Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
I’m switching up my blogging schedule – normally on Wednesdays I do my Writing about Reading bit, but right now I’m sitting on a plane on the way to Newark from Reykjavik, Iceland, and I want to tell you about the past three days. It’s my blog, so I can switch up the schedule like…
I’ve started doing something fun on youtube this week. I run the Renaissance English History Podcast, which currently gets about 120k listeners each month, and I’ve been trying to figure out ways that I can make more of a community out of it. Do more episodes, lead tours of England, write books; ways to get…
First off, I had an article in The Digital Reader yesterday about NYPL and their Library Simplified project. If you’re at all into libraries, ebooks, and innovation, they are a good group to be watching. So, this week in books. I just finished Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which I had initially purchased in paperback…
Normally in these Writing about Reading segments I talk about industry specific eBook topics. And on that note, I did buy my ticket to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October today. Nearly 300,000 people and five days of book industry madness. I’m excited! But beyond that, I want to talk about my self publishing journey, which…
So let me tell you about my trip to the UK last week. It was full of excitement (ie meeting with one of my idols, the early music expert David Skinner, to interview him for my podcast), and peace (long train journeys criss crossing the country, listening to my music in my headphones, drinking a…
I’m going to Iceland next week. I first went there in 2012, just for a few days, at the suggestion of several friends who had visited and loved it. We were on an extended visit to the UK, and decided to take a few days to make the short flight to Reykjavik, and rented a…
Recently on a train trip from Gatwick to Cirencester, I passed through Swindon. Swindon, in general, isn’t a huge tourist attraction. In fact, Jasper Fford seems to have built a website dedicated to taking the piss out of Swindon as a tourist attraction (pointing out the double helix carpark as a major sight). One thing Swindon does…
Ok, so I didn’t drop off the face of the planet before now. Those of you who follow my personal blog as well will know that I broke my shoulder in Chicago at the end of January. I had a nasty surgery with another fracture during surgery when my bone fragmented when the pins went…
I recently finished After Birth by Eliza Albert, a book that struck me because it was described as being honest about the period after a baby is born, which is always portrayed as being this beautiful joyous angelic time, but in reality is anything but. For a lot of women (myself included) it was a…
In a few months I’m going to be moving to Spain. Specifically Ronda, in Andalucia. An area loaded with history dating to the pre-Roman times. I’m super stoked for this move. So in advance, and because I speak no Spanish other than the words I pick up living in Southern California, I am listening to more…