Rated Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory 8/10
It's good to take a moment out of the series and acknowledge that some horrible stuff has happened to several people. The question is, when is Murderbot going to see a shrink?
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Wants to read Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
Wants to read Wizard of the Crow
Rated Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues 8/10
For a relatively slim book, this really packs in a lot of information. Between my biology background and always having had an interest in anthropology, archaeology, and history, this book was right in my wheelhouse. There's a lot I learned about times I generally knew about, but this book covers specifics. I think most know that in the past before the understanding of germ theory a lot of cultures were less than sanitary, but the added points of interest were always the connections made to how massive amounts of disease and death created "opportunities" for turning points in history. That's what kept me turning the pages even as my eyes wanted to shut because it was my bedtime. I recommend this book if you're into the above mentioned subjects for a thought provoking read.
Wants to read Walking Practice
Rated Jade Legacy 10/10
very long and rich and sweeping but also very exciting moment-by-moment. the first two books are so tight in scope by comparison that it's impressive that this one *moves* as much as they do.
Rated Fang Fiction 8/10
Charming, cleverly executed, very satisfying.
Wants to read Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York
Wants to read The Memory Police
Rated The Elements of Style 10/10
Not my first read, and my copy is so old that the bookmark in it is a Blockbuster Video rent-6-get-one-free card. Some of the advice here is dated and all of it is opinionated in a charming-but-cranky way but it’s a delight to read and a good reminder that writing is communication. In an age when so much of the the “written” “content” you come across was not written but “generated,” a stern but encouraging voice telling you to structure, write, to rewrite, and to think about the reader’s experience is refreshing.
Edited 86d ago
Rated Persuasion 10/10
the ability to accurately narrate a character’s interior justification at face value and yet still convey the gap between it and the real world is a kind of magic trick, and to also make it funny, a little miracle
Rated Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care 10/10
Thought-provoking and important. Deliberately and smartly doesn’t grind your face in the problems activists are working to solve or the badness of their enemies; this is taken as a given. Instead, it’s about how organizers and activists can live their values in the work they do and how that actually improves the work.
Rated The Spiritual Poems of Rumi 4/10
This was a gift and it’s more decorative than anything else; the layout is beautiful but the “nonliteral” translations are so hippy-dippy and loose that they could be hanging on the wall of an AirBnB.
Rated Player's Handbook 8/10
I think they did a really good job with this edition - putting the detailed instructions on how the game is actually played up front, for instance. The art is nice and I mostly like the minor changes they’ve made to the game mechanics and how those mechanics are explained.
Rated Crying in H Mart 8/10
A really lovely memoir of the author’s fraught relationship with her Korean-immigrant mother and the Korean food that bonded them. I went in expecting this to be very sad and it is - the subject is very much loss and grief, and the ravages of both cancer and cancer treatment come up in detail. But it’s also very warm and thoughtful, with much of the book focused on how Zauner uses cooking, music, writing, and travel to keep her mother with her. Brief and really well written.