these far and starlit shores

Hard to believe it's already almost March, and that it's taken me about this long to claw my way back to something more resembling my usual attitude toward work. Burnout is a bitch.

I have been trying to get more in the habit of reading books again, as opposed to, say, falling into terrible time- and attention-sucking websites -- with some success. Some booklogging below the fold.

( books )

I keep having vague ambitions to dust this thing off and try to be social again, and then I get to the point of actually entering text into the box, and it all comes out variations on the same vaguely distanced gosh! isn't the pandemic awful! I have so much work to do but I am too burnt out to do it all, hahaha oh well. Which is (i) boring, (ii) depressingly Groundhog Day-esque, and (iii) I'm sure this sentiment is one everyone is all too familiar with themselves, and hardly needs to see it again from me.

So: I've read some actual books. The theme here is in no small part that the pandemic got me squirrely enough to lift the lid on my well of repressed history geeking (this is probably strongly correlated with my recent free-fall into Old Guard fandom).

Maureen Ash has a series of mystery novels set in 13th century Lincoln starring a convalescent Templar knight on leave from his order. I grabbed the first one, The Alehouse Murders, on impulse at the library, and have mixed reactions. There's a clear wealth of research into the details of everyday life in the medieval town, the politics of the time, and so on. But Ash is much less successful (in my opinion) in evoking the real community of people that would be living there; characterization is done in rather broad strokes. But they do enough right that I'm now on book three. Basically, if you're interested in reading murder mysteries set in medieval England, you could do a lot worse, but if you aren't already in the mood for that very specific genre, I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend them.

If you happen, for some reason, to be interested in the Crusades, I highly recommend Carole Hillenbrand's "The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives". It's an excellent overview of the course of the conflicts, focusing on providing a clear, succinct, and trenchant discussion of the political and intellectual developments in the Muslim world through this time period. As a bonus, includes a large number of illustrations drawn from architecture, art, and inscriptions, some of which are just plain fun – for instance, I didn't realize there was a substantial medieval genre of "animated inscriptions", where the large upward strokes and serifs in written texts are anthropomorphized and do all sorts of entertaining things.

Paulina Lewicka's "Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes" was a surprisingly fun read -- I grabbed it from the library because it showed up on Google books as the only useful hit for working out how many meals, and what times of day, you might expect a medieval Muslim to eat, but ended up reading it straight through out of delighted curiosity. Highly recommended if you're at all interested in the topic, or the sort of person whose life is improved by knowing about the existence of medieval food anthropomorfic: it's well-written, thorough, vivid, and occasionally hilarious.

I spent spring break gibbering, sleeping in the name of great white blood cell justice, and mainlining Martha Wells' Raksura books.

I have so very much work to do it is not even funny, my friends, but that is situation normal for me so let's go on and talk about the Raksura, who are delightful, them and Our Hero Moon and the sheer unfolding inventiveness of the world they inhabit. I find myself in the awkward spot of wanting to roll around in all the meta but where I have nothing much concrete to contribute myself, necessarily. So I will say: ( Read more... )