Alexandra > Recent Status Updates

Heading on over to Story Graph, folks. I'm there as full first name + last name (all one word) if you're also over there and want to connect.

Perhaps the most personal one I’ve read yet

Similarity to Gladstone in magic as contract law

I am so excited to be reading this.

It’s like the anti-gleeful info dumps of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Foolish? Perhaps. But I’m going in. Let’s hope the Suck Fairy hasn’t visited.

Pleiti and Mossa // Watson and Holmes…

A similarity between Mossa with her private rail car and… I don’t remember her name, Mishima?? and her private car

Hera the protagonist, Athene a rather unpleasant goddess, Telemachus a brat… I’m loving this

Glorious beginning.
A bit like Walton’s My Real Children, maybe - although I don’t know if that’s actually going to be the case!

A bit uneven in how periods are examined. Extensive section on the fifth crusade in Egypt, which is only indirectly connected to the Mongols; and then very briskly moving through the fall of the Anatolian Seljuks. Perhaps the latter is about lack of sources? Unclear. Felt weird though.

He’s married but so far, after reading about months of preparation, I have no idea where the little woman is or what she’s thinking of this expedition or what she’s doing.

I love a travel story so I figured I should read this one that helped popularise the idea of daft epic voyages. I have however just read that his theories are racist so… that’s a dampener. I am still going to read it because I want to understand how he presents the ideas. But I’m a bit sad already.

Just a bit too laissez fare with the old “civilisation vs barbarian” distinction. Also just referred to the Avars, apparently Mongolian, as goblin-like.

Turns out I am bored by revenge stories.

And there is a line between “raw” and “gratuitous violence”. This book doesn’t know it.

Skipped the section on playing a violent game as an American soldier in the Vietnam War. Because I didn’t pick up this book to read that sort of thing. If there’s much more like that this will be a dnf.

I know Elektra is all “oooh revenge” but I just don’t understand why. There’s no real convincing reason presented.

There’s a lot of dramatic gnashing of teeth from elektra, and also Clytemnestra. It’s a bit hamlet in being a lot of talk and not a whole lot of action. And I know there’s a decade of war to be got through but unless something really important is going to happen I don’t feel like we need too much of what the women were doing, when it’s “nothing different”

She can’t quite work out whether she wants the place to seem modern and therefore relatable or whether she wants it to foreign and, perhaps, exotic. Doesn’t seem to me like there’s a huge attempt to evoke “Ancient Greece”, not least because she’s actually referring to “Greece” which is hello ever so anachronistic.

First two chapters have almost nothing about either Isabelle, which is mostly becuase there’s so little contemporary info which makes 70 odd pages dubious. It’s a lot of “what we think we know about medieval women and queens with vague reference to the purported subjects of the book” and I don’t like it. Also, meandering.

Peter is creepy AF. Unsurprisingly.

Uncritically excerpting medieval chronicles is dubious historical practice.
Lots of descriptions of battles where what should be the main character, the de Warenne of the generation, is barely mentioned.

… the first page is already a lot. I love it.

Yeh there’s definitely some weird editorial stuff happening here - the occasional very random sentence being in what must be the wrong spot - and just now a very odd maths mistake.

Some confusion over spelling. Having an initial french and then English spelling might make sense in some cases, maybe? I guess I can see it for Etienne of Blois being crowned as Stephen. But Saladdin then Saladin is either a typo or weird.

Some confusing bits already - paragraphs that seem to repeat information or have it in an odd order - and he’s just repeated that old saw about spices being used to cover the taste of rotting meat.

Page 11 and he’s mentioning a (male) historian who think the Bayeux tapestry was designed by a dude because of the penises. So that’s not a great start.

Vibes of Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain, and also that Ted Chiang story where get implants... I’ll remember the name eventually (and there’s an irony in that, given that story).

Skirting the line between saying society expected women to have a connection to botany becuase nature, and suggesting women HAD a botany becuase nature. Not sure this line is being skirted successfully.

So far, a very general overview of a couple of women in ancient and medieval Europe. Not terrible. Not identifying that the women who had some science education in the renaissance because they were expected to have interesting conversation were of a particular class, though.