I haven‘t read much fiction in a long, long time. I enjoyed the movies but wanted to get deeper into the lore, into the world building, so I picked up the first book in the Dune Chronicles. The cover art is beautiful.

Also I had a baby, so I haven‘t had much time to do really anything this year.

I found this historical fiction of Llewelyn of Wales at the bargain bookstore for $4. What really caught my eye is how worn and well-read it was compared to the books next to it.

“On the night before Isabella arrived in Paris, King Philip and his court had witnessed the burning of her godfather, Jaques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Knights Templar.” Pg 98

I had no idea the last Grand Master—the man Isabella‘s father unjustly charged with treason so he could take the Order‘s assets—was also her godfather.

“These happy and auspicious plans were overshadowed in France by the mass arrest of about two thousand Knights Templar, on the King‘s orders, on 13 October. …For the next seven years, the Templars in France would be…interrogated, tortured, tried, and sometimes burned at the stake. Philip‘s treatment of the Templars paved the way for their condemnation by the Pope and the dissolution of the Order.” Pg 13-14

“…in 1309, under pressure from Philip, Clement moved the seat of the papacy from Rome to Avignon in southern France, where it was to remain for nearly seventy years, in thrall to the kings of France.” Pg 11

This full color, glossy-paged book from 1979 is another bargain bookstore find for $4.99.

I picked up a couple books by Alison Weir at the bargain store last week. It seemed best to start here since I just read _England in the Age of Chivalry . . . And Awful Diseases_ by Ed West: it offers a very, very brief history of England around the time of Isabella.

This was another enjoyable installment in the Rick and Morty comic series. About half the book was populated with short stories of various flavors. In the spirit of Inter-dimensional Cable, they drew from many hilarious tropes and premises.

Gorman writes with the spirit of the early TV series. It‘s oddly refreshing to get back to the irreverent absurdity that l fell in love with in the first place.

This was a pretty enjoyable, quick read that brought back some beloved characters from the TV series. I can‘t decide if the Sleepy Gary story was my favorite or least favorite.

Overall I enjoyed this quick read, but I thought the author spent too much time on the personal details of the cast—details that ended up being irrelevant. Descriptions of the viruses and containment procedures were super interesting.

“If the elephants have been tusking out the rock of Kitum Cave at a rate of a few pounds a night, the cave could easily have been carved by elephants over a few hundred thousand years. Ian Redmond…calls it speleogenisis by elephants—the creation of a cave by elephants.” Pg 397-8

“Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.” Pg 66

“You wanted to dissect the animals quickly, before the spontaneous liquefaction began, because you can‘t dissect gumbo.” Pg 60

“The fact that the [WHO] team apparently never spoke with him, the monkey inspector, ‘was bad epidemiology but good politics,‘ he remarked to me.” Pg 42

“Then comes a sound like a bedsheet being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from the anus.” Pg 24

My husband spotted this beauty on the bottom shelf of the bookstore yesterday, and we had to have it.

After finishing 1453 by Roger Crowley, I decided to move back in history to read about the empire Byzantine was heir to.

Wow, that was a fantastic read in both subject matter and writing. Reading about the history leading up to a massive siege was almost as fascinating as being taken through the politics and tactics of the actual battles that happened over those 50+ days of siege at Constantinople.

“At the time of the first Arab siege of 669, a strange prophetic book had appeared, the so-called Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.” Pg 186

“In the slashing, hacking confusion, the two leaders squared up to each other in single combat in front of their men.” Pg 162

“The obsession was linked to secrecy, learned young in the dangerous world of the Ottoman court, which made him keep plans close to himself until they were ripe.” Pg 145

“Today, Babylon has been reborn from its ashes.” Pg. 110

“‘Battles on the sea are more dangerous and fierce than the battles by land, for on the sea there is no recoiling nor fleeing, there is no remedy but to fight and to abide fortune, and every man shows his prowess.‘ Jean Froissart, fourteenth-century French chronicler” Pg 123

“The Greek chroniclers struggled to convey what they saw, or even to find a vocabulary to describe the guns.” Pg 116

“During the winter of 1452, [Orban] set to the task of casting what was probably the largest cannon ever built. This painstaking and extraordinary process was described in detail by the Greek chronicler Kritovoulos.” Pg 91

“Booty was a raison d‘être” Pg 24

“Orthodox religion worked powerfully on the emotions of the people through the intense colors of its mosaics and icons, the mysterious beauty of its liturgy rising and falling in the darkness of lamplit churches...” Pg 18

“The Byzantines, who were heirs to the practical engineering skills of the Roman Empire, seem to have developed a technique for heating the mixture [for Greek Fire] in sealed bronze containers, pressurizing it by means of a hand pump, then emitting it through a nozzle, where it could be ignited by a flame.” Pg 13

“‘A red apple invites stones.‘ Turkish Proverb”. Pg 9

“To the Ottoman Turks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries [the Theodosian wall] was ‘a bone in the throat of Allah‘.” Pg 1-2

After reading a bunch of fiction, I decided it was time to whip out this book about the fall of Constantinople.

“‘Definitely not gypsies,‘ he decided in his semiconscious delirium. ‘Aliens perhaps?‘ Yes, he had heard about things like this. Fortunately, the beings would not harm him. All they wanted were his—“ Pg 431

“Glick was sweet...charming in a pasty, Briddish, unstrung sort of way. Like Hugh Grant on lithium.” Pg 229

“America‘s intended destiny has been lost to history.” Pg 97

“Opponents point to the Buckyball, a self-assembling, soccer ball–shaped carbon nanomolecule. Once thought to be harmless, it now turns out to persist in the environment for considerable time when released, invading the cells of living things with unknown consequences.” Pg 3015

“Elderly Papua New Guinean women were still dying from prion infections contracted at burial feasts they had participated in forty years before.” Pg 3070

This guy rambles a bit.

“We made a unique contribution of our own to the region‘s multiplying environmental tragedies. In 1972, two fisherman died when a shift in the direction of the wind sent a cloud of plague over their boat. In the 1970s and 1980s, abnormally high instances of plague were detected in rodents in inhabited areas north of the testing ground. After the Soviet collapse of 1991, doctors reported outbreaks of plague in several areas of Central Asia.” Pg 16

It seems like an appropriate time to read a book on biowarfare, aye?

I have a backlog of books to read, and I still picked this up at the thrift store. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I can‘t wait to dive into this one tomorrow.

“The Moon blew up suddenly and for no apparent reason.” Pg. 1

“Like most ancient peoples, the Greeks were stargazers, and the Babylonians were the first masters of astronomy: they had learned how to predict eclipses. Thales, the first Greek astronomer, learned how to do this from the Babylonians, or perhaps through the Egyptians. ... With Babylonian astronomy came Babylonian numbers. For astronomical purposes, the Greeks adopted a sexagesimal number system and even divided hours into 60 minutes....” Pg 39

“Pythagoras himself fled for his life, and he might have gotten away had he not run smack into a bean field. There he stopped. He declared that he would rather be killed than cross the field of beans. His pursuers were more than happy to oblige. They cut his throat.” Pg 38

I‘ve wanted to read this book for a while, but I was a bit underwhelmed. The stories of patients are fascinating. It seems that Sacks did care about uncovering the mechanisms of the brain; however, he‘s hopelessly full of himself. He goes on philosophical rants for pages and pages. I‘m interested in the patients and their afflictions, not how well-read or clever Sacks thinks he is.

I got my newest book haul today!

Despite the dry, technical nature of the subject matter, this book was a page-turner. I was enraptured from beginning to end while the author discussed some aspects of life in Soviet Russia, the politics surrounding the reactor‘s design and details of the catastrophe and subsequent relief efforts.

“Inside the Sarcophagus, they were explorers on the frontier of an alien world, where they found gamma radiation fields scaling heights no one had witnessed before and strange new materials forged at temperatures of more than 10,000 degrees centigrade in the crucible of a disintegrating nuclear reactor.” Pg 339