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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on a bunch of stuff. Adding Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America, another open access book, to my list.
The Worm Ourobouros, again and still.
Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century. I read a Kindle sample and found its subject matter interesting, but the actual treatment of it seemed convoluted and overly materialist, and on top of that the full book is quite expensive. I'd rather just read Frantz Schmidt's diary directly, if I could get a reasonably readable edition of it. All I find is direct scans of 19th century versions in fonts that are cute in their antiquated way, but to be quite honest I'm habituated to more accessible typography.
That has been on my reading list for several years now, but I’ve never gotten around to picking it up. Would you still recommend it despite your somewhat tepid review?
As said, I've only read a sample, which probably amounts to the first twenty or so pages. The subject matter is very interesting, but the style in which the book is written annoyed me. It kept spiralling around key information without revealing it directly, semingly trying to build up tension. And I just don't need that in an educational book. Too many wasted words and repetitions, and far too much time spent on emphasizing how alien the profession of the executioner must seem to modern readers. Then an aside into how the guilds discriminated against executioners purely because of their members' economical insecurity, and that kind of historical materialism plus armchair psychology really turned me off. I had hoped that the author would simply go over the source material and provide additional context, but instead I got a newspaper-article-level clickbait narrative and a bunch of unqualified comments that were ass-pulls from the land beyond even speculation.
All that said, the author clearly did a lot of research and I would have liked to read about that, but not at the price of 15€ plus all the useless bullshit he packed into his book (or at least the early pages thereof that I read). So I'll personally prefer to just read the source directly, if ever I can find a readable version of it.
If you aren't a picky reader but interested in the subject, then it's probably a perfectly servicable pop-sci book.
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