Sakura of DOOM

This, oddly enough, may be the Bradshaw that I fell in love with most quickly. It took me a while to warm to Island of Ghosts, largely because it was the first Bradshaw I'd read, and while I liked The Beacon at Alexandria, it didn't make me grin as immediately as this one.

Er, mostly that's because the two weren't on math.

The Sand-Reckoner is on Archimedes. Unlike the first two Bradshaws I've read, it's not in first-person, largely because Archimedes' first-person POV would probably be completely incomprehensible to most people. While he's the focus of the story, the book is also on his reluctant slave Marcus, along with his city's ongoing war with Rome and possibly Carthage.

And because I am a giant dork, my favorite part of the book wasn't Marcus, who is a wonderful character, but the math and the wonder of it, the sheer geekery of remembering bits and pieces of high school geometry and calculus, double cones, hyperbolae and parabolae. The sheer brilliance of Archimedes is astounding, and the best part is that Bradshaw isn't making it up. Obviously, Archimedes' personality may not be historically accurate, but it's just so cool reading about him trying to figure out pi as a way to cope with grief (and actually naming it "pi"), and how he doesn't think his inventions are marvellous and wonderful, simply common-sense.

I never thought I would gravitate toward Bradshaw's books because of how she portrays intellectual interests, but that's turned out to be a big draw for both this book and The Beacon at Alexandria. It's strangely exciting reading about people studying things they love, and even though they're things I may not love or understand, the sheer joy in scholarship and knowledge is infectious.

I miss school now. And I feel bad that I was never wonderful at math -- I always understood enough to do it, but I never had that beautiful, instinctual grasp of the workings behind it that Archimedes did. But then, that's what made the book such a joy to read.

I keep thinking of this as a very Yoon-ish book, given the math and the music.

Sometimes, I'd feel like people were overly awed by Archimedes, and then I would think on what he was actually doing and how ahead of the times he was, and I would completely understand why Marcus says that even if Archimedes were his enemy, he would never kill him because it would be such an irreparable loss to human understanding.

My very favorite part of the book was Archimedes grieving over his father's death. He sits and scribbles on the floor to try and figure out the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference, and when his mother finally talks to him, he says something like: This number is infinite! It goes on forever, no matter how much I narrow it down. And maybe, since there's some part of our minds that understand and grasp an infinite number, maybe there's some part of us that's infinite as well.

Links:
rilina's review

This is actually the first Gillian Bradshaw book I've read (cue gasps of horror?), but I'll probably be picking up a lot more on the strength of this one, except the one that yhlee found horribly sporky.

Ariantes is a prince of the conquered Sarmatian people, sent off to Britain with his company and a few others to act as cavalry for the Romans. He's got to try and balance between gaining the Romans' trust so that he can help out his people and not becoming so Romanized that the Sarmatians stop trusting him. Of course, while all this is going on, he stumbles into a conspiracy that threatens both the Sarmatians and the Romans and must work out who's trying to kill him.

Even though I'm a cultural fish out of water, this type of plot isn't one that usually interests me, largely because the conclusions seem too easy and too pat. Many authors seem to ignore that this sort of cross-cultural divide can be a lifelong thing, and that it has to be dealt with and worked on day-to-day and isn't resolved by some big epiphany. I was also wary of the whole wild yet free barbarians vs. civilized yet corrupt Romans story, or the man seduced into other culture and hated by his own people but then brings peace to them both story.

Anyhow, Bradshaw avoids all these, which is really quite marvelous and much more difficult than it sounds. She manages to include several cultures and sub-cultures, including the Sarmatians, the conquered British, the Romans, and others belonging to religious cults, and while she's doing this, she never resorts to stereotyping. All the characters are very much products of their culture(s) while still being individuals with their own personalities, and I also like that she portrays factions within a culture so that there isn't a single Roman mono-culture or something. There are layers and complications, which is fitting for a book that delves into what culture means and how it shapes people.

While the most obvious dilemma is Ariantes', since he's caught between the Roman world and the Sarmatian one, everyone has their fair share, from the Roman officers who are now living in Britain to people from Britain serving the Romans, and, of course, people who belong to different religions while also serving different nations/tribes. I really loved how Bradshaw portrayed all this with such nuance.

And, while the book was a little slow to start off with, I found myself really, really like Ariantes by the end. He's such a good man, and realistically so. Sometimes there are good people in books or movies who are really wonderfully good, but aren't like people I know, or good people who are heroic. Ariantes is just a man caught in confusing circumstances, and he consistently tries to do the right thing even while he's attempting to navigate his new world. I found myself admiring him a great deal throughout the book. And Bradshaw doesn't make him perfect or make him have modern attitudes; he's very much a Sarmatian and a believable one at that.

There's also the bonus of a love story that isn't Grand and Epic. All in all, very good read.