The Queen's Servants and The King's Servants arrived yesterday, much sooner than I expected them! There's a lot of information here, just about all from the records of what was provided for members of the royal household (which, despite the impression the titles of the books have on the modern ear, largely means the upper crust). So far my main takeaway is that it must have been pretty chilly, given all the fully-fur-lined gowns. (Edit: I'd really mainly only looked through TQS - skimming through TKS, the clothing there seems more quotidian.)

The only problem I have (which I also had with The Tudor Tailor) is that I'm always a bit concerned about the patterns being potentially too theatrical. This isn't really fair of me, I think it comes largely from the shininess of the example garments and the white background used in photographing them, but there we are.

I've been reading Regina Harrison's Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru: Spanish-Quechua Penitential Texts, 1560–1650 over the last week and it's been fascinating so far. A ranking member of The Oatmeal Pantheon, Bartolome de las Casas (unfortunately Tesla is nowhere to be found) has some pretty good cameos, but most fascinating to me so far has been Harrison's examination of how European missionaries fit Andean women into their catechism.

I've been trying to remember that South America exists while I wander around the 16-17th centuries so if anyone has any recommendations for further reading I'm all ears.

Somehow this summer I ended up reading three biographies of Cold War scientists in a row. Note to future self: don't do that. One of them was for a review in Nature Physics, another for a review in Nature, so those are nice publications to have (the engineer bosses will be impressed), but I am sick of biographies for the moment.

Things I have been reading this week: still finishing up O'Donnell's Developer's Dilemma (in preparation for teaching a course next semester that involves video game development), making my way through Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (working on a museum exhibit about submarines, so felt it was worth actually reading), finished Sontag and Drew's Blind Man's Bluff (for same submarine exhibit — about Cold War submarine spying), and finished the first volume of Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen (something I had just never gotten around to doing, in preparation for thinking about using alternative modes of media for communicating nuclear risk and empathy, and to go along with a review I am writing of the film In This Corner of the World, which I saw last weekend).

And one syllabus is done, another almost done, and classes start Monday!

Finished up The Slave Ship: A Human History. It was really good, but the presentation got a bit disjointed sometimes. A few too many vignettes and not enough bridging and integration in some of the middle chapters. The final stuff on the Brooks was great.

I started that to keep me buy until my copy of White Over Black arrived. Ordered used, expected one of the typical academic paperbacks: a little chunky and nondescript. I got...the Pelican edition from 1969. It's the same format as a fiction paperback, complete with their trade dress and a $2.95 price printed on the cover. It's actually kind of adorable. I've never had an original Penguin/Pelican (the main line is Penguin, Pelican is the non-fiction imprint) in my hands before. I can see how people get attached to the things.

The format is a little awkward to read non-fiction in, especially as densely written as Jordan does, but this book is so good even when Jordan seems a little confused. He goes back and forth between leaning on the idea that Englishmen had a deep cultural aversion to blackness that immediately applied to West Africans and emphasizing all the other sources of difference that blackness kind of sweeps up but doesn't quite.

Today I'm going through some material related to Sayre's law ("In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."); in this case the petty politics in science fiction fandom in 1940s Los Angeles, and the debate in amateur journalism between H. P. Lovecraft and Charles D. Isaacson in 1915. In both cases, the uglier the argument, the worse everybody looks; you have to remind yourself that these are adult human beings and that the internet was still a very long ways away... some atrocious stuff, but also sort of enlightening, at least for the angles I'm working. Isaacson, for example, was basically the first Jewish person Lovecraft had to deal with since high school, and their exchange is pretty much the first glance we have at Lovecraft's understanding of race and Judaism outside of childhood.

Does anyone have any recommendations for books on the final years and the dissolution of the Soviet Union? I have found a few that I am likely going to get, however I have to try and get this subs opinion.