Category: Non-fiction
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Mind blown, thinking changed
In The Dawn of everything I found a great deal of food for my confirmation bias. This is often a problem for me when I’m reading popular science writing, since my prejudices frequently seem to be in line with the results of statistical research, and the theorisations of researchers. When…
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Eating the world
Not many of us, I suspect, think of the British Empire much in terms of food. I certainly didn’t, before reading Lizzie Collingham’s book, The Hungry Empire. I mean, I was certainly aware of the economic importance of sugar and tea, and the horrific human cost of producing the former…
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True history
This small book, published in 404 Ink’s ‘Inklings’ series, covers a subject close to my heart—since starting to listen heavily to hip-hop I’ve always been drawn to women MCs, mainly because the mainstream of the music has been dominated by such egregiously toxic patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality. There…
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Founding a field
Finally, an academic has written a book about what I spend most of my time doing. Well, I say finally… it would be more to the point to say that I’ve finally got around to reading the book I bought several years ago. However, it is a very new thing…
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History of tradition
I think I’ve burnt myself out on research now. There’s a lot more I could read to expand my thinking on the areas that will feature in the stories I plan to write, but I’ve been working on the background for so long, and I am so close to being…
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Putting medicine in its place
The historian Roy Porter was known during his lifetime as a ‘one-man book factory’, a prodigiously productive scholar who wrote or edited over 100 books—proper books, mind you, not light novels dashed off in a weekend, but major chunks of work based on original research. He took early retirement in…
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The last man who knew everything (about bread)
Mostly if I want to find out about something (I call it ‘research’ when I’m feeling self-important), I look on Wikipedia. If I need to go a bit deeper then I make a big stack of books on the subject and make notes on them. When I’m choosing books to…
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Nurture writing
I read an interview with Suzanne Simard in New Scientist and it brought tears to my eyes. Her description of the realities revealed in her career as an experimental scientist gave me such a sense of validation and hope that I immediately pre-ordered the book she was plugging, Finding the…
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For the bakers
I’m fortunate enough to be closely related to someone (my mum) who is something of an authority on the state of scholarship around bread and baking, and she recommended Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery as remaining one of the best secondary sources, more than forty years after its…
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My grandfather’s hats
It’s a strange privilege to have had a grandfather who was, as he once put it, ‘world famous to five hundred people’. He was actually downplaying his public profile there, although that’s a fair description of many academics, whose disciplines tend to be both obscure and globally distributed. In my…
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Needful history
A book with a title like The Cambridge History Of Medicine makes an obvious claim to be definitive, but also stakes its territory in the domain of tertiary documentation—we don’t expect its authors to be sharing the bleeding edge of their research, or making controversial claims, but to be providing…
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Culturing flavour
The world of ‘elite food’ raises certain questions. It would be easy to write off entirely, from a social justice point of view: good food is domestic food, and everyone should have access to it. Even in a world of perfect economic equality, there would be no way that we…
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Speculative non-fiction
In the interests of easing myself gradually into research, I’ve continued my investigation of historical bread-baking with quite a modest volume, although not as tiny as the Shire Album with which I started. William Rubel’s Bread: A Global History is not a scholarly work (it lacks references), but some scholarship…
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Periodic themes
My two main topics of research for my soon-to-be commenced fantasy novel are baking and medicine, since they’re the activities on which my narrator spends her time. In both areas I’m very fortunate to be related to someone (Parent) who is a bona fide expert on the field, so I’ve…
Oliver Arditi 