Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 13th, 2016 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Mike Dash’s Tulipomania, which I enjoyed a lot. I particularly liked his attempts to make the reader see tulips through seventeenth-century eyes: not as a ubiquitous spring flower, but as a rare and exotic import, a bright splash of color that was allowed in a society that sternly disapproved of most kinds of colorful ostentation.
It also reminded me that I have long intended to read more about the Ottoman Empire, because everything I have read about it suggests that the Ottoman court was a very strange place. When the old sultan died, for instance, it was customary for the son who succeeded him to kill all of his own brothers, so no one could challenge his throne; but then a sultan in the early 1600s couldn’t bear to think of his children killing each other when he died, so he outlawed the practice. Instead, the other brothers would be locked up in a small suite of rooms in the palace, where they would while away their meaningless days doing nothing in particular.
I guess that is nicer than killing them all. Sort of.
I was also reading Irvin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, but I’ve decided to put that aside for now on the grounds that I have been wallowing morbidly in mortality and need to think about something else.
What I’m Reading Now
Still Shirley. This is the book that Charlotte Bronte wrote as her sisters Anne and Emily died of consumption, and thinking about that as I read just kills me, because the book is practically a love lyric to sisterhood.
I’ve also been reading Robert Gross’s The Minutemen and Their World, which still doesn’t have the “what did they eat for breakfast” details I desire, but does have lots of fascinating detail about the community of Concord in the years before the Revolutionary War. It’s like reading a soap opera, eighteenth-century New England style: Joseph Lee wants to join the Church, but some of the Church members don’t want to let him in. Years of acrimony ensue!
What I Plan to Read Next
Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist, an early twentieth century fantasy novel.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
evelyn_b recommended it to me, so I’m looking forward to it!
Mike Dash’s Tulipomania, which I enjoyed a lot. I particularly liked his attempts to make the reader see tulips through seventeenth-century eyes: not as a ubiquitous spring flower, but as a rare and exotic import, a bright splash of color that was allowed in a society that sternly disapproved of most kinds of colorful ostentation.
It also reminded me that I have long intended to read more about the Ottoman Empire, because everything I have read about it suggests that the Ottoman court was a very strange place. When the old sultan died, for instance, it was customary for the son who succeeded him to kill all of his own brothers, so no one could challenge his throne; but then a sultan in the early 1600s couldn’t bear to think of his children killing each other when he died, so he outlawed the practice. Instead, the other brothers would be locked up in a small suite of rooms in the palace, where they would while away their meaningless days doing nothing in particular.
I guess that is nicer than killing them all. Sort of.
I was also reading Irvin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, but I’ve decided to put that aside for now on the grounds that I have been wallowing morbidly in mortality and need to think about something else.
What I’m Reading Now
Still Shirley. This is the book that Charlotte Bronte wrote as her sisters Anne and Emily died of consumption, and thinking about that as I read just kills me, because the book is practically a love lyric to sisterhood.
I’ve also been reading Robert Gross’s The Minutemen and Their World, which still doesn’t have the “what did they eat for breakfast” details I desire, but does have lots of fascinating detail about the community of Concord in the years before the Revolutionary War. It’s like reading a soap opera, eighteenth-century New England style: Joseph Lee wants to join the Church, but some of the Church members don’t want to let him in. Years of acrimony ensue!
What I Plan to Read Next
Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist, an early twentieth century fantasy novel.
evelyn_b recommended it to me, so I’m looking forward to it!
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no subject
Date: 2016-07-13 01:55 pm (UTC)Re: the Ottoman court, if I were a locked-in brother, I'd break out. But of course, that would make people think that maybe killing was better after all....
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Date: 2016-07-13 02:58 pm (UTC)Also, when the sultan died, often a different brother would be elevated to sultan. So maybe none of them wanted to lose their chance to become the ruler of the empire. I imagine this led to some extremely incompetent emperors, though, given their total lack of life experience.