Books read (early May) and other stuff

[mrissa]

The other stuff first: the plan to get me a new desk has taken another step forward: markgritter disassembled timprov's old desk and reassembled it in the basement to be a home for some of his new work stuff. So now there's room for me to get a new desk or computer table. Of course, that would involve shopping for one, so we won't be planning on that happening

Comments

[aedifica]

I like Sarah Caudwell, but I somehow managed not to know about The Sibyl in Her Grave. I'll have to go looking for that one--and also the not-Bagthorpe-but-like-good-Bagthorpe books.

[desperance]

It was published posthumously, a dozen years after the previous title; a lot of people missed it.

[zalena]

I LOVE McKay's Casson Family series. Rose is just amazing. (She reminds me of Little My.) McKay has a gift for allowing children to have a complex inner lives without making them adults.

I remember The Toothpaste Millionaire as being one of the first books I read featuring an African-American protagonist in which nothing in the book really had anything to do with the character's racial identity, they just happened to be African-American. Also Ann Cameron's The Stories Julian Tells.

[mrissa]

I had not made the Rose/Little My connection. But yes. Very yes.

The thing about race in The Toothpaste Millionaire that startled me: the protag states right up front that some people think it's strange that she's a white girl and her best friend is a black boy, but that it works fine for them. And I thought, y'know, there are still plenty of people in this country who would think it was pretty weird -- but they wouldn't admit it out front so that the kid could properly dismiss it and walk away. I'm not sure if that's progress or not.

[wshaffer]

Oh, wow. Do you remember that whole period (I think it was in the mid-to-late 1980s) when quantum mechanics was the current hip explanation for anything remotely weird? It was almost a relief when they moved on to DNA. (Well, not very much of a relief, really.)

Also, I love Sarah Caudwell, but I swear I thought she had only written three books. I'll have to work out which one of those I haven't read.

(Comment edited because apparently I don't love Caudwell well enough to spell her name correctly on first attempt.)

[mrissa]

Former physicist here: there were plenty of people who were still willing to use quantum mechanics as the explanation for anything remotely weird while I was in physics. Realio trulio. More than plenty.

[wshaffer]

Ah, yes - using quantum mechanics as an explanation for anything remotely weird never went away. To the chagrin of physicists and the scientifically literate everywhere. I just have a distinct memory (and it may be false) that it hit a kind of peak in its use in popular fiction and media, and that it's now somewhat been displaced by other easily abused bits of science.

Although maybe it's just that the way they use quantum mechanics has changed. I have a year's best SF anthology from the late 80s that has two different stories that explain the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment in great detail. Nowadays, I think people would just say, "Cat. Box. Handwavium!" and consider it taken care of.

[mrissa]

Indeed. I think that even non-SF readers have a firmer grasp on Schrodinger's Cat as an uncertainty experiment than they did awhile back -- mostly as a general description, I'm afraid, rather than having any genuine understanding of measurement changing a system.

Sigh.

[tewok]

Oh, the Mushroom Planet books! I'd forgotten all about them. Thanks for the reminder.

[carbonel]

I'm currently reading The Sybil in Her Grave, having discovered it on the swap table at Escapade and snatched it so quickly I probably caused a sonic boom in removing it -- I hadn't realized Caudwell had written four books rather than three. This one was published posthumously.

The Court of the Stone Children is the one with the two-layer painting, right? It's my favorite of hers other than the Mushroom Planet books, but I could tell when I read it (in high school, I think) that the physics stuff was just handwaving.

[mrissa]

Yes, that's the Cameron in question. I haven't read any of her other non-Mushroom Planet stuff, so it may be my favorite of them as well.