recs

Recs

I'm going to do something a bit different here. I'm not going to rec fanfic - if I did it would probably boil down to, "read everything by Sebastian, HG and M.Fae Glasgow and her various iterations (but always read the warnings first!)" - which is not a combination of punctuation marks I've ever perpetrated before.

Instead, this is going to be a rec list of books, movies, music etc. that have appealed to me. I'm going to update as I experience, because otherwise this page would be a zillion lines long and start with the complete works of Dickens and Mozart.

Today's rec is musical. Gentlebeings may I draw to your attention The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain - which does exactly what it says on the box, it's a Ukulele band but what a band! Virtuoso playing and a sly sense of humour that takes the most unlikely of material and proves that the ukulele can cope - pop along to You Tube and check out their version of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or my favourite Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" in the style of Cab Calloway.

So the first thing I'd like to draw to your collective attentions to is a book. "City of the Sharp-nosed Fish - Greek lives in Roman Egypt" by Peter Parsons. The city in question lies in a particularly arid area of Egypt which has preserved papyrus for hundreds of years, and two British archaeologists found its rubbish dumps with thousands of preserved scraps, from government orders to family letters, by way of school exercise books and rich folks' libraries. The writing is clear and just technical enough, and you get a vivid series of snapshots of the lives in Oxyrhynchos from the conquest of Alexander to the Arabic invasion. My only complaint is there is no picture of the eponymous fish.

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