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Whole pile o' books
Feb. 20th, 2008 11:01 pmIn no particular order:
Dead of Night, an anthology of 4 novellas billed as "paranormal stories" - which mostly aren't. The J.D. Robb story, which has top billing, is an Eve Dallas story, and although it involves vampire wannabes, there are no paranormal characters at all. The next two stories are time-travel romances, and except for the device, in one, of a ghost giving the pretext for the time travel, there are no supernatural characters in those either. And the last story is a 21st century retake on "It's a Wonderful Life" - and again, except for the "magic carpet" that allows our heroine to see what life would have been like had she not married who she did, there is nothing else paranormal - no supernatural characters. So if the red cover with spooky illustration were leading one to expect vampires, witches, and midnight rituals, one would be rather mislead. OTOH, if one merely wants to read a decent installment in the Eve Dallas mystery series, then this would be it.
Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove. An alternate history, in which the east coast of North America is instead a separate continent off the eastern shore of NA in the middle of the Atlantic. It's not a bad story, though as usual with Turtledove, it is made into a fatter book than it needs to be by the addition of far too many battle scenes; there are several places where one can skim through 20 pages at a time by reading only the middle line of each page, to see whether anyone important has been killed, and avoid all the blood spilling in the mud and people discussing attack strategy. There are a couple of sly nods to our timeline. And a couple of fun hints at how Atlantis might resemble, say, Madagascar.
The Dead Travel Fast by Eric Nazum. Subtitled "Stalking vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula," this is nonfiction about the author's investigation of various parts of the "vampire subculture." He meets groups of people who think they are vampires, goes on a Dracula tour of Europe, attends a Dark Shadows convention, plays a vampire at a Halloween haunted house... it's a very funny book, but also sort of sad, as Nazum makes it clear that there are far too many people out there who don't just read fantasy; they spend a great portion of their time and energy being upset and unhappy that the real world does not contain their fantasy characters. Incidentally, though he sets out to try and watch every vampire movie ever made, "All told, I made it through 216 films - 389 films short of my goal. At first it may seem like a failure or cop-out, but 216 films is probably about 200 more than should be humanly permissible."
Downsizing Your Home With Style by Lauri Ward. I guess there are some people who need entire hardcover books to give them such common advice as "If you have a small living room, buy a shorter sofa," and tell them that built-in bookcases are a great storage idea. Oh, and a windowseat is a great place for additional hidden storage! Sheeee.
Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language by Seth Lerer. Though it's still a "popular" book rather than an academic one, it is less breezy and fun than, say, John McWhorter or Bill Bryson. There are many pages of line-by-line analysis of how alliterative rhymes work in Beowulf, the importance of subject-verb order in Old English, and vowel shifts from Old English to Middle English, and for that matter, deep comparisons between early Middle English and late Middle English. I think it's fascinating, but I wouldn't go recommending this to all and sundry as fun reading, the way I do with McWhorter. Later chapters deal with the divergence of American and British English, and use WW2 journalism to give some examples. Typical sentence: "Chaucer does not so much 'invent' a new English as much as he invents the pose of someone who invents a new English."
Food: The History of Taste edited by Paul Freedman. What this is, really, is the art history of food - the chapters are illustrated with paintings, from cave art to 20th century advertisements, and many of the authors concentrate on how the art of a given period can tell us a lot about the diet of people during that period. An illustration of a meal in a brothel from a German manuscript of about 1470, to illustrate the deadly sins of gluttony and lust. Lots of Greek urns and bas reliefs. Roman mosaics - dining room floors were often tiled with illustrations of food. One thing I noted is how many of the pictures, across continents and millenia, seem to include dogs at the table - apparently, up until our own time, a dining table would probably be more likely to have plates missing, than dogs. One of my favorite illustrations is from Philippe Sylvestre Dufour's 1671 treatise, Traite nouveau & curieux du café, du thé, et du chocolat, of a Turk, a Chinese man, and a Native American with their respective drinks. I wondered why the chapter on "The Birth of the Modern Consumer Age" about the period from 1800 to the first quarter of the 20th century seemed to have so many illustrations of advertisements in German, then I looked back and noticed that the author of that chapter was one Hans Teutenberg. Well, that would explain it.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
angevin2, you might enjoy the list, in the chapter on food fashions just after the Renaissance, of titles of dietetic manuals/cookbooks from England: Thomas Elyot's Castel of Helth (1534), Andrew Boorde's Compendyous Regyment of a Dyetary of Health (1542) and so on.
Whew, there's more, but that's the stack that is taking up the bulk of my computer desk here.
Dead of Night, an anthology of 4 novellas billed as "paranormal stories" - which mostly aren't. The J.D. Robb story, which has top billing, is an Eve Dallas story, and although it involves vampire wannabes, there are no paranormal characters at all. The next two stories are time-travel romances, and except for the device, in one, of a ghost giving the pretext for the time travel, there are no supernatural characters in those either. And the last story is a 21st century retake on "It's a Wonderful Life" - and again, except for the "magic carpet" that allows our heroine to see what life would have been like had she not married who she did, there is nothing else paranormal - no supernatural characters. So if the red cover with spooky illustration were leading one to expect vampires, witches, and midnight rituals, one would be rather mislead. OTOH, if one merely wants to read a decent installment in the Eve Dallas mystery series, then this would be it.
Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove. An alternate history, in which the east coast of North America is instead a separate continent off the eastern shore of NA in the middle of the Atlantic. It's not a bad story, though as usual with Turtledove, it is made into a fatter book than it needs to be by the addition of far too many battle scenes; there are several places where one can skim through 20 pages at a time by reading only the middle line of each page, to see whether anyone important has been killed, and avoid all the blood spilling in the mud and people discussing attack strategy. There are a couple of sly nods to our timeline. And a couple of fun hints at how Atlantis might resemble, say, Madagascar.
The Dead Travel Fast by Eric Nazum. Subtitled "Stalking vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula," this is nonfiction about the author's investigation of various parts of the "vampire subculture." He meets groups of people who think they are vampires, goes on a Dracula tour of Europe, attends a Dark Shadows convention, plays a vampire at a Halloween haunted house... it's a very funny book, but also sort of sad, as Nazum makes it clear that there are far too many people out there who don't just read fantasy; they spend a great portion of their time and energy being upset and unhappy that the real world does not contain their fantasy characters. Incidentally, though he sets out to try and watch every vampire movie ever made, "All told, I made it through 216 films - 389 films short of my goal. At first it may seem like a failure or cop-out, but 216 films is probably about 200 more than should be humanly permissible."
Downsizing Your Home With Style by Lauri Ward. I guess there are some people who need entire hardcover books to give them such common advice as "If you have a small living room, buy a shorter sofa," and tell them that built-in bookcases are a great storage idea. Oh, and a windowseat is a great place for additional hidden storage! Sheeee.
Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language by Seth Lerer. Though it's still a "popular" book rather than an academic one, it is less breezy and fun than, say, John McWhorter or Bill Bryson. There are many pages of line-by-line analysis of how alliterative rhymes work in Beowulf, the importance of subject-verb order in Old English, and vowel shifts from Old English to Middle English, and for that matter, deep comparisons between early Middle English and late Middle English. I think it's fascinating, but I wouldn't go recommending this to all and sundry as fun reading, the way I do with McWhorter. Later chapters deal with the divergence of American and British English, and use WW2 journalism to give some examples. Typical sentence: "Chaucer does not so much 'invent' a new English as much as he invents the pose of someone who invents a new English."
Food: The History of Taste edited by Paul Freedman. What this is, really, is the art history of food - the chapters are illustrated with paintings, from cave art to 20th century advertisements, and many of the authors concentrate on how the art of a given period can tell us a lot about the diet of people during that period. An illustration of a meal in a brothel from a German manuscript of about 1470, to illustrate the deadly sins of gluttony and lust. Lots of Greek urns and bas reliefs. Roman mosaics - dining room floors were often tiled with illustrations of food. One thing I noted is how many of the pictures, across continents and millenia, seem to include dogs at the table - apparently, up until our own time, a dining table would probably be more likely to have plates missing, than dogs. One of my favorite illustrations is from Philippe Sylvestre Dufour's 1671 treatise, Traite nouveau & curieux du café, du thé, et du chocolat, of a Turk, a Chinese man, and a Native American with their respective drinks. I wondered why the chapter on "The Birth of the Modern Consumer Age" about the period from 1800 to the first quarter of the 20th century seemed to have so many illustrations of advertisements in German, then I looked back and noticed that the author of that chapter was one Hans Teutenberg. Well, that would explain it.
angevin2, you might enjoy the list, in the chapter on food fashions just after the Renaissance, of titles of dietetic manuals/cookbooks from England: Thomas Elyot's Castel of Helth (1534), Andrew Boorde's Compendyous Regyment of a Dyetary of Health (1542) and so on.Whew, there's more, but that's the stack that is taking up the bulk of my computer desk here.
