I am, in fact, still on this medieval history kick. I've got three used books ordered and on their way that I'm looking forward too, and I'm having to try my best not to continue buying even more just yet. I did finally get back to and then quickly finish reading Eco's THE NAME OF THE ROSE this past week which was a delight. The more I've been doing my own online research into the European religion during medieval period, the more I kept noticing fleeting mentions of topics so specific I wondered if he didn't have training as a historian. Lo and behold, Eco was a medievalist long before he wrote fiction.

I have what I guess I might call Trivia Brain. My neurons love to squirrel away tidbits of information that vary greatly in usefulness, and those neuron-squirrels are always looking for more stuff to store. As such, I have an absolute ball reading stuff like THE NAME OF THE ROSE or MOBY DICK (age of sail/whaling is another special interest I have) because those little trivia neurons get pinged constantly. ((I think I might have even pissed a random person on bsky off a bit once because they were dubious about Ishmael's whole "are whales fish?" thing and I replied that it was a legitimate scientific conundrum at the time. They seemed to reply (if I am taking perhaps a hostile reading of the encounter) assuming I didn't realize that Melville of course knew whales aren't fish and he was purposely making Ishmael an idiot. I think that was likely a case of both of us talking past each other or some sort of context collapse, so I didn't reply after that.)) But all that to say that I think it's wildly worthwhile to read history, in at least small part because it makes reading books (especially older books or well-executed historical novels) so much fun.

After I finished THE NAME OF THE ROSE, I was out of on-hand medeival-adjacent stuff to read. But then I realized I had A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ sitting on my kindle app and I'm now about 1/3 of the way through it. I have a fairly high tolerance for the stylistic quirks of golden- and silver-age Sci-Fi but I've found I don't even need it for CANTICLE. For something published in 1959 it feels surprisingly modern as far as voice. As a longtime fan of the Fallout games (especially New Vegas) it's wildly obvious how much inspiration the game devs pulled from the bool and it's already a novel that almost feels like coming home. I think even if one has little interest in 50s-60s SF it's such a stone-cold classic (I say not even having finished it yet) that it's worth checking out.

One more thing I've had on hand for nearly a decade and only just got to was THE CHEMICAL WEDDING OF CHRISTIAN ROSENKREUTZ in the edition that was kickstarted by Small Beer Press (it's a gorgeous illustrated hardcover with a ribbon bookmark). I don't know that I'd recommend it necessarily unless you have a strong interest in (pseudo?) alchemical (maybe?) allegorical books from the early 1600s, but I do so I'm glad I have it. I will say that John Crowley's version of the text is very modern-reader-friendly though. I'm considering adding another Bookshelf section to the site to highlight the medieval and/or weird old esoteric texts I've read, but I'm not fully sure if I have enough content just yet (I'll probably go ahead and do it when it strikes my fancy regardless).

That's all for now, and I hope you have a good one.

-Verdigristle 11.15.25