{"id":2947,"date":"2011-05-10T07:29:39","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T12:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2011\/05\/10\/books-read-april-3\/"},"modified":"2011-05-19T04:10:58","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T09:10:58","slug":"books-read-april-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2011\/05\/10\/books-read-april-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Books read April"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nWay too late with this post, but then April was not a good month for me. A combination of work, private troubles and other priorities meant I only managed to read three books this month. It didn&#8217;t help that I was way too ambitious chosing which books to read, as you&#8217;ll see. This time last year I read <a href=\"\/wissewords2\/2010\/05\/01\/books-read-april-2\/\">ten books<\/a>, in 2009 <a href=\"\/wissewords2\/2009\/05\/01\/books-read-april\/\">thirteen<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<cite><a href=\"\/books2\/2011\/04\/the-inheritance-of-rome-chris-wickham\/\">The Inheritance of Rome<\/a><\/cite> &#8212; Chris Wickham<br \/>\nRecommended to me by <a href=\"\/books2\/2010\/11\/the-ruin-of-the-roman-empire-james-j-odonnell\/#comment-6010\">Chris Y<\/a>: it did not disappoint. An excellent book that traces the evolution of the Late Antiquity Roman Empire into the early Middle Ages, without getting hungup on &#8220;the Fall of Rome&#8221; or the political-military aspects of this history.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<cite>Three Victories and a Defeat<\/cite> &#8212; Brendan Simms<br \/>\nReadable if at times repetitive history of the Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, as the cover has it, in the context of the British quest for a Balance of Power in Europe in the eighteenth century as successive governments, both Tory and Whigs, sought to guarantee Britain&#8217;s safety. A very traditional novel, as the focus is solely on diplomancy, war and the internal politics of the British Empire, with a soupcon of economic history. It&#8217;s repetitive because Simms points out with great glee how each new government made the same old errors.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<cite><a href=\"\/books\/china-mountain-zhang.html\">China Mountain Zhang<\/a><\/cite> &#8212; Maureen F. McHugh<br \/>\nAnother book read for my <cite>Year of Reading Women<\/cite> project, this is McHugh&#8217;s debut novel and is that rare science fiction novel that doesn&#8217;t have the fate of the world or universe at stake. Instead it tells the story of a gay American Born Chinese construction worker with a Hispanic mother who was big in the revolution that made the US a socialist country and vassal state of China sometime in the late or early 22nd century. Zhang just tries to live his life in a world that on the whole is neither worse nor better than our own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Way too late with this post, but then April was not a good month for me. A combination of work, private troubles and other priorities meant I only managed to read three books this month. It didn&#8217;t help that I was way too ambitious chosing which books to read, as you&#8217;ll see. This time last [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-posts-interesting-only-to-me"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2947"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2963,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947\/revisions\/2963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}