Becca

Fascinating. Goodreads says that I read this ten years ago, which I don't remember at all. I guess that says something about the impression it left on me. I hate reviewing old fantasy, because I feel guilty saying that this has been done one hundred times before and better, knowing that Obernewtyn may well have been one of the first instantiations. Nonetheless, there is nothing original for the modern reader - society got too advanced, set off a nuclear weapon, destroyed society back to medieval times; some people were mutated and therefore have magic (every bone in my geneticist body is twitching to point out how very unrealistic this is in several ways, but I'll defer); one girl is The Special-ist and she Will Save the World with the help of her Magic Cat and the Ruggedly Handsome and Terse, but Ultimately Loving Love Interest. Along the way, we will be “surprised” to know that civilization was destroyed by itself and the nuclear war. Her friends, of course, involve the Boy Who is Super Magic to compensate for his Blindness and The Boy Who Mopes after his Dead Girlfriend, the Very Delicate sacrificial lamb. Sorry, if I want a post-apocalyptic fantasy world with strong, yet loving female characters and brusque but lovable male love interests, I'll go back to reading [a:Sharon Shinn 28544 Sharon Shinn http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1218995575p2/28544.jpg]

Quinn has clearly done her research: nearly every single beat of her story about female spies in WWI is hold up by primary sources. Usually I feel uncomfortable about fictionalizations of real people, but this is such an untouched area of history, that I loved seeing these characters come to life. The stories about how women managed to sneak in and out of occupied European countries, and pass messages on hat pins, hidden by the misconceptions that women would never participate in war efforts were fascinating.

Like other reviewers, I thought the book as a whole was less than a sum of its parts – I liked Charlie, and I was interested in her search following WWII, but it was much thinner. I was hoping for more about the war effort in WWII. It was vaguely alluded to at various points that Eve worked WWII, but never really explored.

This is a crazy romp of a story: Elizebeth Smith, bored of women's work and afraid she'll never be taken seriously as a scholar first gets taken in by a larger than life self-made millionaire and self-declared colonel, where she joins his intentional community as one of several women looking for secret messages in the Shakespeare folios, to prove that they were indeed written by Sir Francis Bacon. However, once the Great War starts, she finds herself the only person in the country with any serious expertise in codes. So she, and her future husband forge the field of cryptanalysis. Following the war, mostly discarded by the military, she continues to work for the coast guard to decrypt coded messages by the mob as they traffic moonshine. So she is well-poised to lead the American effort when WWII truly becomes the war of codes.

Despite my obsession with the British female codebreakers of Bletchley Park, I knew less about the American side: we decrypted Engima! And defeated a bizarre secret South American-takeover plot!

If I had one complaint it's that the book to some extent sidelined her husband, William Friedman. This bothers me not just because “The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies And Her Husband, the Brilliant Jewish Geneticist, Who Also Smashed Codes” is EVEN more likely to be mistaken for a Markov Chain generated specifically from Becca's Interests, but also, Elizebeth and William made clear that they saw themselves as equals and I think they would have preferred it that way.

Nonetheless, this is a fascinating piece of history, well told by Fagone.

I first saw a DTWOF comic in one of the campus newspapers of my hometown growing up. In the years of DTWOF comic strips that followed, I'd occasionally catch one posted online, or in another newspaper, or a few strips in a collection at someone's house. But the comics are intensely serialized (not making much sense as a standalone), the whole archive was never available online and only 527 comics were ever published in the 21 years of the strip, so it always seemed like I was catching a glimpse of an elusive whole. This collection is near-complete and the storyline finally manages to be cohesive. Don't get me wrong: this still reads like a serial, and threads drop and there are one-off jokes, but it reads a lot better as a collection.

Perhaps what I found the most interesting from a modern perspective was actually the politics. It was fascinating to realize that the things that the characters said about Bush (HW) and Clinton (Bill) strongly resemble the things that I've said about Bush (W) and Clinton (Hillary) and Trump and Obama, too, for that matter. And indeed, the protest wing of leftwing politics versus the run-for-office-wing versus the tear-your-hair-out-publicly wing have apparently always had the tension that is so apparent now.

Jemisin caps off the best fantasy trilogy with a conclusion that is deeply & profoundly personal to the protagonist, and also about changing the world. Jemisin is endlessly imaginative, but her books capture a grittiness about our world, about self-sacrifice and cultural conflicts and about what people in power inflict on others. This is one of the darkest books I've read in ages and I was sitting on a friend's floor trying to convince her to read it anyway: “When Jemisin's characters die, it's about something. She cares about her characters. They aren't forgotten. The other characters don't just magically heal their trauma. They find ways to construct meaning to move forward.” This is a story about being in community and how we do that, despite hurting each other, despite being unable to save each other. This is a story about unconventional loves (and more about Alabaster and Essun) including platonic and familial. I loved every page.

[b:The Girl With All the Gifts 17235026 The Girl With All the Gifts (The Girl With All the Gifts #1) M.R. Carey https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403033579s/17235026.jpg 23753235] was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of book: smart science, interesting existential quandaries. The Boy on the Bridge is the Girl With All the Gifts redux. But unfortunately, literally: the smart but loving female scientist, and the precocious but different kid and they travel with a small crew who are deadset against them, all together exploring a land laid waste by the zombie plague. Unfortunately with all of the clever twists done already in The Girl, there wasn't much new and I felt like The Boy largely dragged. That's not to say there weren't well-drawn characters and emotional beats – there were, but it really hit basically all the same emotional, plot and character notes as The Girl did.

So, I'm curious: has Seanan McGuire ever...read a book? Does she know what they are and how they work? Because I kind of like her schtick, but it's profoundly not a novella. By which I mean, Down Among the Sticks and Bones only has any sense of narrative structure and emotional payoff in retrospect in the events of Every Heart a Doorway, it's prequel. And the murder mystery in Every Heart a Doorway doesn't actually make any sense until you read Down Among the Sticks and Bones. I spent a lot of time frustrated by the murder mystery of Down Among the Sticks and Bones because it felt like cheating to have a murder mystery when the rules turned out to allow resurrection. Down Among the Sticks and Bones makes that slightly more palatable (although not really until book #5 is it really addressed).

As a standalone, this works barely at all. Jack and Jill are flimsy characters and the plot is basically nonexistent, with the book fizzling just as it should be hitting a climax. Where it does succeed is where Seanan McGuire seems to excel: a beautifully depicted setting (in this case, a canonical horro movie) and a rich fairy tale-esque theme. It's beautiful reading, but when the spell breaks I'm still at WTH did I just read?

I'm a sucker for little chunks of history that mean something in a bigger context; it's probably why I'm addicted to all retellings of the Bletchley Park story. And that's how I feel about the Radium Girls – it's a story I already know from [b:The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York 7054123 The Poisoner's Handbook Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York Deborah Blum https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442933592s/7054123.jpg 7305202], and found fascinating there, but I find it to have endless depths and nuances, and so I jumped for a more in-depth exploration (and I would again.)With a backdrop of WWI, luminosity of watchfaces is a matter of life and death for soldiers. Fortunately, radioactive elements have recently been discovered, so women are paid to use radium to paint watch dials. Unfortunately, working with radium is a matter of life and death for the dialpainters...but no one seems to notice or care. It's a story about chemistry and the dual roles of chemical utility and chemical toxicity make in our lives. It's a story about feminism, and how women joined the workforce and were let in only around the edges. It's a story about our workplace rights that is still relevant in modern times – after all, it directly led to the development of OSHA. It's a story about medical mysteries and how doctors work through tracing disparate symptoms to a single underlying disease. It's a stunningly apropos tale of a society that does not care for the weak in its ranks and bankrupts them through their efforts to obtain medical care for societal-inflicted wounds.Kate Moore wanted more than that: she wanted a story that was really about the individual dialpainters, and to that end (according to the introduction, at least), she painstakingly interviews the families and friends of dozens of them. She wants them to be real people, rather than symbols. It's a deeply admirable goal. And it completely fell flat for me. By including what feels like at least 100 named dialpainters, I felt the impact was actually lessened, because I never got attached to any of them. Each has a tragic story, but it's really the same tragic story. So reading pages of “Jane Doe was a dialpainter. She loved her beautiful dress and her winning smile. She was dating John Doe. She was friends with other dialpainters, Sarah and Sally. They all lip-pointed, just like they were taught. Then her teeth starting falling out. They thought she had phosphorus jaw, but she didn't. Then she died. Mary Smith was a dialpainter...” got very (very, very) tedious. And then, honestly, I just got inured – once I knew every character introduced would die within 10 pages, I stopped caring who their friends were, or who they were dating.The latter parts of the book were better, especially the last part, where the book really focuses on a core group of painters from the Ottawa factor and the reader gets to know them and their personalities decently well. Even then, though, Moore tells us little about them except that they were “strong.” The women never came alive for me. Overall, I loved the topic. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I learned, and talking to people about radium and how we can reflect on that era. I respect what Moore was trying to do. On the other hand, I didn't actually enjoy reading this book. I spent 8 weeks reading this book. I usually read a book every 10 days, so that says a lot. I dreaded picking it up and treated it like a chore, especially the first half; the back half was better. This may be better as a physical book, where one can skim, but as an un-table-of-contented-eBook, it was pretty painful.Overall, 3.5 stars.

Oh, this was lovely. I kind of always want to know exactly what it is that other people do all day, so finding out in detail not just how modern dictionaries work, but also the politics and intricacies of being a lexicographer (and how Kory Stamper feels when she checks her e-mails) was deeply satisfying. Stamper does a great job of making every detail of the dictionary-writing process accessible. Each chapter focuses on a principle highlighted by a specific word and start very basic (like how hard it is to categorize parts of speech) and venture into the quite abstract (the way that implicit biases affect definitions and how the definitions used can be perceived by readers.)

The strongest thread throughout the book is basically an ode to descriptivist linguistics as well as a dismissal of the prescriptivist (and, to be frank, neurotic) approach that Stamper perceives in amateur logophiles.

Overall, the book is personal, funny and educational - a rare combination. If I had one complaint, it would be that the self-deprecation wears very thin, but that's easy to overlook with so much more to like.

As a teenager, I was going about my own merry way until Margaret and her literary ilk sent me into a neurotic spiral of “why don't I worry about my body shape?” “Why don't I have obsessive, angsty crashes on guys?” “Why don't I care whether my friends have their periods?”

The answer, revealed years later is that I'm far wiser than these girls and their nonfictional counterparts – a truth I wish I knew as a middleschooler when teachers harassed me about not being able to find ways that Margaret resonated with me.

A book about a petty and shallow girl, befitting petty and shallow preteens and the intelligent young women who want insight into why their peers have suddenly gone crazy.

I'd had a long week last week (my pager went off starting at 1:30 PM and didn't stop for 18 hours.) I was too tired to do pretty much anything. Including getting up from the couch to find my book. So I did what any reasonable person would do, found the first ebook available from my library and downloaded it to my laptop.

I have intermittently watched the TV show of the same name (after it was recommended to me by a patient) and found it extremely entertaining - dark, dramatic and yet with relevance to actual teenage issues, without being a Very Special Show. So I chose Heartless from the library (none of the other books in the series were available.)

On the one hand, it was a quick read - it took me less than two hours. The characters were flat. There was no thematic intentions. I can ignore all of that for a good mystery, but literally nothing happened in Heartless. There were a couple of interesting plot threads, but they were left completely without conclusions. Very Ho-Hum.

Leo: I like it
What do you like about it? That they make the dragon a bookstore
Is there anything you don't like about it Well, at the beginning, the people aren't very nice to the dragon.
Anything else? It's interesting that they make the dragon be the bookshop and not, like a plane or a helicopter.

Parents say... A lovely book about the importance of tolerance and how to make friends by sharing a love of reading. The illustrations are beautiful, the rhyming fails to irritate me and some lines like “Franklin and Luna felt like they were made of stories” really stick with me. Also, ballerina spiders (Leo: “They're not wearing ballet dresses, but they are holding the handles.” Me: “Yeah, they don't have tutus, but they dance at the barre.” Leo: “what's a tutu?”) and kung fu bats. Just super cute.

Alex, if not Irene Pepperberg, is a household name. I vaguely remember in middle school watching the famous Alex videos and having all of my ideas about animal intelligence challenged. My dad eagerly tells of his experience meeting Irene Pepperberg (I'm sure I'll get an e-mail from him reminding me that he knows her personally after I publish this review), so they're both definitely household names in my life. Therefore, there is little attempt to familiarize the reader with the story of Alex or why he is important and the attempt that is made (a painfully long intro/eulogy) is unnecessary.

I was expecting the book to largely focus on the science of working with Alex and how Dr. Pepperberg formulated the work as she had and what she has concluded. Instead, Dr. Pepperberg makes the decision to really write a memoir, which turns out to be a fascinating look at how much being a scientist requires overcoming opposition and how favored one is by lucky coincidences. Most interesting, to me, at least, is Pepperberg's explorations of the setbacks she faces, especially as a female scientist, and the unconventional methods she turns to to get funding and faculty support. It is really very telling about the state of American science that as famous of a scientist as Pepperberg is, she still reverts to private funding and adjunct faculty positions.

There are books about revolutions that are really novels, and not a manifesto. This is not one of them. More propaganda than literature, furnished with schticks rather than narrative this is a clunky sophomore novel. The redeeming feature is the intricacy of character in Rex and Gordon. However, all of the other characters, even the ostensible main characters are not featured enough to be much more than spokespeople for the various political causes Chute uses them for.

An extremely satisfying prequel to [b:The Haunting of Tram Car 015 36546128 The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Fatma el-Sha'arawi, #2) P. Djèlí Clark https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1537226167l/36546128.SY75.jpg 58277622]. Clark continues to shine in his ability to build a rich and interesting setting. In this case, I found the steampunk angels that were controversially “angels” versus angels and were being of pure ethereal light encased in a steampunk chassis fascinating. I think the continued richness of magical, metropolitan Cairo that Clark develops is perhaps one of the strongest de facto arguments in favor of the importance of diverse authors in speculative fiction. Clark just really brings a unique voice to the field. I found Fatma a much richer character than those in Tram Car – I loved her opinionated stance, the idea of her exotifying Western culture and of course the gender nonconformity. The downsides here were similar to Tram Car: Clark doesn't seem to really know how to conclude a story and instead just abruptly ties all the loose ends in a bow and declares the story over. I found it just as jarring in this novelette as I did in Tram Car – these are rich, complex settings with so much nuance in the set up and then almost anticlimactically neatly wrapped up. I am interested in finding out if this will persist to the upcoming full-length novel in this setting. But, nonetheless, Clark is now on my must-read list.

Full disclosure: I went into this with a hatred of chick-lit. I had enjoyed the guilty pleasure of The Nanny Diaries, and when my best friend told me she secretly loved chick-lit, I decided to give it a try. My first attempt (from her bookshelf) was deplorable, but I liked The Devil Wears Prada film, so I decided to give the genre a second try.

This book was unbelievably terrible. The shallow, self-absorbed main character, whom we're supposed to believe is interesting enough for everyone to follow her life in the newspaper and qualified enough for her Fabulous job. (And also, women everywhere in Weisberger's world, even highly educated and qualified ones, want Fabulous jobs in fashion and entertainment) The staunch homophobia, with only truly flaming homosexual characters (and all effete men being secretly homosexual) was what really turned me off from this book.

Experiment? Over.

I wanted to love this, but at the end of the day, Vincent's characterization of men was so unbelievable – I read passages about how men acted towards each other aloud to my husband, who found them a trite over-simplification. It reveals more of Vincent's misandry than any profound truths about sex and gender.

Becky Chambers specializes in cozy scifi. This lost the lovely family of choice of the first Wayfarers book, but I found the exploration of humanity between the AI and the clone pretty compelling. Equally homey is them slowly find their way to make a home, life and family with each other.

My preordered copy came in the day before Rosh Hashanah. On the second day, after services were over (my synagogue runs short and under-populated on the second day), the house quiet without electricity and my toddler at daycare, the idea of just reading a little was unbelievably tempting, albeit borderline sacrilegious. And of course, once I started, Tana French's writing was addictive.

I remember very little of the “central” mystery. What I remember about is the creeping, burning embarrassment of self-recognition reading about how Antoinette Conway nearly let a mystery go unsolved because she was so caught up in how others saw her. Many mystery novels have the “stupid plot” error, where an idiot could solve the mystery if they simply followed the obvious clues, and so the writers have to make the brilliant detective look over the one clear next step to prevent the novel from early closure. In this case, there's no inconsistency: French's novel is literally about the narrative that Conway tells about herself of being an isolated loner. The mystery is window-dressing for the consequences of letting yourself be seduced into such a narrative, and the hard climb back out.

So in the end, it was pretty apropos of the holiday – I'm definitely guilty of perpetuating negative self-narratives, and choosing to fail rather than challenge them. And I felt inspired by French to try to do better this year.

I think this book may be better titled “Harry Potter is a Terrible Dad,” but that would break the grammar of the titles, I suppose.

That being said, this was the right book for this time in my life and my current relationship with Harry Potter. I'm a little younger/older than Harry – Harry himself was born two years before I was, but the series didn't become widely available in the US until I was 17, so 6 years older than Harry. Nonetheless, I mostly felt about the same age and facing the same trials and tribulations – I read about OWLS and NEWTS in between college finals, and rooted for Ron and Hermione around my own engagement. And as a teen, the exploratory world-building was right up my alley.

And on the flipside, a book focused on an older, more harried, Harry is right for me right now. The more introspective tone about setting priorities and how much to force people to live the life you wish they would was also right for me right now. Yes, I wanted the nostalgia of a real Harry Potter book, but this was good.

I felt less certain about the return of the time-turners – Rowling herself has said their inclusion was a mistake in the initial series and was quite adamant that they were all destroyed. On the other hand, if they had to come back this was the right time and the right purpose. I liked that the use of the time-turner helped highlight all of the additional possible futures in the face of years of internet speculation of what the future of the potterverse may hold.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. On the one hand, it is a beautifully written, moving (if depressing) and thorough account of three generations surviving in the face of death, infidelity and alienation. On the other hand, after 300 pages, a reader gets bored of every female character getting pregnant, running away from home and/or marrying an emotionally distance if not frankly abusive husband and regretting her life. It ends up feeling flat at best and at worst, a little misogynistic that even the smartest female characters get entangled in such things.

On a practical level, the intertwined narratives of many generations playing through the same script are very hard to keep straight, and I ended up needing a diagram to remember if Frank was Nell's husband or Alice's and how exactly Edmund was related to Bunty and who exactly Betty was, again? I get the parallels Atkinson is trying to draw, but they work better when she gives the characters enough individuality that the reader can keep them straight.

The true redeeming aspect of the novel is Ruby – the protagonist. Her thoughts are vivid, full of metaphor and symbolism and yet relatable. The book truly shines in Ruby's nightmares – inchoate end of the world fantasies, in which the familiar twists with a certainty of catastrophe – and the way in which they mature with Ruby. These nightmares reflect the heart of Atkinson's narrative – the way in which the families are both familiar and yet ill-meaning, self-involved and chaotic, which she does equally skillfully.

Not as good or tightly paced as Six of Crows, but the gang's back together for one last heist. And it's cute. I liked the resolution and the character growth. I'm still not a huge fan of the Grishaverse, but I thought Bardugo introduced some interesting new concepts in this one. I was also not a huge fan of all of the female characters being damaged and needing emotional support/rescue.

But it reads fun, they pull off hijinks, the characters are mostly nuanced and well-written, so pretty enjoyable reading experience. Overall, 3.5 stars

About a hundred years ago, Daf Yomi was invented. “The world's oldest book club,” my rabbi called it, before adding sardonically “except the [torah portion of the week]. I'm not totally sure why we need two.” The goal is reading a page of talmud a day. At that breakneck pace, it only takes 7.5 years to complete. I tried it picking up in the middle of last cycle (13) and lasted about a month of dense discussion about where birds would be sacrificed in the temple before giving up. Ilana Kurshan was on the leading edge: this is her autobiography about the 7.5 years of her life doing the 12th daf yomi cycle from ~2005-2013. I wanted to read it because I committed to cycle 14, which began this January. Unlike cycle 13 (and very unlike cycle 12), apparently the idea of progressive daf yomi has ripened. There are facebook groups and slack channels filled with women and heterodox Jews of all strips.

But Ilana Kurshan did it before us. Back when it was shockingly unusual for a non-Orthodox Jew or a woman to do it. Back when there was no framework for how to do it outside of a bet mikdash. So Kurshan shows us how to take the talmud, learn from the nearly impenetrable mutterings about fruit growth and apply it to modern life. The talmud bridges her from her divorce to her second marriage, and the births of her children. She tells us about her studying on planes, in labor, in Jerusalem, in New York, in the times where she had no idea where her life was going. It's a deeply vulnerable and relatable memoir.

When people ask me about the Jewish calendar, I point out that yes, it's a lunar calendar but also inextricably linked to the solar seasons. Unlike Islam, we always celebrate holidays at the same time of year, born out of the fundamental agricultural underpinings of the religion. We always celebrate Passover in Spring, and the High Holidays in fall, and the holidays resonate with seasonal themes. At 7.5 years the daf yomi cycle is unmoored in time (honestly, I think the tannaim & amoraim would be horrified). It was unsettling to me when she read a tractate strolling through the Jerusalem shuk in summer that I'll read in Philadelphia winters. I struggled with this a lot when I started daf yomi - who knows what the context of my life will be when I read any particular tractate? Kurshan set the example of how to choose to set each page within the firmament of her life.

It's possible I got old between the other Twelve Houses books and this. I remember the Twelve Houses as charming old-school fantasy novels with great character growth and setting development. Fortune and Fate feels like a fanfic of that: Wen is a character who has been totally present all along, don't you remember she was Justin's BFF? And the Queen loves her so much she won't replace her even though she went missing? So, since she's totally a central character we know and love, here's her story, with ample name-dropping of the (actual) main characters and a side plot about the actual main characters that's completely unrelated. So, yeah, as a Gillengaria novel this fails – and there are more loose threads than I could handle on that end: “there's so much more crime in the Southern lands than there has been, let's investigate.” That ended up being completely dropped. “What if people aren't still loyal to the queen?” Oh well, everyone loves Cammon, so should be fine.

On the other hand, Wen's story was sweet, if predictable. There's room in my life for a cozy old-school fantasy about female warriors.

Math! And social justice! Two of my favorite things! What's not to like?

Unfortunately, kind of a lot. Look: people who read math books for fun are math nerds. Dumbing down math concepts with cutesy terms is not needed. It will not make people who would not otherwise read math for fun read your book and it will piss off the rest of us. Also, it's lazy. And it's bad math – O'Neil uses the term “weapon of math destruction” (over and over) very vaguely, so that she doesn't have to define exactly what she's talking about. Oh, she claims that she has a clear definition, but then she calls things like Racial Profiling a WMD (cringe). Racial Profiling isn't an algorithm; it's a cognitive heuristic and it doesn't relay on Big Data.

More problematically, I think she uses this term to obscure that a lot of her points are actually about cognitive biases, racial inequality and socioeconomic inequality, rather than the data science used to enforce these. She herself acknowledges that some things (like, e.g. racial profiling) have happened to exactly the current degree long before data science was available.

Overall, I found her approach really shallow. She's a former tenured ivy league math professor! I wanted her to write a book that only she could write – full of nuance and equations I needed a scratchpad to struggle through.

Nonetheless, I think some of her points were good: that machine-learning algorithms are dense and require supervision and critical thinking as to their results rather than blind trust. It's an important book for the math-phobic.