chezmax

Well Christmas dinner could have been a disaster, but for the fact that my sister decided to cook the turkey joint on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. We popped the turkey into a hot oven after cooking pizza for ourselves and then settled down to watch Red One, which was almost so bad it was good. At the end of the film my sister went to check on the turkey, which was now mildly defrosted, as opposed to piping hot. The oven was just as cold, no matter what the controls said. Cue panic.

Fortunately the oven started heating up again as soon as we started fiddling with knobs, and it was just 10PM, so there was just time to cook it for another 2 hours, this time with frequent checks, and still be in bed before Santa started on his rounds.

Christmas morning we went down to see my mother for a couple of hours, cut slightly shorter than expected because the care home was starting dinner at 12:30 rather than the normal 1PM, but hadn't actually mentioned that to any of the relatives. Mind you we passed the hot food trolleys on the way out and it smelled gorgeous.

So we didn't even start cooking veg etc until after 1PM - I say 'we', but in truth it was almost all my sister, I just helped around the edges. And we finally sat down to eat at 3:30ish, much later than we have in the past. Amazingly the turkey had come through its ordeal of four hours in the oven without drying out.

When we finally got around to presents it was quickly apparent Poppy the dog had more than the rest of the family together - though now my sister has to persuade her that a reindeer soft toy almost as long as she is just isn't appropriate for taking on a walk!

Current Mood: F'lup
Current Location: Home is where the Christmas Dinner is

Tags:

alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

http://alpennia.com/blog/book-review-inventing-renaissance-ada-palmer

Sunday, December 28, 2025 - 10:05

bookreview.jpg

In the last couple years I've moved my non-LHMP book reviews over to Dreamwidth to keep a certain separation between my voice as an author and my voice as a reader. But I want to give this one a bit more visibility.

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer is not simply my favorite book of the year, but is my candidate for Best Book of the Year overall. This is not simply a book about history but is a book about the process of history. It demonstrates the fractal messiness of the people, places, and events that we try to tidily sort into specific eras, and especially how all those people, places, and events are braided together into a solid fabric. Palmer doesn’t shy away from pointing out how thoroughly our understanding of history is shaped by the prejudices and preoccupations of historians; she embraces this aspect noting at every turn how her own take is shaped by her love of the city of Florence and especially its most controversial son, Machiavelli.

But what makes this book great is the humor poured into the cracks around the politics, violence, and art. (A recurring feature is little comic dialogues that summarize key events in a narrative style familiar to anyone on Twitter or Bluesky. I desperately want to see these presented in visual format, whether as live theater or animated shorts. It’s hard to pick a favorite line, but the top two are “Maria Visconti-Sforza: I’m standing right here!” and “King of France: You Italians are very strange.”)

The book concludes with what I can only describe as a stump speech for the importance to the contemporary world of studying and understanding history, embracing the necessary messiness of “progress,” and the hope that we can indeed continue the Renaissance project of reaching for a better world.

This is a very long book, though paced in manageable chapters. When I decided to read it and found that the audiobook was the same price as the hardcover, I went for audio (at over 30 hours!) and listened to it while taking the train home from the International Medieval Conference. The narration is top-notch, capturing the emotional range of the text perfectly. The side benefit is that the combination of material, voice, and length made it perfect to add to my “sleep-aid audiobooks” collection, which means I get to enjoy it over and over again (in the bits and pieces I consciously hear). But of course I bought the hardcover too, not only so I could get Palmer to autograph it, but because I needed to be able to track down my favorite bits and check out the footnotes.

Major category:

Reviews

Tags:

Reviews: Books

http://alpennia.com/blog/book-review-inventing-renaissance-ada-palmer

susandennis

I love things you do every day. For several years, I took the same photo everyday at noon. Then for 3 years I snapped pictures of the stadium across the street every day and put them on a website. I used to take a photo of my knitting basket every day. I write in this journal every day and I also keep a One Sentence A Day journal in a small book - I write in it each night when I get into bed.

This week I started a tracker. It's an app on my phone. I built a template and every day I will fill it in with notes. I have no plans for this info but I do get a weird satisfaction from just keeping up with it and knowing I have it.

Yesterday the pool water was cold and the air in the pool room was 79 when it's always 81. I reported it to the front desk but The Guy Who Never Does What You Ask was on duty so I know I was wasting air. This morning, I knew the sun was going to be out and if I wanted to swim before the clouds lifted, I'd better get going. BUT I also wore my track suit and went prepared to use one of the machines in the gym instead. The pool water was colder than yesterday and the air was now 76. The same guy was on at the front desk. So no one will even know about it until tomorrow. It takes a few days to heat up that water. Volleyball on Tuesday is looking iffy. Tomorrow's swim ain't happening. BUT I did enjoy today's. After the first five or so laps, the cold isn't terrible. Not great but not terrible.

The sun is out now and the mountains are covered with snow. It's a beautiful sight. I did not move one inch from my table to take this photo right now. This is what I see.

I really can't believe that I get to live in this apartment with this view for the rest of my days. I often feel like I'm being pranked. I think it's the equivalent of impostor syndrome but for retirees.

Biggie had another bloodless pee. I am so hopeful that at least this latest issue might not kill him. Of course, if it does not, he'll think of some other way soon, I'm sure.

Today I'm thinking maybe some work on the puzzle in the elbow, maybe some TV, maybe some knitting. The usual.

hrj

(This is the promised separate review of my favorite book from 2025.)

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer is not simply my favorite book of the year, but is my candidate for Best Book of the Year overall. This is not simply a book about history but is a book about the process of history. It demonstrates the fractal messiness of the people, places, and events that we try to tidily sort into specific eras, and especially how all those people, places, and events are braided together into a solid fabric. Palmer doesn’t shy away from pointing out how thoroughly our understanding of history is shaped by the prejudices and preoccupations of historians; she embraces this aspect noting at every turn how her own take is shaped by her love of the city of Florence and especially its most controversial son, Machiavelli.

But what makes this book great is the humor poured into the cracks around the politics, violence, and art. (A recurring feature is little comic dialogues that summarize key events in a narrative style familiar to anyone on Twitter or Bluesky. I desperately want to see these presented in visual format, whether as live theater or animated shorts. It’s hard to pick a favorite line, but the top two are “Maria Visconti-Sforza: I’m standing right here!” and “King of France: You Italians are very strange.”)

The book concludes with what I can only describe as a stump speech for the importance to the contemporary world of studying and understanding history, embracing the necessary messiness of “progress,” and the hope that we can indeed continue the Renaissance project of reaching for a better world.

This is a very long book, though paced in manageable chapters. When I decided to read it and found that the audiobook was the same price as the hardcover, I went for audio (at over 30 hours!) and listened to it while taking the train home from the International Medieval Conference. The narration is top-notch, capturing the emotional range of the text perfectly. The side benefit is that the combination of material, voice, and length made it perfect to add to my “sleep-aid audiobooks” collection, which means I get to enjoy it over and over again (in the bits and pieces I consciously hear). But of course I bought the hardcover too, not only so I could get Palmer to autograph it, but because I needed to be able to track down my favorite bits and check out the footnotes.

Tags:

reviews: books

fred_mouse

A fortnight or so ago, james_davis_nicoll posted 200 Significant Science Fiction Books by Women, 1984–2001, by David G. Hartwell. I had an interesting time skimming it, and then decided that I own a lot of those books and either haven't read them, or read them long enough ago that I don't remember enough of them.

So! I decided to try and read as many of them as possible. And because I like to make life easier for Future Me, I turned it into a StoryGraph Challenge. This challenge has no time limits, and welcomes all comers. I'd dearly like to have other people join the challenge, and read a stack of fascinating books, some by authors who should be better remembered than they are (Bujold, for one, is actually well remembered. Tess Williams, on the other hand, isn't).

Tags:

reading challenges

james_davis_nicoll

Ekumen envoy Genly Ai's mission to entice Gethen to join the Ekumen is complicated by atypical biology and all too familiar local politics.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Tags:

sallymn posting in

1word1day

contemporaneous [kuhn-tem-puh-rey-nee-uhs]

adjective:
existing, beginning, or occurring in the same period of time

Examples:

Some economic data, such as last month’s unemployment rate and consumer-inflation numbers, can’t be compiled retroactively, the Labor Department has said, because they rely on contemporaneous surveys. (Nick Timiraos and Matt Grossman, Wholesale Price Gains Hint at Muted Rise in Fed’s Preferred Inflation Gauge, The Wall Street Journal, November 2025)

These moments of reckoning - in which something that once felt exciting begins to seem noxious, mephitic, dangerous - are important to heed. (Alex Ross, At Ninety, Arvo Pärt and Terry Riley Still Sound Vital, The New Yorker, November 2025)

In addition to contemporaneous comics, architecture, and music, the film explores the influence of the space race on everyday life of the 1960s. (Ben Sachs, Lewis Klahr’s Sixty Six is a masterful journey through inner space and the American past, Chicago Reader, May 2017)

It gave the explanation, gave sanity to the pranks of this atavistic brain of mine that, modern and normal, harked back to a past so remote as to be contemporaneous with the raw beginnings of mankind. (Jack London, Before Adam)

Origin:
'living or existing at the same time,' 1650s, from Late Latin contemporaneus 'contemporary,' from the same Latin source as contemporary but with an extended form after Late Latin temporaneous 'timely.' An earlier adjective was contemporanean (1550s). (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Tags:

michelel72 posting in

little_details

I'm hoping these are straightforward questions, but I couldn't find a way to word the first to get any relevant results in web searches, and the second got weird on me.

The context is a civilian with extensive field-medic-style training providing off-the-books, in-home medical/supportive care to a preteen who is ill with a viral* fever-inducing illness. (* Viral seems easier; but bacterial is possible if necessary.) The setting is the modern-day (or at least vaguely post-2010) United States.

1. Is it feasible to administer intravenous (IV) saline without an infusion pump? (I've been assuming it is but want to double-check.)

( cut for IV details )

2. Is there a point at which a childhood (viral) fever is dangerous?

( Read more... )

Many thanks!

loganberrybunny

Public

330/365: Hagley Hall, Bewdley
Click for a larger, sharper image
It was off to the Severn Valley Railway today for a few hours on the trains. The rain just about held off, although it became very murky and gloomy by mid-afternoon. The trains were pretty busy, and I had to stand for half my first journey. Bridgnorth town centre was also packed, but fortunately the station refreshment room had space for me to have a coffee and a beef and veg pasty. Quite a relaxed day overall, certainly compared to the big gala events I'm more used to attending, but that was part of its appeal. Here's my first train of the day, 4930 Hagley Hall (which turns 97 in May) arriving at Bewdley station.

Current Mood: chipper

Tags:

bill_schubert

They have this really cool ball machine at Tejas Pickleball. It runs on a rechargable battery and has an app that does all kinds of amazing things. You can tell the ball machine where it has been placed on the court, tell it what kind of shots you want including a shot series that you particularly want to practice. How to rush the net and then get back quickly for a lob then back to a deep shot. You can collect a bunch of different routines and link them together and practically play a game against the machine. It is really amazing to do. But it requires focus and effort and a lot of brainwork and time. I have the app and know how to use it and, give that time and focus, can run it through its places.

So I requested some ball machine time. The guy running things set me up with a block of time but opened it to anyone else up to a total of four people. Three others signed up. I got there and was in the process of setting up the machine and linking the app when two them showed up and said 'hey, I think this M button will run the maching just fine' and proceeded to take over and use the machine in its lowest possible usage. Just same ball at same place over and over. They were extatic that it worked and were running around like elementary school kids (they are likely a few years younger than me). Didn't ask my opinion, didn't acknowlege that I had any place on the court or operating the machine.

I left.

Next time I need to figure out a way to lock everyone out and use the machine the way it is supposed to be used.

It was really not a happy event for me at all. Monday I'll talk to the big guy and see if we can figure it out.

susandennis

Hazel has come into my apartment 3 times this week to ask me to fix her tablet. Three times I have said that I would all she has to do is bring it to me. No tablet yet. She downloads shit and then gets warnings from malware. I think if I ever see the tablet again, I'll find her solitaire games that she can play offline and then turn off her wifi access.

But, the big news is she said that John (her husband who can't turn on his computer) has ordered her a big cellphone. Probably a large size, off brand smart phone. "he got the big one so I can see the numbers". Hazel cannot work a traditional handset because she forgets how. There is no way in the world she will be able to operate a cellphone. She will be in here every time she tries to turn it on. John does not know how to operate a smart phone. He can barely manage his feature flip phone. This is going to get ugly fast. I think my game plan is to show her to to call our IT guys here at Timber Ridge.

Elbow Coffee was not as bad as it has been and not as good. But, it is over for another week.

I'm just tired of old people.

I did my Safeway run and it is really cold out. I have no reason to test it further. I might puzzle a bit and then settle in with some TV and knitting.

susandennis

We only had 4 people turn out for volleyball so we only played an hour and it was not very vigorous and then I swam laps for about 20 minutes. There is a problem with the pool - both the water and the air are a few degrees cooler than they should be. And it's the weekend. Assuming no one gets to it, it should be icicles by Monday. I told the front desk but the guy on duty is famous for not doing shit so...

The big headline news is that this morning there was no blood in Biggie's pee!!! It looked just like Julio's pee!!! Yep, I'm very excited to report the findings made in comparing my cats' urine. Turns out that one of the big pluses about tofu litter is the ability to see the color of pee easily. (Biggie and Julio use different litter box real estate. Biggie pees in the back of the box and Julio's partial to the front left side. This has been very helpful in tracking them.)

I finished up a very good book a few days ago (The Wrong Hands by Mark Billingham) and have had a really hard time latching onto a new one but I think I might have found the one... Playing Dead by Elizabeth Greenwood. It's non fiction about people and reasons and methods for faking your own death. I'm just at the beginning but the prolong is really interesting.

I'm at the beginning of Season 6 (of 10) of Shetland.

I am seriously considering a quick to Safeway. I want fried chicken and cake.

But right now, I need to go to Elbow Coffee.

bill_schubert

I bought a month of YouTube TV yesterday. Actually a month plus five days for free. Buyer's remorse set in almost immediately. I got it so we could watch some of the football playoff games. At $90 it is an expensive ticket. We did watch the news yesterday for the first time in a long while. It is much easier to speed read than speed watch. The older I get the less I'm able to tolerate the news.

Today is going to be hot. Monday will be cold. That time of year.

I set up a couple of hours of pickleball ball machine today. There are others that decided they wanted to join me so we'll see how it goes. I need some reps without thinking about just winning the point. Hopetully it will be a good session. I need to increase my accuracy to reduce my annoyance when I am playing.

Toby continues to get better. He's coughing less and less. Beaux is over his respiratory but it seems he has contracted hook worms likely left over from when he was in his previous situation. I asked the doc if the parasite could be dormant for a couple of months and apparently that is frequently the case. Fortunately it is a one pill now, one pill in three weeks and all done kind of thing so no big deal.

I actually think that the respiratory bug they both got was also from when Beaux was in his hoarding situation.

He is actually well and we have some anti-diarrhea med that is already fixing the problem along with the anti-parasite. So it is an easy fix.

Beaux's personality continues to come out. He jumps up on the bed and plays around and is increasingly affectionate. He still hasn't discovered toys but has pretty much figured everything else out. Toby is happy that Beaux doesn't understand playing with toys.

Tomorrow is going to be interesting. One of my three networking friends is LDS and his son just came back from a year as a missionary. Son is going to give a presentation about it and apparently they officially welcome him back. I'm about the last person to latch onto this kind of stuff being a follower of Christopher Hitchens as much as anything but Tyson is a good person and has been one of my longest lasting friendships and it means a lot to him. So we're going to the ceremony at the church. First time in an LDS church.

Otherwise just glad to have the two weeks of Christmas be over.

james_davis_nicoll

Hisako Ichiki is a perfectly normal Japanese school girl with perfectly normal social anxiety and depression and perfectly dreadful marks. Hisako also has a stalker.

Fears And Hates (Ultimate X‑Men, volume 1) by Peach Momoko

Tags:

james_davis_nicoll

Seven works new to me: four fantasy, three science fiction, of which at least three are series.

Books Received, December 20 — December 26

Poll #34011 Books Received, December 20 — December 26

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

View Respondents

Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

The King Must Die by Kemi Ashing-Giwa (November 2025)
14 (35.9%)

Mortedant’s Peril by R. J. Barker (May 2026)
10 (25.6%)

Cold Steel by Joyce Ch’Ng (March 2025)
9 (23.1%)

The Ganymedan by R. T. Ester (November 2025)
13 (33.3%)

Alchemy of Souls by Adriana Mather (August 2026)
5 (12.8%)

The Bird Tribe by Lucinda Roy (July 2026)
5 (12.8%)

Household by Riccardo Sirignano and Simone Formicola (2022)
8 (20.5%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
30 (76.9%)

Tags:

books received

minoanmiss

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: amused

silvercat17 posting in

justcreate

What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?

Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?

What do you just want to talk about?

What have you been watching or reading?

Chores and other not-fun things count!

Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky.

Tags:

sturgeonslawyer

This short piece takes the form of (surprise, surprise) a conversation, ostensibly at a dinner party, about art in general and the paintings of one Walter Sickert in particular.

The conversation (rather disembodied, almost a monologue) swoops over a variety of topics, but mostly homes in on the idea that Sickert is a storyteller in paint. The conversationalist(s) discuss several of his paintings, describing them slightly if at all, while extracting a great deal of, if not actual story, at least character sketch and situation from them.

At the end, Woolf produces a letter from Sickert in which the painter states that he is "a literary painter ... like all the decent painters." This seems a bit pat, but does wind the discussion up neatly.

Very readable, if slight.

Six out of ten pigments.

sturgeonslawyer

Subtitle: Who Rigged It, How We Fix it

Robert Reich (pronounced with a "sh" ending, not a "k" - so it rhymes with "fleisch," not with "hike") has served in education (he recently retired as the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley) and in government (he served in the administrations of both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, was Secretary of Labor during Bill Clinton's first term, and was a member of Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. In 2008, Time named him one of the ten most effective Cabiniet members of the century; in the same year, the Wall Street Journal listed him sixth on its list of most influential business thinkers ... and, yes, some of that was cribbed from Wikipedia, thank you ... the point is, this is a guy who knows what he's talking about.

And what he's talking about is how the "free market" is rigged so that those with large amounts of money get to keep it and gather more, while those with very little have very little hope of keeping even what they have.

This isn't just a whining about how the rich have all the advantages. It's a careful description of how, beginning in the 1980s, what you might call "moneyed interests" began pressuring, persuading, and outright bribing, government officials to dismantle the protections against monopoly power put in place beginning with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act(1890) and culminating in the reforms that were put in place to ease the Great Depression that began in 1929, and to prevent another one. (Sherman is still nominally in place, but the Depression-era laws, like the Glass-Steagall provisions of 1933, are mostly gone. Poof.)

Much of this has come from belief in something called the "free market." What this belief fails to note is that no market is truly "free;" every market runs by a set of rules.

What has happened in the past four and a half decades has been a gradual and subtle, and occasionally rapid and blatant, reform of those rules so that they ensure that the "moneyed interests" can take outrageous chances -- for example, the famous "junk bonds" and "derivatives" that played such a large part in the 2008 financial crisis. When those risks pay off, the gamblers keep their winnings, and pay little or no taxes on them; when they crash and burn, things are set up so that the government -- meaning taxes paid mostly by the middle and working classes -- bail them out.

Reich goes into this in much more detail, with better explanation than I have any hope of giving in the space of a review. He supplies lots of historical background, comparing the current situation to the "first Gilded Age" (that of the "robber barons" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

And, most important of all, he ends with reason to hope and an actionable program by which that hope can more speedily be brought to fruition.

9 out of 10 junk bonds.

Profile

chezmax

October 2011

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Page Summary

davidgillon - All that festive stuff
alpennia_feed - Book Review: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer
susandennis - Every day obsession
hrj - Books I've Read: Book of the Year
fred_mouse - Storygraph challenge
james_davis_nicoll - The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 28-12-2025
sallymn in 1word1day - Sunday Word: Contemporaneous
michelel72 in little_details - IV saline without infusion pump; childhood fevers
loganberrybunny - Riding the rails again
bill_schubert - Complete pickleball fail
susandennis - 2026 whine preview
susandennis - Saturday
bill_schubert - A hundred channels and...
james_davis_nicoll - Fears And Hates (Ultimate X‑Men, volume 1) by Peach Momoko
james_davis_nicoll - Books Received, December 20 — December 26
minoanmiss - Conversation With My Father
silvercat17 in justcreate - Just Create - Hacker Edition
sturgeonslawyer - Virginia Woolf: Walter Sickert: a conversation (2025-62)
sturgeonslawyer - Robert B. Reich: The System (2025-61)

Style Credit

Base style: Tectonic by daemon @ LJ and momijizukamori
Theme: City Dragon by momijizukamori

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Dec. 30th, 2025 03:29 pm

Network

Navigation

All that festive stuff

Book Review: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer

bookreview.jpg

Every day obsession

Books I've Read: Book of the Year

Storygraph challenge

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Interesting Links for 28-12-2025

Sunday Word: Contemporaneous

IV saline without infusion pump; childhood fevers

Riding the rails again

Complete pickleball fail

2026 whine preview

Saturday

A hundred channels and...

Fears And Hates (Ultimate X‑Men, volume 1) by Peach Momoko

Books Received, December 20 — December 26

Conversation With My Father

Just Create - Hacker Edition

Virginia Woolf: Walter Sickert: a conversation (2025-62)

Robert B. Reich: The System (2025-61)

Profile

October 2011

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags