I've been listening to a history of Alexander the Great written about a hundred years after his death, but it's a little hard to get into as an audiobook.
There are lots of descriptions of places that no longer exist and a lot of passages that sound like this "And so Alexander met with Thorax. This is not Thorax of Hypnotia, whom some of the early Lucites worshipped as a god. This is Thorax of Biodegradia, son of Beltsander." And then there are the countless battles with triremes and quadriremes and lemoncremes until your eyes no longer blink in unison.
The Pirate took Peaches off to the library tonight so that she could get some books for a school project and came home with histories of Mesopotamia, Sumaria, Babylon, Assyria and the Persian empire.
Frankly, there is a whole big hunk of history that I just have a hard time getting past. Everything between....fire and the invention of Popeil's Pocket Fisherman. Okay, maybe not that big, but anything that doesn't already come with a compelling narrative is just tough to get past. Even the Bible skips past all this and gets right to the sex (you know - Hashish begat Diphthong who begat Target who begat Hut who begat Tarnashun who begat....). And then you go right to a place where we begin to have written record.
So, right now he's sitting next to me reading about how the little Mesopotamuses went to war with the Sombrarians under Xanax and created the first empire. Meanwhile, in the Persian empire, Zoroaster was creating the first religion to be picked up by a country music singer and made into a chain of fast food restaurants, Kenny Roger's Zoroasters.
This is really motivating me to find a wall-sized map of ancient Greece so I can go back to Alexander the Great and skip the whole history of the Assyrians who invaded the Sombrarians while the Sombrarians were busy using their little hats as flowerpots. Or maybe it was the Babbleonandonians.
I can never remember.
Monday, March 01, 2004
Bedtime Reading of the Terribly Pedantic Lifestyle
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