Book round-up: October 2020
Nov. 11th, 2020 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sixthlightWriting continued to take precedence over reading for me this month; I read two books for book club, one quick re-read (Proper English by K J Charles, which I have reviewed here before and shall not go over again, save to say that it’s an excellent comfort re-read), and one novel. At this rate I won’t hit a hundred books this year, which is a little sad but given my dry patch in Level 4 perhaps not unexpected.
Swordheart (T Kingfisher)
Also romantic fantasy in Not Quite D&D Land, about a widow who accidentally inherits a sword that summons a magically-bound warrior from the past; shenanigans ensue as they try to ensure her awful relatives don’t force her to re-marry. I have concluded after two T Kingfisher books that something about her writing makes me grumpy in the same way Seanan McGuire does; something about the uncanny valley of it almost being exactly what I want but then not quite? Or hmm, no, it’s that both books have been about female protagonists escaping abusive domestic situations and I have a very low tolerance for that. Add in minimal queer rep and I’m out. Sorry, Ursula Vernon, your Twitter feed continues to amuse.
The End of Everything (Katie Mack)
All the ways the universe could end, from a cosmologist’s perspective. Very engagingly written and accessible to non-experts, lots of expertly-used pop culture references. Perhaps not a recommended read if you’re experiencing existential dread, but I haven’t really read a cosmology book in fifteen years so I was delighted to catch up on the latest, and ultimately all the universe’s possible fates are well outside my lifetime (uh...mostly…) so what’s to worry about?
Entangled Life (Merlin Sheldrake)
A book by someone who loves fungi a lot and would like you to love them as well. Occasionally oversteps its bounds in terms of evolutionary speculation (is it really meaningful to argue that mushrooms ‘control’ us? ….no, Merlin) but an entertaining read and had a few facts I hadn’t caught up with, like electrical impulses in hyphal networks. As a trained environmental microbiologist I am definitely not the target audience, which I do take into account. I tolerated its flights of fancy much more after finding out the author is fairly freshly out of his PhD; I think I would have preferred the book he might write twenty years from now (this one is very Excited Twenty-Something White Male Cambridge Graduate) but I’ll take this in the meantime.
Swordheart (T Kingfisher)
Also romantic fantasy in Not Quite D&D Land, about a widow who accidentally inherits a sword that summons a magically-bound warrior from the past; shenanigans ensue as they try to ensure her awful relatives don’t force her to re-marry. I have concluded after two T Kingfisher books that something about her writing makes me grumpy in the same way Seanan McGuire does; something about the uncanny valley of it almost being exactly what I want but then not quite? Or hmm, no, it’s that both books have been about female protagonists escaping abusive domestic situations and I have a very low tolerance for that. Add in minimal queer rep and I’m out. Sorry, Ursula Vernon, your Twitter feed continues to amuse.
The End of Everything (Katie Mack)
All the ways the universe could end, from a cosmologist’s perspective. Very engagingly written and accessible to non-experts, lots of expertly-used pop culture references. Perhaps not a recommended read if you’re experiencing existential dread, but I haven’t really read a cosmology book in fifteen years so I was delighted to catch up on the latest, and ultimately all the universe’s possible fates are well outside my lifetime (uh...mostly…) so what’s to worry about?
Entangled Life (Merlin Sheldrake)
A book by someone who loves fungi a lot and would like you to love them as well. Occasionally oversteps its bounds in terms of evolutionary speculation (is it really meaningful to argue that mushrooms ‘control’ us? ….no, Merlin) but an entertaining read and had a few facts I hadn’t caught up with, like electrical impulses in hyphal networks. As a trained environmental microbiologist I am definitely not the target audience, which I do take into account. I tolerated its flights of fancy much more after finding out the author is fairly freshly out of his PhD; I think I would have preferred the book he might write twenty years from now (this one is very Excited Twenty-Something White Male Cambridge Graduate) but I’ll take this in the meantime.
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