Aliette de Bodard ([info]aliettedb) wrote,
@ 2008-04-19 10:27:00
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Current mood: bouncy

Saturday laziness
Reading a friend's book with a cup of tea. Not productive, but very pleasant :)

In other news, a review of the Shimmer art issue by Lois Tilton (she didn't like my story, but I did know beforehand it wasn't going to be to her taste).

Found the complete English translation of the Mahabharata. Still unsure how I'm going to go about reading it, because my eyes are going to give up on it if I do it on the computer screen. On the other hand, each of the 18 books is about 400 pages of dense text...

EDIT: my amazon order has arrived!!! Two books about daily life in the Aztec and the Maya World (Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, and Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World, both published by Oxford Press). After flipping through the Aztec one, I really, really wish I'd had it to hand when writing the Acatl novel. It has maps of everything (one of the valley of Mexico with a scale and the main routes, one of the city of Tenochtitlan, and one of the Sacred Precinct), reference charts on the calendar, the main gods...
*sigh* Where was this book when I was writing "Servant of the Underworld"? (on the plus side, if there's a book 2, I can add lots of nifty ideas).


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[info]marshall_payne
2008-04-19 11:38 am UTC (link)
I read the review and of course didn’t think much of it. Once again Lois just gave a synopsis and her opinion and didn’t really try a deconstruction. Which is laziness, if you ask me. Perhaps if I keep trying I can come off as that jaded in future reviews. Wish me luck. ;)

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[info]aliettedb
2008-04-20 05:24 pm UTC (link)
Good luck ;)

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[info]tlmorganfield
2008-04-19 01:51 pm UTC (link)
After flipping through the Aztec one, I really, really wish I'd had it to hand when writing the Acatl novel. It has maps of everything (one of the valley of Mexico with a scale and the main routes, one of the city of Tenochtitlan, and one of the Sacred Precinct), reference charts on the calendar, the main gods...
*sigh* Where was this book when I was writing "Servant of the Underworld"? (on the plus side, if there's a book 2, I can add lots of nifty ideas).

Well, you could always use it for the rewrite. It is a very cool reference book

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[info]aliettedb
2008-04-20 05:26 pm UTC (link)
It is very cool, though some of it conflicts with stuff I've read elsewhere (guess even academics can't agree on everything). I'm certainly going to use it for the revisions (there are some details that are just too good to be passed up). I just wish I had had it earlier to save me the 2-day search on the Internet just to know the distances between Tenochtitlan, Chalco and Amecameca, and the 3-day search for a decent map of the districts of the town...

But I certainly don't regret my 15-euro investment ;)

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[info]xanthalanari
2008-04-19 02:22 pm UTC (link)
They sound like cool books. I wonder if they do them for other periods. Although that could get very expensive as my interest tends to flit between different eras. :-D

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[info]aliettedb
2008-04-20 05:27 pm UTC (link)
They do them for a bunch of other periods, though the actual quality varies (the Aztec one, for instance, looks way better than the Maya one, although it's presumably because we know much more about the Aztecs than about the Mayas...)

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[info]xanthalanari
2008-04-21 07:42 am UTC (link)
I'll have to look into those, once I decide on a period to focus on. Most of my reference books are quite general. :)

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[info]aliettedb
2008-04-21 07:24 pm UTC (link)
Hum, they're rather limited (I think you have Antiquity, plus Middle Ages, but a bunch of "exotics" like Aztecs, Mayas, Japanese). But if your period happens to be one of those ones, they look really like a worthwhile investment.

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[info]angelaina
2008-04-21 06:33 am UTC (link)
Wow. Lois really didn't like anybody, let's face it.

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[info]marshall_payne
2008-04-21 12:27 pm UTC (link)
Well said!

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[info]aliettedb
2008-04-21 06:53 pm UTC (link)
Well...
I get the feeling she doesn't often like Shimmer stuff (primarily because she prefers her stories longer).

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