Wednesday Reading Meme

[rosanicus]

Thought I wasn't going to get much in for this and then I had an insanely good evening yesterday.

What I've Just Finished Reading

• Buried: An alternative history of the first millenium in Britain by Professor Alice Roberts
  
  • I bought this after Goodreads pushed my brother's partner's review of it onto my timeline despite the review being several years old. It's an excellent read and I have NO regrets - such a thoughtful and kind examination of historical burial practices, the limitations of archaeology, and the ongoing quest to discover exactly what happened on this little island after the fall of Rome. The second chapter is quite heavy going - it's about infant burials - but the author is upfront about it and even invites you to skip it, which I thought was nice. I did read it though because I wanted to learn more about it and ended up with lots of info about surgical abortions in the Roman era, which was COOL. Honestly, a lot of the info here was just cool to me, I love archaeology and grew up watching Time Team obsessively.
• Donut Squad: TAKE OVER THE WORLD by Neill Cameron
  • The boys in my class won't stop going on about this so when I saw it half-price at Waterstone's I picked it up (along with an enamel pin of Anxiety Donut, I'm not made of stone) and it is, irritatingly, really funny. It has the vibe of Beano or the Bash Street Kids, which makes sense since it's a compilation of strips from the kids' magazine The Phoenix. The strips are all four panels centering on a particular character or plotline (either world domination by the Donut Squad or the evil machinations of their enemies the Bagel Battalion) and they are genuinely very good. My favourite doughnuts are Sprunky the unpredictable (who does things like write communist propaganda on the walls of Buckingham Palace) and Chalky (the ghost of a murdered Victorian doughnut). It's very silly and it only took about forty minutes to read. 
• Pride by Eric Huang
  • This one was another impulse buy at Waterstone's. It's a picture book about going to Pride as a child with your gay parents, and I loved it. So sweet and gentle in a way which will definitely not appeal to the boys in my class but that's fine, I'll lend it to the Reception teacher who was on our Sherlock Homos quiz team last term. I love children's books which deal with queer identity in this matter of fact way, it gives one a bit of hope.
• Biggles Takes It Rough by W.E. Johns
  • Reviewed here!
• What it was like to be an Ancient Maya by David Long
  • Research for next term's History topic and also the only book I could find at Waterstone's about the Maya. The book was simple and easy to follow, being a Barrington Stoke title, and I would describe it as largely inoffensive. It's an underrepresented period in children's books on this side of the Atlantic, abandoned in favour of the more dramatic and bloodthirsty representations of the Aztecs and Inca (I am not immune to the Pachacuti song from Horrible Histories). I learned just enough to discover that the scheme the school buys into has, once again, been massively reductive and occasionally outright incorrect. Great!

What I'm Reading Now

STILL Blood on Satan's Claw, I promise I'm reading it on and off it's just heavy going while we wait for the teens to get on with the rituals.

What I'm Going To Read Next

I plucked Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane off my bookshelf this morning and am very excited to get into it! I fucking love Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places is one of my favourite books ever.