1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danny Danziger & John Gillingham.

I am way behind on my bookblogging, but I'll post a really quick review of something I read a few months back just to try to get back in the game a little.

This is an apparent 'sequel' to something called The Year 1000, which I haven't read. It's your typical pop history - both ' ( Read more... )

Pushing Ice (2005) by Alastair Reynolds.

This was very readable though not particularly original. It's 2057 and there's a fairly mature comet-mining industry. Captain Bella Lind and the crew of the Rockhopper are busily working in said industry, when Janus abruptly drops its disguise as a moon of Jupiter and begins to accelerate out of the solar ( Read more... )

( Review of Stephen Baxter's Evolution (spoilers - the major turning point of the novel is probably deducible from this, though I don't state what happens outright): )

A History of New Zealand by Keith Sinclair.

This is a history of, arguably, the most substantial country on Earth with the least amount of history. (I assume you can find other candidates among the smaller islands in the Pacific, but that's why I included the weasel word "substantial".)

The most interesting material was about the Maori land ( Read more... )

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee.

This book is a social history of American Chinese food and an account of the inner workings of the Chinese restaurant industry, with occasional bits of autobiography. The author points out in the first sentence of Chapter One that there are more Chinese ( Read more... )