Wednesday media consumption round up

[mousetrappling]

Books

Fiction: started "Girl Reading", Katie Ward. A series of linked vignettes each centred on a girl or woman being painted/photographed reading. I probably wouldn't've ever picked this up if the author wasn't a friend (I don't read much literary fiction), which would've been a shame as I'm enjoying it. Reminding me a bit of Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life" as I think there's some similarity of themes.

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - this week a bit about the governance of towns, plus the merchants and craftsmen.

Poets: Seamus Heaney (1939-) - as with Ted Hughes, I liked these but have a feeling there were deeper points I was missing.

And that finishes the poets, I've worked my way through the whole of The Oxford Book of English Verse over the last 18 months or so at a rate of two poems a day (ish). Some day I'll repeat the process, I'm sure. This time I found several poets I rather liked, and some it turns out I knew bits of their work without knowing it. Next book I'm working my way through in this fashion is rather different: "The New Atlas of World History: Global Events At a Glance", John Haywood. I'll be doing a map+timeline a day or so.

Maps: 8mya-100,000ya - early hominids, the beginnings of H. sapiens up to just before the appearance of anatomically modern humans. Did you know use of fire to cook almost certainly pre-dates H. sapiens by at least 100,000 years?

Listening

Podcasts: ep B19-B36 of The Ancient World podcast - the descendants of Mark Anthony & Cleopatra continue, we're now up to the Severan dynasty of Roman Emperors, and Septimius Severus's wife is one of the descendants.

Sunday podcast: an IOT about Louis Pasteur, which we were underwhelmed by. One expert clearly didn't cope well with the format, one kept going off on tangents (mostly it seemed when he was scared of the question), the other one was OK tho. Overall failed to ignite interest in the subject.

Music: while running I've listened to The Monkees, and a metal compilation called Corrosion.

Games

Diablo 3 - there's a new season, and we picked up the new DLC too, so we made new characters (J's playing the new Necromancer, I've got a Monk) and are blatting our way through the first chapter of the season goals.

Watching

ep 3 of Metalworks! - this time about Blacksmiths. Oddly distinct from the others in the series as there was no presenter, it also seemed a bit more incoherent and unable to work out what it wanted to tell us about (blacksmiths as artisans crafting fine hand-made wrought ironwork? Cast iron as the new wonder material that built the industrial revolution?). The series overall was a bit odd, but quite enjoyable.

ep 3 of Japan: Earth's Enchanted Islands - still full of woo, still pretty. Not the best nature series we've seen, I really don't get on with the "this other culture lives in such harmony with nature unlike us" nonsense that the narrative was peddling.

ep 1 of Secrets of Silicon Valley - how the tech being created in Silicon Valley is changing society, and not necessarily in a good way for everybody, and how there's little thought being put into how to ameliorate or work around the potential disruption. I think I bought what the guy was selling more than J did, but we both agreed this his proposed solution (slow down, don't introduce this tech) isn't viable and flings the baby out with the bathwater.

ep 2 of The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World - pretty depressing, tho not as bad as it could've been, considering. The aftermath of the Summer of Love, as it all went sour. Also how it shaped a lot of modern society as bits of the culture went mainstream. Juxtaposed interestingly with the Silicon Valley programme, you could see how the "we're going to change the world for the better!" ethos of the bright young things of both eras were linked.