Hi friends,
February was a great month for reading, which was a welcome escape because February also brought more illness for our family. I’m so tired of being sick and having sick kids. Hopefully, now that March and warmer weather are here, we can catch a break from the winter sickness onslaught.
Anyway, let me know what you think of these books, and if you have suggestions for further reading.
Cheers,
Tonya
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: I’ve read a few nonfiction books now about octopus, and they all talk about how smart they are and wonder about how octopus experience the world and think. In this scifi book, Nayler takes that wondering a step further and imagines that some octopus have evolved to the equivalent of humans in the stone age, which he calls the “shell age.” The whole book is one long meditation on consciousness and minds. It’s a slow burn, character driven scifi read with no action scenes, and most of the content is characters talking to one another, so if you’re looking for action packed scifi, you’ll be disappointed. I really liked the change of pace from my usual fiction reading. Nayler spends most of the book exploring questions about what is a mind and what is consciousness. He talks about these in the context of the advanced octopus but also in the context of AI with one of the main characters being an AI construct that believes it has gained sentience. He doesn’t offer any definitive answers to these questions and the book has a very open ending. I highly enjoyed it especially considering the release of ChatGPT and the discourse surrounding that.
Melodies of Fire by Rachel Zincke
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: I love a good dragon story and interesting magic system, and Zincke delivers both in this debut novel. She leverages several common fantasy tropes including a secret society, gradual exploration of a magic system, and a protagonist with unique and unexplainable powers. Through these mechanisms, we get to explore and discover more about this magical world with the main character. There are some good tense moments and a few action sequences that had me wondering what would happen next. This is the first in a series, and I’m excited to read future installments.
Jerome the Gnome by Rachel Zincke
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This is a prequel to Melodies of Fire that focuses on the backstory for one of the side characters in that story, Jerome the Gnome. This second installment from Zincke showed a great improvement in writing style, plot, characterization, and dialogue. I really enjoyed learning more about the gnome world and seeing Jerome and the gnome society wrestle with some weighty issues including censoring of speech, a society-wide fear of the outside world, and social ostracization. The ending helps set up the events in Melodies of Fire but doesn’t resolve Jerome’s story, which I understand will continue to be told in future installments in the Songs of Power series. I can’t wait to read more about this world and my new favorite gnome.
White Sand Volume 3 by Brandon Sanderson
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes, for Cosmere fans
Review: I’ve never read graphic novels, but I am a huge Sanderson fan and wanted to read everything in his Cosmere universe, so I came back to this third installment in the White Sand series. I’m still not a fan of the graphic novel medium as I find it hard to follow the action scenes and get a good understanding of the magic system. However, Sanderson’s story-telling is on-point as usual here as he has created an intriguing world with great characters and an interesting magic system. The scope of this story is a bit smaller than other Cosmere entries, as it focuses mostly on the main character’s arc as he works to overcome a myriad of challenges to achieve his goals of saving the system of magic practitioners on this planet from an array of unknown and powerful opposition. It’s a solid Cosmere entry, but again, I prefer the text format for my storytelling.
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: I understand that there’s a lot of controversy about this book in the media. I heard about it because I’m a New York Times subscriber, and I was looking for a good read for black history month in February. The book is a compilation of essays, poems, and other short works of fiction that seeks to tell the story of America through the lens of slavery and the black experience. The title refers to the year that the first enslaved Africans were brought to America and predates the common founding story of America by a good 150 years. One of the things I love about reading is that I can gain insight into the experiences of other people whose lived experience and history is very different from my own. My experience, and research has shown, that reading can promote empathy and understanding for different people. I definitely found that to be the case with this book. The essays range in topics from the impact of slavery on the drafting of our constitution, to the role that sugar played in entrenching slavery in the past and now plays in perpetuating negative health outcomes in predominantly black communities, to medical care, and segregation. Some of the information in the essays surprised me including that at no point in this country’s history have even half of the Black children in this country attended a majority-white school; that the wealth gap between black and white families is as great today as it was in the 1960s; and that federal policies that promoted the growth of the modern middle class including the Homesteaders Act and New Deal programs, and that were responsible for the increase in homeownership and accompanying increase in wealth for White Americans have never been extended to Black Americans. It made me wonder how much of the wealth I enjoy today comes from access to these policies, and to confront the reality that these benefits were not provided equally to all citizens. Hannah-Jones ends the book with a call to action for our country to not only confront and deal with the racist past and present that we live in, but also to act to rectify some of the wrongs that are responsible for the lack of generational wealth that Black people experience today. She ends by saying, “Citizens inherit not just the glory of a nation but its wrongs too,” and, “A truly great country does not ignore or excuse its sins. It confronts them, and then works to make them right.” This resonated strongly with me, and I found myself realizing that it echoes what I usually tell my children that we all make mistakes, but we have to admit them and then work to fix them. I personally think that America has a lot more work to do to correct these historic and ongoing mistakes.
Starry Messenger by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes, for fans of his work
Review: I’ve read a few other of Tyson’s books, and I always enjoy his strong voice and how that comes through even when he’s talking about very technical topics. This book wasn’t super technical though. It mainly read as a collection of somewhat random thoughts and essays that Tyson has had over the years and wanted to arrange in one collection. The premise behind the book is that if we take a truly objective, evidence-based approach to the world around us, how would we see the world differently and what would that perspective mean. It’s an interesting topic to explore and Tyson applies this cosmic perspective to everything from race and politics to vegetarianism. He offers few concrete answers, and his tone occasionally comes off as somewhat insulting and derogatory. As someone who spends a good deal of time with people who are more scientifically and technically trained than I am, I’m familiar with the tone of down-talking that Tyson conveys throughout the book. It’s one that, if not done carefully, can come off as quite insulting. For what it’s worth, I think Tyson falls mostly on the side of quippy humor and intriguing insight, but it’s a fine line to walk.
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes, for fantasy fans
Review: Hobb is one of the big fantasy names that gets thrown around a lot in the genre, so I figured I’d give her Elderings series a try. This book came out in 1995, and I think that it’s aged pretty well considering how much the genre has changed since then. It keeps pretty close to classic Middle Ages style fantasy in setting and characters, but it does it really well, so the use of these now somewhat outdated tropes doesn’t come off as stale. This is mainly do to the excellent character work that Hobb executes with our first-person point-of-view protagonist the bastard royal FitzChivalry who doesn’t even have an official name for most of the book. Although the choice of a first person point-of-view can be restrictive for a story of this scope, Hobb’s choice was definitely the right one as its use helps us come to know Fitz so intimately. Watching him navigate the questionable moral grounds of training as an assassin for his king, who won’t even recognize him as his grandson is fascinating, and while the pace is much slower than many fantasy books written today, Hobb uses the extra time to help us get to know the world and secondary characters so well that I found myself enjoying the slow trod through the story. I’m already reading the sequels to this first installment, so reviews for those will be coming soon!
Mommy Corner
Chloe had fun at the climbing gym with Daddy and Maya. She's getting pretty good! 
Lincoln is my little sunshine. 
Grandma and Grandpa Johnson came to visit and had fun taking the girls to the children's museum in Denver.
No comments:
Post a Comment