heliopausa

First up: stay warm, all friends in snowy, snowy places! :)

And ..things I've been reading, this past week

I am slogging on with My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. It's an interesting, but for me, distinctly not an easy read - I'm not sure how much this is because it's culturally a jump for me - it's sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, in the lives and concerns of miniaturists, painting/illuminating those glorious manuscripts of tales. So far - I'm just over halfway through - I haven't felt the utterly compelling sense of involvement in the lives of the characters which is one thing I enjoy in reading. Maybe it's not what the writer is wanting to produce, though? Lots of it is philosophical, thinking about art and artifice and theology - it's set as Islam begins to edge towards (if I'm reading correctly - much ignorance here) the strong anti-depiction theology of today. And that sort of thinking-through of values and changes is also something I enjoy a lot in reading; and that part is starting to grip.

Thanks to the post three lines from three WIPs meme, I have found my way to a whole new story-cycle by

cofax7 - it's a combination of two fandoms I don't know, taking the protagonists of Supernatural, and putting them in a world known as Riderverse from novels by CJ Cherryh. Rivetting!

Other reading: The Railway Navvies: a history of the men who made the railways, by Terry Coleman. I enjoyed this very much as a connector, linking the construction of railways in Britain with many things, like parallel European works and the Crimean War. For example, it was the brilliant intervention of the railway baron,Morton Peto, who more or less pulled the British army from total disaster in the Crimea,by getting built (at cost) a railway to get supplies through; Army officers were astonished at the speed, skill and cohesion of the workforce (all volunteers -paid,but not drafted). It's popular history, not academic history, and won't be much new to any historian out there, but they're not in the general memory - or at least, they weren't in mine! It's not terrific in terms of reliability - he is a little bit fast-and-loose with his sources - e.g. one source which he quotes as being about pipe-smoking among the navvies turns out on investigation to be about pipe-smoking among the women in the navvy community (not labourers - family). But I thought it was great as a thought-provoker and for lots of sidelights on social history. :)

also, come across by chance on the internet: an interesting paper called "Omitted from History: Women in the Building Trades" by Linda Clarke and Chris Wall, which gives details of legislation and actual figures of women involved in these trades in England over several centuries. Some of their sources are secondary, e.g. they bring from someone called Snell, the info that "in the southern counties of England between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries... 34% of parish apprentices were girls, who were apprenticed in 51 occupations including as bricklayers, carpenters, joiners and shipwrights". But some are primary, such as the London 1841 Census figures. All of which I found very interesting, though I have no particular use for it. :)

editing to add: And I made another ghastly bish-up trying to to get the neat link to

cofax7 . :( Thanks to

lady_songsmith for bailing me out!