Tim鈥檚 Year in Books

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2024

18,388

pages read

books read

Tim Martin

The Sinking of the Bounty by Matthew Shaer

Shortest Book

pages

Longest Book

718

pages

Average book length in 2024

301

pages

Most Shelved

376,467

people also shelved

Least Shelved

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Tim鈥檚 average rating for 2024

4.7

Our Enemies Will Vanish by Yaroslav Trofimov

Highest Rated on 欧宝娱乐

4.40 average

Tim鈥檚 first review of the year

really liked it

Fun, cozy, generally pretty light travelogue of sorts (memoir?) about a woman and her husband鈥檚 decision to leave their jobs, sell their home in central London, UK and buy a dilapidated farmhouse in rural, northern France to live in. They went from living in London, a very much urban life in one of the largest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world, to living in the very rural Seven Valleys area of Pas de Calais, the nearest village to their farm Fun, cozy, generally pretty light travelogue of sorts (memoir?) about a woman and her husband鈥檚 decision to leave their jobs, sell their home in central London, UK and buy a dilapidated farmhouse in rural, northern France to live in. They went from living in London, a very much urban life in one of the largest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world, to living in the very rural Seven Valleys area of Pas de Calais, the nearest village to their farmhouse having a population of 142 people, a place where only people born in and around the village weren鈥檛 considered visitors basically, no matter how long you lived there.

Author Janine Marsh and her husband Mark have quite the culture shocks, not just from moving from the UK to France, but from moving from a very urban lifestyle to a very rural one. Much of the book is humorous, detailing their learning the ins and outs of life in France, with dealing with French bureaucracy, French views on standing in lines or kissing versus hugging or on social etiquette in visiting people鈥檚 homes, and the ins and outs of rural life, from fixing up a very old farmhouse in poor shape to dealing with a septic system to growing a garden to managing their ever increasing menagerie on the property, including ducks, chickens, cats, dogs, and one sheep.

Though there is a family tragedy detailed in the book, for the most part the book has a light, humorous tone as the author with a bemused air described the colorful characters in life (human and animal) and the strange things she had to come to get used to, whether it is the French love of making speeches or just how cold northern France can get in winter or the local love of mushroom gathering.

It felt like the first two thirds detailed getting the farmhouse, fixing it up, acquiring their many animals, and coming to know their neighbors and making new friends, and the last third was the author鈥檚 views on things peculiarly French. The very last section detailed a lot of things expats moving to France should know about French law and French customs and culture that will help them. I did like how the author didn鈥檛 overly romanticize the area, as while beautiful, it could be quite isolated, often had gray, overcast skies especially in fall and winter, and definitely got very cold in the winter; it definitely isn鈥檛 sunny, warm Provence.
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罢滨惭鈥橲 2024 BOOKS

The Story of French by Jean-Beno卯t Nadeau

it was amazing

Barcelona The Great Enchantress by Robert Hughes

Imperial Spain, 1469 - 1716 by J.H. Elliott

What the Hell Did I Just Read by David Wong

Captain Alatriste by Arturo P茅rez-Reverte

it was amazing

Seville, C贸rdoba, and Granada by Elizabeth Nash

it was amazing

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Monsters in Orbit / The World Between and other Stories by Jack Vance

The Time Mercenaries / Anthropol by Louis Trimble

it was amazing

Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey by Fiona Carnarvon

it was amazing

Secret of the Sunless World by C.C. MacApp

Garlic, an Edible Biography by Robin Cherry

The Secret Lives of Bats by Merlin Tuttle

it was amazing

Planetary Systems by Raymond T. Pierrehumbert

The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

it was amazing

The Wavewatcher's Companion by Pretor-Pinney, Gavin (2010) Ha... by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Tim鈥檚 last review of the year

it was amazing

Impressive book on Paleolithic European cave painting, with black and white illustrations and photos, color photos, and even a cave map. Though I had read some on cave painting prior to this in _Color: A Natural History of the Palette_ by Victoria Finlay and _Europe: A Natural History_ by Tim Flannery, both books I highly recommend, I was blown away by all that I learned in _The Cave Painters_.

The author looked at cave painting from an art histo Impressive book on Paleolithic European cave painting, with black and white illustrations and photos, color photos, and even a cave map. Though I had read some on cave painting prior to this in _Color: A Natural History of the Palette_ by Victoria Finlay and _Europe: A Natural History_ by Tim Flannery, both books I highly recommend, I was blown away by all that I learned in _The Cave Painters_.

The author looked at cave painting from an art historian鈥檚 perspective and an archaeologist鈥檚 perspective. Curtis discussed the cave art in terms of conventions that lasted for thousands of years in terms of composition of individual forms, themes, and entire scenes, how like with classical Greek public art, they express 鈥渢he unified beliefs of a whole society鈥� and given the cave paintings possess classical ideas, grace, confidence, and dignity, 鈥渢hey feel familiar and appear to be a direct part of our heritage.鈥�

I had no idea that not only was their such a consistent unity in themes, in how animals were painted or engraved, across time and space, but how long the cave painting culture lasted. It lasted more than 20,000 years, longer even than Western culture (鈥渁ssuming that it began in the eastern Mediterranean around 2000 BC, is barely 4,000 years old鈥�). Though the famous painted caves might appear more or less from the same time, Chauvet dates from 32,000 years ago while famed Lascaux dates to 18,000 years ago, yet someone from Lascaux 鈥渁pparently would be able to drop into the world of Chauvet, understand it immediately, and join in.鈥�

At the same time, I had no idea how relatively limited the geographic area of the painted caves was; it was an area of southern France and northern Spain, with the majority of the caves discussed in the book in France. The author gives a tour of many of the most famous and noteworthy painted caves, from a very detailed tour and history with a map of Lascaux, discussing its Chinese horses, its Hall of the Bulls, the Unicorn, and the Shaft Scene at Lascaux, to the hunting lions as well as the actual bear skulls of Chauvet, to the 鈥渨eighty, yet delicately curving bison in Altamira and Font-de-Gaume鈥� to privately owned Les Trois-Fr猫res (which the author personally toured), with its unique clay bison sculptures, its strange cave lion engraving, and the enigmatic Sorcerer of Les Trois-Fr猫res.

The author did a detailed look at many of the famous people associated with the study of cave art, both 鈥渄irt archaeologists鈥� and art historians. People looked at include Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola of Spain, 鈥渢he man who was the first to understand what the cave paintings were, the man who was the first to comprehend that they had been made by prehistoric people,鈥� a man who 鈥渉ad offered the world a great treasure and the world had responded by calling him a liar and a scoundrel,鈥� a man whose vindication only came after his death; Henri Breuil (a French priest turned expert on cave art, a towering figure in the history of the discipline whose shadow can be felt throughout the book, who for 鈥渢he first half of the twentieth century鈥eigned as the Pope of Prehistory鈥�); Anette Laming-Emperaire (who made a huge contribution by noting and studying the group of various figures in prehistoric art, as prior to her work no one had particularly noticed that there were even groupings of different species; she also raised important concerns with using ethnography of modern stone age peoples, discussing where it can be useful and where it can be as the author wrote 鈥渄angerously misleading鈥�); Andr茅 Leroi-Gourhan (who did pioneering work in creating a systematic and statistical study of cave art including a stroke-by-stroke analysis of how the paintings were created and an analysis of 鈥渢he position of the paintings relative to one another and to their locations in the caves,鈥� as well making an enormous change from excavating vertically to excavating horizontally at a dig site, a 鈥渟imple idea鈥� that 鈥減roduced profound results鈥�; a 鈥渕odern scientist explores a cave thinking like Leroi-Gourhan鈥�); and Jean Clottes (who did important work on the underwater Cosquer cave, discovered in 1985 near Marseille, on Chauvet Cave, discovered in 1994, had a major role in debunking ideas that cave art became less primitive over time when he showed that Chauvet art was quite sophisticated, but became tied to a controversial shamanistic interpretation of cave art with South African anthropologist David Lewis-Willaims in 1996).

There is also early on a discussion of the animals illustrated in cave art, such as lions and bears (appearing 鈥渇requently in the paintings of Chauvet but become rare in the caves painted thousands of years later鈥�), horses (at Lascaux 鈥渁re the dominant animal in the cave and constitute over half of the one thousand or so paintings and engravings鈥�), and the woolly mammoth (these 鈥渁nimals with their long, curved tusks, appear frequently on the walls of the painted caves and in engravings on bone and ivory鈥�).

Very readable, has an index, notes, and an extensive bibliography.

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