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Recent Book Reviews
Sep. 29th, 2024 09:49 pmFeed Them Silence. When I'd first heard from Tor that they were publishing this book, I put it on my "to read someday" list and I was not disappointed. It's the story of a scientist who uses an experimental technology to experience what a wild wolf experiences. She's trying to give more emotive depth to a research project on wolf behavior, studying one of the last packs left in the Midwest. But while she does that, her marriage starts to fall apart and using the technology has consequences for her--and the pack. At times we've had discussions over what novels are therian novels. I think this one either counts or is on the edge of counting. It's a short text at only 101 pages, so there's not enough room to explore the subject much. But Sean's mind is clearly affected by her experience in ways beyond mental stress and she picks up a couple quirks from inhabiting the mind of a wolf.
I recommend it, especially to any other scientists on this forum.
The Lost Spells. This is Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris' book of nature-related poetry. The last time I read good poetry was over a decade ago so I'm not qualified to say much of it, but I the imagery was vivid and the watercolors were beautiful.
One Day All This Will be Yours. Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of my favorite writers, so when seeing he wrote this I decided to try it. I regretted it. This is attempt at writing humorous time travel fiction. It sucked and I couldn't finish it. I'm not sure what it is that makes me hate it so. Maybe it's the clash of humor with by far the most misanthropic narrator I've seen a professional author write. Maybe it's the constant asides by the first-person narrator, which feel as if each of them is accompanied by a wink and a nudge. Maybe Tchaikovsky just can't write comedy worth a damn; it's not like the good books he wrote had much in the way of humorous moments. When I tried to read it I at first thought it was a really old book, and he'd gotten better since. But no, he wrote it in 2021. Not sure what went wrong there.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. It calls itself a history, but I think "anti-history" would be just as appropriate--while most such histories attempt to create grand narratives about how human history worked, The Dawn of Everything wrote a book that critiques the very notion of a unidirectional path of history in the first place. They do a very good job of calling it into question, showing how at the regional scale we see dramatic changes in politics and culture that can't be fit into standard narratives about how history is supposed to work. We're introduced to extremely violent holy tyrants who nevertheless were openly ignored by their subjects, transitions between different types of authority then back again, and cities with strongly stratified cultures but no distinct leaders or signs of extreme concentrations of wealth among the presumed ruling class.
There are running themes throughout the work. The authors argue, very well, that we have proof of conscious political consciousness and experimentation long before the modern period in cities such as Teotihuacan and that many cultural divisions--even ancient, long-running ones--were self-created by people to define themselves against what their neighbors did. In the end though the primary argument of the book is that there is no "running theme" for human history, and I certainly came away convinced.
I recommend it, especially to any other scientists on this forum.
The Lost Spells. This is Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris' book of nature-related poetry. The last time I read good poetry was over a decade ago so I'm not qualified to say much of it, but I the imagery was vivid and the watercolors were beautiful.
One Day All This Will be Yours. Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of my favorite writers, so when seeing he wrote this I decided to try it. I regretted it. This is attempt at writing humorous time travel fiction. It sucked and I couldn't finish it. I'm not sure what it is that makes me hate it so. Maybe it's the clash of humor with by far the most misanthropic narrator I've seen a professional author write. Maybe it's the constant asides by the first-person narrator, which feel as if each of them is accompanied by a wink and a nudge. Maybe Tchaikovsky just can't write comedy worth a damn; it's not like the good books he wrote had much in the way of humorous moments. When I tried to read it I at first thought it was a really old book, and he'd gotten better since. But no, he wrote it in 2021. Not sure what went wrong there.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. It calls itself a history, but I think "anti-history" would be just as appropriate--while most such histories attempt to create grand narratives about how human history worked, The Dawn of Everything wrote a book that critiques the very notion of a unidirectional path of history in the first place. They do a very good job of calling it into question, showing how at the regional scale we see dramatic changes in politics and culture that can't be fit into standard narratives about how history is supposed to work. We're introduced to extremely violent holy tyrants who nevertheless were openly ignored by their subjects, transitions between different types of authority then back again, and cities with strongly stratified cultures but no distinct leaders or signs of extreme concentrations of wealth among the presumed ruling class.
There are running themes throughout the work. The authors argue, very well, that we have proof of conscious political consciousness and experimentation long before the modern period in cities such as Teotihuacan and that many cultural divisions--even ancient, long-running ones--were self-created by people to define themselves against what their neighbors did. In the end though the primary argument of the book is that there is no "running theme" for human history, and I certainly came away convinced.
