What have you read lately?

[Parasaurolophus]

In December I read a few new ones, and finished a few that were lingering around:

Stephen Jay Gould - Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History: Gould is always a joy to read, and I learned a great deal, as ever. The book flags in its last third/quarter, though, once he's run out of Burgess material to discuss.

Becky Chambers - Record of a Spaceborn Few: Chambers's novels are always fun, and this was no exception. Not much happens, and I haven't much to report, but it's a nice way to fill out the story of the Exodan fleet.

Adrian Currie - Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist's Guide to the Historical Sciences: I don't normally list the philosophy books I read, but I read this one for fun, so it counts. It was a joy to read: Currie does a fantastic job of leading with examples, and returning to them over and over again to make his more nuanced arguments. It's a thoroughly convincing argument about methodology in the historical sciences.

Michael Livingston - Origins of the Wheel of Time: The Legends and Mythologies that Inspired Robert Jordan: This is a somewhat weird book--it's part biography, part glossary, and part investigation of the influences behind WoT, especially from Tolkein and Graves's The White Goddess. As a huge WoT nerd, I was fascinated, and delighted to discover how on the mark many of my own pet theories about the structure of Randland are/were. I certainly learned some things. And the corrected map of Randland (including Seanchan) is a very nice addition.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Expert System's Champion: A delightful return to the world of The Expert System's Brother (a colonization project gone wrong/native), ten years later. Loved it.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Elder Race: Another fantastic short novel by Tchaikovsky, this time about an anthropologist observing a colony world who seems to have outlasted his own civilization. So much fun. Tchaikovsky is really good at writing gripping scifi focused on a premise that only takes about 200 pages to articulate.

John Conway - A History of Painting (With Dinosaurs): A brilliant little book, which presents a fun new twist on the brilliant methodological twist at the end of All Yesterdays: Conway reimagines important pieces of art history as though they had taken dinosaurs for their subject matter. My only complaint, really, is the conceit that sets up the book--I would have preferred a straight-up text that justifies its existence in the real (art-historical) world. There are some really important art-historical observations and arguments undergirding this little project, and the conceit obscures them, shifting the book from a serious broadside to a quirky project for the lulz. Still, it's a wonderful little work, and well worth the twenty-five dollars.

[Juvenal]

Just re-read the (apparently under-rated?) Canadian writer, Robertson Davies's "Cornish Trilogy," The Rebel Angels, The Lyre of Orpheus, What's Bred in the Bone.  Delightful, linked novels.  Nice to have an Anglophone milieu that's neither US nor UK.  Things do go on north of the US border, with an academic background, so it seems ...

[hmaria1609]

From the library: local history books about regional cuisine and town history.
Also, A Certain Darkness by Anna Lee Huber
New and 7th installment in the "Verity Kent Mystery" series. In 1920, Verity and Sidney Kent head to France and Holland for their latest case, relating to their time serving abroad during the war. The novel ends with them planning a trip to Dublin.

[apl68]

In December I read a few new ones, and finished a few that were lingering around:

Stephen Jay Gould - Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History: Gould is always a joy to read, and I learned a great deal, as ever. The book flags in its last third/quarter, though, once he's run out of Burgess material to discuss.

I've never read much about the Burgess Shale fossils, or of Cambrian fossils in general.  There was a lot of weird stuff roaming the Earth--well, some of it could roam--back then.

[apl68]

Atlantic:  Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of  a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester.  I just happened to run across a copy of this a while back, and took my time gradually reading through it.  Winchester looks at the Atlantic from a wide range of perspectives--its geological history, from the time it formed with the breakup of the Pangaea super-continent; its hydrology; its weather; its exploration; the war and trade that have been centered around it; and the growing environmental crisis surrounding it. 

That's an awful lot to synthesize and pack into a few hundred pages.  And he does it so well!  The book is developed through a series of thematic chapters that follow the conceit of the "Ages of Man" as seen in Shakespeare--infancy (the ocean's formation), childhood (the gradual exploration and discovery of the ocean's shape and extent), and so forth.  Due to environmental degradation and climate change, it appears that we are now living in a time corresponding to the age of decline and dementia, at least as far as the ocean's biological communities and thriving human coastal communities are concerned. 

It's interesting that Winchester, writing only a little over a decade ago, was prepared to express a certain amount of skepticism regarding whether humans were causing climate change.  But he is not by any means a climate change denialist--he accepts that it's happening, but wonders whether we're barking up the wrong tree in trying to fix carbon emissions when there are lots of other environmental threats, like pollution, over-fishing, and human insistence on building along stormy, erosion-prone coasts to worry about.  I wonder whether Winchester has since become as convinced of the urgency of addressing climate change through de-carbonizing our economy as most climate scientists now are?  Anyway, he does show that it is possible to have a certain skepticism regarding some aspects of conventional scientific wisdom without being an ignorant crackpot.

[hmaria1609]

From the library:
Death at the Falls by Rosemary Simpson
New and #7 in "A Gilded Age Mystery" series

A Tale of Two Murders by Heather Redmond
#1 in "A Dickens of a Crime" series--Charles Dickens is a young journalist who becomes an amateur sleuth in London.  The story opens in January 1835.

[Parasaurolophus]

In December I read a few new ones, and finished a few that were lingering around:

Stephen Jay Gould - Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History: Gould is always a joy to read, and I learned a great deal, as ever. The book flags in its last third/quarter, though, once he's run out of Burgess material to discuss.

I've never read much about the Burgess Shale fossils, or of Cambrian fossils in general.  There was a lot of weird stuff roaming the Earth--well, some of it could roam--back then.

Gould is always fun to read. It was super informative, and did a great job of explaining why they're so interesting. But it's also from 1988, so, you know.

[FishProf]

Gould is always fun to read. It was super informative, and did a great job of explaining why they're so interesting. But it's also from 1988, so, you know.

Although he is one of my favorites, his take on the Burgess Shale fossils is not without controversy.  Simon Conway Morris wrote a book The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals which is an alternative interpretation and an attempt to refute Gould's primary thesis.

It's worth a read.

[apl68]

Gould is always fun to read. It was super informative, and did a great job of explaining why they're so interesting. But it's also from 1988, so, you know.

Although he is one of my favorites, his take on the Burgess Shale fossils is not without controversy.  Simon Conway Morris wrote a book The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals which is an alternative interpretation and an attempt to refute Gould's primary thesis.

It's worth a read.

Yes, I do know that he may have overestimated how unique the Burgess Shale specimens were.  It's understandable that a writer who died in 2002 might not be up on the research developments of the past 20 years or so.

[apl68]

The Enigma Story:  The Truth Behind the 'Unbreakable' World War II Cipher, by Dermot Turing.  I received this as an unexpected Christmas present.  It's quite an interesting comprehensive view of the Allied efforts to break the famous German Enigma cipher machine.  The story of this effort has sometimes been presented mainly as the story of Alan Turing, the great computer science pioneer.  Although--or maybe because--Turing the author is Alan Turing's nephew, he goes to some effort to correct various myths about Turing.  Mainly he puts Alan Turing's contributions to the Enigma decrypts into perspective by presenting him as only one of many key figures in the operation.  Breaking Enigma took a lot of people.

Turing also gives due credit to Polish, French, and eventually American contributions to the war against German cipher signals security.  Most accounts of Enigma give the impression that some Allied genius--Alan Turing, or some unsung Polish cryptographer, or some unsung woman at Bletchley Park--made a genius breakthrough that laid German communications bare.  In reality, the German kept trying to improve Enigma's security throughout the war, and the Allies had to keep upping their own game.  Turing also points out that the efforts to decrypt Enigma were only one of many "codebreaking" operations going on in the war.  And he tries to give a more balanced perspective on cryptography's contribution to victory.  It was seldom a matter of reading dramatic, critically-important secret messages.  Signals intelligence was and is mostly about decrypting lots of little bits of evidence that can be combined to form a bigger picture.

It's a big, complicated story told in a readable and accessible fashion.  Good work, Mr. Turing!

[hmaria1609]

Started from the library:
Murder at the Serpentine Bridge by Andrea Penrose
New and #6 installment in the "Wexford & Sloane" series

[Parasaurolophus]

Gould is always fun to read. It was super informative, and did a great job of explaining why they're so interesting. But it's also from 1988, so, you know.

Although he is one of my favorites, his take on the Burgess Shale fossils is not without controversy.  Simon Conway Morris wrote a book The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals which is an alternative interpretation and an attempt to refute Gould's primary thesis.

It's worth a read.

Cool! I'll check it out!

[paultuttle]

Books 1 and 2 of the Harry Potter series, all of the Lord of the Rings series, and several one-offs from other writers.

Is it just me, or do other people also read several books at a time, moving forward on each one when they're in range of that volume they set down on the bedside table, mantel, coffee table, or bookshelf?

[apl68]

Books 1 and 2 of the Harry Potter series, all of the Lord of the Rings series, and several one-offs from other writers.

Is it just me, or do other people also read several books at a time, moving forward on each one when they're in range of that volume they set down on the bedside table, mantel, coffee table, or bookshelf?

I keep multiple items going at a time like that.  Although which I take up to read at any given time isn't as determined by proximity.

[Parasaurolophus]

I used to have up to eight going at a time, but eventually I settled on one fiction and one non-fiction at a time, because I found that too many were languishing uncompleted for too long.

Post-baby, I'm down to just a single book at a time (for pleasure; up to one work book at a time, too). I don't have the bandwidth for more at the moment.