home) and I probably haven't read any of them since I stopped commuting. My book reading criteria have changed somewhat in the meantime, so it feels a bit like listening to a cheesy pop song that was a hit when I was a kid so I know all the words - big nostalgia hit, but I'm not sure that if I'd come to it cold that I'd keep reading. Can't remember if these get better or worse as the series continues ...
Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - read the chapter on religion as experienced by the lay people (following on from the chapter on the institutional Church). In many ways the experience of a lay person was of being excluded from the mystery, and this was a deliberate choice on the part of the Church. You can see the seeds of the Reformation being sown in this era (most notably by Wycliff, but also by an increasing desire on the part of the culture to merge the secular and spiritual life & stop it from being a dichotomy where either you were a cleric/monk or you were a lay person - the writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are a manifestation of this). Now into the final third of the book, about the events & the people, starting with "losing the peace" in the 1360s.
Maps: 650-1206 CE - the meteoric rise of Islam & the Caliphate reshaping the world before fragmenting politically. The Vikings come & go (or rather raid then settle). New Zealand finally inhabited c.1200 CE.
Listening
Podcasts: ep 33-43 of Renaissance English History podcast. Quite a few interviews with historians, interesting for different perspectives.
Sunday podcast: ep 9 & 10 of Our Man in the Middle East - the effects of sanctions on civilians in Iraq, plus tragedy as Bowen was reporting from Lebanon about the Israeli withdrawal in the same time span (they stopped to film a segment in what they thought was a safe place, but an Israeli tank shelled the car & killed the driver).
Music: while running I've mostly listened to Maxïmo Park & Voice of the Beehive.
Live music: a variety of Palermo bands playing on the street as part of the gelato festival happening hear our hotel, some quite good, none terrible.
Games
Bit of Diablo 3, but mostly watching J playing The Witness and helping figure out the puzzles. I thought the end was rather anticlimactic, and the game itself gave me motion sickness if I watched while J was moving the character around, but I enjoyed it. It's in essence a series of puzzles and in each one you have to trace a route through a maze fulfilling the conditions imposed by the symbols/cues on/nearby the maze - you start knowing nothing about any of the symbols & figure out the rules & possibilities as you go on. The key is to experiment, observe your surroundings and use the data you get to deduce the rules.
Watching
ep 3 & 4 of The World's Busiest Cities - Moscow & Delhi respectively. It was a bit of an odd series, Dan Snow and Anita Rani were clearly filmed on location at the same time, but the third presenter almost certainly wasn't and it felt a bit like he'd been added later and I'm not sure why. I did enjoy watching it, but it did feel a bit shallow.
Goodbye Cassini, Hello Saturn - a brief history of the Cassini mission, with highlights of the findings and filming the final moments as the probe dives into Saturn (I mean, filming the people on Earth watching the data & instruments that told them what it was doing, not filming the actual event of course!). Programmes like this are part of why I wanted to be a scientist as a kid, even tho I ended up wanting to be a biologist.
Egypt's Great Pyramid: The New Evidence - new documentary on Channel 4 that's one of the better Ancient Egypt things I've seen. Looking at how the large outer casing blocks for Khufu's pyramid were transported to the pyramid site. Close to no sensationalism yet still telling a compelling story about what they've discovered, what the evidence is and how they found it. I think J & I had actually found out about everything that was in this previously but we're no longer quite the target audience for this sort of thing, and it was nice to see it tied together coherently.
Letters from Baghdad - biography of Gertrude Bell who was a contemporary of Lawrence of Arabia & worked for the Foreign Office in the Middle East in the early 20th Century. Told mostly through her own letters, and those of her contemporaries. Very good.
ep 1 of Russia with Simon Reeve - Russia getting the Simon Reeve treatment, so far travelled across the easternmost parts of the country, looking at Chinese gamblers in Vladivostock, reindeer herders in the far north east, melting permafrost due to global warming in Siberia (amongst other things).
Reformation: Europe's Holy War - David Starkey telling the story of the Reformation, with lots of modern cultural references. He was focused mostly on the immediate story of Luther and then the effects on England, so could skip a lot of the complexity. Good, tho I didn't really learn anything (again, see not quite the target audience).
