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Last week I read Lisa Goldstein's Summer King, Winter Fool and Noriko Ogiwara's Dragon Sword and Wind Child. I attempted to read Microcosm by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, supposedly a "portrait" of the Polish city Wrocław, and started Echoes in Time by Andre Norton and Sherwood Smith.
Both the books I finished were nice little amusements. They have stories in them that ought to seem biggish, involving the whims of gods and kings and queens, but because they were both sort of stylized and removed from actual life, they seemed small to me. Like pretty toys. I liked them both, though I got a little impatient partway through and wished they would drop the royalist crap. I mean I felt like they were wasting themselves on trivial gods-and-royals stories when all that beauty and passion could have been spoent on something I personally care about because doesn't the world revolve around my tastes and if not why not? But they were fun anyway. Goldstein's book is in a completely new world informed by late Eurpoean nedieval times, and Ogiwara's book is in a magic world not many steps removed from Japan.
Microcosm is unreadable. It's written like one of those breathless magazine survey articles of the sixties, jumbled up and oh god why don't they use any of the actual place names! What the hell! Some of the places names they translate into English and I don't mean those odd Anglicized place names, I mean stuff like "Giant Mountains" and "Snowy Head" and "Cats Hills." Also, "The River." Skipping ahead, I see that they eventually deign to use the names of at least cities and states but they've lost me already.
I was going to say that this was obviously a product of the postwar period because even though the book spans prehistory to modern times the first chapter is about World War Two and of course that would have made sense up to about 1989 because until Solidarnosc Americans thought history stopped in Eastern Europe in about 1950. But the book was first printed in 2002, so I don't understand why the book starts out like this. I recall nopeing out of another Polish history book by Davies too. Unfortunately Polish histories aren't very thick on the ground at my library. What there is--is almost exclusively this guy, and/or books about concentration camps. Which are necessary to tell Polish history but not sufficient. Maybe I'll try it again sometime when my disappointment has had a chance to settle down.
I don't have much to say about the Norton/Smith yet, since I just started it.
I stalled out on the giant fantasy trilogy my brother-in-law lent me. I feel like I should keep trying because he was so enthusiastic about it. Also I haven't started the Kameron Hurley. But probably next is The Mystic Marriage by our own Heather Rose Jones, and anything that looks fun in the library, and another attempt at Eastern European history. I think I remember seeing some other city histories on the shelf.
( cut for medical neepery, not gross but probably boring )
On still another front: I'm hungry and I think I am going to boil some cracked grains in milk. Yes, I get to do that. Because, that's why.
Both the books I finished were nice little amusements. They have stories in them that ought to seem biggish, involving the whims of gods and kings and queens, but because they were both sort of stylized and removed from actual life, they seemed small to me. Like pretty toys. I liked them both, though I got a little impatient partway through and wished they would drop the royalist crap. I mean I felt like they were wasting themselves on trivial gods-and-royals stories when all that beauty and passion could have been spoent on something I personally care about because doesn't the world revolve around my tastes and if not why not? But they were fun anyway. Goldstein's book is in a completely new world informed by late Eurpoean nedieval times, and Ogiwara's book is in a magic world not many steps removed from Japan.
Microcosm is unreadable. It's written like one of those breathless magazine survey articles of the sixties, jumbled up and oh god why don't they use any of the actual place names! What the hell! Some of the places names they translate into English and I don't mean those odd Anglicized place names, I mean stuff like "Giant Mountains" and "Snowy Head" and "Cats Hills." Also, "The River." Skipping ahead, I see that they eventually deign to use the names of at least cities and states but they've lost me already.
I was going to say that this was obviously a product of the postwar period because even though the book spans prehistory to modern times the first chapter is about World War Two and of course that would have made sense up to about 1989 because until Solidarnosc Americans thought history stopped in Eastern Europe in about 1950. But the book was first printed in 2002, so I don't understand why the book starts out like this. I recall nopeing out of another Polish history book by Davies too. Unfortunately Polish histories aren't very thick on the ground at my library. What there is--is almost exclusively this guy, and/or books about concentration camps. Which are necessary to tell Polish history but not sufficient. Maybe I'll try it again sometime when my disappointment has had a chance to settle down.
I don't have much to say about the Norton/Smith yet, since I just started it.
I stalled out on the giant fantasy trilogy my brother-in-law lent me. I feel like I should keep trying because he was so enthusiastic about it. Also I haven't started the Kameron Hurley. But probably next is The Mystic Marriage by our own Heather Rose Jones, and anything that looks fun in the library, and another attempt at Eastern European history. I think I remember seeing some other city histories on the shelf.
( cut for medical neepery, not gross but probably boring )
On still another front: I'm hungry and I think I am going to boil some cracked grains in milk. Yes, I get to do that. Because, that's why.
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