Books For The Beginning of Spring

Women's Work by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

It is about the history of textiles, starting from the Stone Age up to the Bronze Age, focusing mainly on Europe, the Middle East and Egypt.

I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it's an interesting look at how we can learn about something that's hard to get archaeological evidence for (cloth just does not preserve well) and at the different economic systems that spring up around to solve the problem of "how do you clothe everyone?" And it's interesting to see discussions of, for example, sheep domestication as a form of technology and how it's affected by other technologies. (Bronze shears don't really work, but iron ones do, and it seems that breeding sheep that don't shed their wool coincided with the iron age.)

...The thing is, because this is from the 1990s, and it's studying things that don't preserve well, there's a certain amount of "let's use linguistics to understand historical textiles!" or "let's use mythology!" or "these skirts carved into Neolithic statues look kind of like a thing worn in rural Greece nowadays, if you squint," and I'm not sure how much to trust it.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I bounced off it the first time I read it. It just seemed a bit skull-skull-skull all the time, the characters hated each other in way that was more irritating than entertaining, and the POV character didn't have a motivation.

Then I tried it again, a few years later, with the audiobook this time. The deeply charming voice acting got me over the hump of the beginning-- and it turns out, once you're about a quarter of the way in, you don't want to murder Gideon and Harrow as much, and motivations start happening?

And once those things click into place, it's fun. The narrative voice of Gideon is excellent, the cast bounces off each other in interesting ways, and the mystery of "how exactly does one become a lyctor [read: immortal necromantic saint]?" and "why is everyone dying?"

It's a good time! I'm currently devouring the sequel, Harrow the Ninth.