Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Between the bus trip to and from Montreal, and time spent reading while I was visiting rysmiel, I finished six or seven books in the last week, including one reread.

So:

Periodic Tales: A cultural history of the elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams: This is basically what it says on the tin, through a personal as well as British lens. This is I think best read as a series of interesting anecdotes, though I went "wait a minute" on enough things, from osmium being "the densest thing known" [me: what about neutronium?] to the claim (in the section on calcium) that the White House was so named for being whitewashed (in the section on calcium) that I would double-check any facts in here before quoting them.

Clockwork Boys (Clocktaur Wars book 1) and The Wonder Engine (Clocktaur Wars book 2), by tkingfisher (This is why it's "six or seven" books: the two parts are novella-length, and book 2 picks up immediately after the end of book 1.) I liked this a lot: it's a fantasy about a kingdom being invaded/ravaged by some magical(?) creatures, and the unlikely group sent in search of some, any, defense after a more plausible group vanished. Demon tattoos enforcing the group's obedience, if not loyalty. The group leader, Slate (a forger who was convicted of treason) recruits someone by asking if he'd like to go on a suicide mission. The story also includes attack tattoos--aimed at the wearers. Also gnoles, and I don't remember which other Kingfisher book they were in.

Unthinkable, by Helen Thomson: Thomson writes about a variety of people with unusual brains as ways of talking about the human mind and brain more generally. The examples include a woman who is always lost, a man with impressively good memory of his past, a man whose schizophrenia makes him believe he is a tiger, people who believe themselves to be dead, and a color-blind man with the kind of synesthesia that sees letters in different colors, whose brain sees colors his eyes cannot. The individual sections were interesting, but it felt as though the whole was less than the sum of the parts; on the other hand, that may depend on how much the reader already knows.

Exhalation, by Ted Chiang: a second collection of Chiang's sf and fantasy stories. I liked it, though there's nothing here as memorable as "Story of Your Life" (which is a pretty high standard of comparison).

Hawk, by Stephen Brust: another Taltos book, a bit more about relationships (and wanting some sort of connection) than some of the previous, as Vlad tries a complicated plan to get the Jhereg to leave him alone.

Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett: reread of a Discworld novel, which I enjoyed.

I'm going to try doing "reading Wednesday" posts again, without the "what I plan to read next" section, because I'm bad at predicting that.

Recent reading:

Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Sorcery and Cecilia and The Mislaid Magician. These were rereads, mostly during nights when I was having trouble sleeping and wanted something light. Still fun. This is volumes 1 and 3 of a trilogy, because for some reason I don't own volume 2.

Merle A. Reinikka, A History of the Orchid. This is more a history of orchid collecting; I asked the library for it after seeing a mention somewhere, and don't remember the context. I stopped reading partway through, for several reasons, including that there isn't the right kind or level of detail for me; irritation at old-fashioned and even racist language; and the topic not being at the center of my interests. References to "Oriental" plants and using "Western Hemisphere" instead of "Americas" were distracting, but I could accept them in a book from 1970; the phrase that stopped me cold was a reference to European orchid-hunters running into "hostile savages." This on a page where the author also tells the reader how those hunters had destroyed areas of forest and completely eliminated the local populations of orchids; "savage" seems in this context to mean the locals, who weren't European or urbanized. I can't recommend this one even if you're looking for something on this subject.

James Fallon, The Psychopath Inside. This is a first-person memoir by a neurologist/researcher who discovered that his brain scan matched the patterns seen in criminal psychopaths, and started wondering what that meant and why he hadn't done such horrible things. I'd read a magazine-article version of this a couple of years ago. He talks some about gradually realizing/listening to friends and family who told him that no, he really wasn't "normal" in things like his risk tolerance and willingness to ignore possible harm to others.

The author hasn't (from what he writes here, at least) tried to kill or sabotage anyone. But he has left colleagues holding the bag at what were supposed to be joint conference presentations, because he was having fun hanging out at a bar. And he invited his brother to explore a cave with him, concealing the fact that it contained bats that carried a potentially lethal infection. (His brother was not pleased when he stumbled on that fact months later, needless to say.) One bit that fell under "what kind of person says that?" crossed with "ugh, Libertarians" [he identifies as one, and says it's one of the important things he and his wife have in common] was the author's assertion that he's not a monster, so he wouldn't watch a child starve to death in front of him—followed immediately by saying that he would happily eliminate all welfare payments even though he knows it means people would die, because that would be good for the species. So, not ethics but an odd combination of squeamishness with a surprising willingness to admit that he is in favor of people children starving to death.

Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library. I am working my way through the Miss Marple books (I think I read these in my teens, but that's long enough ago that I remember nothing at all about them). This novel is "what it says on the tin" in the sense that Christie says in the introduction that she wanted to write that already-cliched shape of story but only if she could break already-existing expectations for that shape of story. A dead body is found in the library of one of Miss Marple's acquaintances, and the book is about the police, with her assistance, figuring out who the dead woman was, why she was left there, and by whom. As seems to be the pattern here, people who hadn't already known Miss Marple assume she is a stereotypical harmless old lady; her crime-solving "secret," such as it is, is to listen for gossip and assume the worst of everybody.

Jim C. Hines, Codex Born. The continuing adventures of a young "libriomancer," someone whose magic consists of being able to pull things out of books and use them. "Things" can be weapons, healing spells, or almost anything small enough: one of the main characters is a dryad, born from an acorn someone pulled out of a bad fantasy novel. The main constraint is that the same book has to have been read by a lot of people; a magician can't materialize something just by describing it om paper. This is fast-paced and good, but it's definitely the middle book of a trilogy; start with Libriomancer.

Catherynne Valente, Smoky and the feast of Mabon. A sweet but rather earnest picture book about a girl getting lost in the woods and celebrating a pagan holiday; there's a smaller-print introduction that tells the adult reader more about Mabon. This is another book that I grabbed off our shelves because I wanted light reading; cattitude is a serious Valente fan, which I assume is why we have this, since neither of us is pagan nor do we have children of the age this is aimed at. conuly, you can add this to your list of picture books with protagonists of color, but note the explicit religious content.

Currently reading:

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice. I'm about a third of the way through this one, and so far it's very good. More later, or go find any of the write-ups by people who have already finished it. (This won the Hugo and Nebula for best novel for 2014.)

Julie Smith, Death before Facebook. A mystery novel that I downloaded a while ago; my current kindle book. I'm not using the kindle much, for some reason; I wouldn't be surprised if I don't finish this until partway through my next flight to Boston.