Today on my commute I got through about another 20% of A little commonwealth: family life in Plymouth Colony, as part of my look into the 17th century. My interest in the domestic histories seems to be following up on the glimpses found in Beverwijck : a Dutch village on the American frontier, 1652-1664.

Lunchtime was just a couple pages of Trilobites of New York: An Illustrated Guide (touchstone not working...), as I went over to the NYS Museum to, you know, actually look at some of their trilobite fossils, including some collected by Beecher Himself, of "Beecher's Bed" fame.

A stop at the APL's "free books" bin was worthwhile, and I got home to find an ARC of Robert Sawyer's Rollback in the mail from BookMooch.

Message edited by its author, Dec 2, 2008, 7:20pm.

>1 Bob, you might also enjoy historian Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare which places the Salem Witchcraft crisis in historical context. It discusses the Indian wars and how the judges all knew each other...etc. I have not read the Demos, but I have read others like The Puritan Family by Edmund S. Morgan. I have escaped the 17th century and am currently in the early 19th, still in New England though.

Yeah, thanks for the recommendation - I own it, but, like much of the "Salem" shelf I've been putting together, I've only looked through it. It's sort of jumbled in my head with several others, too (Devil in the shape of a woman etc.).

I've actually read the Morgan, but a good 30 years ago.

Last month I acquired and read Guide to the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692 which was a good refresher.

I had a 'philosophy of science' course that introduced me to Religion and the Decline of Magic and Trevor-Roper's " The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries". So "witches/Salem/etc" has been a back-burner interest of mine for a long time now.

(The 17th century interest also comes from radical politics: Winstanley and the Diggers and the Levellers and those guys.)

I while ago I discovered some Nieuw Amsterdam ancestry, so I've also been coming at the 17th century from the local-history angle: thus, the shelf on the early history of Albany and the Mohawk Valley and first contact with the locals: Before Albany and all that.

Oh, and Albany is gearing up for next year's 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson. There's a replica Halfmoon docked a mile from my office. (It's not quite tall enough to see from my office over the riverside highways.)

edited to wrestle with touchstones which work only on preview

Message edited by its author, Dec 3, 2008, 12:49am.

Wednesday's mail brought a gift package from Elizabeth Hand.

Those go to the top of the TBR stack.

Day three: essentially no, you know, actual reading: only the Economist on the commute in to work, a few pages at lunch, the local 'alternative weekly' on the way home.

And after Quality Time, some arguing on LT's "Pro and Con" forum.

we have a 35-45 minute commute (w/ no light rail or mass transit in sight) and we've been listening to a good number of courses on cd...Currently an excellent 48 lecture series on the history/social context of English lit. Previously a v. good one on fantastic fiction, an excellent one on the political accommodations between the individual and society under diff. types of regimes..Except for an annoying one on the history of the symphony where the lecturer was far too pleased w/ himself, all the courses have been a pleasure. Medallia..ever come across a SF based composer/musicologist..evident jerk...Robt Greenburg (sic). Kind of hoping he was nicer in rea,l as opposed to lecture, life.

Pleased to meet you Bob. I believe I already have an acquaintance with your family.

bobmc--Haven't met him personally, nor have I heard any assessments of his personality. I think I can imagine the kind of overbearing pedantry that must've been part of the lecture--it's pretty much par for the course here in Academia (in fact, I feel sure that he's probably a nice guy, he's just one of those). Good news, though: in addition to that lecture, he has recorded 56 more! I know what I'm getting you for Christmas. ;) (If you're ever in the market for a good book on the symphony, let me suggest Michael Steinberg's The Symphony: A Listener's Guide. Michael, I can assure you, is an wonderful guy.)

AYKB--I'm a new subscriber to the Economist. Enjoy it thoroughly, but it's something of a time commitment in itself. Keep posting in Pro & Con--I always enjoy it.

#7 Hi, pleased to meet you, too. (I take it you're one of the members of avaland's Other Project? Maggie doesn't tell me enough of what goes on there for me to keep everyone straight.)

#8 Yeah, given that I can't consistently keep up with The New Yorker, I only read occasional copies of The Economist. On today's commute, I finally got to last month's "Election Round-Up" issue, which also had a nice obit for Studs Terkel.

Thanks for the kind words, it's good to know that someone enjoys it.

AYK_Bob: are we talking train or bus for the commute? I'm envious, losing about 6-1/2 hours/week to driving.

I'm trying to stretch One More Season out of my old car, so I'm taking the bus until the snow comes (when waiting at bus stops will get too nasty to do voluntarily).

It's satisfactory service: the bus comes reliably (+/- 3 minutes), a 35-minute ride, and it gets me to work reliably 5 minutes early.

So on days I take the bus, yeah, it buys me an extra hour a day for reading - and without the distraction of internet access.

Yay, catching up on magazines.

Saturday - while waiting for a kid - I did a Forced March and made it through to the end of "Trilobites of New York".

The early chapters are plenty interesting in a science-geek sort of way - I now understand a lot more about the regional geology* - but the climatic 'Chapter 5' (describing in detail each of the hundreds of NYS species) is a little too encyclopedic really to read just for fun. It left me dizzy.

{Note to self: Remember that this is supposed to be pleasure reading.}

* I live on the lakebed of an ice-age lake, so my house sits on a hundred feet or more of glacial sand. But there's Devonian- and older limestone within ten miles in any direction, some of which I've hammered at, looking for fossils. The nice fat chapter on "The Paleozic Geology of New York" has given me a much better understanding of what lies where.

Message edited by its author, Dec 6, 2008, 9:14pm.

Oh, let's see: I finished A little commonwealth: family life in Plymouth Colony on the commute in to work this morning. Interesting enough to bother finishing (which is more than I can say about some books...), though I was somewhat surprised that (mid-book) it had an outbreak of Eriksonian psychologizing.

(I pulled this out of my TBR stack because I've been reading around the 17th century, and I had heard Toni Morrison on All Things Considered at the end of October, on a book tour for her new A Mercy. And she was talking up White Cargo: the Forgotten history of Britain's White Slaves in America, which sounded interesting enough to add to my TBR list - though I haven't quite decided whether or not it sounds interesting enough to run out and buy. So while I brood on that, I pulled out a book with points of similarity.)

Lunchtime, it was over to the State Library, to peruse the current (Nov-Dec) issue of American Scientist.

On the commute home, I read the novelet (novella? novellini?) The Minuteman's Witch by Charles Coleman Finlay, the lead story in the January issue of F&SF. It's a retelling of the events of Concord and Lexington, with just a dash of the supernatural added.

Having been just out to the re-enactments of the battles this past Patriots' Day, the story was affecting enough, to the point that the supernatural angle seemed unneeded.

Edited to try to add a touchstone - I noticed that bluetyson has ALREADY added the CC Finlay story...

Message edited by its author, Dec 9, 2008, 9:57pm.

So my 'commuting' bag is still full of magazines (new F&SF, another damn New Yorker came today..) but is currently lacking a book.

I guess tomorrow I look into Elizabeth Hand's collection Saffron and Brimstone.

Message edited by its author, Dec 9, 2008, 9:58pm.

I quite enjoyed Saffron and Brimstone. I'll be curious to hear your thoughts.

I'm certainly predisposed to like E.Hand. A decade or so ago - and I don't know if it's due to parenthood, or to the Internet (probably the two factors working together) - my attention span got distinctly shorter.

So short story collections are more plausible for me these days than. say, interminable fantasy trilogies....

And with an odd hour after the kids' bed-time, I finished The Post-Corporate World.

(Which was OK, but certainly 'preaching to the converted' in my case....)

in re "the minuteman's watch" i thought the salient bit about the prescience..was no matter how obvious some result may seem..that's not the result you get. I enjoyed the story, too.

Finished the world in six songs - half fascinating examples from ethnology or neuroscience and how social/physiological mechanisms that get 'em to work; and the rest kind of limp socio-biology.

Bob, I snagged a copy of A Little Commonwealth through BookMooch. I've moved on from the 17th century research, but it still sounded interesting.

Another decent book on indentured servitude/white slavery is Colonists in Bondage by Abbot Emerson Smith. There is also a book meant for high schoolers, I think, called Colonists for Sale that I thought covered the whole subject well. Both books are old/older and might be found cheaply or perhaps on BM. This is one of the five subject areas/eras I've been researching. There are a fair number of scholarly articles on the subject also but they tend towards a discussion of labor and economy in this country, which, of course, it is inextricably tied to. I'm probably going to have to pick up White Cargo now (sigh), although from the description it seems it won't have anything new to tell me.

PS: I did hear part of the same Toni Morrison interview, but never caught the name of the book.

#18 I've seen The World in six songs at the library, I may check it out and add it to the queue after the recent Oliver Sacks on the neurology of music.

#19: I added the AE Smith to my BookMooch list.

#20 On days I drive to work, I get to listen to All Things Considered and learn new things; on days I take the bus, I get to read. I suppose if I added an FM Walkman to my bus ride, I could do both, but then my head would explode from Too Much Information.

Read half of Saffron and Brimstone today; Hand is certainly a writer. (I first found her because (for 20-some years now) I've been following the Philip K. Dick Award, which for which she was nominated two or three times. Now, of course, she no longer qualifies for the PKD "Best Original PB" because her books get hardcover editions.)

#21 - i really enjoyed this is your brain on music - the second book was a bit disappointing.

We're caught in the Great North East Ice Storm of 'Ought Eight and will be mostly incommunicado for the next few days. (Yay, local libraries with electricity and internet!)

A million customers in NY and NEngland are without power; the power is out in my neighborhood, AND a falling tree brought down the lines from the pole to my house, which will be a lower priority for repair. So we're roughing it in the dark for a few days.

I'll be back when I can.

Back.

Where were we?

Thursday night or Friday morning I finished Saffron and Brimstone; good stuff, I'll have to review it more formally when I have a minute. Seems to be somewhat disturbingly autobiographical.

{On Friday I got to play lumberjack; I own a wimpy electric chainsaw, never imagining the day would come when I needed to clear fallen trees before the electricity is restored. So in the wake of our ice storm I was reduced to going out to clear my downed trees with a @#$% hand saw.

On Saturday and Sunday we did a lot of going out in search of light, heat, and coffee....}

One of our weekend expeditions brought me to my local Borders, where I found the new Thomas Frank The Wrecking Crew on sale.

It was wanly amusing to read about the many failures of conservative governance while freezing in the dark.

Oh, let's see, if this is Friday, it must be another winter storm. A full-scale blizzard, this week. I left work early before the roads become impassible.

The Dec. 15th New Yorker had a *wonderful* article on a guy who has reverse-engineered Little Man uranium bomb. This hits several points for me: as a former physics major, I've had a life-long fascination with the Manhattan Project (see my tags...).

At some point in my "evolution/paleontology" travels, I ran across The Blink of an Eye (touchstone not working), so I ordered it when I saw that it had been remaindered. It arrived Wednesday and I read it, as follow-up to last month's Trilobites of New York.

Just popped by to say hallo, Bob. Your Maggie is one in a million. Hope the storms don't get worse.

Oh, hi. (And I agree about M.)

It's December in upstate NY, so of course we have snow storms. But we're home and have heat and light. (Plenty to read, too....)

Bob? Was there an avalanche in the house? Should we bring the backhoe? We seem to have lost you over the holidays:-)

Bob, have you seen the PBS television program about the French and Indian war/s? I saw it listed in the catalog recently and was intrigued; thought perhaps you had already seen it and could tell me whether it was any good.

"The War That Made America" went by about three years ago; I don't recall it in much detail except that it was all PBS-ey: in that it made proper acknowledgement that there were Native Americans affected; and I recall it seemed to spend a lot of time on GWashington and Fort Necessity. I don't recall much of Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, so maybe they scanted it, or it's possible I didn't even see that segment.

Whether it's any good? *shrug*. It wasn't bad, it wasn't television I'll remember forever...PBS documentaries sort of exist outside a scale of good and bad...