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2020 reading so far!
Feb. 4th, 2020 11:17 pmHello flist! I post so sporadically now - I've become one of those people that apologizes for this! But I am resolved to post book reviews this year of everything I read (that is not embarrassing, lol) that I finish.
My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir
Nonfiction, journal. John Muir was a great lover of the natural world and the American Sierra especially, and the founder of the Sierra Mountain Club. It was pretty wonderful to read this. He was asked by a friend to assist moving sheep up to mountain pasture in Yosemite, accepted with great joy, and wrote a few paragraphs or pages every day.
You can absolutely read the love and wonder and delight he took in the natural surroundings in every entry he writes. He observes the clouds, and describes the rivers and streams, and notes down the little animal life and big animal life alike, from squirrels to bears. He catalogues and notes the botany too - the flowers and shrubs and trees - and there is much to observe as they move the sheep from the dry California scrub up through the greener mountain shoulder up till they start to thin out again from the altitude. He is just so full of admiration and joy, and it never ceases, it's refreshing to read.
I also enormously enjoyed his anecdotes of the people and the sheep especially. Sheep are pretty stupid and his accounts, interspersed here and there between the observation of Yosemite, of how he and the shepherd struggle to get them through various difficulties is both wry and hilarious. He doesn't have the money to just hare off into the mountains and bring enough supplies, so he jumps at these chances, but I wish I could read an entire book of John Muir's anecdotes about shepherding or something. They were so entertaining! 8/10
The Art of Theft by Sherry Thomas
Mystery, historical fiction. This is the fourth book in Thomas's Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes pretends that her brother is an invalid and acts as his speaker and his eyes and ears, but of course it is her doing all the analysis, with some help from Mrs Watson. Charlotte is from a middle class family who wants to social climb, and Charlotte deliberately ends up ruining her reputation and getting away.
The books have one central mystery but the overall characters progress, we learn more about what's going on. I found that this one was easier to get into, and I liked the resolution of the plot. I do kind of forget how the different relationships are twisted though - I know the ACD canon very well and between books, forget how certain characters are related or who is who and what's a nod to what (there are Stapletons - no relation or association to Baskerville for example). And I found Thomas's writing sometimes really great and the conceits great - I enjoy Charlotte's conception of Maximum Tolerable Chins - but sometimes it falls short. I don't know. Maybe I've read too many of her books. I still think the romance is the strongest part.
Also, I think that the Lady Sherlock books must take place in the same universe as some of her other books. Miss Redmayne is studying to be a doctor - I think she is the fully-fledged physician that tends to Lady Helena. 7/10
Early Riser by Jasper Fforde
Post-apocalyptic, satire. In this future, the planet has gotten very cold, and to cope, humans hibernate - but not well. Some just never wake again, or they will partially wake and wander around like zombies. But it's not a planet of howling winters like Hoth with no infrastructure - it's one with a lot of corporate wealth at stake. Morphenox, a drug that mostly makes sure you survive the winter (except for that pesky zombifying thing), is manufactured by a massive pharmaceutical company.
I have so many thoughts about this novel. I'm actually having trouble getting them out because I have so many.
1. Jasper Fforde didn't write a book for...several years, before this came out. Before this, I think he wrote one a year. As someone who checked his website periodically to see when the Shades of Grey sequel would come out (please Fforde, you left us on a cliffhanger!) he actually writes he had an inexplicable and distressing period where he apparently just didn't write. And about this novel, that he sat down to try to write something that he eventually realized was not him - he tried to write something that was someone else, so he had to slash and rewrite it many times, and put himself back into it. He certainly does wry post-apocalyptic absurdity, but he does it with his own humour (this last clause is my thoughts, not what he said). And he also mentions that it's very anvilicious, but that there are times you just have to. This is just after 2016.
2. I can see all of that. Personally, I love Fforde's comic absurdity - I like absurdity generally, and I find his to be very entertaining. I absolutely love the weird (and impossible) inventions. But I felt the ending was weirdly not grim enough. It's a deeply messed up world - Morphenox's motto of equality in sleep is obviously undercut by the fact that only the rich can afford it (and to make it through the winter), plus the fact there's a small chance you'll become braindead and then treated as not-a-human and reassigned to the menial or dangerous tasks that no one wants to do, free slave labour. The book's obviously in response to our current problems; there are some books you don't need publishing metadata to know when it was published. The world has cooled almost catastrophically instead of warming. But all the other things of the world, the social parts, are still there. There are still huge corporations which may have started as small operations and for the benefit of others, but which have taken on a life of their own and become this juggernaut crushing anyone and everyone in the pursuit of expansion and profit. There's all the weird fairy tales and urban legends that spring up among a community, except centered very tightly around Winter. There's collateralized debt. There's much larger infrastructure around adoption and foster homes, because if there's a high risk of death every year obviously there'll be shifts.
3. However, I do know Shades of Grey pretty well and that familiarity made me more aware, I think, of the similarities between the two. There's a very similar protagonist in Eddie (SoG) and Charlie (ER). The baffling society that both operate in - though I suppose SoG's is governmental and ER's is corporate - also ring similarly. I mention it mostly because I find this kind of thing to be incredibly distracting, but I'm not sure it actually bothers other people. I don't mind this in a series, and in fact am quite happy to accept it then, but when authors or other artists create separate works and it still makes me think always of their other work, it distracts me a lot.
4. I do really enjoy all the wordplay that Fforde always brings. The Winter exerts an incredibly strong pressure on the society (maybe too strong - I mean this in a Doyalist way). Therefore there are different despised social roles, for example. Those who don't sleep through are seen as drains on society's resources, as they burn more in food while others are sleeping, they're Winsomniacs. Or there are nomads that exist outside of the general society (Womads). So many new terms, all winterized. I find them extremely entertaining, though in the beginning as they were being introduced in rapid succession, somewhat overwhelming. I still think even a society so shaped by Winter would still have new words that do not refer to winter so overtly, though.
5. It's set in Wales and Fforde has a nice selection of photos on his site about it, plus extra contextual information on how he reversed a lot of the Beeching cuts, though of course the train doesn't run in the winter. You only realize about 75% of the way through that they're not speaking English but Welsh (I enjoyed this) and also that's when you find out the Villains, which I had mentally grouped in a class like Womads, also outside of the general society, are English. I'm not sure what to say, except that's definitely very pointed, but Fforde can do what he wants. It was pretty entertaining though.
Overall, 8/10. The similarities to SoG just bothered me otherwise it'd have been higher.
How-To by Randall Munroe
Nonfiction, humour. This is I think Munroe's third book, and it's his book about how to do things just taken to hilarious extremes. After all, you can always just add a few more zeros to your input values!
I love xkcd and Munroe and absolutely loved this book. xkcd is a very long running series with a lot of content, and I think you can get a good sense of who Munroe is as a person from it - endlessly curious, willing to dig into the guts of things to find information, unabashedly interested in space and physics and robots and the natural world altogether, plus sf/f, and also, honestly, kind. He also has a pretty deadpan kind of humour too - the kind that looks at moon-sized-balls-of-moles and goes "huh". And that comes across very well here. It's never dry, even though it includes plenty of equations and stuff so you can follow along with the math.
I also admire Munroe's research. He often tries to model complex scenarios - not unusual - but also weird and funny ones, so there are a lot of calculations (including on xkcd/what-if) that are footnoted with approximations from a random obscure paper, because that was the closest he could get. There's an absolutely amazing chapter where he basically calls up Chris Hadfield, the astronaut, and asks him dozens of very specific scenarios to hear what Hadfield would recommend in order to land yourself safely. It was just so cool to read about and Hadfield has definitely put a huge amount of thought into it - he was a test pilot first, and has enormous amounts of experience in just this subject, and it's an absolutely fascinating interview. Seriously, worth the price of admission alone.
Also absolute gems are the sports chapter. Like I said before, it's pretty easy to slide into being derisive about things you don't like and care about, but Munroe isn't - he just adds his own twist on how sports might work. It ends up with estimates about the Rohirrim's charge through orcs. Really, overall great. 10/10
Field Manual For the Amateur Geologist by Alan Cvancara
Nonfiction, geology/science. I picked this up as well as another short introduction, because I don't know much about geology and it was sort of becoming more apparent as I was learning more about paleontology. Fossils are rock!
I can't rate it on how accurate it is, being a complete amateur. Cvancara goes through the various landforms and how they are molded - by the plate tectonics, or wind, or waves, or rivers, or glaciers - as well as rock type (my head spins, there are too many, can't we just crush up a sample and just mass-spectrometer it or something). Then, he also has a few interesting chapters like "how to start a rock collection" (be alert, be ethical, organize it in some way for heaven's sake), or "how to pan for gold" (fascinating), "broadly how petro-geologists look for oil" and such. I felt he didn't define terms enough sometimes and wasted it on instead including pronunciation guides on words that are pretty common - seriously, I'd rather you just gave a definition. It's quite compact - there's a lot of ground covered in not much space.
I also have new admiration for geologists. So many of the formations seem so similar at first glance and even at second or third glances. Plus, and this must be so aggravating, when you are interested in the rock underlying us, so much of the world is overlaid with soil and plants (sometimes thickly, in forests) and also human infrastructure - so you can't exactly peel them off and see underneath it. Cvancara advises you to look for anywhere the ground is cut into, like by a river or even in a man-made cut, like the passes blown through rock to make highway roads straight.
Also! This book was published in the 1990's and it is so 90's in so many ways. He helpfully includes detail to help you get more information. For example, send off to this PO box by mail to get maps. There's no mention whatsoever of GPS or satellites. And the naming of the geological ages - which I am at least slightly familiar with - are a little different, reflecting the changes that have been made in the intervening 30 years to the GTS. It was pretty entertaining! 8/10
My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir
Nonfiction, journal. John Muir was a great lover of the natural world and the American Sierra especially, and the founder of the Sierra Mountain Club. It was pretty wonderful to read this. He was asked by a friend to assist moving sheep up to mountain pasture in Yosemite, accepted with great joy, and wrote a few paragraphs or pages every day.
You can absolutely read the love and wonder and delight he took in the natural surroundings in every entry he writes. He observes the clouds, and describes the rivers and streams, and notes down the little animal life and big animal life alike, from squirrels to bears. He catalogues and notes the botany too - the flowers and shrubs and trees - and there is much to observe as they move the sheep from the dry California scrub up through the greener mountain shoulder up till they start to thin out again from the altitude. He is just so full of admiration and joy, and it never ceases, it's refreshing to read.
I also enormously enjoyed his anecdotes of the people and the sheep especially. Sheep are pretty stupid and his accounts, interspersed here and there between the observation of Yosemite, of how he and the shepherd struggle to get them through various difficulties is both wry and hilarious. He doesn't have the money to just hare off into the mountains and bring enough supplies, so he jumps at these chances, but I wish I could read an entire book of John Muir's anecdotes about shepherding or something. They were so entertaining! 8/10
The Art of Theft by Sherry Thomas
Mystery, historical fiction. This is the fourth book in Thomas's Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes pretends that her brother is an invalid and acts as his speaker and his eyes and ears, but of course it is her doing all the analysis, with some help from Mrs Watson. Charlotte is from a middle class family who wants to social climb, and Charlotte deliberately ends up ruining her reputation and getting away.
The books have one central mystery but the overall characters progress, we learn more about what's going on. I found that this one was easier to get into, and I liked the resolution of the plot. I do kind of forget how the different relationships are twisted though - I know the ACD canon very well and between books, forget how certain characters are related or who is who and what's a nod to what (there are Stapletons - no relation or association to Baskerville for example). And I found Thomas's writing sometimes really great and the conceits great - I enjoy Charlotte's conception of Maximum Tolerable Chins - but sometimes it falls short. I don't know. Maybe I've read too many of her books. I still think the romance is the strongest part.
Also, I think that the Lady Sherlock books must take place in the same universe as some of her other books. Miss Redmayne is studying to be a doctor - I think she is the fully-fledged physician that tends to Lady Helena. 7/10
Early Riser by Jasper Fforde
Post-apocalyptic, satire. In this future, the planet has gotten very cold, and to cope, humans hibernate - but not well. Some just never wake again, or they will partially wake and wander around like zombies. But it's not a planet of howling winters like Hoth with no infrastructure - it's one with a lot of corporate wealth at stake. Morphenox, a drug that mostly makes sure you survive the winter (except for that pesky zombifying thing), is manufactured by a massive pharmaceutical company.
I have so many thoughts about this novel. I'm actually having trouble getting them out because I have so many.
1. Jasper Fforde didn't write a book for...several years, before this came out. Before this, I think he wrote one a year. As someone who checked his website periodically to see when the Shades of Grey sequel would come out (please Fforde, you left us on a cliffhanger!) he actually writes he had an inexplicable and distressing period where he apparently just didn't write. And about this novel, that he sat down to try to write something that he eventually realized was not him - he tried to write something that was someone else, so he had to slash and rewrite it many times, and put himself back into it. He certainly does wry post-apocalyptic absurdity, but he does it with his own humour (this last clause is my thoughts, not what he said). And he also mentions that it's very anvilicious, but that there are times you just have to. This is just after 2016.
2. I can see all of that. Personally, I love Fforde's comic absurdity - I like absurdity generally, and I find his to be very entertaining. I absolutely love the weird (and impossible) inventions. But I felt the ending was weirdly not grim enough. It's a deeply messed up world - Morphenox's motto of equality in sleep is obviously undercut by the fact that only the rich can afford it (and to make it through the winter), plus the fact there's a small chance you'll become braindead and then treated as not-a-human and reassigned to the menial or dangerous tasks that no one wants to do, free slave labour. The book's obviously in response to our current problems; there are some books you don't need publishing metadata to know when it was published. The world has cooled almost catastrophically instead of warming. But all the other things of the world, the social parts, are still there. There are still huge corporations which may have started as small operations and for the benefit of others, but which have taken on a life of their own and become this juggernaut crushing anyone and everyone in the pursuit of expansion and profit. There's all the weird fairy tales and urban legends that spring up among a community, except centered very tightly around Winter. There's collateralized debt. There's much larger infrastructure around adoption and foster homes, because if there's a high risk of death every year obviously there'll be shifts.
3. However, I do know Shades of Grey pretty well and that familiarity made me more aware, I think, of the similarities between the two. There's a very similar protagonist in Eddie (SoG) and Charlie (ER). The baffling society that both operate in - though I suppose SoG's is governmental and ER's is corporate - also ring similarly. I mention it mostly because I find this kind of thing to be incredibly distracting, but I'm not sure it actually bothers other people. I don't mind this in a series, and in fact am quite happy to accept it then, but when authors or other artists create separate works and it still makes me think always of their other work, it distracts me a lot.
4. I do really enjoy all the wordplay that Fforde always brings. The Winter exerts an incredibly strong pressure on the society (maybe too strong - I mean this in a Doyalist way). Therefore there are different despised social roles, for example. Those who don't sleep through are seen as drains on society's resources, as they burn more in food while others are sleeping, they're Winsomniacs. Or there are nomads that exist outside of the general society (Womads). So many new terms, all winterized. I find them extremely entertaining, though in the beginning as they were being introduced in rapid succession, somewhat overwhelming. I still think even a society so shaped by Winter would still have new words that do not refer to winter so overtly, though.
5. It's set in Wales and Fforde has a nice selection of photos on his site about it, plus extra contextual information on how he reversed a lot of the Beeching cuts, though of course the train doesn't run in the winter. You only realize about 75% of the way through that they're not speaking English but Welsh (I enjoyed this) and also that's when you find out the Villains, which I had mentally grouped in a class like Womads, also outside of the general society, are English. I'm not sure what to say, except that's definitely very pointed, but Fforde can do what he wants. It was pretty entertaining though.
Overall, 8/10. The similarities to SoG just bothered me otherwise it'd have been higher.
How-To by Randall Munroe
Nonfiction, humour. This is I think Munroe's third book, and it's his book about how to do things just taken to hilarious extremes. After all, you can always just add a few more zeros to your input values!
I love xkcd and Munroe and absolutely loved this book. xkcd is a very long running series with a lot of content, and I think you can get a good sense of who Munroe is as a person from it - endlessly curious, willing to dig into the guts of things to find information, unabashedly interested in space and physics and robots and the natural world altogether, plus sf/f, and also, honestly, kind. He also has a pretty deadpan kind of humour too - the kind that looks at moon-sized-balls-of-moles and goes "huh". And that comes across very well here. It's never dry, even though it includes plenty of equations and stuff so you can follow along with the math.
I also admire Munroe's research. He often tries to model complex scenarios - not unusual - but also weird and funny ones, so there are a lot of calculations (including on xkcd/what-if) that are footnoted with approximations from a random obscure paper, because that was the closest he could get. There's an absolutely amazing chapter where he basically calls up Chris Hadfield, the astronaut, and asks him dozens of very specific scenarios to hear what Hadfield would recommend in order to land yourself safely. It was just so cool to read about and Hadfield has definitely put a huge amount of thought into it - he was a test pilot first, and has enormous amounts of experience in just this subject, and it's an absolutely fascinating interview. Seriously, worth the price of admission alone.
Also absolute gems are the sports chapter. Like I said before, it's pretty easy to slide into being derisive about things you don't like and care about, but Munroe isn't - he just adds his own twist on how sports might work. It ends up with estimates about the Rohirrim's charge through orcs. Really, overall great. 10/10
Field Manual For the Amateur Geologist by Alan Cvancara
Nonfiction, geology/science. I picked this up as well as another short introduction, because I don't know much about geology and it was sort of becoming more apparent as I was learning more about paleontology. Fossils are rock!
I can't rate it on how accurate it is, being a complete amateur. Cvancara goes through the various landforms and how they are molded - by the plate tectonics, or wind, or waves, or rivers, or glaciers - as well as rock type (my head spins, there are too many, can't we just crush up a sample and just mass-spectrometer it or something). Then, he also has a few interesting chapters like "how to start a rock collection" (be alert, be ethical, organize it in some way for heaven's sake), or "how to pan for gold" (fascinating), "broadly how petro-geologists look for oil" and such. I felt he didn't define terms enough sometimes and wasted it on instead including pronunciation guides on words that are pretty common - seriously, I'd rather you just gave a definition. It's quite compact - there's a lot of ground covered in not much space.
I also have new admiration for geologists. So many of the formations seem so similar at first glance and even at second or third glances. Plus, and this must be so aggravating, when you are interested in the rock underlying us, so much of the world is overlaid with soil and plants (sometimes thickly, in forests) and also human infrastructure - so you can't exactly peel them off and see underneath it. Cvancara advises you to look for anywhere the ground is cut into, like by a river or even in a man-made cut, like the passes blown through rock to make highway roads straight.
Also! This book was published in the 1990's and it is so 90's in so many ways. He helpfully includes detail to help you get more information. For example, send off to this PO box by mail to get maps. There's no mention whatsoever of GPS or satellites. And the naming of the geological ages - which I am at least slightly familiar with - are a little different, reflecting the changes that have been made in the intervening 30 years to the GTS. It was pretty entertaining! 8/10
