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Hey, welcome to my journal. I primarily post book reviews, with occasional personal posts, politics and fandom/writing stuff.

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I would call 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Cline, a member of the popular history written by historians genre rather than academic history per se, although it was published by Princeton University Press. It's about the Bronze Age Collapse, although much of the book is taken up with a slow roundup of the situation, introducing the reader to each participant culture through example artifacts, often a discussion of how they became known to modern history, and their general political situation in the Late Bronze Age before reaching the end.

As a historian albeit reading outside my field, these sketches felt a little sparse to me, emphasizing the boring names-and-dates bits over more interesting questions and details, but I suspect this is a place where I'm no longer equipped to judge how popular readers react. It was interesting to compare his treatment of peoples I've done more hobby-and-comparative-study reading for (Assyrians, Minoans) to ones I really know nothing about (Hittites).

The details of the Bronze Age Collapse as given in this book are a bit underwhelming in emphasis for the alleged point of the book – sure, there's a lot we don't know and may never know, to quote a different popular historian,* but slightly more narrative emphasis on what we do know before we dive into the chart of causes might have helped the book feel more whole, especially since up to that point the book is nothing but a collage of narratives. Nonetheless I liked the way the issue was folded into illustrating something that IME popular history readers often struggle with which is really important in the academic field, that is, events that clearly have numerous complex causes, but are controversial in terms of which specific group of causes and their relative weight of importance.

Cline's writing overall is more functional than showstopping, but it's a fairly short read covering a lot of ground. Recommended to people interested in the Bronze Age/early Iron Age or apocalypses/civilizational collapse.

*Bret Devereaux is fond of saying this a lot and I have started saying it to my students, because it's important!

The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor, out of Princeton University Press, is one of those historians' books which can't quite decide if it wants to be popular or academic history. I tend to find this annoying, in part because some parties in my field use it to make historical arguments to other professionals without professional citation practice. To her credit, Mayor has not done this; the book is endnoted and festooned with an extensive bibliography.

The main argument Mayor makes is that the "amazons" of Greek mythology are not akin to mythology about centaurs and so on, but refer with their varying accuracy and fantasy to a specific and real group of people, mostly women of the Scythian/Saka people, but confused to different extents with other nomadic Central Asian cultures in which women frequently fought. We can tell because visual depictions from very early Greece accurately and consistently portray Saka clothing, weapons, and body modification, Amazons in visual and literary media frequently have names otherwise attested in Central Asian languages, and the material culture discernible in the Greek images and writing matches the archaeology the better the more the archaeology progresses, and the archaeology includes substantial numbers of female graves with weapons, armor, and healed injuries from combat all similar to men's (iirc something like a full third of identified female graves, far outstripping cases like the Vikings where female warrior graves are known but rare).

This is an academic argument I have participated in albeit about for a much later period, which in this case, hopefully, will help me explain this book. Despite framing her argument in this way, Mayor has actually ransacked just about every credible and semi-credible story about women participating in combat in Eurasia from the Ancient World, every archaeological site, and a lot of much later stuff that should be eliminated simply because what people were doing in the nineteenth century Caucasus can't possibly be evidence for three thousand years before...

Except in the highly specific topic of "female combatants," it kind of is! Under the pernicious influence of Victorian historiography, much of the history profession maintains that stories about women in combat are hilarious and obviously false, with varying degrees of sophistication and tact in their particular comments. The slightly more nuanced version holds that this has changed because of the industrial revolution and/or birth control and/or the totally unprecedented invention of feminism and/or something else in the last 150 years; some of the perpetratrs genuinely do not seem aware of the present existence of female soldiers. So it becomes a sort of black swan situation: you just need one black swan to knock down the "total impossibility" argument, no matter where it comes from, and then you can go and look at the ceramic vessels from the Bronze Age and make your case that if there are women warriors ANYWHERE pre-industrial they could be here!

So I understand why Mayor tried to tackle everything and I'm sympathetic to it, but the book is very long, somewhat repetitive, and while it's clear in every specific incidence whether we're talking about mythological women or historical women or archaeology, I felt that it probably could have cut the two thirds of the book that consist of summarizing every amazon myth and semi-historical account Mayor could find without losing much and been a better book. Also, she says some silly things I find annoying, like that women were able to fight on the steppes because of the equalizing factor of the horse and bow or in China because of martial arts (???); presumably this is why she didn't go into the Viking graves, although it's just as silly when she regularly discusses female warrior graves with lances, swords, and healed injuries similar to male wielders thereof. It additionally suffers from that common problem of feminist historiography where there has been a blind conflation of "women doing something we don't expect" with "women having greater equality and rights than we generally expect in the premodern past" with "women being actually equal;" you can make an argument for this trajectory but you have to make it! Don't just assume!

That said, somebody really needed to do the exhaustive archaeological and plausible historical list, a lot of work went into doing it here, and I am going to cite this a lot now that somebody has. So I can't really complain, and every other attempted overview I've seen on this subject has been considerably less professional. Recommended if this subject is an interest of yours, but probably not otherwise.

Happy new year, everyone! My 2024 book list is below. My main goal this year was not to lose momentum when I was done with comps reading, and happily, I succeeded. I also have finally reached a state where I can stand to write reviews again as of the last few weeks, so please ask about anything you'd like to hear about!

Rereads in italics, and listed only the first time this year.

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There is a lot happening in this book. Star violin teacher Shizuka Satomi searches for her seventh and final pupil, who she must convince to sell their soul to Hell in order to be released from her own contract; meanwhile, Lan Tran runs a donut shop in LA and tries to conceal the fact that she and her family are space aliens disguised as humans, refugees from a dystopian galactic empire; meanwhile and first of all, the actual protagonist of this book, transgender violinist and sex worker Katrina Nguyen runs away from an abusive home, only to discover the boy she met at a queer youth conference isn't so nice anymore and didn't mean his offer to help.

Katrina's destiny as Shizuka's seventh pupil is fairly obvious, but the sixty or so pages it takes to get there are the source of some unpleasantly realistic misery as Katrina has a brief stint as the punching bag of a bunch of relatively more affluent, white queer roommates. But this is just the journey she has to go through to be taken on by Shizuka, at which point the book takes a gleeful turn into lots of scenes where Shizuka is infuriated by people misgendering and/or being mean to Katrina, buys her expensive things and tries to figure out how to effectively improve her violin skills, alternating with Shizuka assuring her housekeeper and the actual demon in charge of her contract that she hasn't gone soft!!! She is totally going to trick Katrina into relinquishing her soul!!! It's just not time yet!!!

Meanwhile, Shizuka and Lan Tran fall in love; Lan Tran struggles to parent her numerous and interestingly difficult children, including sentient hologram/computer program Shirley and space fascism-sympathizer Markus; and Lan Tran slowly comes to the realization that Earth has some things to offer aside from being an utterly primitive backwater where nobody from the space fascist government will go looking for dissenters. Also present are various interesting side characters, such as dramatic tantrum-throwing violin student Tamiko Gizelle Grohl, obsessed with Shizuka Satomi and will do anything to be her student in the full knowledge her last six students have died tragically and probably the seventh will be next, and Lucy Matia, scion of a long line of black magic-practicing luthiers.

Overall an extremely fun book with the most accurate and detailed depiction of violin (both the music and the horrible competition culture) that I've seen in fiction, although definitely Not For Everyone. There is ( spoilers ) although Aoki didn't quite stick all of the twists, one complication fewer might have worked better. A long list of disturbing content which never gets too depressing IMO, in part because the book always has something else to throw at you and/or the characters when it might get to be too much. This was, as far as I could tell, a second novel, and I'm interested in what Aoki comes out with next.

Just passed my last oral defense! I'm a PhD candidate now.

Happy new year, everyone! My 2023 booklist is below the cut. I read 145 books in 2023. I've also fallen way behind on book reviews, in part because I've been writing up short notes for my advisor every week as part of prep for my comps exams, but please comment for any particular requests you have from the list.

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Dear Femslashex Creator,

First, thank you so much for creating for me! These prompts are just meant to get you started and give you an idea of what I like. If you have a different idea, I'd love to see it!

( General Info )

( Buffy the Vampire Slayer )

( Harry Potter )

( Star Wars )

( Dragonriders of Pern )

( The Old Guard )

( Arthurian Mythology )

( Ancient Greek Religion & Lore )

( We Are Lady Parts )

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is a 2022 debut novel, partly cosmic horror and partly a book about grief. In one timeline, Leah, a deep sea researcher, is trapped under the ocean in a submarine for months in a bizarre accident, increasingly suspicious that she and her team were set up. In the other, Miri, Leah's wife, struggles to understand Leah's strange behavior after her return, while navigating bizarre interactions with Leah's employers - and, at the same time, to mask her own resentment over a delay she was repeatedly told was routine and intentional. But it becomes increasingly clear that Leah may have returned without being saved.

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Still, this was a great debut novel and I'm looking forward to seeing more from Armfield!

Life is going okay, kind of exhausted by classwork combined with petty travel difficulties, but that was inevitable. In lieu of a substantial life update, here are some quick reviews of nonfiction I've read recently:

On operations: operational art and military disciplines by Brett A. Friedman. Academic military theory/history. This book is arguing with what is apparently a major facet of US military doctrine, so probably not the best introduction to the general subject, but what Friedman wants to replace it with is basically a new idea of how modern warfare command does and should work with some canned mini histories of various battles as examples from Napoleon to WWII. As a medievalist I had to laugh at the tendency to write the history of something like, say, information or logistics and divide it into an ancient section containing everything until the medieval period and a medieval period running from the early middle ages to the eighteenth century, but TBF that wasn't exactly the point. I read this for some military science fiction stuff I'm working on right now, and for that purpose I think it was helpful in looking at how command and campaigns are organized from a more theoretical, how-things-are-supposed-to-work perspective.

Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley. Excellent example of the awkward, now-conventionalized gender history genre that is like, "This is the information we can reconstruct about women's lives from minimal data, from which we conclude that nothing about women's lives changed over thousands of years! Women were horribly limited but didn't mind it because they experienced some cultural rewards! This culture was better than all of the others because I found some ways that women could live fulfilling lives or were unexpectedly not restricted in comparison with my vague osmosis of the rest of human history!" In seriousness it's a fairly readable introduction to what I guess is/was the 90s consensus on women in Ancient Egypt, I simply have grown to hate this particular gender history genre. If you read it, don't take any of its arguments very seriously.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry. This on the other hand was fantastic! This is basically an overview/introduction to medieval history as currently viewed, ranging in time/space from western Europe in the last century of Rome through Central Asia and the Middle East, up to the fifteenth century, with an eye to enjoyable prose, emphasizing contingency and the way things changed drastically on a century to century level, and summarizing accurate recent scholarship; this is the first pan-medieval work I have ever read which both addresses my area and does it well. I had maybe one minor quibble to do with one particular person in the several chapters on the Islamic world. Really great introduction to current work in the field if you're curious about it, with further reading listed for everything.

A History of Saudi Arabia by Madawi Al-Rasheed. This is an academic history of the Al Saud-Wahhabi alliance behind the state of Saudi Arabia, from the beginnings of that alliance in the eighteenth century up to the early 2000s when it was written. Inevitably a lot of that detail is dry and I think coming into this without any kind of background on either modern Muslim fundamentalist movements or modern Middle Eastern history would probably be hard, but it's a great history and if you have some of that background or are willing to struggle and have any interest in Muslim fundamentalism, Saudi Arabia, or related current events like 9/11 or the Taliban I really recommend it. What Al-Rasheed has done is demonstrate the lie in the idea that Saudi Arabia is simply a medieval country that has not changed in centuries, ranging from the specific intellectual roots of Wahhabism (which is a revisionist and very recent version of Islam) to details like the labor movement at Aramco facilities.