I am reading Babad Tanah Jawi: Complete Research and Discussion right now. Babad Tanah Jawi itself was written during Mataram Kingdom era, containing mix of myths and historical facts from the time of (supposedly) Adam to the kings of Mataram. It claimed that Batara Wishnu (the God Vishnu) is the seventh generation descendant from Adam. It also claimed Vishnu was the first Javanese King. It's okay, most books written on that era delve a lot into mysticism.

What made me said WTF out loud was because the writer of this book I'm reading, who wrote very scientific research about myths and facts within Babad Tanah Jawi on the backcover of the book, also included this writing inside:

Seeing that every human living in this world descended from the Adam, therefore Babad Tanah Jawi is perfectly right in claiming that the first Javanese kings directly descended from Adam.

Reading motivation instantly minus fifty percent...

I've been working my way through a National Geographic book about World War I, so that I can then turn around and finish Max Hastings's 1914.

If anyone has any material about WWI from a Belgian perspective, I would really love to see it.

Anyone have any book recommendations for the artillery of the First World War? Can be specific or general. I'd really like to learn more.

I've been reading Phil Weigand's older works. I wish he had published more of his data and made better maps of all the guachimontones and shaft tombs he claimed he visited and recorded. Dude also should have taken photos, a lot more photos.

#Grand Opera: The Story of the Met by Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron, 2014

This came out in Fall 2014, but I didn’t get around to reading it until winter break.

If you’re interested in opera history I’d say this is definitely worth your time, because in broad strokes, it tells the story of how America went from a cultural backwaters with only the barest of operatic offerings to being (currently) the #2 consumers of opera worldwide, and more importantly for the Met, holders of the premiere opera house that sets the bar for the rest of the world. There’s also a secondary story here about the birth of modern opera as we know it, and not modern music and weird stagings, but a modern operatic working environment where you are now expected to perform every opera in its original language by default and therefore where singers must know how to sing in multiple languages, where radio and television are a major part of the audience, and where public-appeal donation drives for the first time bring some actual financial democracy to this crazy, messy, fantastic animal we call opera. And that’s a good story!

However. I think one of the more serious faults in the books lies with its over-reliance on telling the story of the Met in a hoary “Great Men of The Metropolitan Opera” style. The book focuses very heavily on the directors and how they shaped the Met, gives occasional fair attention to conductors and singers, but skims over anyone else who might have had an influence or just doesn’t mention them at all. And I think this does a great disservice to the story; in the grand scheme of things often the people who shaped art on the macro-level were the ones writing the checks, not the ones cashing them.

While the book opens with a good angle on the unabashedly status-symbol beginnings of the Met (which was founded because New York’s [existing opera house](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Music_(New_York_City%29) wouldn’t sell boxes to New Money, that opera house was then casually ground under the heels of the Met’s 70 boxholders’ industrialist tycoon boots and now you’ve never heard of it), and there’s also some really good stuff on how they tried to attract the various immigrant groups in NYC, first banking on the Italians, but they were too poor to come, then switching to German opera because the Germans actually had some money to spare. But once we hit the 20th century the focus on who’s actually paying for this loud nonsense fades away. For one of the biggest opera-supporters of modern times, Sybil B. Harrington, she gets I think one name drop, although I personally think her lasting influence on the Met will become abundantly clear in maybe 40 years time or so. Heck, I think I’ll give you an idea of her legacy right now. Do you like big glitzy opera with a canonized composer, singers in ballgowns and waistcoats, and staging that is crazy-expensive and actually looks like 19th century Parisian courtesan’s house? Of course you do, that’s what everyone knows opera is supposed to be like. And that’s what Sybil B. Harrington liked to see, and she had the money to make sure she got exactly what she liked, and made sure her money wouldn’t be used for any stupid modern stuff. If you want to look at the cementing of “museum-piece” opera in the later half of the 20th century look no further than Sybil B. Harrington and her unabashedly buying the Met audience the opera it wants, not the opera it needs.

As you can anticipate the book’s history-telling gets increasingly sketchy as it nears the present day. Everything up through the building of the new Met house in the 1960s is solid, but after that, hold on to your butt. The end stuff on Peter Gelb’s tenure at the end of the book is pretty safe to skip, we just can’t usefully analyse his influence on the Met at this time, and the manuscript was written before the most interesting events of 2014 which involved Gelb getting yelled at a fair amount, so that section was out of date before it hit bookstore shelves anyway.

Anyway. Not a faultless book but if you’re into opera history, or perhaps into New York history, it’s a well-researched and well worth your time.

I've been slowly working my way through Joe Miller's Jest Book a collection of humorous anecdotes that seems to have been originally knocked together circa 1830, but had later additions, bringing it from about 150 anecdotes to over 1200. Some of the anecdotes are much older, it seems, than 1830. You get a fascinating look at what people in pre-industrial England found to be funny. Some of these still are.

I got given a book called The Black Russian, by Vladimir Alexandrov, for Christmas in 2013. Been trying to get through it this last week, and it's quite interesting. It's all about the son of ex-slaves in America who made his way to Russia via most of the major European cities, and became one of the richest businessmen in Moscow.

I also went hunting for books on Irish history, but didn't find exactly what I wanted. I did however, pick up these four:

• Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America
• Thomas Keneally, The Great Shame
• Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse
• Richard Storry, A History Of Modern Japan

I assume that the last one is probably a bit out of date, but that's the perils of buying $2 books at op shops.