Entry tags:
Wednesday reading
Recently read:
David Quammen's Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. I read this on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
astrogirl2's recommendation, and thought it was interesting, informative, and not as alarmist as the title and the front cover suggest. It was perhaps a bit long on anecdote and short on science-y goodness; I don't feel like I learned much about the mechanisms of spillover and what turns a spillover into a pandemic. There's some of that, of course, but I wanted more. My platonic ideal of science writing is Stephen Jay Gould, who would happily spend pages explaining scientific reasoning and evidence in detail, and I'd have liked more of that from Quammen.
Jordan L. Hawk, Widdershins. And for something completely different, m/m paranormal romance. I am 99% certain this book began life as fanfic for Sarah Monette's Kyle Murchison Booth stories (most collected in The Bone Key), and normally an obvious fanfic origin puts me off, but in this case I liked it. I am thoroughly fed up with Monette's tendency to pile loneliness and misery on gay male characters, and have often wished that she would give Booth (whom I love) some happiness. Hawk's book does that for her alt!Booth. The prose isn't as good as Monette's and the plot has some pacing issues, but it worked for me. By the way, this ebook is available for free on Smashwords if you want to give it a try.
I gave up on Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins books (the ones about the woman exorcist) after the third one, A Crown of Lights, which ( cut for spoilers, not that I think you should read these books anyway )
Currently reading:
I liked Widdershins enough to buy a couple of the later e-books, so now I'm reading the second one, Threshold. I'm not sure about it so far. Hawk seems to be having difficulty keeping the main character's personality distinct now that he's no longer so closely based on Kyle Murchison Booth. I'll see how it goes.
Up next:
I picked up several books from the library today, including Gary Corby's Death Ex Machina (set in classical Athens, about an actor--and his wife--who solve mysteries; I'm giving it a chance despite my innate suspicion of anything with that setting where the main male character is heterosexual); Ian Tattersall's The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolusion; and Vaughn Entwistle's The Dead Assassin, featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde as detectives (the author is English, which is a better sign in this kind of book than the author being American but still no guarantor of quality; in his author photo he looks unnervingly like Bill Bailey in a top hat). I also got a book about cheese, as you do.
David Quammen's Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. I read this on
astrogirl2's recommendation, and thought it was interesting, informative, and not as alarmist as the title and the front cover suggest. It was perhaps a bit long on anecdote and short on science-y goodness; I don't feel like I learned much about the mechanisms of spillover and what turns a spillover into a pandemic. There's some of that, of course, but I wanted more. My platonic ideal of science writing is Stephen Jay Gould, who would happily spend pages explaining scientific reasoning and evidence in detail, and I'd have liked more of that from Quammen. Jordan L. Hawk, Widdershins. And for something completely different, m/m paranormal romance. I am 99% certain this book began life as fanfic for Sarah Monette's Kyle Murchison Booth stories (most collected in The Bone Key), and normally an obvious fanfic origin puts me off, but in this case I liked it. I am thoroughly fed up with Monette's tendency to pile loneliness and misery on gay male characters, and have often wished that she would give Booth (whom I love) some happiness. Hawk's book does that for her alt!Booth. The prose isn't as good as Monette's and the plot has some pacing issues, but it worked for me. By the way, this ebook is available for free on Smashwords if you want to give it a try.
I gave up on Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins books (the ones about the woman exorcist) after the third one, A Crown of Lights, which ( cut for spoilers, not that I think you should read these books anyway )
Currently reading:
I liked Widdershins enough to buy a couple of the later e-books, so now I'm reading the second one, Threshold. I'm not sure about it so far. Hawk seems to be having difficulty keeping the main character's personality distinct now that he's no longer so closely based on Kyle Murchison Booth. I'll see how it goes.
Up next:
I picked up several books from the library today, including Gary Corby's Death Ex Machina (set in classical Athens, about an actor--and his wife--who solve mysteries; I'm giving it a chance despite my innate suspicion of anything with that setting where the main male character is heterosexual); Ian Tattersall's The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolusion; and Vaughn Entwistle's The Dead Assassin, featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde as detectives (the author is English, which is a better sign in this kind of book than the author being American but still no guarantor of quality; in his author photo he looks unnervingly like Bill Bailey in a top hat). I also got a book about cheese, as you do.