15 September 2009

Reading Update

Kage Baker The Empress of Mars: A nice story set in the shadow of her epic Company series. Only tangentially related, but good in its own right. Feisty, outcast Mars colonists versus everyone! Huzzah!

Seth Hunter The Time of Terror: Another Napoleonic naval adventure, broadly. More specifically, it's earlier (Robespierre is the chief antagonist) and our hero spends most of the book as a spy in Paris and smuggling things back and forward. Good stuff, but grim (being about The Terror, hard not to be).

Chris Wickham The Inheritance of Rome: A big, solid history of Europe from 400-1000. Lots of interesting stuff in here, although because of the book's scope, detail is lacking. It paints a picture of the fall of Rome being less catastrophic than had been previously thought, and follows the various aspects that were preserved and the new things that arose after. I'd been aware of the revision of the "Dark Ages" into something somewhat less of an oubliette of history, and this cleared up the reasons that view has come to be.

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