Kat: With book five, Last Dragon Standing, I have finished Rachel Aaron’s HEARTSTRIKERS series. My daughter and I enjoyed it. Now we have started Marissa Meyer’s LUNAR CHRONICLES and will finish the first book, Cinder, today. So far, we’re entertained, and we plan to pick up the second book, Scarlet, next.
Bill: This week I read Amanda Moore’s poetry collection Requeening, the challenging Understanding Genes by Kostas Kampourakis, and Pamela Paul’s light but well written collection of essays, 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet . In audio, I finished Jill Lepore’s excellent collection The Story of America: Essays on Origins. All my genre intake was video this week. I watched Dune, short take is visually beautiful but stunted characterization (long review to come). I’m still enjoying Apple TV’s Foundation adaptation, but with growing concern about the “specialness” of two characters. And I quite liked the first three episodes of Invasion, which takes on alien invasion from a relatively unique, character-driven, people-on-the-ground approach. Still enjoying Babylon 5 (in season 2) though not quite getting the massive love for it. And I wrapped up genre viewing with Halloween (the original) which remains a great film, and The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. And it’s non-genre, but I’m adding a plug for Apple TV’s Acapulco, which we’ve utterly fallen in love with. Best new show for us since Ted Lasso and shares a lot of its DNA
Marion: Last week I finished Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders. This is nonfiction; part writing how-to and part inspirational (the subtitle is, “How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories.”) My first take after I finished it was, “Lots of inspiration and thought-provoking content–not much craft advice,” but upon reflection there’s quite a bit about craft in it, particularly around revision. I’ve already ordered two copies as gifts. (By the way, the supply stream blockages are REAL. If you’re looking at books for holiday gifts, order them now.)
Sandy: Moi? I am currently reading a novel that I have long wanted to check out, Harold M. Sherman’s 1946 offering entitled The Green Man. The book is proving to be very amusing indeed, a bit dated but often very funny. I look forward to being able to share some thoughts about this one with you all very shortly….
Terry: I’m not quite halfway through Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, and I get more enmeshed with each page I read. McGuire’s good with writing adolescents, but this time she’s also writing about some deep … um, magic? Alchemy? She’s got a couple of characters unlike any she’s written so far. I really like this book. I finished David Baldacci’s Split Second, one of his earlier novels; it shows it. I also read and loved Where the Drowned Girls Go, the next in Seanan McGuire’s WAYWARD CHILDREN series of novellas — I definitely recommend these, but read them in order! I’m also dipping into The Miniature Wife and Other Stories by Manuel Gonzales, every story more surrealistic than the one before. I’m also working on The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette, which I’m not sure about; after 50 pages, I’m not quite captured by it.
I just finished Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie, and I think you might enjoy that as a neuroscientist, Kat. It’s a short read (but with 80 pages of footnotes), subtitled “How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth”, and it covers a fair amount of ground on the “replication crisis”, the journal publication-citation-academic tenure ecosystem, and the loss of public trust in some areas of science due to constant overhyping of results.
That sounds like a worthwhile read.
Thanks, Paul! I have found it on Amazon and will get an audio copy. It sounds like a good read for students in my Research Methods course. I often assign these sorts of readings for extra credit.