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This week I consumed very little news and subsequently read a ton. Much of this reading was done on my bed, next to the giant peace lily I adopted a few weeks back. It's been growing great guns ever since, regularly putting out new leaves and spathes. Unfortunately, it also began putting out regular, worrying rustles starting few days ago. This was concerning because they were coming from the peace lily: with the windows shut and the AC off, there was nothing else that could be generating those noises. Did I somehow bring in a mouse or chipmunk? I thought. But that's impossible; there's no way anything could have survived in there for over a month.
Then I realized: I was hearing the lily's leaves unfurl. How cool is that?
What I Finished Reading This Week
The Book of Mystic Wisdom – Dave Albert
Being one of the two lorebooks for Ultima IV, which I am currently replaying. This one covers the game's 26 spells.
The History of Britannia – Roe R. Adams III
Being the other Ultima IV lorebook, which covers the world, character classes, combat, magic, monsters, and leveling. It's all presented as history vice a manual; Ultima IV just drops you into the world, and one of the joys of playing this game is figuring out what how to play it, which you do by sussing out the clues very cleverly worked into the flavor text in these manuals.
Bog Bodies Uncovered – Miranda Aldhouse-Green
This book is a strong contender to be the worst nonfiction book I've read this year. Aldhouse-Green is a widely referenced and apparently well-regarded historian of the Romano-Celtic period, but based on this garbage I have absolutely no idea why. Bog Bodies Uncovered reads like the output of an early ChatGPT model: meandering, disjointed, frequently contradictory, and highly repetitive. (Take out that repetition and the book would easily be 2/3 shorter.) She is clearly titillated by the violence inflicted on these individuals--a jarring tone in a book that purports to be academic nonfiction vice true crime. Worst of all, Aldhouse-Green presents conjecture and supposition as objective fact, and her scholarship is often lacking in intellectual rigor. She regularly cites herself as a source, all too frequently in support of the book's more improbable statements that don't accord with information in other academic works on the topic. (For example, the source for one of the book's conjecture-presented-as-fact claims, ostensibly "proved" by an experiment, is "Conducted by author". Another source just reads "2009".) She argues that theories about bog people based on early Irish texts aren't valid because they involve "back-projection" and "assume that cultural parallels can be drawn between medieval and Iron Age Ireland." By contrast, here is a non-exhaustive list of things that Aldhouse-Green does use to draw what she claims are valid cultural parallels to Iron Age Ireland:
The Story of Irish Dance – Helen Brennan
This book is a very well-written history of the development of Irish dance from the 17th century to the present. I expected it to be interesting, but did not expect it to be so much fun. And it is, largely because dance was one of the things--alongside folklore, sport, music, and the Irish language--republicans set out to preserve and disseminate as a means of forging national identity in the decades leading up to and following Irish independence. In practice, this meant attempting to define and codify a "pure" form of Irish dance purged of English and continental influences--an impossible task given the plethora of local styles and centuries of cultural cross-pollination with Europe. But they tried, and boy, did they have Opinions. We are talking grown men conducting yearslong newspaper flamewars that would put today's TikTok antis to shame. It is delightful. That aside, Irish Dance is a very informative book. I learned a great deal about everything from regional styles, the history of house dances, and enforcement of the Dance Hall Act, to which dances have fallen in and out of fashion and how the overriding focus on competition over the last 70 years has changed how its danced (tiny skirts and hideous Jon Bennet-Ramsey wigs make sense if you're being judged on how high you appear to be jumping). This was a really good book and one I will read again.
Sistersong – Lucy Holland
Sistersong is a retelling of the Twa Sisters Childe Ballad set in a fantasy Cornwall in the late 6th century. Like Holland's Song of the Huntress, it's not a perfect read, but it is a good one so long as you know ahead of time what you're in for. Sistersong's post-Roman Britain plays fast and loose with historic fact: the Britons are Pagan and the invading Anglo-Saxons Christian. The Paganism is a 21th century melange: characters celebrate the quarterly Celtic festivals but also Eostre, and worship Gaulish, Irish, and Scandinavian(!) deities, and, of course, "The Goddess". They speak a mixture of Scots and Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and "Celtic"-sounding words Holland's invented. "Old Sarum" somehow exists. Architecture is a weird mix of neolithic and medieval (roundhouses, fire pits, and halls, but also fireplaces, wood floors, and glazed windows). Magic is absolutely real.
Sistersong is engineered to check all the BookTok diversity boxes: almost all of the main characters are either trans, asexual, lesbian, physically handicapped, nonbinary or other [Identity Category]. That said, these are crucial elements of the characters' identities and integral to driving the plot, rather than mere virtue-signalling window dressing. Although she doesn't always succeed, Holland does a much better job of having her characters inhabit these identities in a way that makes sense for 6th century Britain. And she weaves them into the ballad's framework in pretty ingenious ways.
But what I like best about Sistersong is that it's messy. Characters aren't wholly good or wholly bad. They act selfishly but can also be selfless. They make mistakes, and better yet, you understand what's driving them to do so. Forgiveness and redemption can exist, but there's no improbably perfect resolution to the challenges and setbacks they face. And oh do I love how Holland took the jealous sister murder ballad trope and created a three-dimensional, complex human being with a very satisfying story arc. This is my kind of book.
Pagan Britain – Ronald Hutton
A strong contender for the best nonfiction book I will read this year. Hutton is such a pleasure to read, so much so that I devoured this 400-page, size-6-font book in a matter of days. Pagan Britain sets out to examine what can and can't be known about the religious beliefs of the isle's inhabitants from the paleolithic to the present. Hutton is a master synthesizer: it's amazing how he can make something that's essentially one giant lit review so interesting. He objectively sets out what can be definitively known from the archeological or historical record, what can be conjectured, where differences of scholarly opinion or interpretation exist, and what is modern (mis)invention. And he's refreshingly pleasant about it all--this is not a man with an axe to grind. It's not a perfect book; the latter chapters feel slightly less meaty than the earlier ones, and Hutton is strangely silent on some topics (e.g., the Carmina Gadelica) that I'd have expected him to examine. But his enthusiasm for the subject matter--and the people who examine it, what they think about it, and why--is apparent on every page, and his commitment to academic precision on the one hand and diversity of opinion, belief, and cultural practice on the other, is wonderful. I absolutely recommend this book and will absolutely read it again.
What I Am Currently Reading
Practical Manx – Jennifer Kewley Draskau
This week I covered the initial sections on noun lenition.
Cunning Folk – Tabitha Stanmore
I'm about a third of the way through and this is a breath of fresh air in comparison to the odious Bog Bodies Uncovered.
What I'm Reading Next
I acquired no new books this week.
これで以上です。
Then I realized: I was hearing the lily's leaves unfurl. How cool is that?
What I Finished Reading This Week
The Book of Mystic Wisdom – Dave Albert
Being one of the two lorebooks for Ultima IV, which I am currently replaying. This one covers the game's 26 spells.
The History of Britannia – Roe R. Adams III
Being the other Ultima IV lorebook, which covers the world, character classes, combat, magic, monsters, and leveling. It's all presented as history vice a manual; Ultima IV just drops you into the world, and one of the joys of playing this game is figuring out what how to play it, which you do by sussing out the clues very cleverly worked into the flavor text in these manuals.
Bog Bodies Uncovered – Miranda Aldhouse-Green
This book is a strong contender to be the worst nonfiction book I've read this year. Aldhouse-Green is a widely referenced and apparently well-regarded historian of the Romano-Celtic period, but based on this garbage I have absolutely no idea why. Bog Bodies Uncovered reads like the output of an early ChatGPT model: meandering, disjointed, frequently contradictory, and highly repetitive. (Take out that repetition and the book would easily be 2/3 shorter.) She is clearly titillated by the violence inflicted on these individuals--a jarring tone in a book that purports to be academic nonfiction vice true crime. Worst of all, Aldhouse-Green presents conjecture and supposition as objective fact, and her scholarship is often lacking in intellectual rigor. She regularly cites herself as a source, all too frequently in support of the book's more improbable statements that don't accord with information in other academic works on the topic. (For example, the source for one of the book's conjecture-presented-as-fact claims, ostensibly "proved" by an experiment, is "Conducted by author". Another source just reads "2009".) She argues that theories about bog people based on early Irish texts aren't valid because they involve "back-projection" and "assume that cultural parallels can be drawn between medieval and Iron Age Ireland." By contrast, here is a non-exhaustive list of things that Aldhouse-Green does use to draw what she claims are valid cultural parallels to Iron Age Ireland:
- Parsee burial customs in Iran and India in the 20th century
- Claims a white, Christian, English colonial official made about the ritual practices of a tribal group in India in 1922
- The Ngadju-Dyak ethnic group's treatment of slaves in Borneo in the 1970s
- The mythology of the Tsimshian Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest as summarized by a French theorist in the 1970s
- Puberty rites of Nigerian Yoruba communities in the 1990s
- The 20th century ITV television series Ghost Train
- Some mystery novel whose title I've forgotten but you get the idea
The Story of Irish Dance – Helen Brennan
This book is a very well-written history of the development of Irish dance from the 17th century to the present. I expected it to be interesting, but did not expect it to be so much fun. And it is, largely because dance was one of the things--alongside folklore, sport, music, and the Irish language--republicans set out to preserve and disseminate as a means of forging national identity in the decades leading up to and following Irish independence. In practice, this meant attempting to define and codify a "pure" form of Irish dance purged of English and continental influences--an impossible task given the plethora of local styles and centuries of cultural cross-pollination with Europe. But they tried, and boy, did they have Opinions. We are talking grown men conducting yearslong newspaper flamewars that would put today's TikTok antis to shame. It is delightful. That aside, Irish Dance is a very informative book. I learned a great deal about everything from regional styles, the history of house dances, and enforcement of the Dance Hall Act, to which dances have fallen in and out of fashion and how the overriding focus on competition over the last 70 years has changed how its danced (tiny skirts and hideous Jon Bennet-Ramsey wigs make sense if you're being judged on how high you appear to be jumping). This was a really good book and one I will read again.
Sistersong – Lucy Holland
Sistersong is a retelling of the Twa Sisters Childe Ballad set in a fantasy Cornwall in the late 6th century. Like Holland's Song of the Huntress, it's not a perfect read, but it is a good one so long as you know ahead of time what you're in for. Sistersong's post-Roman Britain plays fast and loose with historic fact: the Britons are Pagan and the invading Anglo-Saxons Christian. The Paganism is a 21th century melange: characters celebrate the quarterly Celtic festivals but also Eostre, and worship Gaulish, Irish, and Scandinavian(!) deities, and, of course, "The Goddess". They speak a mixture of Scots and Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and "Celtic"-sounding words Holland's invented. "Old Sarum" somehow exists. Architecture is a weird mix of neolithic and medieval (roundhouses, fire pits, and halls, but also fireplaces, wood floors, and glazed windows). Magic is absolutely real.
Sistersong is engineered to check all the BookTok diversity boxes: almost all of the main characters are either trans, asexual, lesbian, physically handicapped, nonbinary or other [Identity Category]. That said, these are crucial elements of the characters' identities and integral to driving the plot, rather than mere virtue-signalling window dressing. Although she doesn't always succeed, Holland does a much better job of having her characters inhabit these identities in a way that makes sense for 6th century Britain. And she weaves them into the ballad's framework in pretty ingenious ways.
But what I like best about Sistersong is that it's messy. Characters aren't wholly good or wholly bad. They act selfishly but can also be selfless. They make mistakes, and better yet, you understand what's driving them to do so. Forgiveness and redemption can exist, but there's no improbably perfect resolution to the challenges and setbacks they face. And oh do I love how Holland took the jealous sister murder ballad trope and created a three-dimensional, complex human being with a very satisfying story arc. This is my kind of book.
Pagan Britain – Ronald Hutton
A strong contender for the best nonfiction book I will read this year. Hutton is such a pleasure to read, so much so that I devoured this 400-page, size-6-font book in a matter of days. Pagan Britain sets out to examine what can and can't be known about the religious beliefs of the isle's inhabitants from the paleolithic to the present. Hutton is a master synthesizer: it's amazing how he can make something that's essentially one giant lit review so interesting. He objectively sets out what can be definitively known from the archeological or historical record, what can be conjectured, where differences of scholarly opinion or interpretation exist, and what is modern (mis)invention. And he's refreshingly pleasant about it all--this is not a man with an axe to grind. It's not a perfect book; the latter chapters feel slightly less meaty than the earlier ones, and Hutton is strangely silent on some topics (e.g., the Carmina Gadelica) that I'd have expected him to examine. But his enthusiasm for the subject matter--and the people who examine it, what they think about it, and why--is apparent on every page, and his commitment to academic precision on the one hand and diversity of opinion, belief, and cultural practice on the other, is wonderful. I absolutely recommend this book and will absolutely read it again.
What I Am Currently Reading
Practical Manx – Jennifer Kewley Draskau
This week I covered the initial sections on noun lenition.
Cunning Folk – Tabitha Stanmore
I'm about a third of the way through and this is a breath of fresh air in comparison to the odious Bog Bodies Uncovered.
What I'm Reading Next
I acquired no new books this week.
これで以上です。
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Nooo.
By contrast, here is a non-exhaustive list of things that Aldhouse-Green does use to draw what she claims are valid cultural parallels to Iron Age Ireland:
Parsee burial customs in Iran and India in the 20th century
Claims a white, Christian, English colonial official made about the ritual practices of a tribal group in India in 1922
The Ngadju-Dyak ethnic group's treatment of slaves in Borneo in the 1970s
The mythology of the Tsimshian Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest as summarized by a French theorist in the 1970s
Puberty rites of Nigerian Yoruba communities in the 1990s
The 20th century ITV television series Ghost Train
Some mystery novel whose title I've forgotten but you get the idea
LOLwhat
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Just about the least reliable kind of thing to reference lmao What a disappointment, especially if the author's considered an actual expert in the field.
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no subject