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demi-shoggoth · 2 years

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2022 Reading Log, pt 5

21. How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero’s Guide to the Real Middle Ages by Cait Stevenson. This is a fun one. Stevenson lays out the basics of the hero’s journey, from choosing the right mentor to the feast to celebrate your accomplishments, through the eyes of actual people living in the medieval period. There’s a good mix of legendry appropriate to the era along with real facts. For example, when talking about dragons, the book discusses Saints George and Margaret, along with St. Margaret’s role as protector of women in childbirth and the real threat of air pollution in London. I also like her definition of what “counts” as the Middle Ages. Her Middle Ages starts with the origin of Islam and ends with the Protestant Reformation, which makes sense to me as what would have affected the most people throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world.

22. Apples of North America by Tom Burford. Burford was one of the leading lights in the revival of heritage apples in the US in the 1980s and 90s, and this book is partially a reflection on a long career and partially a guide to some varieties of note. “Some” is the operative word here: living in Virginia, Burford focuses on East Coast varieties, and the apples covered are those that he could get his hands on to photograph and eat during the writing process. I would have liked a glossary; words like “lenticels”, “russetting” and “scarfskin” are used casually, when for someone who is not immersed in apple culture (like myself) they are somewhat baffling.

23. Monsters of Porphyra 2 by Perry Fehr and Mark Gedak. I don’t think I’ve read Monsters of Porphyra 1. This is a bestiary for Pathfinder 1st edition, put out by a 3rd party company, Purple Duck Games. For the size of the company, the production values are very high—full color, all original art for 150+ monsters. The monsters themselves are a mix of original creatures and conversions of 3.x monsters that are OGL compatible. I recognize some creatures from the Creature Collection series by White Wolf, and Green Ronin’s Book of Fiends. The mechanics are a mixed bag; the monsters follow the rules and are decently well built for the most part, but use a lot of spells and feats from 3rd party sources, and don’t say what those sources are. There’s a reference to the Purple Duck Wiki collecting these for reference, but I can see this book being somewhat frustrating to use at the table.

24. Underground by Will Hunt. This is a book about human relationships with caves, tunnels and other underground spaces. It is a mix of anthropology, history and memoir, and leans heavily into memoir. It helps that Hunt has had a lot of interesting experiences, such as getting lost in the catacombs of Paris with two clowns, being invited into a sacred ochre mine by a Wajarri family in western Australia, and meeting REVS, one of the most prominent graffiti artists of the New York subway system. The book has a decidedly mystical bent. Hunt’s thesis is that the original religion of humanity involved the underground as an otherworld, and that traces of this veneration and mystery percolate into even the modern secular consciousness. He also suggests that this has evolutionary roots in the burrowing animals of the Ediacaran or the microbes living in the Earth’s crust during the Archaean eon. It’s very Jungian, so if you’re annoyed by philosophizing, this might be a book to skip.

25. Eloquence of the Sardine by Bill François, translated by Antony Shugarr. This book also blends philosophizing with science, in this case marine biology. The chapters mix dreamy reminiscing about childhood with information on fish, crustaceans, mollusks and marine mammals; the author is both a scientist and a poet, and you can tell from the prose style. Attention is given to less charismatic species than usual for books about marine biology for general audiences—lots of talk about baitfish, like anchovy and sardines, and freshwater fish, which also tend to be neglected. I feel like this is more successful than Underground, above, at saying something about human connections to nature. It’s also shorter.

#books #reading log #monster book #pathfinder 1e #fish #marine biology #caves #apples #agriculture #medieval europe

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