Truth, Honey & Ashes

there are so many angles in this

I am absolutely taking one of the main plot points to give to a blorbo in a fic.

but it’s just not landing as a fun read. The romance is boring. The pacing is jerky. The voice is intentional and I get what the author is shooting for but I don’t like it.

There’s so much world building and it all passes in a wash without really getting time to be cool. No no no. We need a little more time with that. Hold on. Go back. but instead the book is spending all that page space on an info dump disguised as a teacher evaluation or setting up the stakes via a bureaucratic board meeting.

Go back to the military applications of demons. Can we get some time with the magic tattoos bit? I want more on the difference between academic and “low class” magic. The romance could be good but it is happening on the fringes of a meeting in the archive where a librarian info dumps.

why are we spending so much time on the boring parts and so little time on all the good bits!?

and it is coming on as a RUSH of extremely ambitious creativity that I'm not sure I'm actually equipped to execute but I'm enjoying it.

mostly it's been fic that is the focus of the "unhinge jaw, swallow project whole" energy but today it is the quilt project.

One of these inspo pictures suits my preferences much better.

But I got the white fabric from a different supplier and did not know how to assess from teh thread count or fiber notes if they were the same and ended up with something too stiff and much heavier.

And I think it will be good for me.

Like - I lost a family member about a year ago and it kind of destabilized me and I think having a good cathartic cry over a fictional character's grief will be good for me

There’s another section where he goes into how studies of how the rings of North American Bristol pines can be analyzed to learn things about the climate over the Indian Ocean which correlates with rain in Ethiopian high lands which corresponds with the Nile flooding which impacts how much grain the Roman Empire could extract.

We looked at some trees so we know that the there was a food shortage before the plague started and we know the plague was bad because the ice in Greenland shows that it shut down mining operations.

New hobby. New reading list. New meal prep routines.

Do everything!

I studied European history in university but that was two decades ago and haven’t really read a lot of history since.

I am following my interests of what seems like it might be a neat story. It’s an era I have very little framework for but I know stuff around it. Like I’ve read and seen Antony and Cleopatra. I had a huge Egypt phase as a kid. So much of medieval Europe (especially all the early modern Mediterranean stuff I did in upper years) is built on the bones of Rome.

But I know almost nothing properly so this is me exploring.

This is where my reading list is sitting.

I am enjoying Pox Romana. It is very academic with a lot of discussion of sources and ambiguities. It isn’t too dense though. It’s very readable but not written to be exciting. I’m into books about epidemics and have read a lot of them so it is up my alley just in a different era. I read the first half of Rome of One’s Own and then got distracted and my hold expired. It is well cited and you can tell the author did the research but it also has this very blogger-tone which I don’t love. The Darkening Age and Pagans are both about the rise of Christianity and Darkening Age in particular is apparently in a contentious area of scholarship. There are opinions on her interpretations.