Reading Wednesday
Apr. 13th, 2016 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat 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!)
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!)
