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hawkwing_lbBooks 2010: 147-150
147. Laura Bickle, Sparks.
Second book starring Anya Kalinczyk, medium and arson investigator with the Detroit Fire Department. Neat little mystery, with some untidy asides and personal complications. I enjoyed it a lot.
148. Patricia Briggs, Wolfsbane.
Enjoyable modest fantasy with a faked murder, some intrigue, and unquiet ghosts. Also a mercenary and her wolf.
nonfiction
149. James McMurdo, McMurdo's Account of Sind. Oxford In Asia Historical Reprints, Oxford Unversity Press, Oxford, 2007. With an introduction by Sarah Ansari.
A very, very short historical and geographical account of the area along the Indus river then known as Sindh or Sind, by a little-known British officer in the 1830s. For a small piece of historical context, it's interesting, and in a way, somewhat horrifying.
But then. British imperialism. So judgemental.
150. Shaun Tougher, Julian the Apostate. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2007.
A short but comprehensive overview of the life of the fourth-century emperor Julian, who attempted with limited success (which may be due as much to the brevity of his reign as anything else) to disentangle the Christian churches from the apparatus of Roman governance. A Hellenophile, a lover of philosophy, and a convinced pagan, his death during a campaign against the Persians remains one of the more interesting "what would have happened if he'd survived?" questions of late Antiquity.
This book's value is greatly enhanced by the fact that its second half comprises a large selection of contemporary or near-contemporary (well, within a couple of centuries at the outside, in the case f the historian Zosimus) writings by and about Julian.
I recommend it.
Today's morning temperatures were -5 degrees Celsius when I went to catch the train at ten to nine. Having thawed up to maybe plus one, tonight we are back at zero, with fluffy, powdery snow six centimeters deep. Or maybe deeper, where it hasn't been disturbed. I cannot recall walking through powdery snow ever before. Nor a sight like this morning's hoarfrost, which turned to dust at a touch: dry, so cold and dry, and riming the branches like weird white glass.
I don't think I was alive the last time we had weather like this.
147. Laura Bickle, Sparks.
Second book starring Anya Kalinczyk, medium and arson investigator with the Detroit Fire Department. Neat little mystery, with some untidy asides and personal complications. I enjoyed it a lot.
148. Patricia Briggs, Wolfsbane.
Enjoyable modest fantasy with a faked murder, some intrigue, and unquiet ghosts. Also a mercenary and her wolf.
nonfiction
149. James McMurdo, McMurdo's Account of Sind. Oxford In Asia Historical Reprints, Oxford Unversity Press, Oxford, 2007. With an introduction by Sarah Ansari.
A very, very short historical and geographical account of the area along the Indus river then known as Sindh or Sind, by a little-known British officer in the 1830s. For a small piece of historical context, it's interesting, and in a way, somewhat horrifying.
But then. British imperialism. So judgemental.
150. Shaun Tougher, Julian the Apostate. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2007.
A short but comprehensive overview of the life of the fourth-century emperor Julian, who attempted with limited success (which may be due as much to the brevity of his reign as anything else) to disentangle the Christian churches from the apparatus of Roman governance. A Hellenophile, a lover of philosophy, and a convinced pagan, his death during a campaign against the Persians remains one of the more interesting "what would have happened if he'd survived?" questions of late Antiquity.
This book's value is greatly enhanced by the fact that its second half comprises a large selection of contemporary or near-contemporary (well, within a couple of centuries at the outside, in the case f the historian Zosimus) writings by and about Julian.
I recommend it.
Today's morning temperatures were -5 degrees Celsius when I went to catch the train at ten to nine. Having thawed up to maybe plus one, tonight we are back at zero, with fluffy, powdery snow six centimeters deep. Or maybe deeper, where it hasn't been disturbed. I cannot recall walking through powdery snow ever before. Nor a sight like this morning's hoarfrost, which turned to dust at a touch: dry, so cold and dry, and riming the branches like weird white glass.
I don't think I was alive the last time we had weather like this.
