What have you read lately?

[apl68]

The Empire's Ruin by Brian Staveley
The 1st installment in the "Ashes of the Unhewn Throne" series.  I've read the "Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne" trilogy; the new novel picks up some years afterwards.

Apl68, I've read and enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's Thames: the Biography from the library.

It gives a vivid impression of the city's long history, doesn't it?  BTW, I'm pretty sure Ackroyd is NOT related to eager Roger or Dan.

[mamselle]

Kidding about Roger.

Circling around not falling into a Poirot loop online....

;--》

M.

[mahagonny]

What's a good book for learning more about polling? Anyone? Thanks.

[spork]

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham. Excellent journalistic research (the book includes ~ 100 pages of bibliographic notes). An exciting, if depressing, read. Everyone ends up chronically ill, dead, imprisoned, disgraced, or, usually, some combination thereof. If I was teaching an undergraduate course on the end of the Soviet Union, I would use this book.

[apl68]

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham. Excellent journalistic research (the book includes ~ 100 pages of bibliographic notes). An exciting, if depressing, read. Everyone ends up chronically ill, dead, imprisoned, disgraced, or, usually, some combination thereof. If I was teaching an undergraduate course on the end of the Soviet Union, I would use this book.

The only book-length treatment of the Chernobyl disaster I've ever read was Piers Paul Reed's Ablaze, which was published much closer to the event.

Speaking of Chernobyl--I'm currently reading Islands of Abandonment:  Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, by Cal Flynn.  I've already passed her chapter on the abandoned zone around Chernobyl, which has become a remarkable wildlife preserve.  The return of diverse wildlife to places abandoned by human settlement and use is the book's main theme.  Apparently our greenhouse gas problem would already be far worse by now had it not been for widespread reversion of farmland to forest in much of the world. 

Our region, like so many rural regions, has seen a great deal of that.  Unfortunately our abandoned lands have mostly been clear-cut and then either abandoned again or turned into commercial timber lots.  We really don't have a great deal of biologically-diverse, naturally-seeded woodland around here.  That's one reason why I want so badly not to have to sell our family's 20 acres when my parents die.  If I do, they'll inevitably become yet another clear-cut tract, and there's far too much of that already out their way.

[ergative]

I joined Kameron Hurley's Patreon to get access to her short stories, and a nice perk is that, in addition to getting a new short story every month or so, I also get access to all the last four years of her short stories. The first volume (the Patreon Year 1 collection), is stunningly good. Many of those stories were subsequently published in her short story collection Meet Me in the Future, and of the ones that weren't, some of them are in her Patreon Year 2 collection, which I'm reading now. It's not quite as good as Year 1---to be honest, there is insufficient body horror and mucous, and that really is the purest Hurley ethos---but I'm always struck by how good she is at building a world and a story in very few words. She always does interesting stuff with her fiction, and I recommend her work highly.

[Puget]

  That's one reason why I want so badly not to have to sell our family's 20 acres when my parents die.  If I do, they'll inevitably become yet another clear-cut tract, and there's far too much of that already out their way.

Off topic for this thread but-- have you looked into a conservation easement? That would protect the land from development but allow you to still sell it if necessary. https://www.conservationeasement.us/what-is-a-conservation-easement/

[spork]

13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi, by Mitchell Zuckoff. Read this because I watched the terrible Michael Bay movie adaptation. The writing doesn't come anywhere close to the quality of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down.

Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, by Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto. Sort of an overview on cognitive psychology/science research as it relates to learning. Starts with educational philosophies of the 19th century and how this drove the unscientific development of the educational institutions we have today. Not as epic or as well-organized as The Emperor of All Maladies by Ned Sharpless, and not as practical as Daniel Willingham's stuff.

[ergative]

13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi, by Mitchell Zuckoff. Read this because I watched the terrible Michael Bay movie adaptation. The writing doesn't come anywhere close to the quality of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down.

Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, by Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto. Sort of an overview on cognitive psychology/science research as it relates to learning. Starts with educational philosophies of the 19th century and how this drove the unscientific development of the educational institutions we have today. Not as epic or as well-organized as The Emperor of All Maladies by Ned Sharpless, and not as practical as Daniel Willingham's stuff.

Is this a different book from the history of cancer by the same title by Siddhartha Mukherjee? I did a bit of a google around and couldn't find anything by this title by Ned (=Norman?) Sharpless.

[mamselle]

There isn't a mix-up somewhere in there with Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," is there?

(A good short-story collection, by the way...)

M.

[spork]

13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi, by Mitchell Zuckoff. Read this because I watched the terrible Michael Bay movie adaptation. The writing doesn't come anywhere close to the quality of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down.

Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, by Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto. Sort of an overview on cognitive psychology/science research as it relates to learning. Starts with educational philosophies of the 19th century and how this drove the unscientific development of the educational institutions we have today. Not as epic or as well-organized as The Emperor of All Maladies by Ned Sharpless, and not as practical as Daniel Willingham's stuff.

Is this a different book from the history of cancer by the same title by Siddhartha Mukherjee? I did a bit of a google around and couldn't find anything by this title by Ned (=Norman?) Sharpless.

My mistake. You are correct, the author is Siddhartha Mukherjee. I read so much history of scientific research that I often get the authors and the scientists confused. Mukherjee happens to be both.

[ergative]

13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi, by Mitchell Zuckoff. Read this because I watched the terrible Michael Bay movie adaptation. The writing doesn't come anywhere close to the quality of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down.

Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, by Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto. Sort of an overview on cognitive psychology/science research as it relates to learning. Starts with educational philosophies of the 19th century and how this drove the unscientific development of the educational institutions we have today. Not as epic or as well-organized as The Emperor of All Maladies by Ned Sharpless, and not as practical as Daniel Willingham's stuff.

Is this a different book from the history of cancer by the same title by Siddhartha Mukherjee? I did a bit of a google around and couldn't find anything by this title by Ned (=Norman?) Sharpless.

My mistake. You are correct, the author is Siddhartha Mukherjee. I read so much history of scientific research that I often get the authors and the scientists confused. Mukherjee happens to be both.

Ah, ok. I read The Emperor of All Maladies a few years ago, and it was really superb. I've been thinking of reading his other book, The Gene, but it's marketed as being part memoir because his family has a genetic history of some illness or other, and I get really impatient when my science books start poking the authors' personal lives into the science. (If you* like the parasocial author-reader relationship, good for you, but I get impatient. Maybe it's because I don't really like people that much.)

*the generic you

[spork]

That's why I didn't like Grasp. It was trying to do too many things.

Halfway through Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, by Suchitra Vijayan. A very good book on politics, geography, and identity.

[hmaria1609]

I don't read graphic novels, however, this title was inviting to be read: Reading Quirks: Weird Things that Bookish Nerds Do! by the Wild Detectives
A fun graphic novel for adults of all things we do reading.

[Hegemony]

I was looking for a page-turner, so I tried Then She Was Gone, by Lisa Jewell. To my mind it was more a page-tear-out-and-throw-across-the-room-er. What a lot of unengaging hokum. Implausible on about six different levels. And the ending was guessable from about page 15. Books like that really show you what your time is worth (too much for another one like that).

I'd still love a good page-turner, though.