History Geekery for Steve Rogers

It was SUPER cold and windy out that day and our 110-yr-old stone house leaks like a sieve in the main room, so Purrcy spent Caturday curled up adorably on our bed. *So* friendly.



Purrcy and I were just waking up from a nap, and he was looking *exactly* like a loving kitty whose tummy was only a little bit of a trap. But totally worth it, I swear.

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Two weeks of books, because last week got away from me.

#25 The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie. Re-read. Because I needed to read something I'd read before where every sentence is *good*.

#26 Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by Ada Palmer.
What an excellent way to write history! It's very much based on Palmer's teaching, on what she's learned about what works to reach people, on coming at questions from a variety of directions and styles to get students/readers to get both a feeling for the past, and a feeling for how our understanding of the past has changed.

For instance, one of the stylistic techniques Palmer uses is giving various people a Homeric-type epithet, so that it's easier to remember them and keep them sorted: Sixtus IV (Battle Pope), Innocent VIII (King Log), Julius II (Battle Pope II!); French philosopher Denis Diderot, with whom Palmer feels a particular mental connection across the centuries, is always "dear Diderot", and so on. Honestly, I really wish a historian of China would do this, it would make keeping the names straight SO much easier.

So it's a truly excellent approach to history in general and the Renaissance in particular, but I had to knock my five-star rating down to 4, because the last part of the book includes Palmer including as one of her refrains something that's a pretty obvious mistake, and *someone* should have spotted it & taken it out.

The mistake is stating that cantaloupe is a New World food, like tomatoes, and that discovering these fruits which didn't conform to the established hierarchy of which fruits are good/valuable/noble helped undermine the idea of a great chain of being, next stop! French Revolution. No. Cantaloupe is *not* a New World introduction, and people were suspicious of it & remained so for a long time because they thought it was "too cold and watery" or "distorted the humors" ... but was probably related to the fact that today cantaloupe is the item in the produce department most likely to be contaminated with Salmonella, wash it when you get it home.

It's really a pity that an obvious, checkable mistake was left in & repeated, because it detracts so much from the value of the whole book (at least for food historians). Maybe it can be fixed for a later edition. I've mentioned it to Palmer, we'll see if she ever speaks to me again ...

#27 Pretenders to the Throne of God, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The finale of the Tyrant Philosophers series, sticking the landing while leaving the world completely open. Ties up threads from all 3 previous novels, though it can be confusing especially since most characters we've seen before aren't traveling under their previous names.

As I think about it, the most curious thing about the series is that we really don't know much about the Pal's *philosophy*, what kind of Right Think they're trying to impose. Is Palaseen anti-theism where their martial success comes from, because they decant every magical or religious item they get their hands on for its power? Which of course means their whole culture is powered by a non-renewable resource their success is rapidly running them out of, whoops, which I thought was going to be more of a plot point in the series overall.

One of the constant pluses of this series is how it's focused on people who aren't rulers or bosses or the ones who get books written about them afterwards. It's the small people, the ones who don't run things (or not for long), the stretcher-bearers and soup-stirrers. Yasnic/Jack is a small man with a small god, yet he's the vector of great changes. It's not really that he's small-*minded*, except in the way he thinks only about the people (or gods) in front of him, not the "big picture" other people keep yapping about. He's a Holy Fool, but he really is holy (even when he claims he isn't).

#27 Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston
Big Idea SF, with contrast between humans living in a virtual worlds and those in physical reality, and machine intelligences in both, and the quantum nature of information, but the prose just ... sits there. I'm not invested enough to diagnose why the sentences seem so flat to me, but they are. Very hard for me to get through because of it.

Then over this past weekend I binged the Hilary Tamar series by Sarah Caudwell, which I'd somehow missed when it was new:

#28 Thus Was Adonis Murdered
Quite amusing, comedy-of-manners murder mystery, told for the most part in *letters!* by gad, written in that joyous era of free-floating bisexuality so aptly associated with the original Edward Gorey cover, before the Plague Years arrived. The murder plot was implausible, but the book is *fun*.

#29 The Shortest Way to Hades
Amusing enough, but I didn't LOL as I did at some of the other Hilary Tamars. Possibly because I had too much sympathy for the first victim, and I felt as though no-one else did. I think there's a British class thing going on there.

#30 The Sirens Sang of Murder
I startled my family by the volume of my LOLs. There's actually serious stuff mixed in there, along with the froth of a comedy of manners and tax law. Peak Hilary Tamar!

#31 The Sibyl in Her Grave
Yeah, this one didn't work for me. Too much of the action and the plot hinges on Maurice, an experienced CofE vicar, not having the experience or resources to deal with a mentally disturbed parishioner. But mentally disturbed parishioners who fixate on the vicar (priest, iman, rabbi) are par for the course, they happen literally all the time. Maurice is a social worker, he should be able to actually *help* Daphne, and he should have people around him to be an effective buffer against her.

Or does this reflect English society of the 90s? That Daphne is supposed to read as merely one of those "odd, unstoppable people"? Because to me she *clearly* reads as someone who's been horribly abused all her life and needs some real, *serious* therapy to become a functioning member of society.

#32 Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen.
This re-read was prompted by reading about the reception history of Jane Austen, and how at the time and for much of the 19th C readers found Austen's heroines not "feeling" enough: they really wanted heroines who were more like Marianne, less like Elinor.

Although Elinor is in many ways the most admirable of Austen's heroines, she's also the one who changes least, I think, and that makes her fundamentally the least interesting. To *grab* as a character we'd have to see Elinor change and struggle more--which is why the Emma Thompson movie is the extremely rare example of an Austen adaptation that's *better* than the book. There, I said it.