A light diet for the invalid

[flemmings]

The Difference Engine is the exact antidote I wanted to The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. It has literary style, authentic period details, and an A/U setting that's clearly been carefully worked-out in advance-- which allows the appropriate period details (dress and dialogue) to stay, and supplies seamless A/U details where needed. No nose-following here, nor authorial agendas that I can see, nor howlingly unlikely behaviour from all classes.

Alas, just as the physical side of illness makes one disinclined to eat, so the attendant wanhope makes it inadvisable to read the kind of unpleasant people who populate the book. I'll make better progress with it now, I fancy; but if I need plain fare like the shaman book, which was what I read in between long stretches of sleep, I have one or two sociological treatises still sitting on the shelf, including a formidable-looking work on guanxi. Maybe I'd rather read about Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance instead?

Seeing as my new Hundred Demons still hasn't arrived after almost three weeks...

Comments

[yumiyoshi.livejournal.com]

That book sounds great, I may have to pick it up - I've been looking for something to read!

I hope you feel better soon. *hugs*

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The Difference Engine? Yes, it's a bit of a tour-de-force.

Thank you, the fireworks seem to be over; and the odd experience, for a semi-insomniac, of being able to sleep whenever I choose is both intriguing *and* produces the best dreams.

[yumiyoshi.livejournal.com]

And the book is got! Thank you! I didn't know what I felt like reading, except that nothing I owned was making me excited. This looks perfect. <3

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Excellent. I hope it lives up to expectations.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't go with the guanxi book if I were you. it always leave a rather unpleansant aftertaste when I think about it.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Guanxi itself?

Thing being that the word keeps coming up in other works, being evidently untranslateable. Maybe I'll read the historical background and ignore the descriptions of party politicking in modern PRC.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

but it's just connections, and nowdays it's really a just a quantitative difference between US and China in when it comes to the importance of connections, not qualitative. Humans are quite alike in their corruptability, alas. I also think the mystery surrounding th word originated from the early days of china's opening, when US was also a slightly different country, or at least people thought so. In any case, it's a word that only got coin under communist, so what ever historical background they can trump up would be somewhat suspect.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Interesting. The book seems to imply that guangxi needs constant concrete cultivation, which is a bit different from here. One doesn't bring nice pastries to the city councillor hoping for a favourable vote on the bylaw easement for your proposed rec room.

Even if the word is new, the concept must be old? Just as we have connections now, two hundred years ago we had 'influence.' And did the Quing or Ming version of guangxi work differently from the PRC one? etc etc is what I hope the book might touch on.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

also I don't know whats holding up the chinese tranlation of hundred demons. I feel quite desperate.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The last one still hasn't come out? 21 came out in Japanese fifteen months ago. Argh!

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

Hope you're feeling better and get well soon!

(The medical book looks more interesting, but that's just my bias showing.)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Am sufficiently recovered that diet Pepsi starts looking good again, alas.

The medical book is what I started with, only to discover that one of the major number-crunchers of Periclean Athenian statistics is the quondem wunderkind of my Classics department. Somehow I associate Mark more with flights of interpretive fancy in:re Pindarian odes than with birth rates and female infant mortality.

The thesis of the book is that there were indeed chemical contraceptive methods used during earlier periods, which worked. So far all that's been mentioned for the classical period is pomegranate skin, but I wait to see what shows up. Certainly he's proved that the ancients thought they had contraceptives that worked, and the birth statistics seem to bear out that, well, brood mares did not abound the way one would expect them to.

ETA: he also has a nice snark at historo-anthropological theorization, to the effect that just because farmers do something in Bangladesh now does not mean farmers in 12th century England did the same.