wednesday reads n' things
Since I'm using my 'books and cats' icon, I should report first that Lucy has recovered from Moving Trauma and seems to have settled in, by which I mean that she is leaving nose-prints on the windows and stalking us across the living room and sitting in B's lap when we read in the evenings. Yay!
The next important order of business is to point you all to the free books that are available now or soon. (Some of these may be country-restricted, sorry.)
World Book Day celebration at Amazon: Today only nine books from around the world, in English translation, are available for free in Kindle format. These are mostly literary fiction, historical fiction, and mystery.
Independent Bookstore Day celebration at Libro.fm: On Saturday April 27th, a small selection of audiobooks will be available for free. You need a Libro.fm account, and you need to use their (free) software to listen on your phone.
2019 summer SYNC season: Beginning tomorrow, two audiobooks (mostly YA fiction, usually in pairs of old/classic and a relatively newer title, but for example this year's selection includes a full-cast reading of Othello and Mary Roach's microhistory Gulp) will be free each week (Thursday-Wednesday) for fourteen weeks. These download as mp3 files with no DRM and can be listened to on any device.
Okay, now that that's out of the way:
What I've recently finished reading:
Blood of Elves, the third book (and first novel) in Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher series. Oddly paced, with an abrupt ending, and if you haven't read the short story collections (and likely even if, like me, you have) some of the people, their backstories, and their relationships will confuse you. The translation does not do the prose any favors. On the other hand - this is solid backstory for Ciri, who I loved in the videogame Witcher 3 (and the tutorial/prologue of that game clearly comes straight from this book!), and the first part of the book has a lot of Triss, who I loved in the Witcher 2 game (and if I had played that before the third game, I would have romanced her then instead of Yennefer). Plus, there's more politics than hack-and-slash going on, and I really like the fantasy politics, especially the background of prejudice and marginalization of the non-human races.
I've also been listening to podcasts in preparation for my book club next month; we actually only read a book qua book four times a year, the other months being devoted to podcasts, articles, and storytelling. May's theme is "memory", and our "assigned listening" was a two-parter from Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast series: A Polite Word for Liar and Free Brian Williams, followed by Bringing Gamma Back from Radiolab.
The Revisionist History episodes focused on the natural mutability and fallibility of memory, on the way we tend to think of memories as being accurately and completely stored in memory to be brought out later, like a file on a hard disk, which is far from the truth (as anybody who has ever read any pop psychology about how the accounts of witnesses to a crime invariably contradict each other and themselves knows). Gladwell's point is that if someone is caught saying something about an event that is later contradicted by others (or by the record), they are assumed to have lied, either because they are trying to make themselves look better, or trying to make the story sound better. But our subconscious constantly edits our memories - sometimes adding details heard from someone else, sometimes conflating multiple memories, sometimes deleting bits that the brain has decided are not important.
Anyone with a significant history with a partner sees this in action, of course; I have given up on "correcting" B's story about the previous owner of our cat, a reservation doctor, getting her as a kitten in lieu of payment, because he's absolutely convinced that the doctor's widow told him this story. And maybe she did, I don't know, but I never heard it from her - and I was the one who made the arrangements and agreed to take the cat when she moved to Hawaii. But it's pointless to argue; B doesn't say it because he thinks it makes a good, amusing story, he says it because he truly believes that it's the way things happened.
Gladwell talks about "flashbulb memories", our strong impressions of dramatic events, and how we believe they are accurate because they are so strong, but they are actually no more likely to be accurate than any other memory. He carries out the example of asking a friend who lives in his building about what she remembers about 9/11, and comparing it to what he remembers, and it's clear that although they both remember having had a conversation on that morning, the details differ - including whether they had it in person or on the phone.
9/11 is a classic event of this type, and the subject of a study examining whether these memories are more accurate than others. As it happens, B and I were together on 9/11, and so I'm thinking that before our book club meeting I'll ask him the questions in that article, and also write down my own answers, and see how they compare.
The Radiolab episode was about scientists experimenting with using flickering light to stimulate neurons in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's disease that were gunked up with plaque and not oscillating at what's called the gamma frequency, which is important for cognition and memory. And it worked - putting the test mice into a room with a light flickering at 40 beats per second resulted in a 50% reduction in beta amyloid, the plaque that is found in these Alzheimer brains. The mice were able to learn skills they hadn't been able to before, and to remember things they'd been shown before their brains deteriorated and they forgot them. (Though the plaque came back - the researchers needed to do this light stimulation daily to keep the mouse brains clear.)
That podcast was produced in 2016, so I went looking for updates. I found an article from this March, at MIT news: the lab then studied auditory stimulation (40-hertz tones), both on its own and in combination with the visual stimulation, and it did the same thing on its own and in combination created an even more dramatic effect. They have begun human trials! This is really cool and could be a game-changer for so many people.
I listened to a few more episodes of Revisionist History, just because I like Malcolm Gladwell. It's a lot of fun and I recommend it for interesting perspectives on random trivia.
What I'm reading now:
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondō, which I impulse-bought on Sunday when it was discounted as a Kindle Daily Deal, because the process of moving made me painfully aware of how much crap I own that I don't really use/need/care about. As some of you know, I lived on a 40' sailboat for over 3 years; we had five yard sales to get rid of most of our possessions, and when we sold the boat and returned to "normal" life, we swore we'd never get overburdened by "stuff" again. I mean, compared to the average American couple, we really don't have a lot of things, but it's undeniable that we have many things which are only taking up space and we really should get rid of.
I've only read the introduction and the first chapter, and so far I'm mostly just bemused by the idea of a little girl fantasy-tidying things and cleaning up for fun.
In audio, I have just started listening to a book I got from last summer's SYNC program: The Great War: Stories Inspired by Items from the First World War, which is an anthology of YA short stories by various authors. Each story riffs off an artifact from the war; in the text version, I imagine they are shown in photographs, but in the audiobook they are described after each story. So far I have listened to "Our Jacko" by Michael Morpurgo, which is about a helmet used as a toy by a family's children, who later discover its origin and the story of their great-great-grandfather; and "Another Kind of Missing" by A. L. Kennedy, about a young boy visiting his father in the veteran's hospital after the father was invalided out by taking shrapnel in the face.
ETA: I totally forgot, I was going to mention that I enjoyed the first story, but was sort-of-thrown out by the repeated mention of Ypres, which - - I totally knew, as a place, but didn't realize it was pronounced (at least by the narrator) "eep", which to my ear is terribly odd!
What I'm reading next:
I need to start an eyeball-book soon. Maybe the next Witcher book, maybe one of my enormous backlog ha ha.
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth
The next important order of business is to point you all to the free books that are available now or soon. (Some of these may be country-restricted, sorry.)
World Book Day celebration at Amazon: Today only nine books from around the world, in English translation, are available for free in Kindle format. These are mostly literary fiction, historical fiction, and mystery.
Independent Bookstore Day celebration at Libro.fm: On Saturday April 27th, a small selection of audiobooks will be available for free. You need a Libro.fm account, and you need to use their (free) software to listen on your phone.
2019 summer SYNC season: Beginning tomorrow, two audiobooks (mostly YA fiction, usually in pairs of old/classic and a relatively newer title, but for example this year's selection includes a full-cast reading of Othello and Mary Roach's microhistory Gulp) will be free each week (Thursday-Wednesday) for fourteen weeks. These download as mp3 files with no DRM and can be listened to on any device.
Okay, now that that's out of the way:
What I've recently finished reading:
Blood of Elves, the third book (and first novel) in Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher series. Oddly paced, with an abrupt ending, and if you haven't read the short story collections (and likely even if, like me, you have) some of the people, their backstories, and their relationships will confuse you. The translation does not do the prose any favors. On the other hand - this is solid backstory for Ciri, who I loved in the videogame Witcher 3 (and the tutorial/prologue of that game clearly comes straight from this book!), and the first part of the book has a lot of Triss, who I loved in the Witcher 2 game (and if I had played that before the third game, I would have romanced her then instead of Yennefer). Plus, there's more politics than hack-and-slash going on, and I really like the fantasy politics, especially the background of prejudice and marginalization of the non-human races.
I've also been listening to podcasts in preparation for my book club next month; we actually only read a book qua book four times a year, the other months being devoted to podcasts, articles, and storytelling. May's theme is "memory", and our "assigned listening" was a two-parter from Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast series: A Polite Word for Liar and Free Brian Williams, followed by Bringing Gamma Back from Radiolab.
The Revisionist History episodes focused on the natural mutability and fallibility of memory, on the way we tend to think of memories as being accurately and completely stored in memory to be brought out later, like a file on a hard disk, which is far from the truth (as anybody who has ever read any pop psychology about how the accounts of witnesses to a crime invariably contradict each other and themselves knows). Gladwell's point is that if someone is caught saying something about an event that is later contradicted by others (or by the record), they are assumed to have lied, either because they are trying to make themselves look better, or trying to make the story sound better. But our subconscious constantly edits our memories - sometimes adding details heard from someone else, sometimes conflating multiple memories, sometimes deleting bits that the brain has decided are not important.
Anyone with a significant history with a partner sees this in action, of course; I have given up on "correcting" B's story about the previous owner of our cat, a reservation doctor, getting her as a kitten in lieu of payment, because he's absolutely convinced that the doctor's widow told him this story. And maybe she did, I don't know, but I never heard it from her - and I was the one who made the arrangements and agreed to take the cat when she moved to Hawaii. But it's pointless to argue; B doesn't say it because he thinks it makes a good, amusing story, he says it because he truly believes that it's the way things happened.
Gladwell talks about "flashbulb memories", our strong impressions of dramatic events, and how we believe they are accurate because they are so strong, but they are actually no more likely to be accurate than any other memory. He carries out the example of asking a friend who lives in his building about what she remembers about 9/11, and comparing it to what he remembers, and it's clear that although they both remember having had a conversation on that morning, the details differ - including whether they had it in person or on the phone.
9/11 is a classic event of this type, and the subject of a study examining whether these memories are more accurate than others. As it happens, B and I were together on 9/11, and so I'm thinking that before our book club meeting I'll ask him the questions in that article, and also write down my own answers, and see how they compare.
The Radiolab episode was about scientists experimenting with using flickering light to stimulate neurons in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's disease that were gunked up with plaque and not oscillating at what's called the gamma frequency, which is important for cognition and memory. And it worked - putting the test mice into a room with a light flickering at 40 beats per second resulted in a 50% reduction in beta amyloid, the plaque that is found in these Alzheimer brains. The mice were able to learn skills they hadn't been able to before, and to remember things they'd been shown before their brains deteriorated and they forgot them. (Though the plaque came back - the researchers needed to do this light stimulation daily to keep the mouse brains clear.)
That podcast was produced in 2016, so I went looking for updates. I found an article from this March, at MIT news: the lab then studied auditory stimulation (40-hertz tones), both on its own and in combination with the visual stimulation, and it did the same thing on its own and in combination created an even more dramatic effect. They have begun human trials! This is really cool and could be a game-changer for so many people.
I listened to a few more episodes of Revisionist History, just because I like Malcolm Gladwell. It's a lot of fun and I recommend it for interesting perspectives on random trivia.
What I'm reading now:
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondō, which I impulse-bought on Sunday when it was discounted as a Kindle Daily Deal, because the process of moving made me painfully aware of how much crap I own that I don't really use/need/care about. As some of you know, I lived on a 40' sailboat for over 3 years; we had five yard sales to get rid of most of our possessions, and when we sold the boat and returned to "normal" life, we swore we'd never get overburdened by "stuff" again. I mean, compared to the average American couple, we really don't have a lot of things, but it's undeniable that we have many things which are only taking up space and we really should get rid of.
I've only read the introduction and the first chapter, and so far I'm mostly just bemused by the idea of a little girl fantasy-tidying things and cleaning up for fun.
In audio, I have just started listening to a book I got from last summer's SYNC program: The Great War: Stories Inspired by Items from the First World War, which is an anthology of YA short stories by various authors. Each story riffs off an artifact from the war; in the text version, I imagine they are shown in photographs, but in the audiobook they are described after each story. So far I have listened to "Our Jacko" by Michael Morpurgo, which is about a helmet used as a toy by a family's children, who later discover its origin and the story of their great-great-grandfather; and "Another Kind of Missing" by A. L. Kennedy, about a young boy visiting his father in the veteran's hospital after the father was invalided out by taking shrapnel in the face.
ETA: I totally forgot, I was going to mention that I enjoyed the first story, but was sort-of-thrown out by the repeated mention of Ypres, which - - I totally knew, as a place, but didn't realize it was pronounced (at least by the narrator) "eep", which to my ear is terribly odd!
What I'm reading next:
I need to start an eyeball-book soon. Maybe the next Witcher book, maybe one of my enormous backlog ha ha.
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth