Yeah. I’m reading English translations I got from Project Gutenberg.
Maybe someday I’ll go back and read them in Spanish, but I’ll need to learn Spanish first.
Just finished the second volume of 20th Century Boys. Really looking forward to the 3rd volume of the perfect edition in March.
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Running the audiobook of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror at work. There’s a bit where she goes through all the early 14th century complaints about scandalous clergy clothing decisions that remain extant and it includes canons in v. short tunics. Was disappointed that it did not specifically cite the complaint I have previously read from Angry English Monk re: short tunics on men, which is that they showed off men’s tight butts way too much and could lead to lascivious thoughts re: butts and from there to the basest butt sins.
I guess Barbara is one of those restrained historians that don’t explore all the butt avenues? maybe that’s why she won the Pultizer? idk
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how tight are medieval pants? or, how stretchy are they?
Medieval hosen is quite close fitting/tight
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I can picture the pictures I’ve seen, I just don’t grasp what the material feels like. Is it a stiff fabric that’s tight because it’s tailored, how pliable is it…?
It is tight through careful construction. Hosen was traditionally made from very fine lambswool
Hosen were often lined with a baggier linen layer, kind of like a pair of linen boxers sewn into the hose directly.
They were held up by points tied to the doublet, as can be seen in shrugs picture
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I just read Blood Meridian in one sitting. I really enjoyed the vocabulary and language, but I was disappointed that the left-field brutality seemed to dry to a trickle after the first couple of hellishnesses. The absolute best and most affecting scenes of violence for me are the ones where we don’t even see it happen, just the bizarre aftermath that lets us piece together what horrible things happened. Certain aspects of the abstract antagonism dissatisfied me while others were impressive. I like the ambiguous ending, but I wish the theme of “dancing” had been alluded to more often than once (when Tobin is talking about the Judge’s many skills) for how crucial it seems to be to the final philosophical debate At the same time I liked how Holden would make really petty, cruel points with nonsensical, poor faith arguments in such enormously elaborate and grammatically complex, articulate speech, tempting the reader to puzzle them out and see whether he’s lying this time. Some wilderness adventures felt like they were there to justify snappy landscape descriptions that wouldn’t fit elsewhere. It certainly feels like a book with a lot of hidden connections to make, so I’ll definitely come back and read it again.
So maybe like a fine wool scarf tailored around my legs, with a liner? I can see that.
Thanks you two.
about to read the mechanical bride but alsp today i learned that people actually read light novels
Re-reading Doyle’s SH stories for the first time since I was in grade school. Surprisingly tight reads for the era, and with a remarkable amount of emotional intelligence. Which is something the detective procedurals that have cribbed from Doyle for over a century rarely have. Female characters are badly treated in general, which is irksome if not unexpected.
I have also come to the conclusion that none of the thousand screen adaptations have ever done the source material justice
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I got a library card! I can get free e-books now! It rules.
I read about 45 pages of The Unwomanly Face of War. A woman interviewed women about their experiences in WW2 as soldiers, nurses, snipers, etc. Here’s what I wrote in my media diary:
I don't know how people read stuff like this. A catalogue of misery, hopelessnes, human folly, disaster…there's also love and some joy and humor and strength but good god, the other stuff is so overwhelming. I quit about 45 pages in and returned it.
It sent me into a depression for about 3 days, so no thanks.
I read Artemis, it’s by the guy who wrote the Martian.
A story about a terrorist group working for a corrupt government official to oust the mafia that same government official allowed to flourish, thereby helping a billionaire’s daughter profit even more. Also they're on the moon. They blow up an aluminum processing plant and nearly kill every single person on the moon. Somehow it's a heist comedy. Capitalism saves the day! It's fine I guess
This book was compelling reading in the same way that a slot machine is compelling gaming. The lead was charming enough…but a little too charming?? like on the nose. At least she was very profane. I can’t emphasize enough how capitalistic the book is. Any other author would have written it as a dystopic hellscape but apparently living in terrible conditions on the moon while the rich get anything they want is fun and lighthearted.
Gonna read some PKD to cleanse my palate after that twee shit.
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Great anticapitalist sci-fi palate cleansers:
For space opera socialism and weaponized board gaming, read Iain M Banks’ The Player of Games.
For interplanetary anarchosyndicalism, read Ursula K Leguin’s The Dispossessed.
PKD does rule too though. My favorite is A Scanner Darkly.
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Nice! I’ll put 'em on the list, I’m on a reading (rainbow) roll lately.
Probably going to read Ubik first - that old, comfortable recliner of a novel that makes me question my perception of reality. Also he has to put a quarter in his own door to leave his apartment.
A Scanner Darkly does rule though, one of my favorite books ever.
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Hell yeah, Ubik is my second favorite.
Decided to get around to reading The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, since I’ve had the book for like over a decade, when an old roommate left it behind. Also looked intriguing.
So it starts really good. It was written in 1974 by a guy that went through the Vietnam War, and the entire book is basically about that experience. A war is started with an alien race nobody has seen, the first half of the book is spent training in exo-suits, then they actually travel to a planet and wipe out a village. The government/military is presented as being pretty evil, drafting everyone of value into the army and using a form of hypnosis to put troops into a murderous frenzy before the start of combat. There’s also some interesting stuff about time dilation, and the way in which they are sometimes fighting enemies from their past, and sometimes fighting enemies from a decade in the future, with technology that’s advanced accordingly.
UH THEN?? THEY GET BACK TO EARTH and it’s the far-flung year of 2020. Due to the time dilation, they’ve only been out at war for two years, but back on earth, thirty-something years has passed. Haldeman is going for a “troops return from world to find themselves utterly alienated culturally” kind of thing, and on the base level that works, but god, the details are a little wild.
So immediately we’re told that the population grew absurdly large in the 30 years he’s been gone, to the tune of like 13 billion. Then 4 billion died in the Ration Wars, when there wasn’t enough food to go around and wars were fought to feed everyone. Once that was over, calories became the new currency system (which I kinda liked), and farming’s kind of the only job that matters, so all space everywhere is made up of farms - there are no forests or national parks or anything. Also, it’s impossible to find jobs, since there’s way more jobs than people, so there’s a huge black market for buying other people’s jobs, with the arbiter getting a cut. So far, beyond the crazy population spike, that isn’t unbelievable - The Expanse has a similar situation with everyone on Earth on a UBI due to the lack of jobs.
So the thing is, though, the homosexual population is exploded in the last few decades, leading to a thing called “homolife,” which, is just being gay. As the book progresses, it becomes clear that homolife is in fact intentionally being driven by the government as a means of population control. So, people in the book just become gay, either willingly or without explanation, until by the book’s end the vast majority of Earth’s population is gay, and the protagonist is THE LAST STRAIGHT STANDING, spat upon by the gays in this hellish topsy-turvey future dystopia. They call his kind “breeders.”
So um!!! There’s a few problematic ideas being tossed about there. Feels like the kind of thing TVTropers would love to death.
Don’t know if I’m going to finish it. Basically he’s re-enlisted because he has no other options in this Earth gone mad, so, I guess we’re back to the grind. And I do like the war side of the book, so, might be worth it.
There was one bit I liked from the super-bleak Earth section, which reminded me of Garrick’s speech about Cardassia at the end of DS9:
The main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted a least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contented the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder.
It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were – like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long – at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law.
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Forever War is definitely a product of it’s time, and Haldeman has expressed regret about the weird messaging about homosexuality, if that helps at all. I think it’s worth reading as a “see how vets who were fucked up about Nam we’re trying to deal in 1974” book, but obviously that has some major issues that can’t be excused.
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Yeah, that’s what I read when I was looking into whether or not Haldeman was secretly an Orson Scott Card-type.
Does feel like he went way too hard on the dystopia of Earth a mere 30 years in the future, though. Like, there are roving gangs of rapists on every street, there are thugs waiting to assault you in literally every elevator, and farmers are regularly attacked by raiders in armored trucks. Seemed like a lot, especially now that it is 2020 and everything is horrible, but nowhere near that horrible.
Just sets off some alarms in my brain when he’s using an anti-gay conspiracy theory out of InfoWars to show the moral and cultural degradation of future Earth.
I’d wondered for years why Heinlein liked a book that said the military was bad. Heinlein hating gay folks even more than he loves military dictatorships makes perfect sense.
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