Mirror mirror
What I'm Reading
Finished The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson. Kind of mythic sci-fi: several interlinked stories or versions of the same story of fleeing an environmentally devastated world for a new world. One is another race discovering Earth, one is of the last tree to be chopped down on Easter Island, one set in the near future. Clumsy in places, haunting in others. I didn't think it was as good as the tightly-written "Weight": could maybe have done with another draft. If you don't like or haven't read Winterson this probably isn't a good place to start, but if you like her books it's worth a look. Review, review, review, review, review, extract.
What I'm Reading Found it interesting because I'm pretty ignorant of this stuff. Liked the way it integrates the art and the history together, so you get to see things in context. However, it's necessarily a very high-level overview, so it might be a bit too elementary if you know much about the subject. Also the broad generalizations he makes aren't terribly convincing: it's hard to see a real cultural thread linking the pre-Roman population of Spain with modern Latin America, despite tenuous talk about resistance to authority. Also, while the book seems to be thoroughly researched, I thought there was a bit of a lack of non-Hispanic historical context. For instance, he questions why Spanish culture resisted Islamicization while the Hellenized cultures of Egypt and Syria did not, but as we've seen Hellenization was not a deep process, just a thin overlay and small ruling class. Overall though, an interesting and informative introduction to the topic.
Me
Web Hieronymus Bosch action figures. Economics. Economics and the Prisoners Dilemma. Long but interesting PDF: What's wrong with academic economics?
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