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Reading Wednesday
Jul. 30th, 2025 08:26 amJust finished: Bread and Stone by Allan Weiss. This was really good, and filled a much needed niche both in Canadian historical fiction and working class historical fiction, which is to say there just aren't enough strike novels out there. The ending felt a bit abrupt—things are going downhill and William just...books it, albeit with some vague plan to continue the struggle elsewhere, but we don't really see the aftermath or what becomes of anyone else. Which is admittedly very true to life but it felt like it was either begging for a sequel or an afterword or something.
Currently reading: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. I have been looking forward to this and have had an advance hold on it at the library since she started posting that it was coming out. This is a big thicc chode of a book, nearly as long as it is wide, and the very sight of it (ebooks weren't available for holds so I got it in hardcover) delights me.
It begins with a wholehearted defence of Machiavelli so I kind of knew going in that Palmer's Renaissance Opinions were likely going to align a lot with my Renaissance Opinions, which admittedly are not as informed as hers but still pretty informed. From there, she takes us all on a fucking Journey, complicating the various facets of the Renaissance—chronology, geography, ideology, and so on. Humanist, in the context of the era, doesn't mean what we think it means. There isn't a clear division between the Bad Middle Ages and the Glorious Renaissance the way we conceive it—that is an invention not just of Renaissance thinkers but of later historians. As dedicated to puncturing myths as Palmer is, she loves this era more than anything and interrogates it with humour and passion.
It's very hard to be doing things that aren't reading this book right now. I'll probably buy it in ebook form later so that I have a searchable version.
Currently reading: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. I have been looking forward to this and have had an advance hold on it at the library since she started posting that it was coming out. This is a big thicc chode of a book, nearly as long as it is wide, and the very sight of it (ebooks weren't available for holds so I got it in hardcover) delights me.
It begins with a wholehearted defence of Machiavelli so I kind of knew going in that Palmer's Renaissance Opinions were likely going to align a lot with my Renaissance Opinions, which admittedly are not as informed as hers but still pretty informed. From there, she takes us all on a fucking Journey, complicating the various facets of the Renaissance—chronology, geography, ideology, and so on. Humanist, in the context of the era, doesn't mean what we think it means. There isn't a clear division between the Bad Middle Ages and the Glorious Renaissance the way we conceive it—that is an invention not just of Renaissance thinkers but of later historians. As dedicated to puncturing myths as Palmer is, she loves this era more than anything and interrogates it with humour and passion.
It's very hard to be doing things that aren't reading this book right now. I'll probably buy it in ebook form later so that I have a searchable version.
