Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, June 2024

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on early-modern world history. Also, most of my reading and viewing this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

(Left almost-finished in 2024, because I got interrupted, and posted in 2026, because I wanted to procrastinate about half-a-dozen research projects.)

Berthold Steinhilber, Ghost Towns of the American West

Gorgeous photographs, with the trick being that they're taken at night with dramatic lighting. (Many of them don't really need the trick.) §

Patricia C. Wrede, The Dark Lord's Daughter

Mind candy fantasy for younger readers, in which Mr. and Mrs. Middle America's beloved adoptive daughter turns out to be from Somewhere Else, which comes calling. It's very fluffy, which I was in the mood for, and Wrede is always reliably enjoyable. §

Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, volume 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th--18th Century

This is an immensely learned, elegantly-written survey of the material life of humanity in the 15th to 18th centuries, though still notably Eurocentric (*). Someone looking for a crisp definition of "capitalism", or for that matter of "structure", will come away disappointed. (Those terms are used in what look like theoretical arguments, but they aren't, really arguments.) That's missing the point, which is in the overwhelming demonstration that there was serious history to be written about things like "how much did they have to eat?" (not enough) or "what were ordinary houses like?" (cramped and uncomfortable). §

--- Vol. 2 (and again), vol. 3)

*: There is an unintentionally hilarious passage where Braudel, seeking to (correctly) emphasize the material poverty of the world in his period by considering what they had by way of bread, mostly just enumerates how far different cultures were from having baguettes. It is true --- I speak for once without any trace of irony or sarcasm --- that French baking is a shining jewel in the gastronomic heritage of humanity, but "how close were they to my childhood bread?" is a standard of judgment unworthy of Braudel's erudition and cosmopolitanism.

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Writing for Antiquity; Scientifiction and Fantastica; The Beloved Republic; The Dismal Science