What I Read and Watched This Week – 21st to 27th of April
Read:
Blood Oath by Linda Fairstein
I love Linda Fairstein’s books and I always eagerly await the next one. This was a two years wait but as always I was pleased to get it. I first discovered her work when I found one of her books in a charity second-hand bookshop and I’m so glad I did. I think my favourite book will always be Death Dance – I have three copies – one I bought in Paris, one that she sent me autographed, and one I preordered.
It’s What I Do – Lynsey Addario
This is a really good look at what being a war photographer entails. She works for different outlets and has mainly worked in the Middle East, so there is a lot of information about what it was like to work after 9/11 in these areas.
The Amazons – Adrienne Mayor
I watched Wonder Woman so of course I’m interested in Amazons. It would appear that most of the Greek stories come from Scythian peoples that often had fighting women among their group.
The Book of Forgotten Authors – Christopher Fowler
It is amazing the number of authors we forget – I had forgotten quite a few here, some of whom wrote one book that made them famous, or contributed to screenwriting movies.
National Geographic
- June 2018
- August 1969
- August 1969
- August 1983
- May 2018
The June 2018 issue was devoted entirely to the concept of waste and particularly plastic waste. Apparently half of the world’s plastic waste comes from just five Asian countries. The biggest plastic waste problems are straws, plastic bags and one-use coffee cups.
I was talking to my friend about this the other day, and she said that when she was recently in Malaysia, they gave her a straw that was made out of sugar cane fibres. What a great idea! Using a waste product to create a product that would normally just go to landfill – or even worse, in the oceans.
In particularly poor countries too, where people can often only afford to purchase one sachet of a good such as toothpaste, nobody makes the sachet packets recyclable, and in Manila, there is apparently a blanket of them. Why can’t more companies get onto this?
National Geographic History Volume 4, No 2.
I really love the National Geographic History magazines and this was not an exception. I liked the part on the process Picasso went through to create the painting “Guernica”. I also particularly liked the (perhaps apocryphal) story that when a Nazi showed Picasso a photo of Guernica that he asked the artist “Did you do this?”, that apparently Picasso replied “No, you did.”
I also really liked the article on The Phoenicians who were most famous for creating the purple fabric dye from sea snails. Their entire economy was based on this (at the time) extremely expensive fabric.
Another article was on women in ancient Rome, and I found it particularly nice that surrogacy and fostering were “embedded in Roman ideas of motherhood”.
Smithsonian Magazine – May 2018
I really enjoyed one of the articles in this on Albert Einstein and his travels to Japan. I hadn’t known he had traveled to Japan, but apparently he went in 1922 to go to Egypt, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Japan. The article was very interesting about his visit, and it also mentioned that his travel diaries from this trip were being released as a book, so I shall very much look forward to finding that and reading it.
There was also an interesting article on a man called Eusebio Leal. He is Havana’s official historian and is quite popular for all the work he has done preserving Havana’s historic buildings and streets.
Watched:
The Librarians 2×08 – And the Point of Salvation (loved this episode – they’re all stuck in a videogame and it’s up to Ezekiel to save them all!)
NCIS LA
8×09 – Glasnost
8×10 Sirens (love Nell being a badass with Carl. Also love Hetty’s driving – I KNEW she taught Nell how to drive like that!)
8×11 Tidings We Bring
8×12 Kulinda
8×13 Hot Water
8×14 Under Siege (don’t mess with Hetty Lange. Or Nell Jones.)
8×15 Payback (another great Hetty Lange and Nell Jones episode. And anytime AJ Chegwidden is on the show, it is fantastic.)
Grimm 2×17 – One Angry Fuchsbau
2×18 – Volcanis
2×19 – Endangered (loved the Wesen in this episode. They were so beautiful. And such a great parallel with endangered species)
2×20 Kiss of the Muse
2×21 The Walking Dead (she knows! Juliette finally knows Nick is a Grimm, and it was done with great comedic hilarity)
2×22 Goodnight, Sweet Grimm
3×01 The Ungrateful Dead
3×02 PTZD
Inspector Soneri Fog and Crimes 2 – Parental Rating
The Blacklist 4×15 – The Apothecary (No 59.) – Love Samar going into Panetti’s office and just telling them how it’s going to go. She’s my favourite character on this show (along with Aram).
Black Lightening
1×5 And then the Devil Brought the Plague – The Book of Green Light
1×6 Three Sevens: The Book of Thunder
