Just Passing Through...

Just finished: Nothing, this book is 768 pages long.

Currently reading:  Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. It's so good. The middle of the book tells the story of 15 Renaissance figures, both famous and obscure, on various sides of factional political fights, theology, and modernity. After a sympathetic look at Lucrezia Borgia (who did nothing wrong), I just finished the chapter on Michelangelo, which despite being one of the longer chapters (I am weirdly relieved whenever we hit someone I like who didn't die horribly and prematurely) and focusing on the political infighting of the time, didn't even cover his imprisonment. To be fair, he did a lot of stuff, and it covers his love life admirably, which is juicier. She uses it in part to talk about the degree to which art was wielded as a weapon of political influence, often at the expense of the artists and craftspeople themselves, and also the complex history of queerness in the era.

There's a particularly good exchange between Galeazzo Sanseverino (the lover of Duke Ludovico Sforza, who lived openly with him along with his wife Beatrice) and Francesco Gonzaga, husband of Isabella d'Este. Sanseverino had challenged Gongzaga to a duel, to which Gonzaga replied, "Prù—this is a fart sound I make with my mouth with the addition of a fuck-you gesture and a fig sign," and that when he had gay sex, "I do it at the door of others while you do it at your own." (I.e., he was a top.) 

Anyway this book is great. I'm only highlighting this because it was the last thing I read before I passed out last night. It's all like this, though.

Just finished: Bread and Stone by Allan Weiss. This was really good, and filled a much needed niche both in Canadian historical fiction and working class historical fiction, which is to say there just aren't enough strike novels out there. The ending felt a bit abrupt—things are going downhill and William just...books it, albeit with some vague plan to continue the struggle elsewhere, but we don't really see the aftermath or what becomes of anyone else. Which is admittedly very true to life but it felt like it was either begging for a sequel or an afterword or something.

Currently reading: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. I have been looking forward to this and have had an advance hold on it at the library since she started posting that it was coming out. This is a big thicc chode of a book, nearly as long as it is wide, and the very sight of it (ebooks weren't available for holds so I got it in hardcover) delights me.

It begins with a wholehearted defence of Machiavelli so I kind of knew going in that Palmer's Renaissance Opinions were likely going to align a lot with my Renaissance Opinions, which admittedly are not as informed as hers but still pretty informed. From there, she takes us all on a fucking Journey, complicating the various facets of the Renaissance—chronology, geography, ideology, and so on. Humanist, in the context of the era, doesn't mean what we think it means. There isn't a clear division between the Bad Middle Ages and the Glorious Renaissance the way we conceive it—that is an invention not just of Renaissance thinkers but of later historians. As dedicated to puncturing myths as Palmer is, she loves this era more than anything and interrogates it with humour and passion.

It's very hard to be doing things that aren't reading this book right now. I'll probably buy it in ebook form later so that I have a searchable version.