I took the week off from work, and it was wonderful. Did I do much? Nope. That was the point. I didn’t want to do very much and so I didn’t. My big adventure of the week was to drive half an hour to the little town of Ashland, Nebraska, to visit a stationery shop. Postscript is a cute shop in an old building in Ashland’s historic downtown. It is easy to find and the parking was free which meant I could take my time and look at all the things, big and little. And there were a lot of things to look at. Postscript has everything you need to get yourself organized, plan anything, and send beautiful cards or letters to your friends and family. And because Postscript is also a bit of a coffee shop, you can have a nice coffee while you look through all the different kinds of papers, pens, pencil, planners, stationery sets, office supplies, inks, calligraphy books, posters, cards, and wrapping paper, as well as a small selection of popular novels and poetry. I didn’t find everything I was looking for– they don’t carry the cartridges my fountain pen uses– but I did pick up a few home decor items, a Blackwing pencil to try, a couple of cards for friends, and a set of notepads from the Great Northern Hotel in Twin Peaks, Washington (which are available, along with other fictional hotels, from the Fictional Hotel Notepads line at Herb Lester Associates). I don’t know when I’ll need more stationery supplies, but whenever I do I’ll be happy to make that drive back to Ashland. Next time, I’ll remember to stop by the bakery, too.
During my time off I finished two biographies of medieval English women: Lionessheart: The Life and Times of Joanna Plantagenet by Catherine Hanley and Margaret of York: The Diabolical Duchess by Christine Weightman. Both of the biographies discuss women who are generally overlooked in broad historical narratives, despite their famous families. Neither biography is very long due to a relative lack of primary sources– especially for Joanna Plantagenet– but they both provide a narrative of each woman’s life without resorting to significant speculation about what they might have been thinking or doing when there is no evidence to back it up. Some historians have that tendency, and sometimes they do it in an otherwise straightforward and serious work which is where I mind it the most, but neither Hanley nor Weightman make even mild speculations without qualifiers. Of the two women, Margaret of York was the more dynamic, but then, as a wealthy duchess and later as an extremely wealthy widow with a lot of land under her control, she was in a position to use her wealth and power fairly freely. Joanna, on the other hand, was sent off into a political marriage when she was very young, and when her husband died she didn’t have the money or support to maintain her position as Dowager Queen of Sicily, and ended up being dragged around the Mediterranean by her awful brother, King Richard I of England while he stole her dowry, sold off her property, and made a nuisance of himself across the Mediterranean Sea on his way to fight in the Crusades. She was eventually able to make a marriage of her choice, but it didn’t end well for her. As a historical figure, I like Margaret more, but I thought both of these biographies were well written and portrayed these women as whole human beings and not just brainless tools of their royal families.
Last year, a friend read a bunch of books about the evils of generative AI and recommended them to everyone, but she started that set with Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, which is primarily about the Luddite movement in England in the early 1800s and the parallels between that and our current situation with Big Tech and the way it’s seeking to automate jobs and devalue labor. I already knew that the English Luddites weren’t just technology-fearing idiots who broke machinery because they were afraid of progress. What they objected to was the devaluing of their work, the horrendous conditions in the new cloth factories, the unlivable wages, and the way that factories were breaking up their families and communities. What I didn’t know is that the people who began the Luddite movement had begun by pleading with the English parliament for things like fair wages and an improvement of conditions in the factories so people didn’t get sick en masse and children weren’t being forced into deadly occupations. After parliament spent years ignoring the workers and things kept getting worse, the workers had had enough. They started breaking machines, and while they didn’t win in the end, they did manage to get some basic workers’ rights laws passed and some old anti-workers’ laws repealed. This was a fascinating book that made me hate generative AI even more than I already do.
Two months to the day since I started reading it, I finished The Count of Monte Cristo. I had spend most of that time reading 1-3 chapters a night before bed, but once I got to the last 150 pages, I couldn’t put it down. I was familiar with the basic story: Edmond Dantès, falsely accused and convicted of treason the day before his wedding, is imprisoned in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If for fourteen years, befriends a fellow prisoner who bequeaths him a buried treasure, and after he escapes from prison he proceeds to enact the grandest of Rube Goldberg revenge machines on the three men who destroyed his life. But I already knew all of that. That’s what shows up in pop culture and in the movies, and from all that you’d think the bulk of the plot happens in the Chateau d’If with Abbé Faria, but that’s all over by about the 200 page mark, after which you still have a thousand pages ahead of you. Those thousand pages can feel rambling and pointless at times, but by the time you get to the end of it all, you see how everything is tied together and makes sense. Is The Count of Monte Cristo the best book ever? No, it’s not. It’s a fun book, though, and it was meant to be when it was first serialized in the papers back in the 1840s. It’s like a soap opera with all the unlikely connections, melodramatic dialogue, disguises, double-crosses, poisonings, and other shenanigans, and I enjoyed coming back to it night after night and finding out what extravagant thing Edmond was going to do next. It has felt a little weird not having it to read before bed, though now that I’m finished with the book I’ve started watching the 2024 television series on PBS. I’m three episodes in and enjoying it so much. It’s definitely different from the book, but I haven’t minded any of the changes so far. They had to simplify things somehow, because they took a 1,200 page book and turned it into a series of eight one-hour episodes. Something was going to have to change, and in this first third of the series, I approve of what they’ve done. I’m trying to restrain myself and only watch one episode a night instead of binging the whole thing in a couple of days. It’s been a while since I’ve found a show that I want to watch all at once, so it’s exciting that I’ve managed to find one. I hope the rest of it lives up to the first three episodes. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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