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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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What I read: January 2024

"Morgan is my name" by Sophie Keech. Office book club selection. It gets exhausting to read about plucky young heroines who are terrible at needlework all the time. I should probably read some Jo Walton. I mean, you can be good at needlework and other things too! I didn't find this book very surprising. The first half was kind of boring, but it got better towards the end.  LHC #233: "The Shifter" by Janice Hardy. I read her writing advice website regularly, so I thought I should maybe read an actual book to find out if she was worth it. Oh my, the voice of this book grabbed me immediately. The worldbuilding seemed shady but the voice was solid. It wasn't very subtle, but I might not be the target audience.  LHC #234: "Ragnarok: The End of the Gods" by A. S. Byatt. At this point with my library account, I'm just guessing. I know there was something by Byatt there? I suspect there was. I did not know what to make of this book. Strange, but it w

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  LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by  Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence.  "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read.  LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes.  I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr