Roman Britain by David Shotter

This entry is part 31 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway.  I picked up this book at a university booksale in Jakarta many years ago; I apparently read it in 2016, though I didn’t realize it until near the end, when I reached the most memorable portion of the book—that which discusses the role of religion in Roman Britain.  (I’m sure some of the viewers of Raised by Wolves would be interested in that chapter, since it has a discussion of the rivalry between the Mithraic cult and the Christians in that context. Nodens also comes …

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Saga, Volume 2 by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples

This entry is part 32 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway.  As I recently mentioned, I’ve got the entire Saga series (so far) on my iPad. I read the second volume recently, and enjoyed it. What really grabbed me was the voice: our narrator for a lot of the volume is the future voice of the infant in the present time of the story. The other thing I enjoyed about it is the fact its handling of in-laws: they can, after all, be a real trial for any couple, but when you’re star-crossed lovers from cultures …

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Menace Under Marswood by Sterling Lanier

This entry is part 33 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway.  The back cover copy of this paperback seemed to promise a kind of planetary romance voyage tale, like a more modern (circa 1980s) take on Burroughs’ Mars adventures: a trip into the Martian “outback” to investigate a new threat among the people living in the Martian wilderness. It starts out very slow. The setup preceding the adventure proper—which I’d expect a writer today to cover in 5–10 (or maybe 15) pages—takes about a third of the book, with base politics, an encounter with a shaman and …

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The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui

This entry is part 34 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this at some point weeks after reading the book. This one, I was happy to run across by chance in as an available ebook on the National Library website.  Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is a multigenerational memoir of her family’s experiences—of the history of Vietnam (both during the colonial era and the Vietnam War)—and of their emigration to America, and how the past reverberates through the present, how the further past reverberates through the more recent past.  It’s pretty inspiring that she decided to learn how to draw comics in order to write …

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Muse Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes by Ian Brennan

This entry is part 35 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. This one, I read not long ago, after purchasing it through a book bundle.  This is the first thing I’ve read by Ian Brennan. As John Waters states in his foreword to the book, even when one disagrees with Brennan, what the guy has to say is interesting. I didn’t find myself disagreeing with him all that much, to be honest—certainly less than I expected to.  The book has two sections, with the first part being basically …

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Backwoods Witchcraft: Conjure& Folk Magic From Appalachia by Jake Richards

This entry is part 36 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  Backwoods Witchcraft is kind of a memoir of Appalachian folk magic. This is the second book by Richards I’ve given a look. The first—Doctoring the Devil—was more recent, but also not particularly interesting to me: it’s more of a highly organized magical cookbook than a cultural history, and not the sort of thing I was really after.   Unfortunately, Backwoods Witchcraft ends up feeling a bit like a less-well-organized stream-of-consciousness magical …

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Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel by Milorad Pavić, translated by Christina Pribićević-Zorić

This entry is part 37 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway. (I read this in August.) The Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is a very strange book. I guess I’d sum it up as dueling untrustworthy historical accounts by three sources, one from each of the religions of the book, about the Khazar people. The idea is that the accounts were compiled hundreds of years after whatever actually happened with the Khazars, and those compiled accounts have been translated and edited by a modern scholar. So you have a bunch of points of view, …

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Modern Jazz Voicings: Arranging for Small and Medium Ensembles by Ted Pease and Ken Pullig

This entry is part 38 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this quite a while after finishing the book. Despite having gotten a decent foundation in classical music theory, and some jazz theory of the sort a young improvisor learns, I never managed to find a good source for horn arrangements. A while back, I was inputting an arrangement I did for jazz quintet and orchestra (meaning classical orchestra), when I realized that I didn’t know much about how one goes about actually doing proper jazz arrangements, especially the kind of classic block chords used in sax soli, horn section arrangements, and stuff like that. Not that …

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Mammoths of the Great Plains by Eleanor Arnason

This entry is part 39 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this a while after actually finishing the book. Mammoths of the Great Plains is a volume from PM Press’s wonderful Outspoken Authors series, of which I’ve read a few others—and have at least one or two more waiting to be read. Everything else I’ve read from the series has been excellent, and I really enjoyed Arnason’s Hidden Folk, plus my friend Justin praised it a few years back, so I was eager to give it a try.  The book contains three pieces, and only one of them (the title story) is fiction. That story is one …

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The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer by Ron Pattison

This entry is part 40 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this a while after actually finishing the book. Supposedly, I read this book a few years ago… but I don’t really remember doing so. Perhaps that’s the result of sleep-deprivation, since the time when I (supposedly) read it, my son was very young. In any case, I thought I’d get a refresher on English beers, and this fall I might brew up a few of them.  I’m without the two brewing books I used to find most useful and/or inspiring while planning out my brewing, what that was a more frequent pursuit: Ray Daniels’ Designing Great …

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