(no subject)
So I think I'll try to actually keep track of what I've been reading by writing up a quick review of the books I've finished lately. WHAT A NOVEL CONCEPT.
Lord of the Changing Winds by Rachel Neumeier - Young woman discovers she's a griffin mage healer and saves the griffins. Kind of like a less puerile Mercedes Lackey. It got me through it pretty fast, but it didn't really give me any urge to reread.
Germs, Genes, and Civilizations by David P Clark - AUGH. I've always been fascinated by the effect of plague on history, since it's one of those things that in my opinion, tends to be overlooked because it just doesn't fit into a tidy narrative. But this just drove me nuts because it had this undertone all along the way that all these deaths by plague were okay because they allowed Western civilization to thrive. And there were just some incredibly dumb and offensive fundamental errors, like saying that homosexuality became taboo because anal sex is high risk. Because of course men are the only gay people and also anal sex was totally common in ancient eras where the only lube available was far more desperately needed as food. OH WAIT NO. It had some interesting information about the Indus Valley civilization and the origin of cholera, but I just don't really trust it because he's so bad at tracing cause and effect in every other part of the book. Really I should just stop reading any book with the word germs in the title because they always end up being dumb.
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A Washington - This is one of those books that I basically picked up because I saw it and went "fuck I bet there's a shitload of nasty history there and I don't know a thing about it". It's very well done and very depressing. It's one of the few books I've seen that cover this kind of thing that are infinitely less interesting in shocking you than they are in just letting it be known what happened.
Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry by Stacy Malkan - On the safety of cosmetics. It was very much written as "the cosmetics industry is killing us all!!!!!!", but it mostly didn't much change my pre-held opinion that cosmetics aren't particularly safe or particularly dangerous in moderation. I was genuinely surprised at how little was known about the effects of a lot of the ingredients, though. I don't really believe that a little will hurt, or the stuff designed to be rinsed off immediately will hurt much, but I can certainly see why some of the women wearing pounds of makeup every day could, legitimately, develop health problems from that. Especially if they're doing so while pregnant. I think some of the problems with undertesting cosmetics goes back to the lack of understanding that the skin is an organ just like anything else, and it can absorb some chemicals just fine (see also: nicotine patches.). So not testing for that when you're testing new ingredients is going to lead to some things, well, poisoning people. ...Of course, what I'd really like to see is an understanding that natural things can poison people just as well and the important part isn't whether it's natural or man-made but whether it's ever been tested to see if it does. But that's probably asking too much of a book like this.
Hyperspace by Michio Kaku - FUCK YES I FINISHED A PHYSICS BOOK. (You don't want to know how many times I've given up on A Brief History of Time because it was too hard for me.) I feel vaguely educated except probably not really. I really like having a working theory of how the Big Bang might have gone, even if I'm probably totally misunderstanding it.
Feed by Mira Grant - Zombies and bloggers and presidential campaigns FUCK YES. I started off being amused but really enjoying it, and ended up bawwing at the right times.
...And I vaguely think I'm forgetting a book. Oh well.
Lord of the Changing Winds by Rachel Neumeier - Young woman discovers she's a griffin mage healer and saves the griffins. Kind of like a less puerile Mercedes Lackey. It got me through it pretty fast, but it didn't really give me any urge to reread.
Germs, Genes, and Civilizations by David P Clark - AUGH. I've always been fascinated by the effect of plague on history, since it's one of those things that in my opinion, tends to be overlooked because it just doesn't fit into a tidy narrative. But this just drove me nuts because it had this undertone all along the way that all these deaths by plague were okay because they allowed Western civilization to thrive. And there were just some incredibly dumb and offensive fundamental errors, like saying that homosexuality became taboo because anal sex is high risk. Because of course men are the only gay people and also anal sex was totally common in ancient eras where the only lube available was far more desperately needed as food. OH WAIT NO. It had some interesting information about the Indus Valley civilization and the origin of cholera, but I just don't really trust it because he's so bad at tracing cause and effect in every other part of the book. Really I should just stop reading any book with the word germs in the title because they always end up being dumb.
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A Washington - This is one of those books that I basically picked up because I saw it and went "fuck I bet there's a shitload of nasty history there and I don't know a thing about it". It's very well done and very depressing. It's one of the few books I've seen that cover this kind of thing that are infinitely less interesting in shocking you than they are in just letting it be known what happened.
Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry by Stacy Malkan - On the safety of cosmetics. It was very much written as "the cosmetics industry is killing us all!!!!!!", but it mostly didn't much change my pre-held opinion that cosmetics aren't particularly safe or particularly dangerous in moderation. I was genuinely surprised at how little was known about the effects of a lot of the ingredients, though. I don't really believe that a little will hurt, or the stuff designed to be rinsed off immediately will hurt much, but I can certainly see why some of the women wearing pounds of makeup every day could, legitimately, develop health problems from that. Especially if they're doing so while pregnant. I think some of the problems with undertesting cosmetics goes back to the lack of understanding that the skin is an organ just like anything else, and it can absorb some chemicals just fine (see also: nicotine patches.). So not testing for that when you're testing new ingredients is going to lead to some things, well, poisoning people. ...Of course, what I'd really like to see is an understanding that natural things can poison people just as well and the important part isn't whether it's natural or man-made but whether it's ever been tested to see if it does. But that's probably asking too much of a book like this.
Hyperspace by Michio Kaku - FUCK YES I FINISHED A PHYSICS BOOK. (You don't want to know how many times I've given up on A Brief History of Time because it was too hard for me.) I feel vaguely educated except probably not really. I really like having a working theory of how the Big Bang might have gone, even if I'm probably totally misunderstanding it.
Feed by Mira Grant - Zombies and bloggers and presidential campaigns FUCK YES. I started off being amused but really enjoying it, and ended up bawwing at the right times.
...And I vaguely think I'm forgetting a book. Oh well.