![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading + history
Feb. 12th, 2024 10:21 am
I finished Count Zero! It was wonderful. Bobby is one of my favorite characters in the whole Sprawl trilogy. He's so relatable and unpretentious. The end gave me a shocked Pikachu face though, because I didn't remember the way the plot sort of turns in on itself and eats its own tail like an ouroboros snake. Overall, this is the Sprawl Trilogy book I remembered the least, so I'm very happy I got to reread it. I'm launching straight into Mona Lisa Overdrive now (KUMIKOOO).
My Swedish exam is done and I passed! I'm very happy and relieved. :D An acquaintance of mine did not pass, but she'll go for her second attempt in March & I'll be crossing my fingers for her. I hope she passes then; she's the closest thing to a friend I've made in that class. We might be going out for coffee soon, since she moved and now lives nearby.
I have taken to having a map of Brazil open on my computer 24/7 because I'm reading a book about Brazilian history, and since I know nothing about geography and the maps in the book are few and far between, I like checking which region the book is talking about at any given moment. I know woefully little about South America in general :/ I remember learning about the Treaty of Tordesillas in school, but that was when I was about 13-14 and had little to no interest in history, so I spent most of my history classes drawing anime characters. My genuine interest in history started when I was about 15 and we got a new teacher, who was amazing and had no tolerance for bullshit from my more raucous classmates. \o/
Anyway, Brazilian history is fascinating. I learned that the country is named for its redwood trees, which is super cool, and that Dom Pedro II was only fourteen when he became Emperor post-independence. Wow. (I learned many other things too but those are the two that impressed me the most so far.) The book is very densely written, there's a lot of information in each sentence, plus the author speaks, like, Advanced German and regularly uses absolutely wild words that I have to look up. But it's really fun. I'm using a different highlighter color for each chapter & I get ridiculously excited every time I get to change the color.
My Swedish exam is done and I passed! I'm very happy and relieved. :D An acquaintance of mine did not pass, but she'll go for her second attempt in March & I'll be crossing my fingers for her. I hope she passes then; she's the closest thing to a friend I've made in that class. We might be going out for coffee soon, since she moved and now lives nearby.
I have taken to having a map of Brazil open on my computer 24/7 because I'm reading a book about Brazilian history, and since I know nothing about geography and the maps in the book are few and far between, I like checking which region the book is talking about at any given moment. I know woefully little about South America in general :/ I remember learning about the Treaty of Tordesillas in school, but that was when I was about 13-14 and had little to no interest in history, so I spent most of my history classes drawing anime characters. My genuine interest in history started when I was about 15 and we got a new teacher, who was amazing and had no tolerance for bullshit from my more raucous classmates. \o/
Anyway, Brazilian history is fascinating. I learned that the country is named for its redwood trees, which is super cool, and that Dom Pedro II was only fourteen when he became Emperor post-independence. Wow. (I learned many other things too but those are the two that impressed me the most so far.) The book is very densely written, there's a lot of information in each sentence, plus the author speaks, like, Advanced German and regularly uses absolutely wild words that I have to look up. But it's really fun. I'm using a different highlighter color for each chapter & I get ridiculously excited every time I get to change the color.
