Personal: On Books (Who Cooked the Last Supper?)

[butterfly]

Reading the new Wheel of Time book set me on a good binge of reading actual physical books in general. For a while, now, almost all of my reading has been online, and it's been interesting, these past few days, noticing that it really is a completely different experience to read a book. Books, as Giles said once, smell. Not in a bad way, of course, and I'm quite fond of the smell of paper, whether crisp and new or older and mustier.

Books have weight and length and texture. The feel of a book under my fingers is such a distinct feeling, completely unlike the clicking of keys and scrolling of fingertips over plastic.

One of the books that I just read the other night is a non-fiction called Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World. Fascinating book, one that made me smile in parts and filled me with horror and anger in others.

One amusing and terrifying note is that in seventeenth-century England, the average difference in pay between the genders was exactly the same as it is today. Male laborers got eight pence a day, women got six (without food and board, with, it was five and three). One-quarter less, which is roughly the difference today.

Miles to go, yet. Still.