I am wary of saying too much, because even the titles of the books are spoilery. And you don’t have to read them in order, but they do still spoil each other. So this is your spoiler warning line, though I’m doing my best to summarize vaguely below.
The first book is The Thief, and it is about a kid who was arrested for bragging that he could steal anything, and then proving it. The king’s magus, the brains behind the thrones, then pulls him out of prison to look for an ancient artifact, the ownership of which makes you rightful heir to a neighboring throne. They tell a lot of myths over the course of the book, so it seems like a kinda okay read maybe, and then you get to the end and BAM. TWISTS. that make the whole book 1000% better when you reread.
The second is Queen of Attolia, when this kid is a little older and making himself a nuisance in a foreign country again. He gets his hand cut off for it and this precipitates a three-way war, which he is not initially aware of because he is sulking, because he is majestic and snarky and petty. When he wakes up, he conspires to steal peace, and he does it, of course, in a tricksy heisty magnificent manner involving the cutest boat hook in the world.
The third is King of Attolia, which abruptly changes viewpoints to that of a king’s guard who has just gotten in trouble for punching the king in the face. Costis is a cute sort of honorable fellow, but we really use his viewpoint to see why the king is king, in two… no, three different ways, and it’s also where my shipper heart is abruptly kicked into gear so that I go back and reread Queen and squee magnificently over everything.
The fourth is Conspiracy of Kings, which shifts POV again to a character from the first book who you might almost have forgotten about; there’ve been throwaway lines to some political stuff going on his country that, if you were invested in him, would make you quite worried, and this is the book explaining why no one knew where he was or what he was doing all this time. And also what he does about it which is, sadly, become epic and badass.
Thematically it’s about what it means to be a monarch, and it’s about the prices paid for different kinds of strength, and it’s a hilarious not-quite-heist story, and it’s about international politics in smaller countries that the superpowers of the world would distinctly like to eat up, and it’s about how we relate to our gods, and it’s about maintaining cultural identity in the face of inevitable defeat.
In response to all those articles about talking to women with headphones…
Someone always says it, whenever it comes up: “I guess I’m just not allowed to talk to anyone any more!”
Well. Yes. It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote all us women and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone ever again.
This vote is legally binding.
Yes, of course, all women know each other, the way you always suspected. (Incidentally, so do Canadians. I’m just throwing that out there.) We went into the women’s room at the Applebee’s at the corner of 54 and all the others streamed in through the doors into that endless liminal space, a chain of humans stretching backward heavy skulled Neanderthal women laughing with New York socialites, Lucille Ball hand in hand with the Taung child. We sat around in the couches in the women’s room (I know you’ve always been suspicious of those couches) and chatted with each other in the secret female language that you always knew existed. Somebody set up a console– the Empress Wu is ruthless at Mario Kart and Cleopatra never learned to lose and a woman who ruled an empire that fell when the Sea People came and left no trace can use the blue shell like a surgical instrument.
Eventually we took the vote. You had three defenders: your grandmother and your first-grade teacher and an Albanian nun who believes the best of everybody. Your mom abstained. It was duly recorded in the secret notebooks that have been kept under the couch in the Applebee’s since the beginning of recorded time. And then we went back to playing Mario Kart and Hoelun took off her bra and we didn’t think about you again except that I had to carry this message.
So anyway good luck with that it’s just as you always said it was. Hush now, no talking
This is a great book, all about the work of spinning and weaving, how it developed, and how and why it was women’s work. It makes the great point that women’s work is ephemeral – food, cloth, it’s all things that don’t survive archaeologically, so that it’s something that gets overlooked. The author also knows how to weave herself, and has tried out weaving some ancient cloths, pointing out that it’s only by doing something like that that you can work out practical issues.
One of the things that was really great was the author pointing out that the most plausible reconstruction for the Venus de Milo is of her spinning:
Even better, is that since the book has been written, an artist who makes 3D printed sculpture has made a 3D model of what she would have looked like – and you can buy one for yourself:
I love this concept
OKAY Tumblr, I’m gonna try this one more time. The tags for this post haven’t been working properly and more people need to see this, darn it!
Let’s try linking some good people in and see if that makes it play along.
Oh I love this! I would 100% want a spinning venus in my life….
Thanks for the tag!
Also if you have access to an academic library they may have the same author’s Prehistoric Textiles, which is both broader and more in-depth and tells you about the domestication of sheep and terms for weaving in pre-Hellenic languages and is amazing.
Consider this (based on a conversation I had with some friends a while ago): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for people who actually like Pride and Prejudice.
Look–I tried to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I got about 20 pages in before I came to the conclusion that the person who wrote it did so out of the belief that the original Pride and Prejudice was stuffy and boring. There were out of character vulgar puns. And the trailer for the movie did not convince me that I had missed anything by cutting short my reading experience.
So, what I’m talking about here is this premise: the world of Pride and Prejudice, but if you die, it’s highly likely, almost certain that your corpse will get up and try to eat people.
But no one dies in Pride and Prejudice, you might say. In fact, few or no people die in any Jane Austen novel.
This is true. But people do get sick with some regularity. Imagine the tension added to Jane getting sick after going to visit Bingley if there was the chance that she would become a zombie after she died. Becoming a zombie in an eligible bachelor’s house probably would have seriously wrecked any chances of any of the living sisters ending up with him.
Imagine Mr. Collins, as a minister, having the duty upon someone’s death of severing their head with a ceremonial plate or something that would prevent the corpse from rising. Obviously important, but this only makes him more self-important and obnoxious.
And dangerous.
For you see, in this version, Mr. Bennett, who stays in his office all the time, whose life is the only thing allowing Mrs. Bennett and her daughters to stay in the house–Mr. Bennett is definitely a zombie. He died at home, and Mrs. Bennett decided that, no way were they dealing with this, and so…just started faking it. Jane and Elizabeth know. The younger sisters don’t.
In this universe, I think we have to go with zombies that are not any faster or stronger than the humans they were, and in fact tend to get weaker as time passes because their flesh is rotting. And…hmm, okay, how about they are pretty violent upon rising, and for about a week afterward, trying to bite people and spread the infection (even though most people are carriers anyway, but getting a nasty bite from a corpse will give you other stuff that will have you die while carrying the virus). But then they calm down and basically just start sort of attempting to act like they did in life, that is, taking habitual actions with no consciousness, in a depressing and desiccated way.
So Mr. Bennett is a zombie, and Mrs. Bennett’s number one goal is to get her daughters married before anyone finds that out. And this, actually, makes Elizabeth’s refusal of Mr. Collins more frustrating for Mrs. Bennett–obviously Mr. Bennett didn’t tell Elizabeth that she could refuse Mr. Collins, because Mr. Bennett is dead, but Mrs. Bennett can’t say anything or the game would be up.
Another question in this version–does Mr. Darcy find out about Mr. Bennett being a zombie somehow? Does Elizabeth find out that he knows and didn’t say anything and this is something that helps repair his earlier actions?
Anyway, this is the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that I was looking for.
Kimchi and Justice 