Reading Wednesday

[brigdh]

What did you just finish?
Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky. I'm very into microhistories – books focused on a specific topic or single event – and Kurlansky is one of the best known authors of them, with his book Salt probably the best-known microhistory of them all. In this book, he takes on paper, which he defines very narrowly: "a very thin layer of the randomly woven fibers", which excludes papyrus, parchment, vellum, and other materials that I'd thought were basically the same thing. And then of course there are all the paper-adjacent developments to cover: written language itself, printing, books, art (from watercolors to woodblocks to lithographs to photography), ink, newspapers, and even the American Revolution (after all The Stamp Act was pretty important!). Kurlansky covers paper from prehistory through the Industrial Revolution right up to the modern day, where a trend for hand-made paper is pushing back against the last few centuries of machine-made.

Unfortunately I didn't think this book was quite as fun as the previous books by Kurlansky I'd read. Still, it was an interesting read, and I particularly liked Kurlansky's repeated arguments against technological determinism – the idea that new technologies change society. Instead, as Kurlansky clearly shows, society changes first, and new technologies develop in response. At a time when people can't stop decrying the terrifying oncoming consequences of texting or email or facebook, it's nice to be reminded that people have been prophesying the exact same things since the dawn of history.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

What are you currently reading?
Song Yet Sung by James McBride. A novel about escaping slaves, chosen mostly because of my intense obsession with Underground. (BY THE WAY HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN WATCHING THIS SHOW?? IT'S SO GOOD!)

Comments

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

I AM WATCHING UNDERGROUND AND IT'S AMAZING

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

YES! :D

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

Tbh, I am kind of shipping each and every combination of Rosalee, Noah and Cato.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I was definitely shipping Noah/Cato and Rosalee/Noah, but Rosalee/Cato hadn't even occurred to me! But now that you've mentioned it... yes good. Very good.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

They have a couple of shippy moments (that are all ver short), like Cato asking her "you like what you see". It's a good ship. THEY'RE ALL GOOD SHIPS.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

TRUTH.

[sue-bursztynski.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I LOVE "History Of..." books. I have quite a few, including tourism, chocolate, the Roman Games and food. They were all fascinating. Food: the author says that the Roman empire more or less fell because of picnic baskets. See, they had to supply lunch for people at the games and that cost money and after a while they didn't have enough money to pay their troops on the frontier, so... Speaking of the Games, what do you think the audience was doing while Christians were being fed to the lions and such? They were either home for lunch or having a picnic basket while they waited for the real entertainment to begin, ie gladiators. Lunchtime was comic relief, such as condemned criminals being forced to fight blind and other condemned criminals being fed to the lions... (I keep imagining Mum or Dad yelling, "Who ate the rest of the olives?" while victims were screaming below)Tourism: there were tourists from the Romans going to the seaside to Thomas Cook tours. Chocolate; the history went from the Aztec concoction to that American company which looked after its employees during the war... There are some great micro-histories out there!

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

They are a lot of fun! I read a history of ice cream a while ago which was pretty great, too, and I have been looking for a good chocolate one! It's a crowded field though, and I couldn't decide which one I wanted to read most, so I've ended up not reading ending of them, ha.

[sue-bursztynski.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered how they made ice cream before refrigeration. They did, though.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

What I found most interesting is that a lot of the oldest flavors we have records of are charmingly modern: jasmine, rose, ginger, etc. Chocolate and vanilla are actually new, comparatively, since they both come from the Americas.