Wednesday Reading!
I've been playing a lot of Sims and listening to ballgames almost every day, so I've cut back on my reading a little.
I'm trying to finish Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America by Peter Andreas. It's a really interesting look at American history. I love the fact that the early American textile industry was based on intellectual property theft (along with the actual theft of machines). And now, here we are, desperately trying to convince the rest of the world to accept our ridiculously stringent intellectual property laws. Still, the author veers between trying to write popular history and trying to be academic. It can be done and done well, but his attempt leaves it a little disjointed.
Back to historicals--I'm kind of rediscovering Pauline Gredge. I read her books about Hapshetsut and Boudicca a long time ago, but I've never read anything else by her. So I tried her Lord of the Two Lands trilogy--it starts with The Hippopotamus Marsh--and really liked it. It's about the attempt of the last of the Egyptian royal family to gain the kingdom back from the Hyskos pharaohs and as usual in a Gedge novel, the female characters are well-written and complex. There's one exception, but still, any novel about ancient history that passes the Bechdel test over and over is a good thing.
I want to continue reading Gedge's books and maybe find a couple of good histories of Egypt, but I really really need to start writing.
crossposted from http://telesilla.dreamwidth.org/308486.html |
comments | you can comment at my DW using OpenID
I'm trying to finish Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America by Peter Andreas. It's a really interesting look at American history. I love the fact that the early American textile industry was based on intellectual property theft (along with the actual theft of machines). And now, here we are, desperately trying to convince the rest of the world to accept our ridiculously stringent intellectual property laws. Still, the author veers between trying to write popular history and trying to be academic. It can be done and done well, but his attempt leaves it a little disjointed.
Back to historicals--I'm kind of rediscovering Pauline Gredge. I read her books about Hapshetsut and Boudicca a long time ago, but I've never read anything else by her. So I tried her Lord of the Two Lands trilogy--it starts with The Hippopotamus Marsh--and really liked it. It's about the attempt of the last of the Egyptian royal family to gain the kingdom back from the Hyskos pharaohs and as usual in a Gedge novel, the female characters are well-written and complex. There's one exception, but still, any novel about ancient history that passes the Bechdel test over and over is a good thing.
I want to continue reading Gedge's books and maybe find a couple of good histories of Egypt, but I really really need to start writing.
crossposted from http://telesilla.dreamwidth.org/308486.html |
comments | you can comment at my DW using OpenID