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Good Things - Books I've Read Recently
Aug. 2nd, 2006 06:18 pmAges ago I bought Dimitri Obolensky's The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500-1543 and decided I should finish the John Julius Norwich Byzantium trilogy before attempting it. This turned out to be the wise thing to do, as Byzantine Commonwealth assumes at least a knowledge of the basic timeline of the Byzantine Empire. It took me quite some time to get through it - not because it isn't good, but because it's very dense. Even if I wasn't suffering from cognitive deficits, I think I would have had to take frequent breaks to let the information percolate through. I read the first chapter attached to my Times Concise Atlas of the World, as my knowledge of Balkan geography was woefully inadequate (and is still a bit fuzzy). I am better on the regions around the Black Sea.
Overall, the book is fascinating - what little we know about Eastern Europe does have a tendency to raise more questions than it answers. I should chase up some more recent works on the subject - if you read Obolensky's bibliography, not only is none of it in English, very little is in French, Latin or German either, so no wonder we Westerners knew so little on the subject (it was published in 1971).
Highly recommended, but be warned it's challenging.
For bus reading, I plowed through The Music of the Spheres by Elizabeth Redfern, which is a fair to middling historical thriller. I would probably have thought a lot more of it if I wasn't concurrently reading The System of the World, which is set in London earlier in the 18th century and is vastly superior.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova pressed all the right buttons for me - not so much the mystery itself (OK, it's about Dracula, so how wrong can it go?), but the characters travel to some very nifty places, and as a failed academic I loved the idealised academic world of the 1930s through 1970s, before it all became about targets, administration and endlessly chasing temporary jobs and grant money. I understand that this is a minority opinion and other people haven't been so thrilled with this book, but I still highly recommend it.
The book group at my work read The Kite Runner, which was a lovely surprise. It's very well written, and I learned lots about life in Afghanistan before it all went to shit in the 1970s. There's not much to it, and it's more than worth what little effort you put into it.
Overall, the book is fascinating - what little we know about Eastern Europe does have a tendency to raise more questions than it answers. I should chase up some more recent works on the subject - if you read Obolensky's bibliography, not only is none of it in English, very little is in French, Latin or German either, so no wonder we Westerners knew so little on the subject (it was published in 1971).
Highly recommended, but be warned it's challenging.
For bus reading, I plowed through The Music of the Spheres by Elizabeth Redfern, which is a fair to middling historical thriller. I would probably have thought a lot more of it if I wasn't concurrently reading The System of the World, which is set in London earlier in the 18th century and is vastly superior.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova pressed all the right buttons for me - not so much the mystery itself (OK, it's about Dracula, so how wrong can it go?), but the characters travel to some very nifty places, and as a failed academic I loved the idealised academic world of the 1930s through 1970s, before it all became about targets, administration and endlessly chasing temporary jobs and grant money. I understand that this is a minority opinion and other people haven't been so thrilled with this book, but I still highly recommend it.
The book group at my work read The Kite Runner, which was a lovely surprise. It's very well written, and I learned lots about life in Afghanistan before it all went to shit in the 1970s. There's not much to it, and it's more than worth what little effort you put into it.
