The Back Half (July to December Reading)
Jan. 1st, 2013 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ase2012's going down as one of the less consistent book log years.
The Best American Science Writing 2010 (Jesse Groopman, editor; Jesse Cohen, series editor):. Table of contents below, ask for reactions to any titles that strike your interest.
"The Kindest Cut", Larissa MacFarquhar (from The New Yorker)
"The Placebo Problem", Steve Silberman (from Wired)
"Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk", Benedict Carey (from The New York Times)
"The Truth About Grit", Jonah Lehrer (from The Boston Globe)
"How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion", Daniel M. Wegner (from Science)
"Friendship as a Health Factor", Jennifer Couzin-Frankel (from Science)
"A Life of Its Own", Michael Specter (from The New Yorker)
"The Orchid Children", David Dobbs (from The Atlantic)
"My Genome, My Self", Steven Pinker (from The New York Times Magazine)
"Test Subjects Who Call the Scientist Mom or Dad", Pam Belluck (from The New York Times)
"The Famine Fighter's Last Battle", Erik Stokstad (from Science)
"Pesticides Indicted in Bee Deaths", Julia Scott (from Salon)
"Disaster Aversion", Rivka Galchen (from Harper's Magazine)
"The Sixth Extinction?", Elizabeth Kolbert (from the New Yorker)
"Are We Still Evolving?", Kathleen McAuliffe (from Discover)
"A Most Private Evolution", Susan Milius (from Science News)
"Unpopular Science", Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (from The Nation)
"An Epidemic of Fear", Amy Wallace (from Wired)
"The Missions of Astronomy", Steven Weinberg (from The New Yorker Review of Books)
"Decoding An Ancienct Computer", Tony Freeth (from Scientific American)
"The Deadly Choices at Memorial", Sheri Fink (from The New York Times Magazine)
"So Much to Learn About the Oceans from Sand", Cornelia Dean (from The New York Times)
The Best American Science Writing 2011 (Rebecca Skloot, Floyd Skloot, editors; Jesse Cohen, series editor): Not as good as the 2010 edition, with a standout for "The Mathematics of Terror" for comprehensively demonstrating the need for better math education in the States.
"The Mess He Made", Michael S. Rosenwald (from The Washington Post)
"What Broke My Father's Heart", Katy Butler (from The New York Times Magazine)
"Mother Courage", John Colapinto (from The New Yorker)
"Hot Air", Charles Homans (from Columbia Journalism Review)
"The Singularity", Carl Zimmer (from Playboy)
"BP's Deep Secrets", Julia Whitty (from Mother Jones)
"The Estrogen Dilemma", Cynthia Gorney (from The New York Times Magazine)
"The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome", Charles Siebert (from The New York Times Magazine)
"A Soft Spot for Circuitry", Amy Harmon (from The New York Times)
"Cary in the Sky with Diamonds", Cari Beauchamp and Judy Balaban (from Vanity Fair)
"The Longest Home Run Ever", John Brenkus (from The Week)
"Professor Tracks Injuries with Aim of Prevention", Alan Schwarz (from The New York Times)
"The Trouble With Scientists", Deborah Blum (from the Speakeasy Science blog)
"Gut Bacteria in Japanese People Borrowed Sushi-Digesting Genes from Ocean Bacteria", Ed Yong (from Discover's "Not Exactly Rocket Science" blog)
"The Data Trail", Tim Folger (from OnEarth)
"Nature's Spoils", Burkhard Bilger (from The New Yorker)
"Earth on Fire", Kristin Ohlson (from Discover)
"A Deadly Misdiagnosis", Michael Specter (from The New Yorker)
"The Enemy Within", Mark Bowden (from The Atlantic Monthly)
"The Covenant", Peter J. Boyer (from The New Yorker)
"The Mathematics of Terror", Andrew Curry (from Discover)
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Lois McMaster Bujold) (2012): Despite serious consideration of suicide by Komarran balcony, implied war crimes, that ImpSec thing that probably wasn't insured, and the laying to rest of unquieting family tradition,s this was charming without ever being challenging. It's... it's fluffy. A gooey warm-feeling novel, with few sharp edges. At some point I'll appreciate CVA for what it is, rather than what I'd like it to be.
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) (1813): Reread. Classic romantic story of two proud, intelligent personalities forced to reflect on their flaws, and reassess their assessment of the character of others. P&P took three tries to accomplish the first complete reading, which may be a strong argument for letting people find books at their own speed and maturity. It's grown on me; I doubt I will ever be Darcy's partisan, but the wit and observation of human foibles that weren't appreciated by a teen have greater appeal as I get a little more sympathetic and less judging.
Emma (Jane Austen) (1815): The focus on a young woman with more energy and self-regard than application in a closed society made for curiously relevant lunchtime and public transit reading. When I was giggling at Emma's matchmatching schemes instead of reviewing for the board, or absorbing the narrative's reflections on the anxieties of Society (Highfield, classroom, and/or workspace), Austen's people sense seemed uncannily universal.
I reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein) (1966) in that way you do. As I get older, I have a harder time taking Heinlein's characterization seriously.
The Cloud Roads (Martha Wells) (2011): Moon, orphan and wanderer of the Three Worlds, is reunited with his people, and must face challenges of integration, trust, and the Big Bad.
The worldbuilding is pretty much: that? We have one of that, too. This can be awesome (multicultural worldbuilding with people who fly and also shapeshift) but the width doesn't always translate to depth. On the character side, I have way too much love for Stone and Selis. I am so happy that Selis ran away from home. I don't think it's her destiny to pop up in sequels, but I would be delighted if she did. And Stone gets serious consideration for the Best Grouchy Old Battleaxe Ever award.
And oh yes, most of the major characters come from polyamorous polygamous culture with a lot of cuddling and institutionalized open marriage. It's kind of cute, in between my bouts of cultural whiplash, and also wondering when Moon's going to hit his people-talking-about-him limit.
This isn't deep: I marathoned The Cloud Roads and its sequel in one weekend, and didn't have much impulse to reread after closing the second novel. The ancilliary comments about the Arbora (nonwinged Raksura, usually the makers, sometimes ground fighters) and Aeriat (winged, usually the leaders and fighters) also highlighted, how to say it? Who gets the bulk of the writer love. I mean, flying people, what's not to love.
The Serpent Seas (Martha Wells) (2012): Sequel to The Cloud Roads. Moon had been consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud court, for eleven days; nobody had tried to kill him yet, so he thought it was going well so far. Moon's integration into a Raksuran court and their relocation to a new home is interrupted by the theft of a core element of their new home.
Did anyone other than me mainline Catherine Asaro's sci-fi/romance novels in the late '90s? With the sundry very hot telepaths and really unsubtle bad guys and (sometimes excessively) complex and conveniently frequently summarized backstory? And also the gender role-reversal which wasn't nearly as clever as it thought it was? Yeah, Moon gets a lot of backchat on the "proper" behavior of Raksura consorts, usually right after he's done something un-consort-y and useful, and there's distracting heaps of jewels and silky clothes - distracting to me, I mean, as the reader, who is trying to parse Indigo Cloud Court is in desperate straits in the same context as heaps of jewels.
The Serpent Seas entertained me, but if I'm picking at the economics, I wasn't deeply moved. With that said, I liked the characters a lot, and sometimes you just need something with fairly straightforward morality (stealing is wrong, stealing back is entertaining heist-adventure). Which is not to say there is no gray zone, see also the crazy steampunk explorers of the Klodifore. I'd love to see them again, though I suspect most of them will totter off their boat, fling themselves on the nearest solid ground of home and cry a culturally appropriate variation of never again, never ever again.
So I have mixed feelings: on the one hand, fun adventure novels. On the other hand, the second-order worldbuilding is sometimes not as clever as I'd like.
The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien) (1954): Reread. I wasn't foolish enough to open The Hobbit before watching the new movie, but late fall is Tolkein weather.
The Siren Depths (Martha Wells) (2012): Third novel and sequel to The Serpent Seas; Wells fills in missing pieces of Moon's history, and he lays to rest some of his angst. (Some of it! Don't worry, there remain plenty of unresolved issues for future novels to deal with.) For reasons which aren't relevant at this juncture, some of Wells' comments in her Big Idea post hit close to home, so I'm going to say, Moon being emotionally backward and interpreting everyone's actions in the worst possible light and refusing to believe people's promises is, um, let's just say I had no problems reading what was going on there. And maybe probably makes me a terrible person, but I love Malachite, whose awesome should be self-evident, and I am devastated there isn't more Malachite-Stone interaction. I feel these two agree on very little except protecting the people they love, and the need for adaptability in the face of challenges like family-threatening Fell.
Structurally, I'm not 100% sold on the Indigo Cloud -> Opal Night -> forerunner progression; the A-story of Moon's family history and B-story of the Fell and the imprisoned... I'm still not convinced its forerunner appearance was its true shape and not some kind of projection, like the illusory water. Well, the front two-thirds and the final chapter were one story, with a second story sort of wedged in the back third. Or maybe I am just creeped out by the possibility of the forerunner situation coming back to haunt everyone in future novels (on the back-burner with wacky Fell problems, babies or their lack, Chime's non-mentor powers, and whatever's going to happen with Lithe and Shade - by the way, for a sheltered young thing, Shade is awesome - just to name a few balls in the air.) I remain entertained enough to pick up the ebooks (available without DRM through Baen's web site), and intrigued enough to poke at the worldbuilding.
Numbers game: 10 total finished. 8 new, 2 reread; 8 fiction, 2 nonfiction.
The Best American Science Writing 2010 (Jesse Groopman, editor; Jesse Cohen, series editor):. Table of contents below, ask for reactions to any titles that strike your interest.
"The Kindest Cut", Larissa MacFarquhar (from The New Yorker)
"The Placebo Problem", Steve Silberman (from Wired)
"Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk", Benedict Carey (from The New York Times)
"The Truth About Grit", Jonah Lehrer (from The Boston Globe)
"How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion", Daniel M. Wegner (from Science)
"Friendship as a Health Factor", Jennifer Couzin-Frankel (from Science)
"A Life of Its Own", Michael Specter (from The New Yorker)
"The Orchid Children", David Dobbs (from The Atlantic)
"My Genome, My Self", Steven Pinker (from The New York Times Magazine)
"Test Subjects Who Call the Scientist Mom or Dad", Pam Belluck (from The New York Times)
"The Famine Fighter's Last Battle", Erik Stokstad (from Science)
"Pesticides Indicted in Bee Deaths", Julia Scott (from Salon)
"Disaster Aversion", Rivka Galchen (from Harper's Magazine)
"The Sixth Extinction?", Elizabeth Kolbert (from the New Yorker)
"Are We Still Evolving?", Kathleen McAuliffe (from Discover)
"A Most Private Evolution", Susan Milius (from Science News)
"Unpopular Science", Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (from The Nation)
"An Epidemic of Fear", Amy Wallace (from Wired)
"The Missions of Astronomy", Steven Weinberg (from The New Yorker Review of Books)
"Decoding An Ancienct Computer", Tony Freeth (from Scientific American)
"The Deadly Choices at Memorial", Sheri Fink (from The New York Times Magazine)
"So Much to Learn About the Oceans from Sand", Cornelia Dean (from The New York Times)
The Best American Science Writing 2011 (Rebecca Skloot, Floyd Skloot, editors; Jesse Cohen, series editor): Not as good as the 2010 edition, with a standout for "The Mathematics of Terror" for comprehensively demonstrating the need for better math education in the States.
"The Mess He Made", Michael S. Rosenwald (from The Washington Post)
"What Broke My Father's Heart", Katy Butler (from The New York Times Magazine)
"Mother Courage", John Colapinto (from The New Yorker)
"Hot Air", Charles Homans (from Columbia Journalism Review)
"The Singularity", Carl Zimmer (from Playboy)
"BP's Deep Secrets", Julia Whitty (from Mother Jones)
"The Estrogen Dilemma", Cynthia Gorney (from The New York Times Magazine)
"The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome", Charles Siebert (from The New York Times Magazine)
"A Soft Spot for Circuitry", Amy Harmon (from The New York Times)
"Cary in the Sky with Diamonds", Cari Beauchamp and Judy Balaban (from Vanity Fair)
"The Longest Home Run Ever", John Brenkus (from The Week)
"Professor Tracks Injuries with Aim of Prevention", Alan Schwarz (from The New York Times)
"The Trouble With Scientists", Deborah Blum (from the Speakeasy Science blog)
"Gut Bacteria in Japanese People Borrowed Sushi-Digesting Genes from Ocean Bacteria", Ed Yong (from Discover's "Not Exactly Rocket Science" blog)
"The Data Trail", Tim Folger (from OnEarth)
"Nature's Spoils", Burkhard Bilger (from The New Yorker)
"Earth on Fire", Kristin Ohlson (from Discover)
"A Deadly Misdiagnosis", Michael Specter (from The New Yorker)
"The Enemy Within", Mark Bowden (from The Atlantic Monthly)
"The Covenant", Peter J. Boyer (from The New Yorker)
"The Mathematics of Terror", Andrew Curry (from Discover)
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Lois McMaster Bujold) (2012): Despite serious consideration of suicide by Komarran balcony, implied war crimes, that ImpSec thing that probably wasn't insured, and the laying to rest of unquieting family tradition,s this was charming without ever being challenging. It's... it's fluffy. A gooey warm-feeling novel, with few sharp edges. At some point I'll appreciate CVA for what it is, rather than what I'd like it to be.
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) (1813): Reread. Classic romantic story of two proud, intelligent personalities forced to reflect on their flaws, and reassess their assessment of the character of others. P&P took three tries to accomplish the first complete reading, which may be a strong argument for letting people find books at their own speed and maturity. It's grown on me; I doubt I will ever be Darcy's partisan, but the wit and observation of human foibles that weren't appreciated by a teen have greater appeal as I get a little more sympathetic and less judging.
Emma (Jane Austen) (1815): The focus on a young woman with more energy and self-regard than application in a closed society made for curiously relevant lunchtime and public transit reading. When I was giggling at Emma's matchmatching schemes instead of reviewing for the board, or absorbing the narrative's reflections on the anxieties of Society (Highfield, classroom, and/or workspace), Austen's people sense seemed uncannily universal.
I reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein) (1966) in that way you do. As I get older, I have a harder time taking Heinlein's characterization seriously.
The Cloud Roads (Martha Wells) (2011): Moon, orphan and wanderer of the Three Worlds, is reunited with his people, and must face challenges of integration, trust, and the Big Bad.
The worldbuilding is pretty much: that? We have one of that, too. This can be awesome (multicultural worldbuilding with people who fly and also shapeshift) but the width doesn't always translate to depth. On the character side, I have way too much love for Stone and Selis. I am so happy that Selis ran away from home. I don't think it's her destiny to pop up in sequels, but I would be delighted if she did. And Stone gets serious consideration for the Best Grouchy Old Battleaxe Ever award.
And oh yes, most of the major characters come from polyamorous polygamous culture with a lot of cuddling and institutionalized open marriage. It's kind of cute, in between my bouts of cultural whiplash, and also wondering when Moon's going to hit his people-talking-about-him limit.
This isn't deep: I marathoned The Cloud Roads and its sequel in one weekend, and didn't have much impulse to reread after closing the second novel. The ancilliary comments about the Arbora (nonwinged Raksura, usually the makers, sometimes ground fighters) and Aeriat (winged, usually the leaders and fighters) also highlighted, how to say it? Who gets the bulk of the writer love. I mean, flying people, what's not to love.
The Serpent Seas (Martha Wells) (2012): Sequel to The Cloud Roads. Moon had been consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud court, for eleven days; nobody had tried to kill him yet, so he thought it was going well so far. Moon's integration into a Raksuran court and their relocation to a new home is interrupted by the theft of a core element of their new home.
Did anyone other than me mainline Catherine Asaro's sci-fi/romance novels in the late '90s? With the sundry very hot telepaths and really unsubtle bad guys and (sometimes excessively) complex and conveniently frequently summarized backstory? And also the gender role-reversal which wasn't nearly as clever as it thought it was? Yeah, Moon gets a lot of backchat on the "proper" behavior of Raksura consorts, usually right after he's done something un-consort-y and useful, and there's distracting heaps of jewels and silky clothes - distracting to me, I mean, as the reader, who is trying to parse Indigo Cloud Court is in desperate straits in the same context as heaps of jewels.
The Serpent Seas entertained me, but if I'm picking at the economics, I wasn't deeply moved. With that said, I liked the characters a lot, and sometimes you just need something with fairly straightforward morality (stealing is wrong, stealing back is entertaining heist-adventure). Which is not to say there is no gray zone, see also the crazy steampunk explorers of the Klodifore. I'd love to see them again, though I suspect most of them will totter off their boat, fling themselves on the nearest solid ground of home and cry a culturally appropriate variation of never again, never ever again.
So I have mixed feelings: on the one hand, fun adventure novels. On the other hand, the second-order worldbuilding is sometimes not as clever as I'd like.
The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien) (1954): Reread. I wasn't foolish enough to open The Hobbit before watching the new movie, but late fall is Tolkein weather.
The Siren Depths (Martha Wells) (2012): Third novel and sequel to The Serpent Seas; Wells fills in missing pieces of Moon's history, and he lays to rest some of his angst. (Some of it! Don't worry, there remain plenty of unresolved issues for future novels to deal with.) For reasons which aren't relevant at this juncture, some of Wells' comments in her Big Idea post hit close to home, so I'm going to say, Moon being emotionally backward and interpreting everyone's actions in the worst possible light and refusing to believe people's promises is, um, let's just say I had no problems reading what was going on there. And maybe probably makes me a terrible person, but I love Malachite, whose awesome should be self-evident, and I am devastated there isn't more Malachite-Stone interaction. I feel these two agree on very little except protecting the people they love, and the need for adaptability in the face of challenges like family-threatening Fell.
Structurally, I'm not 100% sold on the Indigo Cloud -> Opal Night -> forerunner progression; the A-story of Moon's family history and B-story of the Fell and the imprisoned... I'm still not convinced its forerunner appearance was its true shape and not some kind of projection, like the illusory water. Well, the front two-thirds and the final chapter were one story, with a second story sort of wedged in the back third. Or maybe I am just creeped out by the possibility of the forerunner situation coming back to haunt everyone in future novels (on the back-burner with wacky Fell problems, babies or their lack, Chime's non-mentor powers, and whatever's going to happen with Lithe and Shade - by the way, for a sheltered young thing, Shade is awesome - just to name a few balls in the air.) I remain entertained enough to pick up the ebooks (available without DRM through Baen's web site), and intrigued enough to poke at the worldbuilding.
Numbers game: 10 total finished. 8 new, 2 reread; 8 fiction, 2 nonfiction.