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What I read: October 2021


LHC #138: "The Limits of Enchantment" by Graham Joyce. I read "Some kind of Fairytale" which was amazing a few years ago. I'm not sure why the library doesn't have more copies of his books? 

LHC #139: "Swordspoint" by Ellen Kushner. eBook. I am always surprised when I read books that are very highly regarded and they turn out to be about characters. I have no idea why this is so. This book was a delight, though some of the extras were less polished. 

LHC #140: "The Perfect Predator" by Steffanie Strathdee PhD, Thomas Patterson PhD, and Theresa H. Barker. A memoir about antibiotic resistant bacteria and phages. I devoured it. 

LHC #141: "The Dragon's Path" by Daniel Abraham (half of James S.A. Corey, I've read one of his books). I talked this up so much, Ed wants to read it too. He will love it. 

LHC #142: "The Iranian Metaphysicals" by Alireza Doostdar. Hard copy. Funny story, the night before this became available at the library, I came across an article about the relationship between rock music, Islam and Iranian heritage, and I thought, wow, that name looks familiar! Yeah, wrote this book. The title makes it sound really dry, but it's about new age people in Tehran mostly. Something that I noticed that wouldn't bother anyone else reading this book is I have a very rudimentary knowledge of farsi script. A lot of terms were written in an english alphabet transcription, and I would have loved to see them in farsi, eg. "science" which when I wrote it out for my phonetic purposes did not come out as 'elm. Though I guess farsi being right-left would make that harder. And this is some kind of standard, just one I've never been exposed to. 

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