book roundup
Jul. 18th, 2005 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anotheranonTentatively starting the new Harry Potter in audio version - good listening when I'm sewing.
Other stuff:
The Historian - A slow chase through hundreds of years of history and several countries and cities, a teenage girl goes on a hunt for her mother and Vlad the Impaler. I enjoyed it because it was a very cerebral chase, most of the action taking place in ancient cities and in dusty libraries all over the world. I'm a sucker for travelogues, even fictional ones, especially when it paints eastern Europe the way this book does, as a place of secrets hiding behind alternately stoic and luxe facades. The ending is a bit easy, but the ride makes it worthwhile. Good if you like mysteries, history, and/or vampires.
V for Vendetta - D.'s had it for years; I finally pried it off our tightly packed graphic novels shelf because I want to read it before the movie comes out. I've been slow to appreciate the storytelling genius of Alan Moore and this is wonderfully dark and smells like 1984, though the dystopian post-Thatcher Britian in which the story is placed is somewhat disturbingly famliar.... I finished Book One last night and found it hard to put down!
A Perfect Red - Shem had this at the CSA syposium and I mentally set it aside until I saw it on the new books shelf at the library. Another good history book for laypeople, it describes the history, science, economics, and espionage behind cochineal (how the HELL do I pronounce this? cutch-en-nel? Cutch-eh-neel?), the vivid red dye discovered by the Conquistadores in Mexico. Reading this I developed a craving for a blisteringly red velvet Elizabethan gown that won't quite go away....
Other stuff:
The Historian - A slow chase through hundreds of years of history and several countries and cities, a teenage girl goes on a hunt for her mother and Vlad the Impaler. I enjoyed it because it was a very cerebral chase, most of the action taking place in ancient cities and in dusty libraries all over the world. I'm a sucker for travelogues, even fictional ones, especially when it paints eastern Europe the way this book does, as a place of secrets hiding behind alternately stoic and luxe facades. The ending is a bit easy, but the ride makes it worthwhile. Good if you like mysteries, history, and/or vampires.
V for Vendetta - D.'s had it for years; I finally pried it off our tightly packed graphic novels shelf because I want to read it before the movie comes out. I've been slow to appreciate the storytelling genius of Alan Moore and this is wonderfully dark and smells like 1984, though the dystopian post-Thatcher Britian in which the story is placed is somewhat disturbingly famliar.... I finished Book One last night and found it hard to put down!
A Perfect Red - Shem had this at the CSA syposium and I mentally set it aside until I saw it on the new books shelf at the library. Another good history book for laypeople, it describes the history, science, economics, and espionage behind cochineal (how the HELL do I pronounce this? cutch-en-nel? Cutch-eh-neel?), the vivid red dye discovered by the Conquistadores in Mexico. Reading this I developed a craving for a blisteringly red velvet Elizabethan gown that won't quite go away....
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Date: 2005-07-19 03:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-19 03:25 am (UTC)I sorta had "The Historian" on my list. But, now, I'll move it up
And, as for the Cochineal book. I love the history of that. Learned it in my ancient Mexican history class. Fun stuff.
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Date: 2005-07-19 11:43 am (UTC)Re: A Perfect Red - thanks for clearing up the pronunciation - there were several in the book and I could never remember the one over at dictionary.com! I found it kind of odd that a luxury item like red dye would excite such fierce competition but I suppose that the class that could afford luxury items were the ones funding the voyages of discovery. That and though it might offend my modern democratic mind I can see where the rich and powerful would be very interested in another means of conspicuous consumption.
Tell me more about that class :)
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Date: 2005-07-20 12:22 am (UTC)