vivdunstan

Crikey I so wanted to type 2024 there haha!

I've got off to a flying start this year, partly with 2 books that were hang overs from before, but also a quick read for my book club. But then I also quickly read 3 other books that had been hanging around for too long, and I wanted to pass on to charity shops. I'd previously started reading a couple of them.

1. An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson
2. Don't Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri
3. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
4. Egyptian Myths: Meet the Gods, Goddesses, and Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt by Jean Menzies
5. Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb by Zahi Hawass
6. ABBA: The Treasures by Ingmarie Halling and Carl Magnus Palm

An Academy for Liars is a dark academia book, with rather a lot of violence and gore added to the mix. It was ok, but I had to push to keep reading it to the end. 3/5 stars.

Don't Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri was an incredible insight into the experience and history of black hair. A strong 4/5 stars.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop was another 3/5 star read for me. Ok, mostly, but a rather odd writing style, and an unexpected and lengthy shift away from the cosy bookshop setting mid way through. 3/5 stars.

Egyptian Myths by classical historian and YouTuber Jean Menzies was an entertaining and informative text, full of striking large format illustrations from Katie Ponder. I did find the order and structure a little confusing in places, but I learned a lot. 4/5 stars.

Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb is a large format coffee table book, filled with huge photographs and details of many hundreds of items from Tutankhamun's tomb. The items chosen are a selection carefully curated by Zahi Hawass, and it's not exhaustive. But for what you did get it was jaw dropping, including multi-page folding out large photographs. Both Martin and I were stunned by parts. 5/5 stars.

ABBA: The Treasures is a large format squidgy book telling much of the story of ABBA in photographs, reminiscences, and reproductions of paper ephemera connected with them, tucked into folders inside that you open up and work through the contents of. It's a nice book, but a rather narrow perspective on their life, focusing mainly on some of their 1970s international tours, which one of the authors accompanied them on. I did feel that I was missing out on the wider story. But the folders of paper ephemera were a delight. I was particularly amused by the customs list, for the Australian tour I think, including a "piano accordion". 4/5 stars.

On to another story, and one that I find personally one of the most disturbing in the entire Holmes canon.

( spoilers )

Pleased to be sitting up, working on an academic journal paper. Filling in more remaining footnotes as I get closer to finished. Latest ones added about Presbyterian minister Archibald Simpson's time in South Carolina, General Staats Long Morris in Aberdeenshire, and Edinburgh Lord Provost Sir James Hunter Blair. All of the above were employers of black servants in late eighteenth century Scotland. I get incredibly frustrated by how little I know about these servants, often not even their names. While the employers are written up at length, often with fancy paintings. Though in the above examples I do know a little about Cloy Simpson, Wattie and Jack Blair Hunter. Yes I have thoughts ...

I'm continuing to watch panels of interest to me from this summer's SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) book history conference. Which this year was totally online. I was too ill at the time to watch anything live, but have until the end of August to watch the Zoom recordings I want to see. So far I have watched 8 panels, each usually with 2 or 3 speakers. And a list of more to watch in the coming weeks.

Every single academic conference talk I am able to watch - now usually from home, in my pyjamas, typically in bed! - inspires my own research. For example today I was watching a panel about black voices and enslaved workers in the North American book trade. So many similar names to the black servants I have been uncovering in eighteenth-century Scotland. I need to get that research written up and submitted to an academic journal for peer review. Watching this panel today gave me a kick up the butt to do that! Another talk I enjoyed was an academic who researched popular readership and translations of Asian literature in the Victorian era for his PhD. Along the way he started building up his own collection of books from that field and era. He talked in the panel about how he researched those books' owners and readers. And again that reminded me that I have some slightly related research that I should write up and publish on sometime.