November Book Log
I have no idea how it's December of 2021 now. Time has entirely lost its meaning somewhere, somehow. But apparently it is, so here's my November's book log post.
100. Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson
An account of the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, with a particular focus on Isaac Cline, who was an officer of the US Weather Bureau in Galveston, and who lost his home and his wife in the storm.
The second half of the book, describing the events of the storm and their aftermath, is pretty engaging, in a horrible and depressing sort of way. The first half, however, which has a lot to say about things like Cline's life, the state of weather forecasting at the time, the personalities of people in the Weather Bureau, and the growth of Galveston, is a lot more dry. (Horrible, tasteless pun very much not intended.) And Larson sometimes way overcompensates for this fact by over-writing in an attempt to make such things feel DRAMATIC and OMINOUS, an approach that backfires a bit for him, at least as far as I'm concerned.
Still, there are a lot of interesting tidbits of information there. And there is a low-key but pervasive thread of commentary through the whole book about how the state of weather forecasting at the time was just good enough to foster overconfidence without being good enough to actually prevent this sort of horror, and about the ways in which ego and politics got in the way of acting properly on the information that was available. Although, since this book was published in 1999, the relevance of all of this to any 21st century hurricanes and other climate problems must remain as an exercise for the reader.
Rating: 3.5/5
101. Things in Jars by Jess Kidd
It's 1863, and Bridie Devine, a detective of sorts with an unusual and interesting medical background, is investigating the kidnapping of a child. She's accompanied by the ghost of a dead boxer who latched onto her while she was walking through a graveyard, but that fact seems almost mundane when compared to the strange, violent, watery nature of the child herself.
This is a weird and fascinating novel, dark and magical and very hard to categorize. The writing is particularly remarkable, because it often seems as if it should come across as contrived, silly, even purple. And yet somehow it really, really works. I don't know how Jess Kidd pulls that off, but my hat's off to her for managing it, and for creating something this weirdly compelling with it.
Rating: 4/5, but I'm seriously tempted to kick it up another half star.
102. Cosmogramma by Corttia Newland
A collection of science fiction stories of various types, usually with an edge of social commentary.
The stories are mostly decent, and feature some intriguing ideas, but with one or two welcome exceptions, they never quite landed for me with anything like the impact I wanted them to have, and by the time I was done with the collection, I was feeling more than a little frustrated with that. I'm not even sure what it was that was causing the general failure to click with me. I think maybe I just didn't get along very well with the writing style, which somehow felt, most of the time, as if it was telling me about the worlds the author had created rather than immersing me in them.
Rating: 3/5
(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book)
103. Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt
A history of women at JPL (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory), from its origins in the 1940s, through many decades of exploring the solar system, up to the present day (or very nearly: the book was published in 2016). For much of this time, most of the women there were employed as computers, calculating complex engineering equations and rocket trajectories by hand with pencil and paper. If you've seen the movie Hidden Figures, or read the book it's based on, this is the same type of job the women featured there were doing elsewhere at NASA. (And, yes, not all of the women at JPL where white, either.) Later on, as electronic computers began to replace human ones, they became computer programmers, as well. And by now, of course, there are many female engineers working there, although still not in the same numbers as the men.
I wasn't always exactly engaged by the writing in this particular volume. It wanders back and forth between being a straightforward history and trying to go for a "narrative nonfiction" approach of dramatizing things from various women's POV, and the two things are grafted rather awkwardly together. (This seems to be a common structure in non-fiction these days, and too few writers, in my opinion, pull it off especially gracefully.) The subject matter is certainly interesting, though. Holt covers a lot of the space missions fairly quickly and not in immense depth, but as a general overview of what JPL has done in its history, it works well enough. And the lives and careers of these women provide a really vivid illustration of what life was like for working women in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, when equally qualified men and women were seldom hired for the same positions and a woman could be summarily fired for getting pregnant. These are worthwhile stories to hear and remember, and even if I have slightly mixed feelings about the writing here, I am unambiguously glad to see these intelligent, dedicated women getting the recognition they deserve.
Rating: 3.5/5
104. Treasury of Aesop's Fables
This collection of fables, which I bought at a library sale somewhere a while back, was published in 1973, but based on the writing, I'm guessing these particular English-language versions are a fair bit older than that, and the (hagiographic and not especially enlightening) "Life of Aesop" essay at the beginning may be older still. It also features small woodcut illustrations by Thomas Bewick (1753-1828).
I was interested to revisit some of the familiar fables from my childhood and maybe discover some more obscure ones I hadn't seen before, but I have to say I found this volume rather disappointing. They're not particularly engaging versions of the tales, are sprinkled with not-very-good poetry, and have appended morals that are often surprisingly hard to parse, and which sometimes seem to have little to do with the fable itself or even to flat-out contradict their apparent intent. I mean, I have certainly never seen the fox in the "sour grapes" story lauded as a paragon of wisdom before! Very often, too, these tales, in their references and sensibilities, seem to have much more of, say, 19th century England than 600 BCE Greece. Admittedly, different times and cultures adapting ancient stories to suit their own needs is fairly natural and perhaps not to be begrudged, but it's not really what I was looking for here. There also seems to be at least one odd omission: I have no idea where the tortoise and the hare might have run off to this time, but they are certainly nowhere to be found here.
All that having been said, though, at least a couple of these stories did give me a bit of a smile, being, as the kids these days say, #relatable. Like the one about the donkey who always longs for it to be whatever season it currently isn't. Who is, of course, being held up as a model for what not to do, but, man, I feel ya Mr. Donkey. I feel ya.
Rating: 2.5/5
105. Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell
This is the final book in the Simon Snow trilogy, which itself was a... spinoff?... of sorts from Rowell's novel Fangirl, Simon Snow being the Harry Potter-esque character the titular fangirl was writing her fanfiction about. And I will never cease to be tickled by the way Rowell basically ended up writing fiction based on her fictional fan's fictional fanfiction. Heh.
This one honestly maybe feels a little too strongly in touch with those fanfictional sensibilities when it comes to the relationship between Simon Snow and his vampiric frenemy-turned-boyfriend Baz, which gets a touch overdramatic for me in places. But it's at least an interestingly messy relationship. And there's plenty else going on here, too, including a guy who claims to be Simon's replacement as the prophesied Chosen One, a bit of difficulty involving a contract with a demon, and a couple of other budding romances, as well.
It didn't sweep me along quite as quickly or entertainingly as the first two books, I will admit, but it was still fun, and I still really like the way it addresses questions of what happens after the epic saga ends and everyone is left to figure out who they are in the aftermath.
Rating: 4/5
106. Bats by Phil Richardson
Yep, it's a book about bats: their anatomy, behavior, and senses, their place in Earth's ecosystems, and their many varieties, complete with lots of colorful photographs of bats whose appearances range from adorable to freaky. It's pretty short -- about 120 pages -- so it's really just a brief layman's overview of the subject, but apparently that's exactly what I needed, because I did not even realize until now how many really basic things I didn't know about bats. The writing, I will say, is pretty pedestrian, but I did not care about this at all, because I was busy happily learning all kinds of Fascinating Bat Facts. For example! Did you know that bats' feet are constructed in such a way that they are clenched when the muscles are relaxed? It takes an actual effort for a bat to uncurl its toes, and that's how bats are able to hang securely from a perch above them even while they're sound asleep. OK, maybe not everybody is going to find that sort of thing interesting, but I sure did, and I spent a lot of my time with this book just thinking "Wow, evolution is neat."
Rating: 4/5
107. Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
This sequel to Olive Kitteridge is structured much the same as the first book. Olive herself -- a woman I find a little bit difficult to like, but remarkably easy to love -- sits at the core of it, but many chapters barely namecheck her, focusing instead on on some of the other residents of her town on the coast of Maine as they live their own weird and mundane lives, lives we dip in and out of over the course of several years.
Some of these chapters worked better for me than others, but always I am impressed and moved by Strout's ability to capture some very complicated and profound human experiences in very simple language. Most particularly, in this case, the experience of aging and everything that goes with it.
Rating: 4/5
108. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
This is the story of Cora, a young woman who escapes from slavery in Georgia and into a complicated and often brutal fugitive life by way of the Underground Railroad. Except, here, the Underground Railroad is a literal railroad, underground.
It's a rough, rough read, one that forces the reader to stare directly into the dark, ugly heart of America. But it is undeniably effective.
I'm a little uncertain what to make of the ahistorical/magical realism element of things. When I try to intellectually detach myself from the novel a bit, take a step back and think about it, it seems like such a strange, unnecessary conceit, one that feels as if it somehow ought to detract, or at least distract, from the painful realism of everything else. And yet, in the experience of reading it, it works. I scarcely found myself even questioning it. And it does, perhaps, provide a rather powerful metaphor in the form of that subterranean darkness.
Rating: 4.5/5
109. Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson
This little volume is exactly what the title says it is: a book about semicolons. Watson looks a bit at the history of the semicolon, where it came from and how its usage has changed over time; examines the ways in which various writers have used the semicolon; and tells some interesting stories about how ambiguous punctuation in written laws has had surprisingly big effects. But it's about more than that, too. Watson's central idea here involves changing how we think about grammar rules and the way we apply them. She's also not remotely shy about voicing plenty of other opinions on related subjects ranging from linguistic snobbery to the proper way to approach the interpretation of laws. It's all very thought-provoking, and Watson's writing is lively and fun to read. She picks great examples of other people's writing to talk about, too.
All-in-all, it's much more interesting and entertaining than you might expect any book about semicolons to be, even if you're the kind of person who's interested in reading books about punctuation to begin with. (Which I am, obviously.) It's also gotten me to think a bit differently about semicolons. I confess, I've long felt reluctant to use them even when I've really wanted to, out of some sense that others would find them pretentious or distracting, but I'm remembering now how fond of them I once was and how useful they can actually be.
Rating: 4/5
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1017606.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.
100. Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson
An account of the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, with a particular focus on Isaac Cline, who was an officer of the US Weather Bureau in Galveston, and who lost his home and his wife in the storm.
The second half of the book, describing the events of the storm and their aftermath, is pretty engaging, in a horrible and depressing sort of way. The first half, however, which has a lot to say about things like Cline's life, the state of weather forecasting at the time, the personalities of people in the Weather Bureau, and the growth of Galveston, is a lot more dry. (Horrible, tasteless pun very much not intended.) And Larson sometimes way overcompensates for this fact by over-writing in an attempt to make such things feel DRAMATIC and OMINOUS, an approach that backfires a bit for him, at least as far as I'm concerned.
Still, there are a lot of interesting tidbits of information there. And there is a low-key but pervasive thread of commentary through the whole book about how the state of weather forecasting at the time was just good enough to foster overconfidence without being good enough to actually prevent this sort of horror, and about the ways in which ego and politics got in the way of acting properly on the information that was available. Although, since this book was published in 1999, the relevance of all of this to any 21st century hurricanes and other climate problems must remain as an exercise for the reader.
Rating: 3.5/5
101. Things in Jars by Jess Kidd
It's 1863, and Bridie Devine, a detective of sorts with an unusual and interesting medical background, is investigating the kidnapping of a child. She's accompanied by the ghost of a dead boxer who latched onto her while she was walking through a graveyard, but that fact seems almost mundane when compared to the strange, violent, watery nature of the child herself.
This is a weird and fascinating novel, dark and magical and very hard to categorize. The writing is particularly remarkable, because it often seems as if it should come across as contrived, silly, even purple. And yet somehow it really, really works. I don't know how Jess Kidd pulls that off, but my hat's off to her for managing it, and for creating something this weirdly compelling with it.
Rating: 4/5, but I'm seriously tempted to kick it up another half star.
102. Cosmogramma by Corttia Newland
A collection of science fiction stories of various types, usually with an edge of social commentary.
The stories are mostly decent, and feature some intriguing ideas, but with one or two welcome exceptions, they never quite landed for me with anything like the impact I wanted them to have, and by the time I was done with the collection, I was feeling more than a little frustrated with that. I'm not even sure what it was that was causing the general failure to click with me. I think maybe I just didn't get along very well with the writing style, which somehow felt, most of the time, as if it was telling me about the worlds the author had created rather than immersing me in them.
Rating: 3/5
(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book)
103. Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt
A history of women at JPL (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory), from its origins in the 1940s, through many decades of exploring the solar system, up to the present day (or very nearly: the book was published in 2016). For much of this time, most of the women there were employed as computers, calculating complex engineering equations and rocket trajectories by hand with pencil and paper. If you've seen the movie Hidden Figures, or read the book it's based on, this is the same type of job the women featured there were doing elsewhere at NASA. (And, yes, not all of the women at JPL where white, either.) Later on, as electronic computers began to replace human ones, they became computer programmers, as well. And by now, of course, there are many female engineers working there, although still not in the same numbers as the men.
I wasn't always exactly engaged by the writing in this particular volume. It wanders back and forth between being a straightforward history and trying to go for a "narrative nonfiction" approach of dramatizing things from various women's POV, and the two things are grafted rather awkwardly together. (This seems to be a common structure in non-fiction these days, and too few writers, in my opinion, pull it off especially gracefully.) The subject matter is certainly interesting, though. Holt covers a lot of the space missions fairly quickly and not in immense depth, but as a general overview of what JPL has done in its history, it works well enough. And the lives and careers of these women provide a really vivid illustration of what life was like for working women in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, when equally qualified men and women were seldom hired for the same positions and a woman could be summarily fired for getting pregnant. These are worthwhile stories to hear and remember, and even if I have slightly mixed feelings about the writing here, I am unambiguously glad to see these intelligent, dedicated women getting the recognition they deserve.
Rating: 3.5/5
104. Treasury of Aesop's Fables
This collection of fables, which I bought at a library sale somewhere a while back, was published in 1973, but based on the writing, I'm guessing these particular English-language versions are a fair bit older than that, and the (hagiographic and not especially enlightening) "Life of Aesop" essay at the beginning may be older still. It also features small woodcut illustrations by Thomas Bewick (1753-1828).
I was interested to revisit some of the familiar fables from my childhood and maybe discover some more obscure ones I hadn't seen before, but I have to say I found this volume rather disappointing. They're not particularly engaging versions of the tales, are sprinkled with not-very-good poetry, and have appended morals that are often surprisingly hard to parse, and which sometimes seem to have little to do with the fable itself or even to flat-out contradict their apparent intent. I mean, I have certainly never seen the fox in the "sour grapes" story lauded as a paragon of wisdom before! Very often, too, these tales, in their references and sensibilities, seem to have much more of, say, 19th century England than 600 BCE Greece. Admittedly, different times and cultures adapting ancient stories to suit their own needs is fairly natural and perhaps not to be begrudged, but it's not really what I was looking for here. There also seems to be at least one odd omission: I have no idea where the tortoise and the hare might have run off to this time, but they are certainly nowhere to be found here.
All that having been said, though, at least a couple of these stories did give me a bit of a smile, being, as the kids these days say, #relatable. Like the one about the donkey who always longs for it to be whatever season it currently isn't. Who is, of course, being held up as a model for what not to do, but, man, I feel ya Mr. Donkey. I feel ya.
Rating: 2.5/5
105. Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell
This is the final book in the Simon Snow trilogy, which itself was a... spinoff?... of sorts from Rowell's novel Fangirl, Simon Snow being the Harry Potter-esque character the titular fangirl was writing her fanfiction about. And I will never cease to be tickled by the way Rowell basically ended up writing fiction based on her fictional fan's fictional fanfiction. Heh.
This one honestly maybe feels a little too strongly in touch with those fanfictional sensibilities when it comes to the relationship between Simon Snow and his vampiric frenemy-turned-boyfriend Baz, which gets a touch overdramatic for me in places. But it's at least an interestingly messy relationship. And there's plenty else going on here, too, including a guy who claims to be Simon's replacement as the prophesied Chosen One, a bit of difficulty involving a contract with a demon, and a couple of other budding romances, as well.
It didn't sweep me along quite as quickly or entertainingly as the first two books, I will admit, but it was still fun, and I still really like the way it addresses questions of what happens after the epic saga ends and everyone is left to figure out who they are in the aftermath.
Rating: 4/5
106. Bats by Phil Richardson
Yep, it's a book about bats: their anatomy, behavior, and senses, their place in Earth's ecosystems, and their many varieties, complete with lots of colorful photographs of bats whose appearances range from adorable to freaky. It's pretty short -- about 120 pages -- so it's really just a brief layman's overview of the subject, but apparently that's exactly what I needed, because I did not even realize until now how many really basic things I didn't know about bats. The writing, I will say, is pretty pedestrian, but I did not care about this at all, because I was busy happily learning all kinds of Fascinating Bat Facts. For example! Did you know that bats' feet are constructed in such a way that they are clenched when the muscles are relaxed? It takes an actual effort for a bat to uncurl its toes, and that's how bats are able to hang securely from a perch above them even while they're sound asleep. OK, maybe not everybody is going to find that sort of thing interesting, but I sure did, and I spent a lot of my time with this book just thinking "Wow, evolution is neat."
Rating: 4/5
107. Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
This sequel to Olive Kitteridge is structured much the same as the first book. Olive herself -- a woman I find a little bit difficult to like, but remarkably easy to love -- sits at the core of it, but many chapters barely namecheck her, focusing instead on on some of the other residents of her town on the coast of Maine as they live their own weird and mundane lives, lives we dip in and out of over the course of several years.
Some of these chapters worked better for me than others, but always I am impressed and moved by Strout's ability to capture some very complicated and profound human experiences in very simple language. Most particularly, in this case, the experience of aging and everything that goes with it.
Rating: 4/5
108. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
This is the story of Cora, a young woman who escapes from slavery in Georgia and into a complicated and often brutal fugitive life by way of the Underground Railroad. Except, here, the Underground Railroad is a literal railroad, underground.
It's a rough, rough read, one that forces the reader to stare directly into the dark, ugly heart of America. But it is undeniably effective.
I'm a little uncertain what to make of the ahistorical/magical realism element of things. When I try to intellectually detach myself from the novel a bit, take a step back and think about it, it seems like such a strange, unnecessary conceit, one that feels as if it somehow ought to detract, or at least distract, from the painful realism of everything else. And yet, in the experience of reading it, it works. I scarcely found myself even questioning it. And it does, perhaps, provide a rather powerful metaphor in the form of that subterranean darkness.
Rating: 4.5/5
109. Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson
This little volume is exactly what the title says it is: a book about semicolons. Watson looks a bit at the history of the semicolon, where it came from and how its usage has changed over time; examines the ways in which various writers have used the semicolon; and tells some interesting stories about how ambiguous punctuation in written laws has had surprisingly big effects. But it's about more than that, too. Watson's central idea here involves changing how we think about grammar rules and the way we apply them. She's also not remotely shy about voicing plenty of other opinions on related subjects ranging from linguistic snobbery to the proper way to approach the interpretation of laws. It's all very thought-provoking, and Watson's writing is lively and fun to read. She picks great examples of other people's writing to talk about, too.
All-in-all, it's much more interesting and entertaining than you might expect any book about semicolons to be, even if you're the kind of person who's interested in reading books about punctuation to begin with. (Which I am, obviously.) It's also gotten me to think a bit differently about semicolons. I confess, I've long felt reluctant to use them even when I've really wanted to, out of some sense that others would find them pretentious or distracting, but I'm remembering now how fond of them I once was and how useful they can actually be.
Rating: 4/5
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1017606.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.