Like all the posts in my 2023 reads list, this comes at a lag, meaning I read this a while back—in this case, last week.  So, I stumbled onto this book at a used bookstore in Cheongju, and bought it hoping it would discuss the tulipomania—the tulip craze that swept the Netherlands (and other parts of Europe) centuries ago. It does, but… not in the way I expected. There’s a lot of detail in this book, and a great deal of it involves what could fairly be called “inside baseball” information: who cultivated what kinds of tulips and sold them …

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 …

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!  The Wages of Whiteness is a book that’s been on my shelf since I read John Strausbaugh’s Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture back in Bucheon, years ago when I was preparing to teach a course in American Popular Culture. That was a book that yielded up a few fascinating-sounding references: I read Nick Tosches’ Where Dead Voices Gather pretty soon after (and …