I’ve never heard of these two things appearing together since “white people” were the barbarians in question
I mainly read primary sources and don’t know any surveys off the top of my head, but I’ll ask @T if he knows.
edit: T recommends
http://www.amazon.com/Inheritance-Rome-Illuminating-400-1000-Penguin/dp/0143117424
which I haven’t read but it sounds good.
Finished a couple.
Delaney’s Nova was great. It puts characters front-and-centre, loads of symbolism and themes (colonial exploitation, tarot, sailing). I really enjoyed that the spaceships were based on yachts, not battleships! This is the first book I’m looking forward to rereading (from the batch I’m going through this year).
The start of Brian Jacques’ Redwall make me think I was in for some Wind in the WIllows English twee talking animals, but it quickly settled down into a full novel of a viscous rat warband laying siege to the eponymous fortress (defended by mice). I was surprised by the accurate technical details of sieging, and also the high body-count (including named characters as well as scores of stoats and dormice).
For High Medieval, how about The Two Cities:
It’s a textbook, I borrowed it from a friend and read it casually to up my Crusader Kings game, but surprise! I have to choose the Kingdom of Sicily every time now that I know the history.
The best thing about the book is that it gives a general overview then chapters for each major geopolitical entity. This leads to some overlap if you read the whole thing: King A attacking King B turns up in the chapter for Kingdom A & Kingdom B.
You… you mean Brian Jacques right? Did some guy Brian Francis reboot Redwall and make it more hardcore or something?
I know you specifically asked about Europe, but in case you want to get past white people entirely, there is a fantastic anthology of (translated) literature, essays, and historical documents about the early medieval period in China that was published just a couple years ago. They define it in this case as about 300 ce to 589. It is a really awkward publication in that it is kind of halfway between a college textbook (that would be basically impossible to design a coherent class around) and an academic reference work, but it is fascinating to just kind of flip through. (This is the period that I study).
Less intimidatingly, here is an interesting article on whether or not it is worth trying to define a global medieval period. I don’t know if I agree completely with the author, but it’s one of the more compelling takes on the topic that I am aware of.
(apologies if that’s behind a paywall, the focus knob on my binoculars in the ivory tower is broken)
whoops yes, I thinko’d ‘French name’ to Francis
how many books in before you pick up on how ludicrously racist brian jacques is? I think it was the 11th book where an orphaned weasel child is raised by one of the good races and the moral of the story is that some species are just evil by nature and there’s nothing that can be done about it besides extermination or benevolent colonization.
When I was a kid shrug I drove myself crazy trying to figure out the scale of the various Redwall creatures which was not consistent or true to real life.
I got out some time before he would have taught me that a leopard can’t change its spots.
I’m reading As I Lay Dying. Durn those boys. Durn them.
A friend recently sent me a pic of a dude on an online dating thing who described himself as having a “21st Century Faulkner aesthetic” and I didn’t a way to tell her to RUNRUNRUN that was emphatic enough. I do enjoy his books but oh shit hell naw.
Read Paul Auster’s Leviathan. I haven’t read Moby-Dick yet so I probably missed some reference.
The characters are the same weirdly-detailed-&-believable puppets as in New York Trilogy, the story is kind of a shaggy-dog without the crippling foreboding of NYT. There’s a lot of talk about marriages breaking up (and generally about the changing nature of human social dynamics).
I just finished Michal Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné. It’s the first book I’ve read (since I started getting piles of old sci-fi & fantasy) that’s made me want to read the next book in the series; but mostly because it’s rather short at 190 small pages with extremely wide margins.
How wide are we talking?
Been reading Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball. It is odd, I’m not sure I’ve ever completely loved any of his novels but I keep reading them because I respect how unusual they are in concept.
i’ve been struggling to read consistently this year, but i just read don mee choi’s hardly war. she frames it as geopolitical poetics and i guess that’s the best term for it- poetry/ archival work tryna speak to korea through the korean war. i dont quite know how to explain it but this essay, womb8691945, takes up the same themes and demonstrates a lot of her techniques: http://thevolta.org/ewc56-dmchoi-p1.html (ping @GarbageBear, i reckon you might like this)
im very struck by her use of overdetermination- its this almost mathematical use of equivalence that she pulls a lot of power from
I’m reading The Three Musketeers. I don’t know why I waited so long to get to this one.
I am about to start reading Gravity’s Rainbow the author grew up not far from where I live, if the book is bad maybe I’ll go spit on his house
@Mikey He lives somewhere in Manhattan last anyone knew for sure, so you can probably go hunt him down. Also, post questions here if you have them and I will try to answer anything I can.
Which translation?
