Most of the stuff I want to talk about recently involves Things I Have Been Reading, so here, Things I Have Been Reading:

1. I put down Ian Hodder's Reading the Past, borrowed from stellar_dust, in order to finish The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük by Ian Hodder, which I started at her place and then checked out on interlibrary loan. I started it in hopes that my inherent fascination with the late Paleolithic and the Copper Age, and the fact that he's actually writing about something other than pure theory, would help me get past NO U IAN HODDER.

( It helped... some? )

...all that aside, and also leaving aside what I suspect is a basic personality conflict + issues with his writing style (readable enough, at least when aimed at a popular audience, but not terribly well structured): still far less frustrating than all pre-Hodder analysis of Catal Hoyuk I've ever read. So there's that.

Maybe I will actually make it through Reading the Past before I see stellar_dust again, and I will decide that actually Hodder's approach is great and all of the above was just me being the hubristic outsider who's read too much Charles Fort which I always fear is the case when I publicly critique academic work I don't have all the background for. Which is why I wanted to borrow Reading the Past in the first place ...

Also? They've found female figurines with detachable/articulated heads at both Catal Hoyuk and Hoyucek (c.9000 years ago), which pushes back the earliest attestable date I had by several thousand years, and means articulated heads on dolls go back about as far as the history of dolls. Yet more evidence that the Venus of Hohle Fels could have had a head and people need to stop assuming that prehistoric artists were as obsessed with fetishizing dismembered women as they are. :P

2. I am also reading, in a free downloaded ebook, Medieval English Nunneries, by Eileen Power, 1922.

This seems to be the only English language book in existence that talks about what life was actually like for the nuns in medieval English nunneries, as opposed to a) what the nuns were supposed to be doing according to the written Rules, or b) how English nunneries fit into some sort of theory of gender or power or class or religion. ( (..you can tell my annoyance with theory-oriented research is still kind of hanging on, can't you.) )

3. Also, just because I can, I am also slowly reading through an online copy of Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. So far my main takeaway from that is: Assbabies!

( Cut for once for possible squickiness rather than length )

...I will do you a favor and not share any of the other things I learn from that book.

...You know, half my excuse for reading all this semi-random nonfiction is that I need to know this stuff for worldbuilding. Maybe I should just post some of the Theory of Worldbuilding stuff that's been accumulating on my hard drive over years.

Or finish organizing/clearing out/actually reading the, um several thousand books I do own on paper. Unlike what I seem to read these days.