What have you read lately?

[ergative]

Oops, I forgot to ask: what can you guys recommend me by way of space colonies with interesting wildlife?

Sue Burke's Semiosis (and the sequel Interference) is awesome in that way, as long as you include sentient plants in your definition of 'interesting wildlife'.

[smallcleanrat]

Fraans de Waal - Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?: An entertaining bit of popular science, with lots of really interesting and compelling examples. I often gasped at the shoddy experimental design from the past, which is basically what I was looking for when I got it (and which were, in many ways, highly reminiscent of Elisabeth Lloy'd magnificent Pre-theoretical Assumptions in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Sexuality). It was also interesting to have my childhood memories of how we talked about animal cognition confirmed; I'd come to think I must have been misremembering, but apparently not. Wow, have we ever come a long way!

If you enjoyed this you might also like Lucy Cooke's The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife.

It has many examples of the historical/cultural origins of misconceptions and myths about animals and contrasts these with the more modern, empirically-based understanding of animal lifestyles and behavior. Also quite an entertaining read.

[Parasaurolophus]

There's a book I remember reading years ago - maybe high school, that has stuck with me, that may in fact be this one.  (I say this after checking out a Wikipedia summary.)  It was definitely a Beowulf in space book, and it fits that the creatures were called grendels.  It stuck with me because of the way the human colonists became prey to this intelligent, learning predator.  It really made me think about human exceptionalism, and how thin the veneer of being the dominant species could get.  Part of the effect may have been the age I read it, but there's not a ton of books that I still randomly think about on occasion, decades later.

Oh! I'm so glad that might have been the one! (I suppose it could have been one of the sequels, too, but I haven't read them yet.) I found out about it from my brother-in-law, who was basically in your situation but couldn't find the book, and after asking me a pile of questions about Beowulf and the names of things in Beowulf, he was able to google his way back to the book.

Sue Burke's Semiosis (and the sequel Interference) is awesome in that way, as long as you include sentient plants in your definition of 'interesting wildlife'.

Thanks! This is actually one of the books I ordered ages ago which should arrive soonish. I'll move it up the 'to read' list accordingly! (Cool flora definitely counts!)

If you enjoyed this you might also like Lucy Cooke's The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife.

It has many examples of the historical/cultural origins of misconceptions and myths about animals and contrasts these with the more modern, empirically-based understanding of animal lifestyles and behavior. Also quite an entertaining read.

Thanks! That sounds really cool, too. I'll look around for it!

[mahagonny]

Without Conscience The Disturbing World of The Psychopaths Among Us by Robert D. Hare

How many have you met/known? Are you sure?

[FishProf]

Whiny student emails, mostly...

...but I am listening to Fahrenheit 451 and trying to get a start on Bill Bryson's The Body.

[mamselle]

As I've said before, elsewhere...we are Bradbury's hoboes....

And think about that wide-screen TV in your wall....

M.

[FishProf]

As I've said before, elsewhere...we are Bradbury's hoboes....

And think about that wide-screen TV in your wall....

M.

Walls, soon we can buy the 4th.

[mamselle]

Got it in one.

M.

[apl68]

The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, and The Tale of Murasaki, by Liza Dalby

I came across Dalby's historical novel some months back.  It looked interesting.  Reading Tale of Genji first, to understand the context, seemed like a good idea.  I'd been toying with the idea of reading Genji for years anyway.  Now I've finally gotten down to business and completed them both.

Tale of Genji was something of a slog.  I'm mainly a reader of nonfiction.  When I read serious literary fiction, it tends to go down like a dose of medicine.  This was a preposterously big dose (How on earth did anybody ever manage to write a novel this long in the days before modern paper, ink, and typewriters?).  Slog or not, it deserves its reputation as one of the world's great novels.  It's full of psychological insight, and it's an extraordinary window into a long-ago world.

Title character Genji...is a real piece of work.  He's a sexual predator who brings disaster upon most of his paramours.  He even manages to create serious trouble for the royal family, with the all the potentially severe political consequences that that entails.  He's not a sociopath.  He has a conscience and can feel remorse.  Mainly that serves to turn him into a world-class rationalizer.  Yet he's supposed to be a sympathetic character. How did a female author create a "hero" like this?  How did he become so popular among a female readership?

Dalby's Tale of Murasaki tries to have Murasaki herself explain this in the course of narrating her own life's story.  Of course there's no way of knowing whether Dalby's educated guesses regarding Murasaki's motivations are true.  They generally come across as plausible.  The one place where she really overreaches is in the final chapter, which is an imagined reconstruction of a hypothetical missing final chapter to Genji.  I think it would have been best not to have tried that.

Overall it's a remarkable novel in the way it vivdly recreates the lost world of the Heian Japanese court.  It also, for the most part, allows its characters to be people of their time, not time-warped moderns.  That's an essential part of any worthwhile historical fiction.  Modern writers can't help having modern preoccupations, but they can work them into their historical recreations in a subtle way.  Dalby only occasionally tips her hand with an observation or phrase that's a little too on-the-nose. 

I do wonder, as I often to when reading historical fiction, whether certain unsympathetically portrayed characters--Murasaki's jerk of a brother comes to mind--are getting treated fairly.  I guess we'll never know. 

[mamselle]

Does your copy of the original book show any of the paintings or the pen-and-ink drawings?

Those are amazing in and of themselves.

I am pretty sure I saw these at one point:

   https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/53892

This is also an oft-reproduced work:

   https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/25532

M.

[Puget]

I've been listening to lots of audiobooks from the library as I work in the yard and house and go for walks--

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (who wrote The Night Circus). A secret underground world centered around stories, with lots of intersecting stories within it and interludes of stories within stories. It got mixed reviews and I can see why-- it's rather odd, and follows dream logic, but in audiobook form and for this moment when we all seem a bit unmoored in time like the characters are, it worked for me.

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield. I really enjoyed this one-- multiple intersecting story lines in 1840s (?) England. Good characters and an interesting plot that kept me guessing, with some magical realism elements.

The House of Silk and Moriarty, by Anthony Horowtz. Two Sherlock Holmes take-offs that were pretty well done and captured the style well.

[apl68]

Does your copy of the original book show any of the paintings or the pen-and-ink drawings?

Those are amazing in and of themselves.

I am pretty sure I saw these at one point:

   https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/53892

This is also an oft-reproduced work:

   https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/25532

M.

The copy I read was our library's very old Modern Library edition (The Arthur Waley translation, which has lots of helpful annotations).  No illustrations.  It doesn't even have its original book jacket! 

I'll have to check those links you've supplied when I have some time.  Thank you!

[notmycircus]

Currently reading Little Fires Everywhere.

[mamselle]

Does your copy of the original book show any of the paintings or the pen-and-ink drawings?

Those are amazing in and of themselves.

I am pretty sure I saw these at one point:

   https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/53892

This is also an oft-reproduced work:

   https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/25532

M.

Just found the copy I got from a friend for use as a teaching resource.

It's Seidensticker's paperback, an abridged tranlation with reproduced woodcuts based, per the publication info, on the 17th c. artist Y. Shunsho's work for a 1650 pub. by E. G. Monogatari.

The cover has two color scenes from the Met's screen (referenced above); I'm thinking the woodcuts were informed by/based on the paintings at Yale (or, depending on an unclear chronology, the other way 'round), since both feature several scenes with protruding corners of porches, dias(es), etc. into the center space.

Anyway, there are worthy visual sources at hand...a kid interested in manga or anime might like to explore these as precursorial elements.

M.

[ergative]

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Steve Brusatte.  It's a fascinating history of--well, the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, as currently understood by paleontology.  It's very readable popular science, with vivid profiles of several figures in the field of paleontology, and detailed descriptions of the methods they use to deduce what dinosaurs looked like, how they lived, and how their lineages mapped out.  It's one of those books where the author's enthusiasm for the subject proves contagious.  That's a mark of good popular nonfiction writing.

For extinct creatures, dinosaurs sure have changed a lot in the four decades since I began reading about them as a kid!  Makes me wonder how much of what Brusatte discusses here will be subject to modification in the years to come, due to continuing new fossil finds and methodologies.

I was intrigued, so I actually requested that my library acquire it as an ebook, and then I took it out and read it. (They're surprisingly obliging about acquiring texts I recommend.) I did enjoy it, but I was extremely struck by the fact that he (a) only seems to profile current people that he knows personally, and (b) they're almost entirely men. In the acknowledgements he says that his research comes from his own personal experience and publications--fine, he's an expert--but it led me to look up the gender balance overall in the field of paleontology. Are women really as rare in the field as they are among his buddies?

According to this article in Smithsonion, women make up 'less than one-quarter' of professional paleontologists. Assuming that 'less than one quarter' means 'more than one fifth and less than one quarter' (or else they'd have said 'less than one fifth'), I would expect a properly representative book to contain between a fifth and a quarter as many women as men. But it sure didn't. On one page I counted twelve men mentioned and no women at all. So this leads me to conclude that Brusatte's own behavior in the discipline--who he makes friends with at conferences, collaborates with, who he cites in this research--is compounding the gender imbalance.

He's exactly my age, and went to my college, so it's not a case of an old fuddy-duddy perpetuating the norms of an earlier time. And that made me sad.