Becca

Andy Weir writes fast-paced, engineering-oriented scifi well. This heist on a moon colony, featuring a vaguely Saudi, lapsed Muslim protagonist was a quick and light read. There's welding and problems with low-gravity/zero atmosphere and family bonding and shady business dealings. So, almost perfect.

But look, some people shouldn't be allowed to write books about women, and Andy Weir is one of those people. Also, mostly, I wanted it to be the Martian redux. And by trying to make a convoluted conspiracy plot, Weir has wandered away from what he does best: MacGyvering in Space! books.

Jemisin has this trick of writing books that harness the tropes of speculative fiction, such that if you try to describe one of her books it sounds like a generic fantasy novel. However, within that she manages to not just invert or subvert the cliches, but actually build something entirely new, while maintaining enough of an homage to classic fantasy that it feels thrilling the way your first introduction to SF/F was. What can I say about the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms to really capture that? The setting of Sky was refreshing, the Arameri truly cruel & the characters nuanced.

I can tell when a book is a true masterpiece because when people ask what I'm reading I feel compelled to provide not just a title but also sentences like: “Did you know that the very first dictionary wasn't until the 1750's?” and “Did you know that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary predated words like ‘typewriter' and ‘schizophrenia'?” and “The OED was published in installments like a Dickens novel, taking over 40 years to publish?”

The story is just fascinating. From the very beginning – the question of how and why to make a dictionary. Like many of the standardizations that begun in the 16th and 17th century, the idea that words should have standard spellings and meanings is pretty intuitive once you've thought of it, but requires an almost unimaginable amount of work. It's hard from this side of the google revolution to imagine how one even conceives of doing this much work. The group asked volunteers to read books from specified centuries, note down the words they found, the sentence it was in and send it in with citations. It was the complaints of poor handwriting and water damage that really hit home to me the intense work required in this plan. These scrips of paper were then sorted by the few OED editorial employees, selected, and set to the printing press(!) I was equally fascinated that a dictionary came so late in human history and that they managed to have a comprehensive dictionary so early.

Winchester intends for this to also be the story of Dr. Minor, who was one of the most important volunteer contributors, from where he sat incarcerated in an insane asylum, diagnosed with “monomacy” for his paranoid delusions. I found the story of a learned doctor, insane, but with preserved cognitive function, obsessively cultivating entries for the OED fascinating, but the story definitely lost steam when it deviated from being about the OED. In particular, the chapters of Dr. Minor's backstory and the chapter of Dr. Minor's dotage dragged. But overall, the story was fascinating and I learned a lot from this slim and readable book.

The entire first part of this book was completely fascinating. I was completely in love with the first significant chunk - about a man who loses his hippocampi in a traumatic accident, but still manages to go for walks around the block, make food and hold conversations about computers, all without being able to remember such details as where he lives or how old he is or what year it is. A Oliver Sacks-worthy story illustrating the power of habit in determining how we live.

Duhigg goes on from there to illustrate, using animal experiments in rodents and monkeys how habits are formed and how we can form good habits and extinguish bad ones. He perfectly balances practicality with intriguing science and anecdotes.

The latter two halves of the book spiral off in a multitude of directions. How is having willpower a habit? I'm not really sold. Some of his anecdotes read like they would belong better in Blink or the Tipping Point and it undermines the strong, consistent definition of a habit from the first third.

Also, some of my favorite parts of the book - the febreze model and the target/pregnancy story are available online on NPR & NYTimes magazine and excerpted on lifehacker. (I had read them prior to this and hoped that the rest of the book would be the same quality)

Take a basic adolescent novel about fitting in, friendship and crushes and then make all of that real: if you don't have any friends, you will literally be eaten by monsters. If the golden boy reciprocates his crush on you, it will literally save your life. That's the premise of Deadly Education and it's kind of a fascinating one.

I think Novik's characters were well-developed, especially to explore the way that adolescence can feel so life-or-death. Sometimes school fantasy can feel twee, but I felt like Novik's monsters felt real, serious threats and this was done well.