Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

One read-aloud, and one book I made my way through slowly on the kindle.

The most recent book cattitude and adrian_turtle read aloud, to me and each other, was Joan Aiken's The Serial Garden, a collection of gentle fantasy short stories about the Armitage family, who a lot of strange things happen to. Mostly the strange things happen on Mondays (thanks to a wish made in the first story), and some but not all of them end at midnight.

The stories aren't a serial, and each one stands alone, but it makes sense to read them in publication order, because there is some continuity. One story is about the family acquiring a unicorn, which then turns up, mostly in small roles, in several later stories. A lot more strange things happen to the Armitages than to the people around them, but their neighbors treat a lot of the fantastic events as just part of life. So, they didn't want to be housing hundreds of displaced goblins, but if the council sent them, there's no point complaining further.

I enjoyed these, and will probably reread them in a few years.

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I finished The Light Eaters, by Zoë Schlanger, just after midnight last night, and decided to count it as my last book finished in 2024.

The subtitle is "how the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on Earth." The author, and the scientists she talks to, are thinking about what "intelligence" means, what awareness is and how it works, and what is a plant anyway? Is intelligence (just) about making good decisions? (how) can any of this work without anything like a nervous system?

The book talks about plants as communities, which sometimes share nutrients via connected root systems, as well as the question of whether symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria are in some meaningful sense part of the plant.

People working in the field are (still) leery of saying anything like "plant intelligence" after the best-selling The Secret Life of Plants, the book that had people talking to their houseplants to encourage them to grow, but they can't find other useful vocabulary for their observations and theories.

There's a section on boquila, a vine that seems to have an incredible ability to mimic the plants growing near it, and people's guesses about how the plant does it. The question is both how does the plant know what the plant it's growing on or next to looks like, and the plasticity required for boquila to take so many different shapes. Did previous exposure to plants from the same ecosystem give boquila the ability to recognize and mimic a specific neighbor? If that's true, it pushes the "how do they know?" question back, rather than answering it, and there's at least one study that showed the plant can mimic a plant from a completely different, distant ecosystem. Is the plant responding to DNA or other info carried by bacteria?

The author notes that understanding boquila's plasticity might enable scientists to give similar plasticity to domesticated plants, to produce more drought-tolerant food crops, for example.

Uncommon Carriers, by John McPhee: McPhee spends time with a long-distance tanker truck driver, barge crews, the staff of the UPS hub in Louisville, and coal train. The tanker truck section includes the driver's opinions of people who drive everything smaller on the roads (from passenger cars to box trucks and buses). In the railroad section McPhee talks about unions, and there's a little about train spotters and hobos.

This is the sort of narrative non-fiction McPhee has been doing well for a long time. I bounced off a couple of his books in the early 2000s, and then decided to try McPhee again a couple of months ago, looking at what I could get from the library in e-book form. I enjoyed this, and will probably add another McPhee or two to my library hold list. This is from 2006, meaning the part of the book about the coal trains talks about coal mines and trains being busier than they had been in a couple of decades. McPhee and his informations don't mention cind, solar, and the shut-downs of older coal-burning plants aren't mentioned, though automation in rail dispatching and package sorting and loading are, When McPhee wrote this, UPS wasn't just one of the world's largest airlines, it had gotten into the education business at the community-college level.

Reading aloud:

Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons; Cattitude and Adrian sometimes passed the book back and forth in mid-paragraph because one of them was laughing too much to continue. The book and its over-the-top descriptions very funny, even without my being familiar with what it's parodying. It's also oddly and incidentally science-fictional, with offhand references to the "Anglo-Nicaraguan war of 1946," and there are video phones, but set in a society where it's unremarkable to take a horse-drawn wagon into town to use a phone there.

The Sirens Sang of Murder, by Sarah Caudwell. I had read this, but enough years ago that I remembered almost nothing. A humorous mystery, with occasional comments by the characters about feeling like they are in an old-fashioned detective novel, and no writer would use that sort of clue nowadays.

(Also, I've reread some things that don't particularly seem worth noting here.)

Recent reading:

Aftermarket Afterlife, by Seanan McGuire: the most recent Incryptid book. Contains significant spoilers for events earlier in the series, including but not limited to the immediately-previous Spelunking through Bedlam

The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels, by India Holton, a light, odd fantasy romance novel set in an alternate England during Queen Victoria's reign

Letters to Half-Moon Street, by Sarah Wallace, M/M romance set in an alternate past, where same-sex relationships are accepted as a matter of course, but one of the main characters' family is pushing him to get married, offering to send him a list of suitable women, or one of suitable men.

The Sybil in Her Grave, by Sarah Caudwell, another read-aloud. This one turned unexpectedly dark near the end, after several plausible murder suspects were ruled out. Cattitude kept asserting, as the story went along, that "Rodrigo is innocent." [Rodrigo is a vulture, and did not in fact kill anyone.]

Lyorn, by Steven Brust, the most recent Vlad Taltos (Jhereg) book. This one contains spoilers for many of the previous volumes. Much of the book takes place in a theater, and the text is full of lyrics filking songs from musicals. I did find myself thinking "Mike [Ford] did it better" (in How Much for Just the Planet?); the similarity may be part of why Brust dedicated this book to him.

I would recommend all of these except "The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels," with the notes about

Currently reading: Well, I've been partway through _The Rediscovery of America_ for weeks, and keep not picking it up again.

I haven't read a lot of books lately, and have both read short things online (blog posts and Discord conversations and news stories) and played little games online, like Quordle and Metazooa and Infinite Craft). I have been advised to step away from my computer screen at least an hour before bedtime, but on the days I do that, am as likely to pick up a puzzle book as to read either a hardcopy book or on my kindle. But I finished a book about books last night, so here's a Wednesday reading post. I liked both these books:

Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer, is a novel that I think started as a series of related stories about Beck, a girl growing up on a "seastead," a group of artificial islands outside any government's borders. She lives with her father, who is powerful within the not-called-a-government structure of their seastead. Along with going to school, Beck earns some spending money by finding things for people, like brown shoelaces or a pair of size 9 black sandals: an unofficial barter system for things people brought with them from the mainland and discovered they could do without. The book is narrated by Beck, which I think works well for world-building, as she figures out more of what's going on under the surface. Starting with those small-scale errands, Beck gradually discovers more about the seastead, angering her father in the process: he is definitely the sort of Libertarian who might say "the government doesn't own the children, the parents own the children," and sees no need to explain the orders he's giving to his teenaged daughter.

I'm going to cheat here, and quote from Naomi's annual guide to "gifts for people you hate": The book includes mystery, danger, the IWW (International Workers of the World) union, reality TV, an epidemic, and an atheist humanitarian aid group with a ship called the Mary Ellen Carter. If anyone you have to give gifts to flies one of those “don’t tread on me” flags, this book would be the perfect gift for pretending that you 100% sincerely assumed they would like it (they will likely be thoroughly annoyed by the time they’re done reading).

Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, by Irene Vallejo, is broader than the subtitle implies. This is a history of books, and paper, and of reading and kibraries and bookstores, with some discussion of modern and contemporary librarians and censorship. It's also part memoir. The "ancient world" here is mostly Europe, the Middle East, and the parts of Asia that Alexander the Great conquered. One of the things Vallejo is interested in is how shared literature helped create and maintain a culture in Hellenistic times, and afterwards. Vallejo discusses the long hard work of keeping books alive when they had to be recopied every couple of hundred years, and the difficult decisions librarians faced, of which of their books were worth the time and effort for that sort of preservation. Vallejo also talks about the spread of literacy, and who was allowed or required to read: in ancient Rome, enslaved people were expected to read aloud to their owners, because the Romans believed that reading, unlike listening, put the reader under the author's control.

[My ebook of the Vallejo is badly overdue, and now that I've finished it I can sync my kindle and go on to something else.]

I don't seem to have done one of these since the middle of July. So:

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older, is a very good sf/mystery/romance novel. It's set on Jupiter after humans have made Earth uninhabitable. They're living on small platforms attached to rails at a distance from the planet that humans can handle, while they work on figuring out how to restore a livable ecology on Earth. They call their refuge/temporary home Giant, but the moons have their current names. The romance part is, the narrator's ex-lover asks her to work together on a mystery, and they have to figure out whether it's possible for t-hem to be lovers, or even good friends, again. The main plot arc is the mystery, plus gradually-revealed and well-done world-building.

The Wizard's Butler, by Nathan Lowell, is a pleasant low-stakes mystery; the title character has no experience as a butler and hadn't even thought about that as a possible job; he's hired on the basis of his experience as an army medic, after being fired from a job as a paramedic.

he Public Library, a Photographic Essay, by Robert Dawson, The Dawson book has photos of lots of different libraries, with text describing them, and some essays by other people. The photo captions were too small for me to read comfortably, but I enjoyed looking at the pictures and reading the larger-print written material. I think I found this while looking for "a book about libraries" for the Boston Public Library summer reading bingo card.

The Shoemaker's Wife and Old as the Hills, are both set in the author's Albion historical fantasy world. The Shoemaker's Wife is a romance set shortly after World War I, and the male protagonist is a just-demobilized soldier. He and his wife are both trying to find their way in peacetime, and with each other, after meetiong and marrying quickly during the war. Old as the Hills is set in 1939-40, and the war is important to the plot. Much of this book is about an attempt to use a magical transport network to rescue European Jews, while other people are working to stop the Germans from invading via the same portals.

The Appeal is an odd epistolary mystery story that didn't work for me, with rounds of "here are some more hints" from a lawyer to two trainees.

Mostly just another list, with some notes copied from my "booklog" file.

Lake, Celia, Winter's Charms. Three winter-themed novellas connected to some of her novels. I particularly liked the one about how Seth, Dilly, and Golshan became a triad (after Seth and Dilly were married, and also after Golshan was seriously wounded in the War).

Rather, Lina, Sisters of the Vast Black. Weird sf, with living spaceships, some of them convents, one of which is named Our Lady of Infinite Constellations, and vaguely hand-waved FTL. This is set a few decades after a very destructive war that left behind extremely nasty plagues. I enjoyed the story, but it is vastly implausible, and not just because it involves faster-than-light travel. This is the first in a loose series, but I didn't like it enough to look for the next one.

Christie, Agatha, After the Funeral and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Murder mysteries about Hercule Poirot, well constructed but ( spoiler )

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape A Dragon's Breath. A very good fantasy novel set in a somewhat alternate-history 19th century New England, with dragons. The viewpoint character is a member of the Wampanoag tribe, as is the author, and a significant part of the plot is driven by settler prejudices against the Indigenous inhabitants of the area. First in a trilogy, and I definitely want to read the next book.

Hogan, Linda, The Radiant Lives of Animals. A mix of poetry and natural history, hard to describe but I liked it. I think someone recommended this to me, but I don't remember who.

Mandel, Emily St. John. Sea of Tranquility. An oddly constructed novel about time travel and pandemics.

Dimaline, Cherie, Venco. This is a fantasy novel about a poor Metis woman from Toronto who finds a spoon, which connects her to women who are working against a deadline to assemhle a coven, and about her relationship with her grandmother. I liked this, and not just because it takes it takes older women seriously.

Recently finished:

The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman

Bound for Perdition, by Celia Lake

Everything for Everyone: an oral history of the New York Commune, by M. E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

One mystery (seems to be first of a series), on fantasy/historical romance (part of a series), on SF. Review later, maybe.

I've finished one book since the last reading post:

To Love and Be Wise, by Josephine Tey. This is a mystery novel from the middle of the twentieth century, which I found on adrian_turtle's bookshelves. A charming photographer turns up in London, befriends a family, gets invited to stay at their home in a rural village. He goes on a multi-day canoe trip writing/photography trip with one of his hosts, then vanishes one night. The viewpoint detective, and several of the other characters spend a lot of time thinking about who might have had a motive for murder. ( massive spoiler warning ) Content warning for random misogyny in passing, things like the detective observing that his friend has this or that virtue, which he/the narrative voice frames as essentially masculine. [I found this on Adrian's bookshelves, and don't think I'd read it before.]

Currently reading:

I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy -- This is a memoir, about parentification and emotional abuse. I'm most of the way through this, and it's good, I'm not sure "enjoying" is the right word here.

The Language of Houses: how buildings speak to us, by Alison Lurie. More or less what it says on the tin, in chapters divided into brief sections, and little overarching structure. The ebook is due in a couple of days, and I probably won't finish it, or re-borrow it later.

Life on the Rocks, by Juli Berwald, is narrative nonfiction book about the threats to coral reefs, including damage that has already been done by global warming, over-fishing, disease, and bombs, and efforts to preserve and restore some of the reefs.

The book is also part memoir. The stories about the coral, and about people who live near reefs and/or are trying to protect them, intertwine both with the trips Berwald took while doing her research, and with discussion of her daughter Isy's mental health problems, and some of her progress and setbacks.

And then it gets to 2020, and trips canceled or postponed because of the pandemic, including an Australian team racing to try a "cloud brightening" experiment with salt water spray, in order to cool the ocean water and buy some time in dealing with climate change. Berwald also talks about the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the protests after Floyd's death, and discusses some of the connections between structural racism and climate change.

I was also interested by the (relatively recent) connections between hobbyists who keep aquariums, and scientists who study corals. The hobbyists had developed useful techniques for growing new coral from small pieces, which scientists and people working on coral restoration are now using, and getting specimens from hobbyists means they can work without further disturbing the reefs.

By the end, it's not clear what things will help, but it is clear that one of the things going on with coral bleaching is the coral [animal] interactions, how algae react to things like warmer water, and changes in which algae are living with/in a given species of coral.

Several weeks' reading:

( cut for length )