Reading Update
Mar. 1st, 2019 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silversandbeaWitchmark by CL Polk: (spoilery) I got this through Tor's book of the month thing. It was an enjoyable, quick read, with an interesting premise and some fun worldbuilding. The romance was still my least favorite part of it - they've known each other for two weeks and now they're married? It moved really quickly from 'being with this person will mean that I will lose my autonomy' to 'yep, totally cool with everything' . Maybe part of this is that romance is not my typical genre outside of occasionally reading fanfic - where the heavy lifting in making me believe in the relationship is happening elsewhere. There were other things that felt really rushed, also - I could have spent a lot more time with Robin, for example. I don't know if I'd put it on my best of list, but still very enjoyable. Part of me does enjoy just living in a world where I'm allowed to be discriminating with my fantasy Edwardian queer romances.
Women's Work: The first 20,000 years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber: This has been recommended to me for years, but didn't get around to reading this until last week's sheep mystery. It is 25 years old at this point, but it doesn't seem like there's another singular book on textile history. And yeah, there were a couple of things that I noticed that were outdated - but maybe fewer than I expected (looking for updates now). It's euro (and mesopotamia) centric enough that forays into East Asia and the Americas ended up being somewhere between awkward and racist. Comparing modern Hopi pottery to being like Neolithic pottery in Anatolia strikes a different note than comparing Balkan dress from the mid 20th century to Balkan dress thousands of years ago - for one thing, we're not talking about the retention of tradition over thousands of years, so it sounds like she's just calling the Hopi people primitive. China didn't fare much better, and I don't remember if India was mentioned at all. But the times when she's focusing on early Bronze age civilizations around the Mediterranean, it's got a lot of great details, and I absolutely loved the details on the early bronze age trade routes through Mesopotamia and Anatolia.
So yes, good to read, could use some updating, and I want more diagrams of different types of looms. Sheep used to have brittle hair (some sheep still have hair) until the end of the neolithic period, which is why you wouldn't use obsidian tools to shear a sheep before the advent of bronze tools - by the time that humans bred sheep to not have an unusable overcoat, they already had bronze tools.
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon: I'd gotten this a year ago from my brother, back when I was starting my D&D campaign (my D&D campaign takes place in a very thinly veiled fantasy version of the Caucuses, at least until they make their way to a thinly veiled version of Constantinople or a thinly veiled version of Baghdad or meet a thinly veiled version of the Mongols, who knows what those assholes are going to do). The working title for it was 'Jews with Swords' and definitely seems like it was Chabon taking the excuse to write an all (well, mostly) Jewish medieval adventure novel where the focus isn't on the possibility of gentiles coming in and killing everyone. That is still definitely a thing that happens in this books world, but mostly seems to be something that happens far away. It's also definitely mimicking the early 20th century adventure novel genre instead of a typical fantasy novel, so that took some getting used to. Still, fun and delivers with the Jews and the swords and the swashbuckling.
O Human Star by Blue Delinquinati: I'd had a volume of this on my bookshelf for about a year, finally got around to reading it last Friday evening, and had finished everything that was available by Saturday afternoon. And I'd been busy Saturday morning. I really liked it - Blue is local for me, and seeing different Minneapolis places is always fun. But while imagining the ING building as a hi-tech headquarters is fun, the draw is the premise. What this reminds me of is that there was this Marvel comics storyline where five of the original X-men from the 60's are brought to the present - and stay there for a while. At some point the young version of Iceman realizes he's gay; despite the fact that the elder doesn't identify as queer. And this seems to be the sort of thing that would be very interested the explore - what the hell does the original Bobby Drake think of this? But as far as I know, it doesn't really get touched in the comics - mostly because the original Bobby Drake has kind of moved away from reality because all of the X-men have Seen Some Shit.
Anyway, this comic is essentially all about that. Except it's not time travel, it's robots. A pioneering robotics engineer dies, and wakes sixteen years later in an android body. He meets up with his old partner, who had tried to bring him back shortly after his death but because of shenanigans, ended up with a child version of him - one that then chose to transition, and is now a fifteen year-old girl. And then there are feelings and mysteries.
I read probably around 400 pages of this within 24 hours and want more.
Delver by Trotman/Hawken: So this is on the comixology imprint, which means that I don't know if it's available in paper. The story is by Spike Trotman (Smut Peddler, Iron Circus, Templar AZ, saying smart things on twitter), though drawn by Clive Hawken (I don't know, but it sure is pretty). The general idea is that portals to monster filled treasure dungeons pop up randomly over this land; and adventurers, being adventurers, pop into them. One day, a portal appears in the main character's root cellar, and lo, adventurers appear, and the town's economy quickly changes to revolve around the cellar and the adventurers. It's a lot wordier than I like my comics to be, but also, they're doing a lot of work to create an interesting, diverse world, and I think I'm really going to enjoy what they're going to do with the premise.
Women's Work: The first 20,000 years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber: This has been recommended to me for years, but didn't get around to reading this until last week's sheep mystery. It is 25 years old at this point, but it doesn't seem like there's another singular book on textile history. And yeah, there were a couple of things that I noticed that were outdated - but maybe fewer than I expected (looking for updates now). It's euro (and mesopotamia) centric enough that forays into East Asia and the Americas ended up being somewhere between awkward and racist. Comparing modern Hopi pottery to being like Neolithic pottery in Anatolia strikes a different note than comparing Balkan dress from the mid 20th century to Balkan dress thousands of years ago - for one thing, we're not talking about the retention of tradition over thousands of years, so it sounds like she's just calling the Hopi people primitive. China didn't fare much better, and I don't remember if India was mentioned at all. But the times when she's focusing on early Bronze age civilizations around the Mediterranean, it's got a lot of great details, and I absolutely loved the details on the early bronze age trade routes through Mesopotamia and Anatolia.
So yes, good to read, could use some updating, and I want more diagrams of different types of looms. Sheep used to have brittle hair (some sheep still have hair) until the end of the neolithic period, which is why you wouldn't use obsidian tools to shear a sheep before the advent of bronze tools - by the time that humans bred sheep to not have an unusable overcoat, they already had bronze tools.
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon: I'd gotten this a year ago from my brother, back when I was starting my D&D campaign (my D&D campaign takes place in a very thinly veiled fantasy version of the Caucuses, at least until they make their way to a thinly veiled version of Constantinople or a thinly veiled version of Baghdad or meet a thinly veiled version of the Mongols, who knows what those assholes are going to do). The working title for it was 'Jews with Swords' and definitely seems like it was Chabon taking the excuse to write an all (well, mostly) Jewish medieval adventure novel where the focus isn't on the possibility of gentiles coming in and killing everyone. That is still definitely a thing that happens in this books world, but mostly seems to be something that happens far away. It's also definitely mimicking the early 20th century adventure novel genre instead of a typical fantasy novel, so that took some getting used to. Still, fun and delivers with the Jews and the swords and the swashbuckling.
O Human Star by Blue Delinquinati: I'd had a volume of this on my bookshelf for about a year, finally got around to reading it last Friday evening, and had finished everything that was available by Saturday afternoon. And I'd been busy Saturday morning. I really liked it - Blue is local for me, and seeing different Minneapolis places is always fun. But while imagining the ING building as a hi-tech headquarters is fun, the draw is the premise. What this reminds me of is that there was this Marvel comics storyline where five of the original X-men from the 60's are brought to the present - and stay there for a while. At some point the young version of Iceman realizes he's gay; despite the fact that the elder doesn't identify as queer. And this seems to be the sort of thing that would be very interested the explore - what the hell does the original Bobby Drake think of this? But as far as I know, it doesn't really get touched in the comics - mostly because the original Bobby Drake has kind of moved away from reality because all of the X-men have Seen Some Shit.
Anyway, this comic is essentially all about that. Except it's not time travel, it's robots. A pioneering robotics engineer dies, and wakes sixteen years later in an android body. He meets up with his old partner, who had tried to bring him back shortly after his death but because of shenanigans, ended up with a child version of him - one that then chose to transition, and is now a fifteen year-old girl. And then there are feelings and mysteries.
I read probably around 400 pages of this within 24 hours and want more.
Delver by Trotman/Hawken: So this is on the comixology imprint, which means that I don't know if it's available in paper. The story is by Spike Trotman (Smut Peddler, Iron Circus, Templar AZ, saying smart things on twitter), though drawn by Clive Hawken (I don't know, but it sure is pretty). The general idea is that portals to monster filled treasure dungeons pop up randomly over this land; and adventurers, being adventurers, pop into them. One day, a portal appears in the main character's root cellar, and lo, adventurers appear, and the town's economy quickly changes to revolve around the cellar and the adventurers. It's a lot wordier than I like my comics to be, but also, they're doing a lot of work to create an interesting, diverse world, and I think I'm really going to enjoy what they're going to do with the premise.
