![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
what i'm reading wednesday
Aug. 28th, 2024 09:56 amWhat I finished:
+ The King's Shadow: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Deadly Quest for the Lost City of Alexandria by Edmund Richardson.
Okay, so this completely ordinary soldier in the East India Company's military in the 1830s deserts. Somehow, he manages to make it out of India and into Afghanistan. At this point in time, there aren't very many Westerners in Afghanistan--they're all over in what would become India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. This dude, who is calling himself Charles Masson, starts making friends and exploring Afghanistan, and he promptly falls in love with it. He also realizes that this is the area in which Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in the Caucasus and he starts to find things like coins that have Greek on one side and some unknown language on the other. So he's pretty sure he's found the lost city and he's super psyched to start digging and prove it.
Unfortunately, he doesn't have much money. He starts publishing in various journals and becomes something of a darling of the historically-minded in India and the UK. He starts to get fans and a bit of funding, he collects a ton of coins and artifacts, he does some digging and finds the Bimaran casket, and it seems like things are going to go well for him.
But THEN the East India Company figures out who he is and blackmails him into being their spy in Afghanistan. Which he hates so much it makes him ill, but he keeps doing it because otherwise he thinks he might get imprisoned/executed for desertion.
Meanwhile, the Company is setting the stage for the profoundly stupid First Anglo-Afghan War, which Masson keeps telling them not to start, but of course they do. Things go from bad to worse for Masson as he gets pulled into this epic fuck-up.
This book is a bit all over the place because Masson's life is a bit all over the place and also because the author clearly kept finding weird and wonderful stories from history that he just couldn't not share. He pivots too quickly sometimes, almost giving me whiplash, and in the second half, it's not always clear what's happening chronologically.
But the book is incredibly fun to read and it is full of weird and wonderful stories.
The most interesting part to me is the backdrop, which unfortunately doesn't get enough attention. The Greek colony of Alexandria in the Caucuses existed for some centuries, centuries during which Afghanistan was almost entirely Buddhist. The Buddhist history of this area almost disappeared from (wider) history after it became majority Muslim, and yet there were hints everywhere. All these ruins that the people who lived there had little understanding of and that seemed confusing in a Muslim world, like the the Buddhas of Bamiyan (which have since been destroyed by the Taliban).
So you've got this city in Afghanistan where people speak Greek and have Greek names and wear Greek clothes, but they are all Buddhists, and isn't that just the most interesting thing you've ever heard? Frankly, I want to know SO much more about this city-state and its culture! And also about the Buddhist history of Afghanistan!
But that isn't really the focus of the book--it's about Masson's adventures and everything that's unfolding around him. Still, I definitely want to see if I can find more books about Alexandria in the Caucuses and also about Harappa, which is also mentioned in the book (Masson was allegedly the first Westerner to see it).
All in all: a fun read, but unsatisfying for those of us (read: me) who want way more about the ancient cultures. Good thing I have access to an academic library.
+ Two Miss Silver books by Patricia Wentworth. These books are the equivalent of a bag of potato chips to me. I scarf them down. Golden Age mysteries, sufficiently smart enough to keep me engaged but with a fair degree of predictability. (For instance, if you know the romantic dynamic that Wentworth writes in literally all of her books, you could have guessed whether the "she" of the She Came Back was the real "she" or not. I knew within a few pages.) Still, the execution is fun enough to gobble the books down.
Golden Age mysteries are what I can read when I don't feel like getting into something heavy. If anyone has any good recommendations, I am always happy to have them.
What I'm currently reading:
+ The Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James. This is my first time reading James. I don't find these stories scary--I think that I am incapable of being scared by something I've read? Books can hold me in suspense, move me, disgust me, delight me, etc. but they don't scare me. For that, I need a TV/movie.
Still, these are interesting little stories in that late Victorian/Edwardian style that I enjoy so much. I appreciate how much is left to implication--we don't plunge into the feeling of what it's like to have these supernatural encounters; instead, it's all implied and left to our imaginations. Combine this with a antiquarian bent and I'm enjoying myself. I will never be a James superfan, but I'm glad I'm reading him.
+ The King's Shadow: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Deadly Quest for the Lost City of Alexandria by Edmund Richardson.
Okay, so this completely ordinary soldier in the East India Company's military in the 1830s deserts. Somehow, he manages to make it out of India and into Afghanistan. At this point in time, there aren't very many Westerners in Afghanistan--they're all over in what would become India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. This dude, who is calling himself Charles Masson, starts making friends and exploring Afghanistan, and he promptly falls in love with it. He also realizes that this is the area in which Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in the Caucasus and he starts to find things like coins that have Greek on one side and some unknown language on the other. So he's pretty sure he's found the lost city and he's super psyched to start digging and prove it.
Unfortunately, he doesn't have much money. He starts publishing in various journals and becomes something of a darling of the historically-minded in India and the UK. He starts to get fans and a bit of funding, he collects a ton of coins and artifacts, he does some digging and finds the Bimaran casket, and it seems like things are going to go well for him.
But THEN the East India Company figures out who he is and blackmails him into being their spy in Afghanistan. Which he hates so much it makes him ill, but he keeps doing it because otherwise he thinks he might get imprisoned/executed for desertion.
Meanwhile, the Company is setting the stage for the profoundly stupid First Anglo-Afghan War, which Masson keeps telling them not to start, but of course they do. Things go from bad to worse for Masson as he gets pulled into this epic fuck-up.
This book is a bit all over the place because Masson's life is a bit all over the place and also because the author clearly kept finding weird and wonderful stories from history that he just couldn't not share. He pivots too quickly sometimes, almost giving me whiplash, and in the second half, it's not always clear what's happening chronologically.
But the book is incredibly fun to read and it is full of weird and wonderful stories.
The most interesting part to me is the backdrop, which unfortunately doesn't get enough attention. The Greek colony of Alexandria in the Caucuses existed for some centuries, centuries during which Afghanistan was almost entirely Buddhist. The Buddhist history of this area almost disappeared from (wider) history after it became majority Muslim, and yet there were hints everywhere. All these ruins that the people who lived there had little understanding of and that seemed confusing in a Muslim world, like the the Buddhas of Bamiyan (which have since been destroyed by the Taliban).
So you've got this city in Afghanistan where people speak Greek and have Greek names and wear Greek clothes, but they are all Buddhists, and isn't that just the most interesting thing you've ever heard? Frankly, I want to know SO much more about this city-state and its culture! And also about the Buddhist history of Afghanistan!
But that isn't really the focus of the book--it's about Masson's adventures and everything that's unfolding around him. Still, I definitely want to see if I can find more books about Alexandria in the Caucuses and also about Harappa, which is also mentioned in the book (Masson was allegedly the first Westerner to see it).
All in all: a fun read, but unsatisfying for those of us (read: me) who want way more about the ancient cultures. Good thing I have access to an academic library.
+ Two Miss Silver books by Patricia Wentworth. These books are the equivalent of a bag of potato chips to me. I scarf them down. Golden Age mysteries, sufficiently smart enough to keep me engaged but with a fair degree of predictability. (For instance, if you know the romantic dynamic that Wentworth writes in literally all of her books, you could have guessed whether the "she" of the She Came Back was the real "she" or not. I knew within a few pages.) Still, the execution is fun enough to gobble the books down.
Golden Age mysteries are what I can read when I don't feel like getting into something heavy. If anyone has any good recommendations, I am always happy to have them.
What I'm currently reading:
+ The Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James. This is my first time reading James. I don't find these stories scary--I think that I am incapable of being scared by something I've read? Books can hold me in suspense, move me, disgust me, delight me, etc. but they don't scare me. For that, I need a TV/movie.
Still, these are interesting little stories in that late Victorian/Edwardian style that I enjoy so much. I appreciate how much is left to implication--we don't plunge into the feeling of what it's like to have these supernatural encounters; instead, it's all implied and left to our imaginations. Combine this with a antiquarian bent and I'm enjoying myself. I will never be a James superfan, but I'm glad I'm reading him.
