December Book Log
Well, this is the last post you will see from me in 2018. (Even if, for many of you, it's already 2019 as I write this.) Whatever time it is for you, whenever you read this, I'd like to wish you a very Happy New Year, and I hope your whole holiday season has been warm and wonderful.
This is actually an eerily apt collection of books for the end of the year. I swear I didn't do it deliberately, but somehow at least half of them turned out to be about looking back at the past and contemplating the relationships between past, present, and future, in some fashion or other.
115. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
I picked this book up shortly after it came out, because I'd heard a lot of good things about it, but then had trouble motivating myself to actually read it. Because, to be honest, I found the Iliad kind of a tedious read, even in Robert Fagles' lively translation. The Odyssey was much more my kind of story. But then Madeline Miller came out with a new book based on the Odyssey, which I decided I very much wanted to read, and I figured I should read this one first.
And I'm very glad I did. It's really, really good. It's the story of Achilles as told by his companion and lover Patroclus, and in this rendition that story is first and foremost a tragic love story. One that I found extremely affecting, and I say that as someone with very little romance in her soul. I'm also impressed with the way that Miller portrays the Greece of myth, complete with gods and larger-than-life heroes, while somehow still making it all feel very real and grounded and human.
Rating: 4.5/5
116. Avatar: The Last Airbender: Legacy by Michael Tettelbaum
I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time a few years ago, and I was genuinely astonished by just how good it was. Not even "good for a kids' show." Just plain good, with no qualifiers whatsoever.
Anyway, this little book is ostensibly put together by Aang and his friends as a present for his son, but it's really mostly just a very short guide to some of the people, places, events, and cultures from the series. If you've watched the show (and have even a passing familiarity with the sequel), there's absolutely nothing new here, and I'm not sure it really captures the series' spark. But it is pretty, with lots of colorful illustrations and some fun little inserts, including a couple of very cool postcards from places depicted in the show. To be honest, it's probably as much a collector's item as it is a book. But it's not a bad collector's item.
Rating: I'm going to call it 3.5/5.
117. Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak
In this science fiction novel from the 1950s, our protagonist, Jay Vickers, learns about some fantastic new products on the market, from ridiculously cheap housing to a razor blade that never dulls to a car will run literally forever. Then he learns some even stranger things about the world, the universe, and himself.
There are some interesting ideas at the heart of this book, and some also-interesting social commentary. The details, though, are a little bit silly and very woo-woo. Actually, it reminds me in a lot of ways of the last Simak novel I read, All Flesh Is Grass, although it lacks the oddball charm of that one.
In the end... Well, I'm not sorry I read it, but I can't really call it Simak's best.
Rating: 3/5
118. The Daughters by Adrienne Celt
Lulu is an opera singer, and a new mother, and a lover of stories. Particularly the fairy tale-like stories her Polish grandmother would tell about her own mother. But the stories are troubling, too, as they include a deal made with the devil for the birth of a daughter, and a curse that may have been passed down through the family, mother to daughter.
It's a beautifully written novel, with smooth, lovely prose, and it does some interesting things in weaving Lulu's real life with the fantasy of her stories. I'm also rather impressed, because opera and babies are two things I have very, very little interest in, and it actually managed to make me feel a connection to both.
I will admit, though, that at some point I started to feel just a little impatient with it, as Lulu's own story felt like it ought to be going somewhere but seemed not to actually be progressing at all. But the ending, while it perhaps didn't entirely satisfy that feeling, did work for me in its own quiet way.
Rating: 4/5
119. The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas
A collection of very short essays from the 1970s in which Lewis Thomas, a medical researcher, muses about various topics related to medicine, biology, and nature. He is particularly interested in mitochondria, social insects and the ways in which human society does or doesn't resemble theirs, and the importance of basic research in medical science.
This is regarded as a real classic of science writing, or at least of writing by a scientist, so it's a little surprising it took me this long to get to it. I must say that, when I first started it, I didn't exactly think it was living up to its reputation. The essays here are really tiny, more a series of individual thoughts than anything else. And Thomas not infrequently uses some technical terms without explaining them, which I didn't find too much of a problem, but which does make it feel less accessible than I was expecting. He also engages in a fair amount of speculation and the occasional flight of fancy that aren't at all scientific, which bugs me possibly more than it ought to.
But the more I read, the more I came to appreciate Thomas's writing. It's rather beautiful, always thoughtful and often thought-provoking, and laced with subtle wit. And although it is very much of its time, aside from a few now-humorous remarks about computers, it's actually aged quite well.
So. Do I still think Lewis Thomas is over-hyped, for lack of a better phrase? Well, yes, a bit. But he is still good.
Rating: 4/5
120. Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown
Owen Wedgewood is a fancy chef whose life is disrupted severely when his employer is killed by Mad Hannah Mabbot, a ruthless but principled pirate captain who then kidnaps Wedgewood onto her ship and demands that, once a week, he serve her a gourmet meal made with whatever poor ingredients he can find on board.
The story of Wedgewood's captivity and Mabbot's causes and vendettas is interesting enough, even if some of the details stretch the suspension of disbelief pretty far. And there were bits of the novel I found myself nicely caught up in. But I have to say, for the most part it just didn't grip me nearly as much as I was hoping it would. I'm not at all sure if that's the book's fault, or if I somehow just wasn't in quite the right mood for it. I do suspect, though, that if I were more of a foodie, I'd be a lot more charmed by all the passages about cooking and eating.
Rating: 3.5/5
121. The Unfinished World and Other Stories by Amber Sparks
Except for the title story, most of the works in this collection are very short, and all of them have some sense of strangeness to them, whether it's a truly surreal premise or simply a slightly dreamlike feeling to the narration. As is usual with any story collection, I liked some a lot better than others, but the best of them are compelling, and even the ones that aren't are interesting, in the good sense of the word. The writing is good, too, with a very assured and original voice.
Rating: 4/5
122. But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman
It is extremely difficult -- indeed, pretty much fundamentally impossible -- to say how people in the future will look back on our own era, because any society's opinions about past generations reflect that society's own culture and concerns more than they do the actual details of history. We can't know what the future will think of us, because we don't know anything about it. This is, essentially, the premise of this book. But Chuck Klosterman then goes on to speculate freely, anyway. Bearing in mind that our most logical guesses are almost certainly wrong -- as the most logical guesses of people in the past usually were -- what can we say or imagine about what literary works of the present will still be read in a hundred years, or whether future scientists will regard us as having been utterly wrong about how the world works, or even if civilizations of the future will have rejected things we regard as beyond question, such as the value of democracy? Probably nothing, but recognizing this fact doesn't stop Klosterman from having lots of rambling thoughts about it all, or from running those thoughts by other people to see what they think.
And for an exercise that seems to be premised on the idea of its own futility, it's surprisingly fascinating. I found myself disagreeing with Klosterman a fair amount -- at least as much as it's actually possible to disagree with someone who is, the entire time, asserting that he's probably wrong -- and often found myself looking up from the book and staring off into space as I had lively internal debates with Klosterman or with myself about whatever he'd just said. There is a bit of a feeling of self-indulgence about much of it -- a sense that Klosterman is just trying to get a grip on his own slippery thoughts on the subject, and that he's paying particular attention to certain topics, such as rock music, simply because they're the things he personally happens to be the most interested in. But, you know, I was absolutely fine with that, and more than happy to just go along for the ride through his brain. And there's quite a lot in here that I found insightful or thought-provoking or just plain fun to contemplate. Indeed, I think this is possibly the most pure intellectual fun I've had reading a work of non-fiction in quite some time.
Rating: 4.5/5
123. My Real Children by Jo Walton
Patricia is an old lady in a nursing home, and she has memory problems. Meaning that she has trouble remembering a lot of things, but also that she remembers more things than she should. In fact, she remembers living two completely different lives, lives which diverged in a single moment when she decided on her answer to a marriage proposal.
It's interesting trying to decide exactly what I think about this book. I will admit that for quite a while, I felt a little disappointed with it, even though I never thought it was bad. I was, I think, expecting more science-fictional exploration of Patricia's two sets of memories and what they mean, but we don't really get that at all. Instead, we're given the full life story of both versions of Patricia, in alternating chapters. They're both reasonably interesting lives, and both Patricias feel like well-rounded characters. But much of those stories are more summarized than dramatized, which doesn't always make for the most satisfying read. And one of the two worlds she inhabits -- neither of which is our own -- felt quite implausible to me in terms of how fast certain kinds of technology develop. It also seemed, at first, that the contrast between the two lives was making a very unnecessary and heavy-handed statement about how freedom and self-determination and love are much better than oppression and sexism and abuse. Which is certainly true, but not exactly something I needed to be told at novel length.
But as things went on... Well, the tendency to skim over and summarize large parts of both lives never goes away. But the good life vs. bad life dichotomy gets a lot more complicated, and the contrast between how things do or don't progress in the two worlds ends up having a worthwhile point to it. And even if I never got quite as emotionally invested in either of Patricia's families as I might have liked, I did care about both of them. So it turned out to be a much better reading experience than I thought that it was going to be early on, and in the end I am glad to have read it.
Rating: Given my changing feelings about it, this one is hard to rate. I'm giving it 3.5/5, but I did like it enough by the end that that feels a little bit stingy. Just a little bit, though.
124. Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time by Paul Cornell
Since we don't get a new Doctor Who episode on Christmas this year -- we have to wait until New Year's! -- I decided to fill the void in my life by reading this novelization of last year's Christmas special. Although, I must admit, I had mixed feelings about that episode; there were some aspects of it I really liked and others that greatly irritated me. Paul Cornell's adaptation evens those mixed feelings out a little, though, I think. Some of the more emotionally affecting moments in the episode hit me less strongly in this form, but others actually worked a bit better. And the things that bugged me bug me slightly less here. It helps that Cornell appears to agree with me that some of the First Doctor's dialog was quite out of character. He doesn't change it -- this is a very faithful adaptation -- but he does at least acknowledge its weirdness, which I found sort of comforting.
It's interesting, actually, to contrast this with the previous New Who novelization I read, Steven Moffat's The Day of the Doctor. That one was complex and experimental and meta, and added lots of lots of content that wasn't actually in the episode. This one, in addition to being very faithful, is also very straightforward. In fact, especially towards the beginning, it seems to be very deliberately echoing the style of Terrance Dicks' old Target novel adaptations of the classic series. It is less bare-bones than those tended to be, though, and adds in a fair bit of character stuff from various POVs, some of which I think really does enhance the story, as well as an entertaining in-joke or two.
Rating: I'm not entirely sure how to rate this, especially given my complex feelings about the episode itself, but it does what it's trying to do quite well, so I'm going to go with 4/5.
125. The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals by Torill Kornfeldt
There are scientists who, right now, are working on things like resurrecting the mammoth or back-engineering a chicken into something resembling a dinosaur. Some of these de-extinction projects, especially ones focused on recently vanished or still-vanishing animals, involve cloning. In others, it's more a case of altering existing creatures to recreate features of their extinct relatives, such as giving a modern elephant wool and a high tolerance for cold. But this book doesn't focus so much on the how as on the why, and on the question of what you then do with the resulting animals and whether it's a good idea. It turns out that that's a very debatable question, as the ultimate aims of some of these researchers involve re-introducing these animals into the wild, and people can and do make some pretty good arguments about why that's either highly desirable or terribly misguided.
It's a really interesting question, and one that we definitely want to be thinking about before we have the technology to make it happen and not after. I will confess, though, I didn't find the book to be quite as fascinating as I'd hoped. I think part of it is that I would have liked a rather deeper dive into the ecological science of the issue. (What Kornfeldt does describe about the possible ecological roles of creatures like mammoths is really interesting.) I also think that the author's presentation of the arguments of the various scientists she's interviewed as they consider the subject is a lot more interesting than her own musings about her mixed feelings on the subject, which aren't bad, but do get a little repetitive. I also can't help but wonder if the writing reads a little better in the original Swedish. There's nothing wrong with it, mind you, but there is so often a slightly unnatural quality to writing in translation, and I think there is a bit of that here, too. (Also, just as a slightly amusing side note, according the the translator's note, a lot of the scientists were originally interviewed in English, but transcripts of the original English interviews weren't available, so they've been re-translated back into English from Swedish. Which has the slightly odd result of making the Americans among them sound like Brits!)
Anyway, the upshot here is that I didn't find it to be one of those page-turnery works of non-fiction, but I did find its explorations of the questions it raises interesting and very much worth considering, and I very much like the way Kornfeldt even-handedly gives us the perspectives of various people who disagree with each other. I've read a bit about these de-extinction projects before, but I think this one offers a perspective on them that my previous exposures to the idea were lacking.
Rating: 3.5/5
(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/946657.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.
This is actually an eerily apt collection of books for the end of the year. I swear I didn't do it deliberately, but somehow at least half of them turned out to be about looking back at the past and contemplating the relationships between past, present, and future, in some fashion or other.
115. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
I picked this book up shortly after it came out, because I'd heard a lot of good things about it, but then had trouble motivating myself to actually read it. Because, to be honest, I found the Iliad kind of a tedious read, even in Robert Fagles' lively translation. The Odyssey was much more my kind of story. But then Madeline Miller came out with a new book based on the Odyssey, which I decided I very much wanted to read, and I figured I should read this one first.
And I'm very glad I did. It's really, really good. It's the story of Achilles as told by his companion and lover Patroclus, and in this rendition that story is first and foremost a tragic love story. One that I found extremely affecting, and I say that as someone with very little romance in her soul. I'm also impressed with the way that Miller portrays the Greece of myth, complete with gods and larger-than-life heroes, while somehow still making it all feel very real and grounded and human.
Rating: 4.5/5
116. Avatar: The Last Airbender: Legacy by Michael Tettelbaum
I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time a few years ago, and I was genuinely astonished by just how good it was. Not even "good for a kids' show." Just plain good, with no qualifiers whatsoever.
Anyway, this little book is ostensibly put together by Aang and his friends as a present for his son, but it's really mostly just a very short guide to some of the people, places, events, and cultures from the series. If you've watched the show (and have even a passing familiarity with the sequel), there's absolutely nothing new here, and I'm not sure it really captures the series' spark. But it is pretty, with lots of colorful illustrations and some fun little inserts, including a couple of very cool postcards from places depicted in the show. To be honest, it's probably as much a collector's item as it is a book. But it's not a bad collector's item.
Rating: I'm going to call it 3.5/5.
117. Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak
In this science fiction novel from the 1950s, our protagonist, Jay Vickers, learns about some fantastic new products on the market, from ridiculously cheap housing to a razor blade that never dulls to a car will run literally forever. Then he learns some even stranger things about the world, the universe, and himself.
There are some interesting ideas at the heart of this book, and some also-interesting social commentary. The details, though, are a little bit silly and very woo-woo. Actually, it reminds me in a lot of ways of the last Simak novel I read, All Flesh Is Grass, although it lacks the oddball charm of that one.
In the end... Well, I'm not sorry I read it, but I can't really call it Simak's best.
Rating: 3/5
118. The Daughters by Adrienne Celt
Lulu is an opera singer, and a new mother, and a lover of stories. Particularly the fairy tale-like stories her Polish grandmother would tell about her own mother. But the stories are troubling, too, as they include a deal made with the devil for the birth of a daughter, and a curse that may have been passed down through the family, mother to daughter.
It's a beautifully written novel, with smooth, lovely prose, and it does some interesting things in weaving Lulu's real life with the fantasy of her stories. I'm also rather impressed, because opera and babies are two things I have very, very little interest in, and it actually managed to make me feel a connection to both.
I will admit, though, that at some point I started to feel just a little impatient with it, as Lulu's own story felt like it ought to be going somewhere but seemed not to actually be progressing at all. But the ending, while it perhaps didn't entirely satisfy that feeling, did work for me in its own quiet way.
Rating: 4/5
119. The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas
A collection of very short essays from the 1970s in which Lewis Thomas, a medical researcher, muses about various topics related to medicine, biology, and nature. He is particularly interested in mitochondria, social insects and the ways in which human society does or doesn't resemble theirs, and the importance of basic research in medical science.
This is regarded as a real classic of science writing, or at least of writing by a scientist, so it's a little surprising it took me this long to get to it. I must say that, when I first started it, I didn't exactly think it was living up to its reputation. The essays here are really tiny, more a series of individual thoughts than anything else. And Thomas not infrequently uses some technical terms without explaining them, which I didn't find too much of a problem, but which does make it feel less accessible than I was expecting. He also engages in a fair amount of speculation and the occasional flight of fancy that aren't at all scientific, which bugs me possibly more than it ought to.
But the more I read, the more I came to appreciate Thomas's writing. It's rather beautiful, always thoughtful and often thought-provoking, and laced with subtle wit. And although it is very much of its time, aside from a few now-humorous remarks about computers, it's actually aged quite well.
So. Do I still think Lewis Thomas is over-hyped, for lack of a better phrase? Well, yes, a bit. But he is still good.
Rating: 4/5
120. Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown
Owen Wedgewood is a fancy chef whose life is disrupted severely when his employer is killed by Mad Hannah Mabbot, a ruthless but principled pirate captain who then kidnaps Wedgewood onto her ship and demands that, once a week, he serve her a gourmet meal made with whatever poor ingredients he can find on board.
The story of Wedgewood's captivity and Mabbot's causes and vendettas is interesting enough, even if some of the details stretch the suspension of disbelief pretty far. And there were bits of the novel I found myself nicely caught up in. But I have to say, for the most part it just didn't grip me nearly as much as I was hoping it would. I'm not at all sure if that's the book's fault, or if I somehow just wasn't in quite the right mood for it. I do suspect, though, that if I were more of a foodie, I'd be a lot more charmed by all the passages about cooking and eating.
Rating: 3.5/5
121. The Unfinished World and Other Stories by Amber Sparks
Except for the title story, most of the works in this collection are very short, and all of them have some sense of strangeness to them, whether it's a truly surreal premise or simply a slightly dreamlike feeling to the narration. As is usual with any story collection, I liked some a lot better than others, but the best of them are compelling, and even the ones that aren't are interesting, in the good sense of the word. The writing is good, too, with a very assured and original voice.
Rating: 4/5
122. But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman
It is extremely difficult -- indeed, pretty much fundamentally impossible -- to say how people in the future will look back on our own era, because any society's opinions about past generations reflect that society's own culture and concerns more than they do the actual details of history. We can't know what the future will think of us, because we don't know anything about it. This is, essentially, the premise of this book. But Chuck Klosterman then goes on to speculate freely, anyway. Bearing in mind that our most logical guesses are almost certainly wrong -- as the most logical guesses of people in the past usually were -- what can we say or imagine about what literary works of the present will still be read in a hundred years, or whether future scientists will regard us as having been utterly wrong about how the world works, or even if civilizations of the future will have rejected things we regard as beyond question, such as the value of democracy? Probably nothing, but recognizing this fact doesn't stop Klosterman from having lots of rambling thoughts about it all, or from running those thoughts by other people to see what they think.
And for an exercise that seems to be premised on the idea of its own futility, it's surprisingly fascinating. I found myself disagreeing with Klosterman a fair amount -- at least as much as it's actually possible to disagree with someone who is, the entire time, asserting that he's probably wrong -- and often found myself looking up from the book and staring off into space as I had lively internal debates with Klosterman or with myself about whatever he'd just said. There is a bit of a feeling of self-indulgence about much of it -- a sense that Klosterman is just trying to get a grip on his own slippery thoughts on the subject, and that he's paying particular attention to certain topics, such as rock music, simply because they're the things he personally happens to be the most interested in. But, you know, I was absolutely fine with that, and more than happy to just go along for the ride through his brain. And there's quite a lot in here that I found insightful or thought-provoking or just plain fun to contemplate. Indeed, I think this is possibly the most pure intellectual fun I've had reading a work of non-fiction in quite some time.
Rating: 4.5/5
123. My Real Children by Jo Walton
Patricia is an old lady in a nursing home, and she has memory problems. Meaning that she has trouble remembering a lot of things, but also that she remembers more things than she should. In fact, she remembers living two completely different lives, lives which diverged in a single moment when she decided on her answer to a marriage proposal.
It's interesting trying to decide exactly what I think about this book. I will admit that for quite a while, I felt a little disappointed with it, even though I never thought it was bad. I was, I think, expecting more science-fictional exploration of Patricia's two sets of memories and what they mean, but we don't really get that at all. Instead, we're given the full life story of both versions of Patricia, in alternating chapters. They're both reasonably interesting lives, and both Patricias feel like well-rounded characters. But much of those stories are more summarized than dramatized, which doesn't always make for the most satisfying read. And one of the two worlds she inhabits -- neither of which is our own -- felt quite implausible to me in terms of how fast certain kinds of technology develop. It also seemed, at first, that the contrast between the two lives was making a very unnecessary and heavy-handed statement about how freedom and self-determination and love are much better than oppression and sexism and abuse. Which is certainly true, but not exactly something I needed to be told at novel length.
But as things went on... Well, the tendency to skim over and summarize large parts of both lives never goes away. But the good life vs. bad life dichotomy gets a lot more complicated, and the contrast between how things do or don't progress in the two worlds ends up having a worthwhile point to it. And even if I never got quite as emotionally invested in either of Patricia's families as I might have liked, I did care about both of them. So it turned out to be a much better reading experience than I thought that it was going to be early on, and in the end I am glad to have read it.
Rating: Given my changing feelings about it, this one is hard to rate. I'm giving it 3.5/5, but I did like it enough by the end that that feels a little bit stingy. Just a little bit, though.
124. Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time by Paul Cornell
Since we don't get a new Doctor Who episode on Christmas this year -- we have to wait until New Year's! -- I decided to fill the void in my life by reading this novelization of last year's Christmas special. Although, I must admit, I had mixed feelings about that episode; there were some aspects of it I really liked and others that greatly irritated me. Paul Cornell's adaptation evens those mixed feelings out a little, though, I think. Some of the more emotionally affecting moments in the episode hit me less strongly in this form, but others actually worked a bit better. And the things that bugged me bug me slightly less here. It helps that Cornell appears to agree with me that some of the First Doctor's dialog was quite out of character. He doesn't change it -- this is a very faithful adaptation -- but he does at least acknowledge its weirdness, which I found sort of comforting.
It's interesting, actually, to contrast this with the previous New Who novelization I read, Steven Moffat's The Day of the Doctor. That one was complex and experimental and meta, and added lots of lots of content that wasn't actually in the episode. This one, in addition to being very faithful, is also very straightforward. In fact, especially towards the beginning, it seems to be very deliberately echoing the style of Terrance Dicks' old Target novel adaptations of the classic series. It is less bare-bones than those tended to be, though, and adds in a fair bit of character stuff from various POVs, some of which I think really does enhance the story, as well as an entertaining in-joke or two.
Rating: I'm not entirely sure how to rate this, especially given my complex feelings about the episode itself, but it does what it's trying to do quite well, so I'm going to go with 4/5.
125. The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals by Torill Kornfeldt
There are scientists who, right now, are working on things like resurrecting the mammoth or back-engineering a chicken into something resembling a dinosaur. Some of these de-extinction projects, especially ones focused on recently vanished or still-vanishing animals, involve cloning. In others, it's more a case of altering existing creatures to recreate features of their extinct relatives, such as giving a modern elephant wool and a high tolerance for cold. But this book doesn't focus so much on the how as on the why, and on the question of what you then do with the resulting animals and whether it's a good idea. It turns out that that's a very debatable question, as the ultimate aims of some of these researchers involve re-introducing these animals into the wild, and people can and do make some pretty good arguments about why that's either highly desirable or terribly misguided.
It's a really interesting question, and one that we definitely want to be thinking about before we have the technology to make it happen and not after. I will confess, though, I didn't find the book to be quite as fascinating as I'd hoped. I think part of it is that I would have liked a rather deeper dive into the ecological science of the issue. (What Kornfeldt does describe about the possible ecological roles of creatures like mammoths is really interesting.) I also think that the author's presentation of the arguments of the various scientists she's interviewed as they consider the subject is a lot more interesting than her own musings about her mixed feelings on the subject, which aren't bad, but do get a little repetitive. I also can't help but wonder if the writing reads a little better in the original Swedish. There's nothing wrong with it, mind you, but there is so often a slightly unnatural quality to writing in translation, and I think there is a bit of that here, too. (Also, just as a slightly amusing side note, according the the translator's note, a lot of the scientists were originally interviewed in English, but transcripts of the original English interviews weren't available, so they've been re-translated back into English from Swedish. Which has the slightly odd result of making the Americans among them sound like Brits!)
Anyway, the upshot here is that I didn't find it to be one of those page-turnery works of non-fiction, but I did find its explorations of the questions it raises interesting and very much worth considering, and I very much like the way Kornfeldt even-handedly gives us the perspectives of various people who disagree with each other. I've read a bit about these de-extinction projects before, but I think this one offers a perspective on them that my previous exposures to the idea were lacking.
Rating: 3.5/5
(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/946657.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.