I'll always be telling this story
Nov. 25th, 2006 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbSo, I'm back.
Sort of. The last few weeks have been characterised by sickness and study. The next two weeks are Final Crunch! time. Two essays due in a week, one due in a fortnight, one test precisely twelve days away.
The sickness, it was unhelpful in the extreme.
Still, I got caught up on some of my reading.
A while ago I read Lois McMaster Bujold's latest, The Sharing Knife Book One: Beguilement. Still in love with the Bujold, yes. It's an interesting kind of book: a love story, I guess I'd say: not entirely a new departure for Ms. Bujold. Lovely and wonderful and other such superlatives.
Mercedes Lackey's Sanctuary is appropriate reading for brain-dead sick people. It didn't require much engagement of the critical faculties, had dragons and angst-ridden young people, and forces of evil (tm). It helped kill a couple of hours.
Scott Westerfeld's Uglies is a strangely complex little YA book. The society is, quite frankly, creepy, and the protagonist, Tally, is interesting. At the age of sixteen, everybody undergoes an operation to make them 'pretty'. Tally can't wait, but her new friend, Shay, is a different story. When Shay disappears a week before the operation, Tally is recruited by the sinister 'Special Circumstances' to track down those who've escaped becoming pretties.
I can't honestly say I liked it. It was an uncomfortable book, about conformism and choices and other such things, but I do want to read the sequel, simply to find out where it goes.
Barb and J.C. Hendee's Dhampir - Hmm. Patchy and uneven, with an annoying, intrusive prose style. But the characters were compelling, and I've bought the sequel. Magiere and her partner, the half-elf Leesil, have been making their living gulling peasants into paying Magiere to hunt vampires. When Magiere tires of the game and decides to settle down, her reputation comes back to haunt her when she discovers there are real vampires in her town, and they think she's there to kill them.
Barbara Bush, Slave Women in the Caribbean, 1650-1868. Fascinating examination of the socio-historical circumstances of women slaves and slave culture in the Caribbean.
Thursday night I attended one of the evening lectures arranged by the School of Biblical and Theological Studies. The speaker was Professor Karen King, of Harvard University. She gave her lecture on the gospel of Mary Magdalene and women leaders in the early church. Fascinating area. It appears that the portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a repentant prostitute dates only to the 300-400s AD. Surviving fragments of the so-called 'Gospel of Mary of Magdala' have been found dating from the second and the fourth centuries. Much coolness.
Another wee fact that I hadn't been aware of until recently was that the canonical texts of the Jewish Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament) weren't edited together until c100 AD, and the writings themselves cannot possible date to earlier than about 560 BC. (The Christian canon of the Old and New Testament was only formally agreed on in 350 or thereabouts.)
The first attestation of Israel - as an ethnic group, not a kingdom - comes from around the twelfth century BC, from an Egyptian border marker. Israel-as-kingdom doesn't really appear in the historical record until (IIRC) c1050 BC or thereabouts. And there is evidence that suggests the Philistines might have been Mycenaean Greeks leaving behind them the destruction of Mycenaean civilisation.
I love history. The interconnectedness of it all. Such fun
Sort of. The last few weeks have been characterised by sickness and study. The next two weeks are Final Crunch! time. Two essays due in a week, one due in a fortnight, one test precisely twelve days away.
The sickness, it was unhelpful in the extreme.
Still, I got caught up on some of my reading.
A while ago I read Lois McMaster Bujold's latest, The Sharing Knife Book One: Beguilement. Still in love with the Bujold, yes. It's an interesting kind of book: a love story, I guess I'd say: not entirely a new departure for Ms. Bujold. Lovely and wonderful and other such superlatives.
Mercedes Lackey's Sanctuary is appropriate reading for brain-dead sick people. It didn't require much engagement of the critical faculties, had dragons and angst-ridden young people, and forces of evil (tm). It helped kill a couple of hours.
Scott Westerfeld's Uglies is a strangely complex little YA book. The society is, quite frankly, creepy, and the protagonist, Tally, is interesting. At the age of sixteen, everybody undergoes an operation to make them 'pretty'. Tally can't wait, but her new friend, Shay, is a different story. When Shay disappears a week before the operation, Tally is recruited by the sinister 'Special Circumstances' to track down those who've escaped becoming pretties.
I can't honestly say I liked it. It was an uncomfortable book, about conformism and choices and other such things, but I do want to read the sequel, simply to find out where it goes.
Barb and J.C. Hendee's Dhampir - Hmm. Patchy and uneven, with an annoying, intrusive prose style. But the characters were compelling, and I've bought the sequel. Magiere and her partner, the half-elf Leesil, have been making their living gulling peasants into paying Magiere to hunt vampires. When Magiere tires of the game and decides to settle down, her reputation comes back to haunt her when she discovers there are real vampires in her town, and they think she's there to kill them.
Barbara Bush, Slave Women in the Caribbean, 1650-1868. Fascinating examination of the socio-historical circumstances of women slaves and slave culture in the Caribbean.
Thursday night I attended one of the evening lectures arranged by the School of Biblical and Theological Studies. The speaker was Professor Karen King, of Harvard University. She gave her lecture on the gospel of Mary Magdalene and women leaders in the early church. Fascinating area. It appears that the portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a repentant prostitute dates only to the 300-400s AD. Surviving fragments of the so-called 'Gospel of Mary of Magdala' have been found dating from the second and the fourth centuries. Much coolness.
Another wee fact that I hadn't been aware of until recently was that the canonical texts of the Jewish Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament) weren't edited together until c100 AD, and the writings themselves cannot possible date to earlier than about 560 BC. (The Christian canon of the Old and New Testament was only formally agreed on in 350 or thereabouts.)
The first attestation of Israel - as an ethnic group, not a kingdom - comes from around the twelfth century BC, from an Egyptian border marker. Israel-as-kingdom doesn't really appear in the historical record until (IIRC) c1050 BC or thereabouts. And there is evidence that suggests the Philistines might have been Mycenaean Greeks leaving behind them the destruction of Mycenaean civilisation.
I love history. The interconnectedness of it all. Such fun
