Books read, early August

Thomas Aquinas, On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists. This was my dad's and kept among his chemistry texts. It was a charming example of medieval philosophy, debunking a notion that another group had come up with that was very inside-baseball but deftly handled with the tools available at the time.

Ruthanna Emrys, Imperfect Commentaries. I'd read, loved, and recommended several stories in this--I think even critiqued one or two in beta form actually--but it's so nice to have them in this lovely volume where I can return to them again and again. Which I will, because there are so many favorites here, it's impossible to pick one or even three or four. Highly recommended, you will want this on your shelf.

Kathleen Flenniken, Plume. This is a volume of poetry by a nuclear engineer who grew up in a town of nuclear engineers, in the shadow of a nuclear facility, and watched cancer clusters form in her childhood neighbors. It's well-informed and technical and also poetically beautiful; it's footnoted for those of you who need it, but for those of us who have the background it can be searing straight-up.

Sarah Foot, Aethelstan. A history or biography-of-sorts of this tenth century monarch, who is peripheral to a project I'm working on--hard to do biography as we think of it for modern figures on someone this far back in time, but it's a different kind of interesting, seeing what we can piece together about him. I remain fascinated by what British historians are and are not interested in talking about regarding the Anglo-Saxon period, so there are several cultural holes I'll continue to look to fill, but this is still a good thing to have on my shelf.

Gwynne Garfinkle, People Change. I was surprised and charmed by the breadth of the Hollywood poems in this. Less surprising but still favorites were "Man-Size" (already enjoyed elsewhere) and "The Paper Doll Golems" (I am a sucker for paper dolls, and this one was new to me).

Ruth Kassinger, Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us. This was less algae biology than I wanted and more algae engineering. It was interesting algae engineering, so it worked out okay! But I had been hoping for lots and lots of detailed algae subspecies biology. Ah well. Algae engineering is good too.

R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic. Discussed elsewhere.

Fonda Lee, Jade War. I love this series. It's so much fun. And I love middle books, and this definitely is one--scope widening, ramifications and implications at every turn, no need to stick the landing yet. Don't start here, for heaven's sake, start with the first one, but you'll want to keep going, because the fantasy gangster kung fu movie mashup in this series works so brilliantly.

Rose MacAulay, The World My Wilderness. Okay so. This book. This book! This book is about a teenage girl who was with the Maquis in WWII and now has been taken back to London by her British father and is supposed to learn to be a "civilized woman" and instead is wandering around the bombed out bits painting them and stealing stuff because Maquis come on. Rose MacAulay is so great and I just keep reading her weird amazing books and this was basically exactly contemporaneous with The Catcher in the Rye. So when you were being handed something about some rando kid slouching around muttering about phonies, you could have been reading painter Maquis girl who is used to bombing Nazi train tracks is faintly baffled by your conformity, come on now, really. Really.

Amanda Owen, The Yorkshire Shepherdess. This is a memoir of a woman who decided to go off and raise sheep and children. She has some moments of "wait you what"...even more so than that decision process might indicate...and there are a few places where I really feel that her husband wants a good kicking, like where she has the ritual commentary about how he doesn't know how to turn on the grill (American English: broiler) and yet has seven children to feed. But I'm revising a novella that features several sheep, so! It was entertaining and interesting, mostly!

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. This ended up mostly being about matsutake mushroom hunters from various subcultures in different regions of the world, their sale and trading and interactions with the larger cultures around them. Occasionally Tsing wandered off into pronouncements of her personal philosophy that connected a little oddly with the mushrooms, but it was always back to the fungus eventually.

J.Y. Yang, The Ascent to Godhood. The fourth in a series of linked novellas, giving more of the history of the setting, but in a way that was all character and story, not a bare recitation of details. This centered on a relationship that shaped a world. My catnip.

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