Nosemonkey > Recent Status Updates

Restarted this one having stopped for no apparent reason a couple of years back. Re-reading the intro and first chapter makes me wonder why I left it unfinished, as it's exactly my kind of thing - and has far more emphasis on ancient India than most general histories.

This continues to be amazing in its sheer whimsy, but it's not a book that encourages rushing through.

This is pretty decent so far - has been blitzing through the early centuries at quite a pace, but now Poland and Lithuania have teamed up it's all going to get more complicated (aka better documented...)

This'll be far, far too chatty for many, and the style / jokes (yes, jokes) will date badly - but I think it kinda works.

They don't seem to have the 2021 revised edition of this on Goodreads, but in theory this has been extensively reworked since this started out as a 1981 BBC TV series. Seems solid so far.

This is good fun so far. Popular historiography - whoever would have thought?

I've vaguely decided that we're likely to see a more obvious Russian incursion into EU / NATO territory and/or a more explicit Chinese move to take over Taiwan soon, and this is so far proving an excellent (worrying) primer for the former...

This is really rather good...

I've been getting back into watching films again lately, thanks to grabbing BFI Player and Mubi subscriptions in sales, and Prime Video having more classics on offer. And to think I was a film critic for a decade...

Forgot I'd not finished this...

This is decent so far, but as ever with histories of Japan I wish there was more emphasis on the pre-Meiji era. Getting there around the halfway mark is better weighting than with some books, but still...

Up to Plato. This is pretty decent, accessible stuff.

This is quite fun, considering it's all about the end of the world...

I'm enjoying this the most so far. The first book is a bit too light and innocent in touch, the second made me kinda hate the narrator. Here, we're moving onto a little bit more direct analysis of French (high) society and politics around the time of the Dreyfuss Affair, and it's far, far more interesting as a result.