Small Great Things - Jodi Picoult
Rating: 3/5Source: Bought for iPad Kindle (first one!)
Date Finished: January 6
This is about an accomplished black Labor & Delivery nurse who's tried all her life to fit in with and be accepted by white society until she gets charged with murder after a baby she treats dies - and the baby's parents are white supremacists.
It was quite enjoyable but tense and I did have some misgivings about it which you can read about here, so I gave it 3 out of 5 stars.
Strange the Dreamer - Laini Taylor
Rating: 3/5Source: Bought for iPad Kindle
Date Finished: January 20
Lazlo is a librarian who dreams of a lost city; Sarai is a demigod who haunts the dreams of the humans who wiped out the rest of her kind.
This book left me conflicted. I had loved the first book of her previous series Daughter of Smoke and Bone - it was a beautiful fantasy world with absolutely gorgeous prose, though I didn't enjoy the 2nd book so much and don't think I read the third. But this one was a chore to read. Also the 'reader-supremacy' annoyed me - a theme was the power of readers and dreamers. I found the book extremely difficult to read; I was constantly having to look up the meaning of the words (thanks, Kindle app dictionary) which was especially bad because it's fantasy so it had loads of made-up words and it didn't define them the first time they appeared so I had no idea which was which. I'm not stupid, and I would've been fine learning some new words, but the combination of the made-up words and the fact that many of the new real words were very specific words for, like, 'the right side of a church', was irritating and unnecessary. It just really dragged and I was forcing myself through it even though I could tell it was trying to be whimsical. Too much description!
All that said, the book did kind of grab me by the end and I cared a lot about the characters...but wow it took a long time, and didn't entice me to read the sequel despite the cliffhanger because of what it put me through to get there. The whole thing was especially frustrating because there are SO MANY raving Goodreads reviews.
The Loneliest Girl in the Universe - Lauren James
Rating: 4.5/5Source: Local public library
Date finished: January 22
Romy, a teenage girl, is the only surviving member of a trip into interstellar space to start a new human colony. Her only human contact occurs with a months-long delay as the signals are transmitted back to Earth, until a new traveller sets off and they start communicating as his ship approaches hers. But all is not as it seems...
I can't say much about the book without spoiling it, but I LOVED it! It's not the most technically-advanced or whatever, in that the character definitely has a childlike voice - she's an utterly alone 15-year-old to be fair - but I immediately felt completely connected to her and brought the book around with me everywhere I went, sneaking peeks at it whenever I got a chance between lectures. It got a little bit less good towards the end but man I adored this book and highly recommend it. It's by turns adorable and terrifying, and I felt so protective of Romy and so proud of her for her resourcefulness and courage despite her fear.
Innate - Kevin Mitchell
Rating: 3/5Source: Borrowed from college library
Date finished: ~late February
This is about different aspects of personality and mental state and how they are influenced by the wiring of your brain, and how that is set up by your genes, but its main contribution is in talking about the inherent role of developmental randomness in creating distance between what your genes 'dictate' and how you actually turn out. That was interesting, and while I didn't learn much new because I'm in my third year of a genetics degree and this is a book for the public, I did learn to think about things in new ways. However, I felt the book fell off a bit towards the end and he didn't put as much as I had hoped into certain topics such as the 'disorders' chapter. Additionally, I didn't really agree with some of his conclusions such as those about sex. Most interesting bits were probably the bits about developmental randomness and the nature of nurture, or how effects that seem to be due to nurture are actually due to your inheritance of your parents' genes. It was also interesting to see how innate some traits can be (more than their heritability would suggest), and that the heritability (contribution of genetic variance to overall phenotypic variance) of intelligence increases with age. The book is sort of a weird one in that it's partly for the public but also partly to get his viewpoint about the importance of developmental randomness across to academic ... sort of like The Selfish Gene in that respect.
The Extinction Trials - SM Wilson
Rating: 3/5
Source: Borrowed from local public library
Date finished: March 23
This is a sort of Hunger Games-esque book. Stormchaser and Lincoln live on a continent that has run out of resources; people are crammed into beds, taking shifts to sleep, eating crap. But there's an entire other continent on their world ripe for the taking, except of course that it's full of terrifying, man-eating dinosaurs. Every year, 100 finalists (thought 'tributes', lol) are sent to Piloria to find food and get information on the dinosaurs, and the few that come back are given healthcare, which no one else gets. Stormchaser goes because she's curious, while Lincoln needs the healthcare for his dying sister.
I mostly enjoyed this book but it was pretty unsophisticated and unrealistic (even with suspension of disbelief). One interesting part that unfortunately just upset me was Storm's concern for the dinosaurs and wrestling with her morals about the justification for killing the dinosaurs. I'm glad they put it in but unfortunately I'm pretty distraught about animal murder and exploitation in the world (and especially in science) at the moment so it didn't make for great escapism. As a geneticist, I also liked that DNA was a plot point here although not a very developed one. The writing felt sort of juvenile, and made me think maybe I've grown out of YA, or at least this 'young-targeted' YA. There was a lot of telling-not-showing and a romance we were told about but didn't really see any evidence of. In summary, it's a decent book for simple entertainment and I like that it put in that unusual perspective on harming the dinosaurs, but it often felt too simple and silly. Also, Storm has violet eyes that they keep commenting on. Argh. I might recommend for young teens/kids.
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? - Frans de Waal
Rating: 3.5/5Source: Borrowed from college library, also got digital version
Date finished: April 9
de Waal is a primatologist who mixes his experiences working with primates in with describing various pieces of evidence we have for animal cognition in this book. I liked it, perhaps because I'm already predisposed to thinking well of animals, and I liked his approach of evolutionary cognition, assuming continuity and not just acting like evolution stopped at the head. I found it hard to believe some of the shit he said other experimenters had done, like said monkeys couldn't tell faces apart because they'd been shown human faces instead of monkey faces, or that elephants couldn't recognise themselves because the damn mirrors were too small. There's loads of this in the book and I almost felt he must be making it up because how could 'scientists' be that stupid, but honestly knowing what many autism researchers are like I can believe it. (Coincidence that both autism researchers and bad animal researchers underestimate their subjects because they think they're not human?) Apart from the examples of how people have messed up the field of animal cognition by refusing to look, I learned a lot about ways we measure animals' abilities so that was interesting. When I heard he'd be mixing his own experiences in with research I thought it might be winding and self-indulgent but no, he actually makes it fit in and blend very well. I learned about some really impressive animals.
On the negative side: I did get a bit bored at points, and he never addressed the elephant in the room of animal cruelty/exploitation and how that can be justified in the light of all this information about animals' mental abilities. He also kept saying that animals are good at what they need to be good at to survive in their niche as if that was an argument for intelligence, which I'm not sure it is.
The Speed of Dark - Elizabeth Moon
Rating: 3/5Source: Bought for iPad Kindle (after borrowing it from the college library, because I loved the start so much I wanted to reward the author...and because it was easier on my eyes)
Date Finished: April 28
Lou is an autistic man, the last generation of autistics who were born too late for the cure. He works as a bioinformatics specialist at a pharmaceutical company using his unique pattern-finding abilities and fences on the side. He struggles to navigate the world but has a good job, a hobby he's good at and a group of friends. One day, news comes out that there's now a cure for autism in adults - it could reverse his condition and make him normal, and his boss starts pressuring him to take it to cut the costs of his accommodations (a gym for bouncing/stimming). Should he take it?
I loved almost all of this book. From the start it grabbed me because it was such a perfect representation of autism and the shit (some) neurotypicals put autistics through that I just felt incredibly seen. I can't describe it all now but there was just so much that rang true, from the stimming to the sitting in the same places to the difficulty working out ambiguous statements to the deep focus on intellectual tasks and pattern-finding ability. (I thought his inability to work out idioms was a bit silly though - you can just memorise those.) At one point a friend betrays him and he's just unable to conceive of that because of his loyalty and because 'friends don't hurt friends', and that rang true as well. He had some really good friends who looked out for him, and I loved seeing that because it was really sweet and heartwarming. It was kinda weird that his friendships with fellow autistics weren't very close, though.
Unfortunately, after all that goodness for 400 pages, the character completely changes in the last 30 pages and makes a choice I hated. (Click if you want to see a spoiler for the ending:
), so that brought down the rating a lot and made it very difficult to rate. Also, a more nitpicky thing, he kept going on about the speed of dark as if that was a smart question. Ugh.
Disrupted - Dan Lyons
Rating: 3/5
Source: Borrowed eBook from local library - first book I've read using the library's BorrowBox app. It's not great.
Date Finished: April 30
When 50-something year old tech editor at Newsweek Dan Lyons was suddenly laid off, he had to go find a job to feed his family and ended up working at HubSpot, a tech company that makes marketing software. It turned out that this was an utter nightmare, where despite the cheery exterior, fun foosball tables and candy wall, there was no structure, no job security, and a whole lot of ageism, sexism and racism, and the company was somehow continuing to raise money despite never making a profit. This is a tell-all expose of HubSpot (and apparently startup in general) culture, which was shocking but delicious in his complete willingness to incinerate bridges. I mean, damn, did you have to personally insult all those individual coworkers? I also have to wonder how they verified that these were true - the publishers did do that, right? - given that lots of them were just personal interactions.
It was fun, and HubSpot sounds like a hellscape, but the author also comes across as a giant, cocky asshole who I wouldn't want to work with either (dude, calm down that you can't joke about 'dry vaginas and giant cocks' at work now. I wouldn't want to hear that either). To borrow from r/AmITheAsshole, Everyone Sucks Here.
Some great/especially savage parts:
'WHY WE LOVE CERVICAL CANCER (AND YOU SHOULD TOO!)'
'MILEY CYRUS AND CERVICAL CANCER: 10 THINGS THEY HAVE IN COMMON'
So read it for the incredibly entertaining/bizarre stories and insights into startup culture and corporate malfeasance, but perhaps keep a healthy distance from identifying with the author.
Overall
It seems like I haven't been reading great books this year so far! 8 books with a mean rating of 3.25/5! The Loneliest Girl in the Universe was the best by far. I've just starting reading a French children's book, Le Petit Nicolas, to improve my French, and have read one chapter of that so far. I'm getting through it OK though I'm very glad for the French dictionary and translator functions my Kindle app provides. I'm hoping to find some really nice, cozy YA books to read now - like Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell - so please give me your recommendations!
), so that brought down the rating a lot and made it very difficult to rate. Also, a more nitpicky thing, he kept going on about the speed of dark as if that was a smart question. Ugh.
Disrupted - Dan Lyons
Rating: 3/5Source: Borrowed eBook from local library - first book I've read using the library's BorrowBox app. It's not great.
Date Finished: April 30
When 50-something year old tech editor at Newsweek Dan Lyons was suddenly laid off, he had to go find a job to feed his family and ended up working at HubSpot, a tech company that makes marketing software. It turned out that this was an utter nightmare, where despite the cheery exterior, fun foosball tables and candy wall, there was no structure, no job security, and a whole lot of ageism, sexism and racism, and the company was somehow continuing to raise money despite never making a profit. This is a tell-all expose of HubSpot (and apparently startup in general) culture, which was shocking but delicious in his complete willingness to incinerate bridges. I mean, damn, did you have to personally insult all those individual coworkers? I also have to wonder how they verified that these were true - the publishers did do that, right? - given that lots of them were just personal interactions.
It was fun, and HubSpot sounds like a hellscape, but the author also comes across as a giant, cocky asshole who I wouldn't want to work with either (dude, calm down that you can't joke about 'dry vaginas and giant cocks' at work now. I wouldn't want to hear that either). To borrow from r/AmITheAsshole, Everyone Sucks Here.
Some great/especially savage parts:
- Someone invented a Blog Topic Generator and excitedly launched it, only to find out that it produced the following results for someone trying to make a blog post about Cervical Cancer Awareness Month:
'WHY WE LOVE CERVICAL CANCER (AND YOU SHOULD TOO!)'
'MILEY CYRUS AND CERVICAL CANCER: 10 THINGS THEY HAVE IN COMMON'
- 'None of this is as awful as Benioff himself. He stands six-feet-five-inches tall and weighs three hundred pounds, with gleaming white teeth and curly black hair that glistens with hair gel' [....] 'Benioff is a buffoon, a bullshit artist, and such an out-of-control egomaniac that it is painful to listen to him talk'[...] '"Have you transformed the way you innovate?" was Benioff's big line at the 2012 Dreamforce show. Note that you can switch the two buzzwords in the sentence and it still sounds good and still means nothing.'
- 'actor-slash-asshole Sean Penn'
- 'phrases like the Internet of customers, where people make decisions at superhuman speeds, and companies operate at the speed of now, as well as at the speed of sales.'
- the utterly insane abuse the author receives from his boss when the boss is pissed off at him, between inexplicable bouts of friendliness. These are hilarious in their absurdity because you know the author makes it out okay. The berating, the loyalty tests, the pretending other people are angry at him and forcing him to apologise to them, the gaslighting about how actually no one has ever liked him...
So read it for the incredibly entertaining/bizarre stories and insights into startup culture and corporate malfeasance, but perhaps keep a healthy distance from identifying with the author.
Overall
It seems like I haven't been reading great books this year so far! 8 books with a mean rating of 3.25/5! The Loneliest Girl in the Universe was the best by far. I've just starting reading a French children's book, Le Petit Nicolas, to improve my French, and have read one chapter of that so far. I'm getting through it OK though I'm very glad for the French dictionary and translator functions my Kindle app provides. I'm hoping to find some really nice, cozy YA books to read now - like Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell - so please give me your recommendations!
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