The Honey Month

This was another from the collection of weird fiction I bought last year. Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month is an odd, sometimes magical little book. It's written as a series of poems and short prose pieces each inspired by a different honey. Each day for a month, the author tastes a honey and briefly describes it, then launches into a vignette of love and longing and hurt. Some of them did nothing for me, but quite a few were beautiful and haunting.

In the Shadow of the Sword

I do love a good history book, and Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword is brilliant. It was recommended by Robin Pierson on his History of Byzantium podcast (I've been reading and listening to a lot about Late Antiquity lately), and is a fantastic look at the birth of Islam. I've read a bit about the traditional view of Islam - as emerging essentially fully formed from a town in Arabia, and exploding onto the world stage due to its own internal force, and the latent power of the Arab people; but this is a very different story of the Arabs and their rise to dominance. They had been largely unharmed by the Black Death (which had repeatedly decimated all the surrounding civilizations), and stepped into the power vacuum created by the mutual destruction of the two great superpowers of the age, Persian and the Byzantine Empire, and then harnessed the infrastructure of those empires to set up their own new superpower, the Caliphate. As they did this, their new religion developed. Archaeological evidence contradicts the traditional view of how Islam developed, showing that early Arab rulers mixed Christian, Jewish, and Muslim symbolism, and what are now considered standard, fixed parts of the religion were in flux for at least the first century, being shaped by an ongoing theological struggle between theologists and the Caliphs.

Holland does a great story of explaining this historical account that has been developed by modern historians in recent years, and in the end it's a much more satisfying account of the emergence of the rich and unique Islamic culture from the melting pot of cultures in the Middle East of late antiquity.

Interface Design for Learning

This is an excellent introduction to a rather obscure topic - designing interfaces to applications that support learning. There's a lot of detail and a lot of examples of best practice. The target audience is both technical people like myself, and more designey folks. It attempts (and I think succeeds) to bridge the gap between interface design and UX, and educational theory, in order to help people develop software and websites that engage students and help them actually learn. I only finished reading it a week ago, and already it's enabled me to give a very knowledgeable take on gamification in a conversation. If you're even remotely working in this field, this is a worthwhile read.

Disclaimer: Dorian Peters is a colleague of mine. She is brilliant, nevertheless.

World of Ice and Fire

The World of Ice and Fire is a companion to the Song of Ice and Fire series that began with A Game of Thrones. It's pure nerd-candy - a history of the world created for that series. It's written as though compiled by one of the maesters of Oldtown, so the reader is presented with the world from a Westerosi viewpoint and the biases that entails. It's very enjoyable, if you're a serious fan of the series - it details the history of each of the kingdoms that comprise the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, as well as the Free Cities and other areas of Essos. There is a lot of detail in here not covered in the main series, and a few details that would reveal secrets in the main plot are coyly sidestepped (including one "we won't go into details here, because everyone knows this"). The illustrations are nicely done, and it adds a lot of depth to what is already a fantastically detailed world.

Old Man's War

I'm not normally a fan of Mil-SF, but John Scalzi's Old Man's War was very well written, and a very thoughtful look at interstellar, inter-species war. It owes a lot to Starship Troopers and other sci-fi, but with a more modern take on the technologies that will be available to the troops of the fascist interstellar governments of the future. The core of the novel is very much the personal journey of the main character, John Perry, from aging man on earth to space soldier defending Earth and its colonies from a range of alien species. Very much worth reading, and I'll be reading the sequels.

Jagannath

Karen Tidbeck's Jagannath was the second book of the five I bought in a Weird Fiction bundle from storybundle.com. It was also sad and lonesome and strange and magical, and tells stories of a reality quite unlike our own. A man who falls in love with an airship; a woman dealing with the death of her father and the strange disappearance of her mother many years earlier; a the people of strange holiday village in the wilderness of Sweden are some of the short stories in this collection. It is very Scandinavian, and it full of mythical creatures from folklore. It reminded me in some ways of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short stories - the underlying desolation covered by a magical weirdness that permeates the world. Well worth a read.

The Apocalypse Codex

The Apocalypse Codex is the fourth novel in the Laundry series, Charles Stross' delightful exploration of a world in which secret spy organizations battle eldritch Lovecraftian horrors. Bob Howard, the IT professional who was forcibly recruited into the British government's secret organization dedicated to fighting the coming apocalyptic end of the world, is pitted against an American evangelical preacher who it trying to bring about the second coming of Christ. As with the rest of the Laundry Files series, it's a rollicking good read, with lots of exciting action, sufficiently monstrous aliens gods and villainous plots to destroy the world, and an ongoing sense of profound nerdiness. Lots of fun, and well worth a read - particularly if you know how computers work and have a decent level of familiarity with the Cthulhu mythos.