Books

I am currently reading:

• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
• The Sorcerer's Apprentice by David Bronstein and Tom Fürstenberg (a chess book)

Books

I have recently finished:

• Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds
• Wayward by Hannah Mathewson

And I am currently reading:

• Drive your Plow over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
• Un Lun Dun by China Mieville
• The Forgotten and Fantastic 5 edited by Teika Bellamy
• The Chosen from the First Age edited by Noel Chidwick
• The Application of Chess Theory by Efim Geller

Books

In the past few months I have read the following books:

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Farthing by Jo Walton
• Agency by William Gibson
• Witherward by Hannah Mathewson
• The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

I am currently reading:

• Ten Thousand Light Years from Home by James Tiptree Jnr
• At the Pond - Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies Pond by various writers
• Zurich International Chess Tournament 1953 by David Bronstein

Books

In the past couple of months I have read the following books:

• Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod
• My Real Children by Jo Walton
• The Second Sleep by Robert Harris
• The Dawn of Software Engineering from Turing to Dikstra by Edgar G Daylight
• Formalism & Intuition in Software Development - A Conversation with Michael A Jackson by Edgar G Daylight
• In the Ocean of Night by Gregory Benford
• Across the Sea of Suns by Gregory Benford

And I am currently reading:

• Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane
• Cosmogramma by Courttia Newland
• Great Sky River by Greory Benford
• Subtle is the Lord... The Science and Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais

The latter has long been recognised as the best biography of Einstein so when I saw a copy for only £6 in the local Oxfam bookshop I bought it without a second thought.

Book Production in 16th Century Asia

As imagined by Orhan Pamuk in My Name is Red (translation by Erdağ M. Göknar):

Miraculously, however, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza's marvelous volume did not remain unfinished, for in his service he had a devoted librarian.  This man would travel on horseback all the way to Shiraz where the best master gilders lived; then he'd take a couple of pages to Isfahan seeking the most elegant calligraphers of Nestalik script; afterwards he'd cross great mountains till he'd made it all the way to Bukhara where he'd arrange the picture's composition and have the figures drawn by the great master painter who worked under the Uzbek Khan; next he'd go down to Herat to commission one of it's half-blind old masters to paint from memory the sinuous curves of plants and leaves; visiting another calligrapher in Herat, he'd direct him to inscribe, in gold Rika script, the sign above a door within the picture; finally, he'd be off again to the south, to Kain, where displaying the half-page he had finished during his six months of travelling, he'd receive the praises of Sultan Ibrahim Mirza.

At this pace, it was clear that the book would never be completed, so mounted Tartar couriers were hired.  In addition to the manuscript leaf, which was to receive the artwork and scripted text, each horseman was given a letter describing the desired work in question to the artist.  Thus, messengers carrying manuscript pages passed over the roads of Persia, Khorasan, the Uzbek territory and Transoxania.  At times, on a snowy night, page 59 and 162, for example, would cross paths in a caravansary wherein the howlings of wolves could be heard, and as they struck up a friendly conversation, they'd discover that they were working on the same book project and would try to determine between themselves where and in which fable the prospective pages, retrieved from their rooms for this purpose, actually belonged.