Books read July

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
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Much, much too late with this list, I know.

Silver Princess, Golden Knight — Sharon Green
I took a punt on this, from an author I hadn’t heard anything before and was disappointed. A princess gets into trouble with the law and her father’s solution is to marry her off through a contest. She enters herself but of course falls in love with her main rival. At the end it turns out all her struggles were for nothing. The author really seemed to hate her heroine.

The Magicians’ Guild — Trudi Canavan
I was disappointed with this novel, as it looked like it was possibly going to challenge the class assumptions built into most epic fantasy novels, but it didn’t.

Rome and the Sword — Simon James
A military history of Rome, as told through the swords it used. An interesting conceit and a decent history.

Last Letters from Hav / Hav of the Myrmidons — Jan Morris
The original was written in 1985, a series of dispatches from a fictional city state located somewhere in the nebulous reaches of far Eastern Europe; the second was written in 2005, updating Hav’s story. The 1985 Hav was chaotic, a mixture of the histories and powers that had shaped it. The 2005 version was streamlined, totalitarian in a way you recognise from actually existing countries.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters — Jason E. Stearns
A nuanced and interesting history of the wars in Zaire/the Congo.

Silence in Solitude — Melissa Scott
The second in the Silence trilogy, about a woman space pilot in a far future where physics is very different from our own and her struggles to find the lost road to Earth.

One year, nine months

posts interesting only to me, Sandra
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As she herself put it, one of the few benefits of having terminal cancer for Jane Catherine Lotter was the chance to write her own obituary:

I was given the gift of life, and now I have to give it back. This is hard. But I was a lucky woman, who led a lucky existence, and for this I am grateful. I first got sick in January 2010. When the cancer recurred last year and was terminal, I decided to be joyful about having had a full life, rather than sad about having to die. Amazingly, this outlook worked for me

Which is one thing I wish we could’ve done when Sandra was dying. We did do something similar to what Jay Lake did recently, when he held his own wake, by doing a proper Sunday roast with the entire family before Sandra stopped her treatment, as a way to say goodbye to everyone so Sandra could withdraw from life and prepare for death.

These rituals, these ways to say goodbye and sum up your life, to mark the transition between living and preparing to die, are important. Sandra in the end died as good a death as she may have wished for, even if it came way too early for us, was such a bitter disappoint following on our dreams of giving her a more normal life again through the kidney transplant. Those last couple of weeks as she was slowly slipping towards death were both stressfull and yet incredibly peaceful. The worst had happened, we were as prepared as we could be and didn’t need to do anything anymore.

Almost two years on, some three weeks before the anniversary of our wedding, she’s still never far from my thoughts, still present in most everything I do. I don’t think that will ever change.

Fanboy mouth strikes again

Comix, geekdom
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Oh gods that’s what I would be doing:

I emailed Howard Chaykin a single sentence one time and he wrote a single sentence back correcting my grammar, and it was at that moment that I knew I had won the contest of who gets to have the best conversation with Howard Chaykin, because I would rather have that one sentence back and forth than any long conversation where I told him about how much I liked The Shadow and he pretended he cared and then maybe I brought up some random part of his career that I bet not a lot of people ask him about and oh aren’t I so clever that I asked the question that a lot of people don’t ask, unlike all those proles who bring up American Flagg, everybody talks about American Flagg, look at me how special it is that I know the name of the thing that is different from the other thing and now maybe I can be best friends with the comics artist or cup my hot mouth on him or just hold his head down in a bowl of warm sand or whatever, however that fantasy plays out.

Rappers delight

geekdom, video
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Did you know rappers are not just people singing hiphop, but can also refer to a traditional English dance originiating from the coal mining villages of Northumberland and Durham? The rappers in this case being flexible swords used in the dance? First described in 1715, it’s one of those dances that was slowly dying out until a group of students, under the leadership of Bill Cassie, a professor of mechanical engineering at King’s College in Newcastle decided to revive it for their rag week in 1949. Over sixty years later and the Newcastle Kingsmen are still going strong:



One of those things you just have to share with people when you stumble across it on Youtube…