Reading, reading , reading
Sep. 14th, 2010 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sandra_lindseyThat's what I've mostly been doing recently.
I finally read A Tale of Two Cities. I've had that book for about 5 or 6 years now, and have been wanting to read the story for about 20 years ...ever since I first saw an old B&W film version on telly (no, I don't know which version). I've tried a few times before but always stalled within a chapter or so of the start. I find I have that problem with authors like Mr Dickens - the first few chapters are like reading something written by a clever 9 year old who just got hold of a dictionary & thesaurus, and you have to get through that to get to the story. In the case of Two Cities I'm glad I finally ploughed through & got to the interesting part of the story, because yes, it was interesting, and exciting, and actually better than I (hazily) remember the film version being. And I cried at the end. Even though I knew it was coming. In fact, the end is the one thing I had remembered correctly from watching the film all those years ago...
I won't be bothering to try reading any of his other books though. Unless, of course, I find a really good screen adaptation that persuades me to give them a go, I guess.
After that, I read a book called Sheep. It's a history book, focusing on the importance of sheep (or equivalent animals e.g. llamas) in the history of civilisations. In essence, it was a short summary of 'Western' history, but made me giggle lots (porbably not the author's intent!) in the way it would tell you all about x, y & z and you're thinking "very interesting, but where do the sheep come into it?" and then you learn that it was funded by a tax on wool, or something like that. Apparently, the American War of Independence was less about taxes on luxuries like tea and more about the restrictions on import of livestock and limitiations placed on wool exports (wool being one of the prime profit-making markets for centuries)!
...and so on and so forth in that kind of vein. Very interesting, and very eye-opening for me who thinks of wool in terms of how it is treated as a commodity these days (for those of you who don't know, it's very rare for a farmer to manage to break even on shearing sheep. The figures quoted by a local farmer at a recent event result in a 50% loss).
Definitely a book I'll be reading again, and it reminded me that I need to go back & read my Honest Thieves book again at some point. I never finished it before, but it's about the history of smuggling, and most of the early section (which I have read before, albeit several years ago now) was smuggling of fleeces & woollen products. Hence the link to this book.
Sticking with the history theme, I then read Early Aviation in North Wales - a book I bought several years ago intending to read it for research purposes for a long saga-ish story involving early aviators (or rather, aviatrixes). It's a fairly short book, but crams in a lot of information and is quite engaging to read and realise how much life has changed over the past century.
Unfortunately, the book turned out to be not quite what I expected. Given the title and (more importantly) the blurb use the phrase "North Wales" to describe the geographical area, I was at first baffled and then somewhat disappointed to discover that the area covered is in fact North West Wales. I can see they wanted to keep the title relatively short, but it's a real shame they cut that word out of the blurb. I'm more interested in North East Wales, you see. So, much as I enjoyed the book and appreciate the background information, it's not the detail I was hoping for - I feel I may as well have spent my money on a book covering the whole of the UK. Ah well.
And now my current reading - The Safeguard of the Sea This is Volume 1 of a Naval History of Britain, covering the years 660-1649. I have the accompanying tome Command of the Ocean which covers the years 1649-1815 waiting on my shelf as well.
Again, like the Sheep book, this is absolutely fascinating stuff. It's a lot more detailed though. I'm learning all sorts of stuff I never knew about before! Like when I was reading all my pirate-related history books years ago I keep exclaiming "Why didn't they teach us this stuff in school? History's really interesting! Why did we have to endlessly compare portraits of Henry VIII?" (Well, ok, maybe we didn't have to actually do that endlessly, but it damn well felt like it!)
I also like that I can now answer the question "What did the Normans do for us?" with "Well they destroyed democracy and completely failed to understand naval strategy, therefore putting England (and later Wales as well) at a disadvantage for centuries!" Because of course, that's an everyday question :-p
So yeah, I've been doing a fair old bit of reading. Still am. A lot of it is adding to my general historical knowledge, so hopefully will help with that part of my writing. In the meantime I'm still being regularly attacked by new ideas, so am doing my best to record notes on them for development at a future time :-)
(and if you really did read through that whole post, I recommend you reward yourself!)
I finally read A Tale of Two Cities. I've had that book for about 5 or 6 years now, and have been wanting to read the story for about 20 years ...ever since I first saw an old B&W film version on telly (no, I don't know which version). I've tried a few times before but always stalled within a chapter or so of the start. I find I have that problem with authors like Mr Dickens - the first few chapters are like reading something written by a clever 9 year old who just got hold of a dictionary & thesaurus, and you have to get through that to get to the story. In the case of Two Cities I'm glad I finally ploughed through & got to the interesting part of the story, because yes, it was interesting, and exciting, and actually better than I (hazily) remember the film version being. And I cried at the end. Even though I knew it was coming. In fact, the end is the one thing I had remembered correctly from watching the film all those years ago...
I won't be bothering to try reading any of his other books though. Unless, of course, I find a really good screen adaptation that persuades me to give them a go, I guess.
After that, I read a book called Sheep. It's a history book, focusing on the importance of sheep (or equivalent animals e.g. llamas) in the history of civilisations. In essence, it was a short summary of 'Western' history, but made me giggle lots (porbably not the author's intent!) in the way it would tell you all about x, y & z and you're thinking "very interesting, but where do the sheep come into it?" and then you learn that it was funded by a tax on wool, or something like that. Apparently, the American War of Independence was less about taxes on luxuries like tea and more about the restrictions on import of livestock and limitiations placed on wool exports (wool being one of the prime profit-making markets for centuries)!
...and so on and so forth in that kind of vein. Very interesting, and very eye-opening for me who thinks of wool in terms of how it is treated as a commodity these days (for those of you who don't know, it's very rare for a farmer to manage to break even on shearing sheep. The figures quoted by a local farmer at a recent event result in a 50% loss).
Definitely a book I'll be reading again, and it reminded me that I need to go back & read my Honest Thieves book again at some point. I never finished it before, but it's about the history of smuggling, and most of the early section (which I have read before, albeit several years ago now) was smuggling of fleeces & woollen products. Hence the link to this book.
Sticking with the history theme, I then read Early Aviation in North Wales - a book I bought several years ago intending to read it for research purposes for a long saga-ish story involving early aviators (or rather, aviatrixes). It's a fairly short book, but crams in a lot of information and is quite engaging to read and realise how much life has changed over the past century.
Unfortunately, the book turned out to be not quite what I expected. Given the title and (more importantly) the blurb use the phrase "North Wales" to describe the geographical area, I was at first baffled and then somewhat disappointed to discover that the area covered is in fact North West Wales. I can see they wanted to keep the title relatively short, but it's a real shame they cut that word out of the blurb. I'm more interested in North East Wales, you see. So, much as I enjoyed the book and appreciate the background information, it's not the detail I was hoping for - I feel I may as well have spent my money on a book covering the whole of the UK. Ah well.
And now my current reading - The Safeguard of the Sea This is Volume 1 of a Naval History of Britain, covering the years 660-1649. I have the accompanying tome Command of the Ocean which covers the years 1649-1815 waiting on my shelf as well.
Again, like the Sheep book, this is absolutely fascinating stuff. It's a lot more detailed though. I'm learning all sorts of stuff I never knew about before! Like when I was reading all my pirate-related history books years ago I keep exclaiming "Why didn't they teach us this stuff in school? History's really interesting! Why did we have to endlessly compare portraits of Henry VIII?" (Well, ok, maybe we didn't have to actually do that endlessly, but it damn well felt like it!)
I also like that I can now answer the question "What did the Normans do for us?" with "Well they destroyed democracy and completely failed to understand naval strategy, therefore putting England (and later Wales as well) at a disadvantage for centuries!" Because of course, that's an everyday question :-p
So yeah, I've been doing a fair old bit of reading. Still am. A lot of it is adding to my general historical knowledge, so hopefully will help with that part of my writing. In the meantime I'm still being regularly attacked by new ideas, so am doing my best to record notes on them for development at a future time :-)
(and if you really did read through that whole post, I recommend you reward yourself!)
