Becca

Dr. Zuk sets out to explore all of the ways that our preconceptions of the Paleo era may differ from how people really lived. I found the book as a whole pretty shallow – some theories of paleolithic parenting, diet, etc. were introduced, but mostly it wasn't a very scholarly approach. Yes, it's a pop!sci book, but Dr. Zuk's popular works on entomology were much better.

I wish I hadn't gone into this book on false pretenses. Jon told me that it was one of his favorite books from 2016 and that “A girl either lives in a fantasy book and it's not clear which.” Only to me, there was absolutely no ambiguity. At all. Yes, Alistair, the ostensible protagonist, thought it might be that she was being abused, but his narratives of how that might make sense of the situation were at least three times more far-fetched than just taking Fiona's story at face value. In fact, if not outright told that there was supposed to be ambiguity, I would have taken for granted that it was a fantasy novel.

And honestly, once I got over being annoyed at the lack of ambiguity, it's a fine fantasy novel. It's a little cliche in parts, but there is something really unique about reading a fantasy novel from a point of view other than that of the clear protagonist. What is it like to bear witness to someone else's story? To be an outsider to time passing in non-linear ways? These are really interesting questions and place a new spin on the time-worn tale of Girl Finds a Fantasy World and Can Stay There Indefinitely, While Time is Paused in the “Real World,” But the Fantasy World is Threatened and Only She Can Save it. Starmer also takes a really morally grey, dark tone with the real world and it infuses the whole atmosphere of the book with a kind of creepy overtone, which plays well with the duality of the narratives that he intended, even if it wasn't fully realized.

I haven't decided yet whether I'll continue on with this series. My concern is that all of the innovation is done in Riverman and the future books will only have the tired tropes of fantasyland to play with. But ultimately, while Riverman wasn't the book I thought it would be, I'm glad I read it.

For a 450 book in which pretty much nothing happens, The Goblin Emperor sure is a fast read. Nearly all plot is sacrificed for Addison to explore the character development of the new emperor, Maia, and even more than that to build her setting. The political intrigue is nuanced and intricate, without ever feeling too difficult to follow (although I will say that the naming conventions are hard to keep track of and it took me 250 pages to realize that there was a reference index at the back.)

Jon tells me that the book borrows wholesale from the Ottoman Empire, but my own world history is too weak to appreciate the parallels. Nonetheless, I found it perfectly enjoyable without understanding the allusions. Instead, I really enjoyed Addison's world, which felt totally self-sufficient and detailed, with a consistent language, multiple related religions and customs.

So a couple years ago, I got anxious about child labor making clothes. I guess, at the end of the day, I'm a hippy at heart and I absorbed a lot of sweatshop rhetoric as a child. At the end of 2013, I made a New Year's resolution that I wasn't going to buy anything, unless it was made in a country with strong labor laws, or out of recycled materials, or in some other way good for something. It was a surprisingly difficult year, especially for socks and underwear. But after 2014 ended, I kept it up for clothes, at least. And, as billed by Elizabeth Cline, buying high-end brands (mostly used) and avoiding fast fashion has resulted in clothes I like more, and keep longer.

Given that I was pretty much already there, I found Overdressed a pretty shallow read. It read fast, and at times seemed more interested in the cost of cheap fashion to a fashionista, rather than more generally. Nonetheless, it provided a context for how the clothing market got to where it was.

I had trouble getting into this book - I picked it up and read a page or two and then abandoned it more times than I can count. But, all of a sudden, by about page 20 it was compulsive reading.

Each of the three main characters, Tony, Roz and Charis teeters on the edge of being a cliche, and the contrast between the three of them pushes them further into familiar territory; however, each of them is written so realistically that I forgave the slightly worn feeling of the tropes.

Each character gets a story in three parts - childhood, emerging adulthood and maturity with Zenia a constant, toxic presence; a measuring stick, by which growth is charted.

Man, this book was overwritten. I think Horn must have intended it to be exclusively read by high school freshman literature classes. In fact, I believe that to such an extent, I feel a little bad about not writing this review as a five-paragraph essay. “How could that be a bad thing?” You might ask. Here's an example: Horn wanted to do a modern retelling of the story of Joseph and Judah. Great, fine. Classic stories have meaning in our time and all that jazz. But Horn worried that we might not get how clever she was being. So she named her Joseph character “Josephine” and her Judah character “Judith” and had them literally go to Egypt. The Tamar stand-in? “Itamar,” of course. We're too stupid to catch anything less on-the-nose. (By the way, this lead to a hilarious and bizarre passage in which we were supposed to believe that a character whose last name is “Ashkenazi” – to contrast her husband, Mr. Mizrahi, of course – convinced an entire room of people that she wasn't Jewish, without pulling out a fake name.)

At times, it seemed that Horn was so hellbent on literary cleverness that I completely lost track of what she was even trying to accomplish. The Mizrahi/Ashkenazi naming quirk mentioned above, for instance, or why asthma is a recurring theme.

The central concept of the book – do literal memories help us, or simply accumulate like sacred trash in a Genizah, was possibly interesting, but again dealt with in such a heavy handed way. The computer program to accumulate memories is called genizah, leaving no doubt to the reader what Horn what the reader's opinion to be and then layered with the additional stories of Rambam and Solomon Schecter and their interactions with the Cairo Genizah.

All in all, the extremely clumsy writing was so distracting that I got barely anything out of this book, but for the group that sent it to me, the PJ Library, a charity encouraging the modern Jewry to retain ties to their Jewish roots, that's probably right up their alley. I was shocked when I realized it actually was picked up by a formal publishing group outside of the Jewish world; I have no idea who else would read it.

Finally, I feel the need to be consistent in my complaining about the use of non-English languages, even though in this case, my Hebrew comprehension is good enough that it didn't personally affect me. Non-English languages should be used in English books only to set tone. If important information is conveyed it should be translated into English. Obnoxiously Horn walked all over that opinion: she both had important conversations carried out in transliterated Hebrew (which also, ugh! Those of us who understand Hebrew understand, so if you're going to be that obnoxious, go all the way and just use Hebrew characters) and then totally banal things unnecessarily translated, like “‘sweetie', he called to her in Hebrew”

I thought this book was going to be dull; the premise, as billed certainly didn't seem that original: a woman alleges a horrible crime. Is she crazy or is it a coverup? Probably one of the most cliche plots. In addition, I tend to avoid literary depictions of “crazy” that don't resemble reality – for example, highly organized improbable thoughts, being presented calmly and rationally. (I'm biting back a long digression here about the history of psychiatry as a tool to discredit women. By the way, the most coherent psychotic episode I've ever witnessed included a patient telling us how groundhogs were equipped with satellites to spy on her – they're very rarely calm, realistic and difficult to dissect from reality.)
But the Farm, while it skirts that cliched territory, avoids it, rather being something much deeper about people, and their relationships to each other.

I first got drawn in in the first chapter. The (ostensible) narrator, Daniel, notes that he hasn't told his parents that he's gay, even though he considers himself close to them, because they tried so hard to create a happy childhood for them and he doesn't want them to doubt that he was happy. This paragraph, a virtual aside, I found so twisted, so illogical and so compelling that I had to read further to find out if it was intentional. The answer is unequivocally yes: this is the world Smith has created for Daniel. A world where people keep relatively benign, mundane secrets from each other for no good reason, except the desire to keep a completely perfect facade. This is one example of money that will come forth in the book and Smith makes it quite clear: the premise of the book – where either Daniel's mother has either been completely psychotic for about a year, or where Daniel's father is involved in a conspiracy to commit murder and has been for several months, all the while Daniel thinking that they were happily living on a farm – is only possible in the context where secrets are habitually kept under the guise of emotional “closeness.” I thought this had particular relevance to today's age and facebook culture, where people post a carefully curated life and keep their feelings under close wraps.

The bulk of the book, while still officially narrated by Daniel, is really the exposition of his mother, Tilde, her “evidence” for the conspiracy and her story of what has happened. Far from being an over-the-top portrayal of psychosis or the depiction of a completely normal woman taken for insane for no clear reason, Smith's depiction here is nuanced: it's impossible to get through this section without believing that Tilde is extrapolating quite a lot from quite a little and, conversely, without believing that there are at least some goings-on that are not totally on the up-and-up. I found out after I read the book that it is based on an autobiographical episode, wherein Smith's mother, who had been living on a farm in Sweden, flew to see him, alleging that his father was involved in a conspiracy, and was declared psychotic. I think the experience and the realism really shows through, here. I loved little touches like the episode where Tilde is mushroom picking and realizes she's got a basket full of leaves instead, and by that point it's so clear she's been hallucinating, but she instead confabulates a story about being gaslit. It's so clear to the reader and so, so sad.

The other thing that I'll note, is in the genre of Shocking Family Secrets! which I usually avoid, because it's usually one of three secrets anyway (affair! homosexuality! abuse!) The Farm built up this shocking secret, about how Tilde, while she claims to lime and respect her parents, ran away and hasn't spoken to them since she was sixteen. And I was convinced that it would be a canonical secret, and it wasn't and indeed, I was shocked: Tilde had a best friend, Freja, who believed in trolls, and they tried to run away together, but it failed and afterwards Freja denied she'd ever been friends with Tilde, and then died under suspicious circumstances. And Tilde ran away because she knew that her parents believed that she killed Freja, even though she didn't. I finished this section and it was chilling -- this idea of "they don't believe me, I'm going to run away from the country forever and never look back" was so beyond the norm and so beyond what I expected, and it really established the tone for the stakes of Tilde's narrative. If I could nest spoilers I would, because once I worked through the matryoshka doll of this secret to find a classic family secret at the middle (Tilde's narrative, in which nests the imputed murder of Freja/Tilde's first psychotic break, in which nests Tilde's father's first story about Freja being imaginary, in which nests Tilde's abuse at her father's hands) I was already sufficiently impressed with the delicate psychology that Smith worked to be impressed

This book has enjoyed a lot of hype, but it wasn't really my cup of tea. I adored some of the essays – especially the ones on parenting, and the ones that really delved into mixing botany with indigenous culture. Two things really got in the way of it being great for me, though: one was that I tend to read in chunks of time and by the end of half an hour the essays would feel very monotone and redundant. I suppose that Kimmerer would say that I wasn't reading as an honorable harvest and that what I should be doing was small moments of mindful reading over time to give the essays space to grow. Which, I guess, leads me to the second point: I found Kimmerer so disdainful - she tries to say she doesn't disdain people, just ways of life, but she also clearly looks down on her students, biologists who don't talk about love and beauty in their scientific presentations, city-dwellers, people who get bored during long speeches and so much more. She comes off as thinking that only her people have insights like “rituals that celebrate the whole community are good” (it turns out non-indigenous people also have spiritual and community rituals).

I got the strong sense reading the book that she would hate me, a biologist who thinks things are cool but not beautiful, who loves being with other people in dense urban cities, who is easily bored despite believing in gratitude. And I just didn't enjoy reading a book that made me feel bad about myself but not in a productive way.

I thought this book was beneath me: I could give an hour lecture on the problems facing the women's right movement today; this book was for women who didn't even know that they're feminists.

For years, as a woman doctor, I shied away from Women in Medicine groups, because having been a female computer scientist and facing the very overt sexism that occurs in the C.S. world, I thought that there was nothing to complain about in medicine. But the further I got in medicine, especially once I had my daughter, I realize all of the subtle ways that its there: the encouragement to leave before you leave; the lack of high-powered female mentors, and the overall relative dearth of women in leadership and highly academic positions. So I joined a national committee on women in medicine and science and at the same time I read this book.

And it's amazing. Sheryl Sandberg gives easy language for the problems I know we face: “sit at the table” for the confidence issues that professional women have; “lean in” and “don't leave before you leave” for the self-selection that occurs. She talks about the seductive message the feminism's work is done that leads to increasing amounts of this subversive sexism (which is the temporal equivalent of the same illusion I fell under switch from C.S. to medicine.) She addresses the hard issues: the linguist quirks that make women seem less confident and the social norms that prevent women from being assertive, both of which put women into a damned if you do/damned if you don't position.

But this is not just a book on contextualization. Sandberg gives concrete advice to women that is useful for women in all fields. She focuses on helping women become top business officers, but its helpful advice to anyone. And she does this without ignoring the importance of being a parent for women who want to parent – and I think this part gets lost among the rhetoric for a lot of people. One of my close friends hates this book, because she says that Sandberg doesn't believe in the importance of mothering, but that's not a correct assertion. Sandberg spends many pages talking about how she decided to take from 5:30-bedtime off from work (offline, off everything) almost all nights because that's what's right for her family. She talks about a woman who joined the Biden administration but on the condition that she goes home for dinner every single night. This is advice on how to set your priorities and then make them happen – dropping the hysteria that comes from assuming that in order to be successful, you have to make sacrifices on someone else's terms.

Sandberg makes it clear that you can't “have it all,” but you can choose what you get to have, and I think that's the best message possible.

The Atlantic headline of the book review for the Hunter was “Tana French has broken the murder mystery...can she put it back together?”

I didn't read their review, but the answer is no, she can't. Look, I get her point: glorification of police is causing political problems in real life and it feels dirty to keep writing police books. But then just...stop. Don't do this, it's sad and it's more sad because we all know how talented Tana French can be.

Since there is literally no plot for the first 179 pages, I spent a lot of time thinking about where Tana French went wrong with the non Dublin Murder Squad books. Yes, it's rural, which is usually not of high interest to me, but the Witch Elm was urban and not much better. I think it's that I really don't care very much about Cal Hooper and Trey Reddy and Lena Dunne and Mart. They have no real interiority except a desire for peace, a shared reticence for speaking and a loose allegiance to the truth.

The plot starts on page 179, which you'd think would improve things, but it weirdly feels the need to close the loop at all times, so first Cal tells the narrator which lie he'll tell, then he tells it, then he tells Lena he told it, then he thinks about how Trey will feel about him telling it, then we hear about how Trey feels about him telling it and then Mart comes around and summarizes how the town feels. Over, and over and over again.

One could be forgiven for not realizing that this is supposed to be a murder mystery, even a post-modern one, since no one dies until page 275. It's not very mysterious, though, the murder and the motive were obvious to me less than a third of the way in the 100 pages between then and the reveal, simply because the book is so sparse that there was literally only one choice.

I never would have picked up a book about a retiree living on the countryside and navigativing his relationship with the townsfolk if it hadn't been written by Tana French, and I think, sadly after a third dud in a row, I'm done with Tana French.

Fortunately, the Milk is a completely adorable, charming slip of a novella with clever & wild illustrations, plenty of time-traveling romping, just-in-time saves and the world's smartest, most scientific stegosaurus (who is parenthetically female).
It is perfect for putting a smile on anyone's face.

Given that many of my closest friendships were forged in the fires of shared literary interests, actually, I have very little overlap in tastes with my real life friends. So despite the fact that my best friend and I both obsessively read science fiction and fantasy, her recommending this to me was not particularly encouraging. She convinced me to read it by pitching the agender society and neurodiversity of the main character, but reading it I found the things that I would have used to pitch it to her in abundance: a deeply created society, such that every utterance of a character was pregnant with meaning, songs and poems that had built up layers of nuance over generations and elaborate rituals. Unlike the sorts of books she typically reads, most of this was implied so that Leckie developed the feel of an intricate created society without the burden of pages and pages of exposition. So I, who hate slow books actually quite enjoyed it.

I liked the exploration of how do very diverse societies clock gender, what does it mean to be an entity (is continuity of consciousness real?) and how do societies change over time

Leo says: “It reminds me of Harold and the Purple Crayon.”
What did you like about it? “It was beautiful.”
Anything else: “She freed the bird at the end. I knew she was going to because that was nice.”

I think: this is a gorgeous, word-less picture book. I was worried that my 4.5 year old wasn't going to understand a book without words, but she actually really understood what was happening. There was a lot of oohing and aahing over the pictures, and especially the forms of transportation and castles and not all of it on the part of the preschooler.

It's been a week of disappointing sequels in my life. Not that the Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two isn't good. It's good, it's just the two prior novels are Oh My Goodness, turn cartwheels, no scoring system goes high enough, amazing. And The Girl Who Soared is good. Maybe even very good, but no better.

Valente's previous works have been a patchwork of disparate settings and characters all loosely bound together in service of a plot, and somehow it just seems to work. Here, the settings are just as magical: a lizard made up of coins guards a cash register that determines your occupation, a whelk has made its shell into a city fueled by its love, acrobats made of paper fold and unfold as they do tricks, and an entire world made up of photographic negatives feature (sadly, while much is discussed about the city of Orrery, which is an Orrery and has every type of “-scope” imaginable, we spend very little time there.) But the threads tying them together feel looser. Zooming from one place to another felt organic and natural in the earlier books. Here it feels frenetic, and I found myself having trouble following why this or that was happening.

Similarly, the other Fairyland books center around themes of Coming of Age and particularly issues of adolescence, in a way that is central, but not overbearing. Here the central theme – how one develops an identity and how volitional that identity is – is equally universal and equally foundational to the book, but its inclusion feels more heavy-handed.

I certainly enjoyed the book, and I certainly will keep reading the series, but just as certainly, it pales by comparison.

Jon billed this to me as a combination of Matilda, a zombie film and Never Let Me Go. Honestly, that's pretty spot on: there's a first part that is basically a zombie in the Matilda-genre, followed by a longer second part of Matilda in the zombie genre.

The whole idea is a really unique take on the zombie genre, and Carey does a great job using a lot of the old standbys of survival horror to set the scene where he can, allowing most of the prose to really focus in on the protagonists. Using an ensemble cast really allows the idea of zombie sentience to sign – without the point-of-view of Melanie, a lot of what happens in the book would lose its ethical greyness, but without the point-of-view of the humans, the survival drive would not be felt as well, either. The five characters and their relationships between each other really complement each other nicely. By using zombies, rather than a brand new concept of some sort, Carey frees up a lot of time to focus on the existential (or as he calls them, ontological) ideas of the novel: what makes a being a person, what is free will, what people owe to humanity.

Finally, the science, as far as I could tell (not being a mycologist) was very nicely done. It's rare to find science fiction that actually hits science and is simultaneously interesting. I don't think that using Ophiocordyceps isn't a unique idea (I assume – given that Ophiocordyceps species that actually exist are already called “Zombie Fungus”; I don't actually do zombie usually) but the details that Carey adds, were interesting, plausible, and added to the plot. My one nitpick is regarding the final piece: that vertical transmission of Ophiocordyceps results in children who are neurologically intact was something I'd guessed from about 25% of the way in, if not sooner, so I don't really think discovering it justifies dissecting children. Caldwell was depicted as a brilliant scientist, who only did the necessary harm, but that really fell flat for me at the end. Yes, it was just a hypothesis, but her dissection didn't really expand beyond the hypothesis in any way, and an MRI of Melanie's brain would have been just as good.

I'm not a huge chick-lit fan, and ultimately, that's what this was. The characters were fairly superficial, each an archetype of a female cliche, with a Central Theme and not much further expansion. There were romances and friendships, and, well, exactly what I imagine the generic chick-lit book to be. It wasn't bad in any sense, just, okay.

I read it for the knitting, and the nice thing about it being such a superficial read is that I could knit while reading it, which was nice, because it made me crave knitting.

Stop me if you've heard this one: people can inherit a genetic mutation that makes them super human. For some insane reason this is not inherited truly as a Mendelian trait, but more like an...autosomal dominant trait with incomplete penetrance? (Or perhaps like a trait invented by someone with only the faintest idea of how genes work.) Despite being genetic its expression has an extreme amount of intrafamilial variability, such that the same gene can cause flying or invisibility or superhuman strength? And also the government wants to either control or eliminate these X-men, uh, Brilliants, because normal people will otherwise feel bad about themselves. Also, women exist to seduce the protagonist.

I mean, I also like watching the X-men movies and this is basically that: fast-paced, action-y, no character development, and about 5 minutes of thought put into the setting. But it's 2020 and there's much better spec fic out there. 2.5 stars.

I love Mary Roach. So much. And finding humor in the oddest places is absolutely the schtick that made her famous.

This is not it. This is finding humor in the most trite, pedestrian places. Like, stop me if you've heard this one: there isn't much knee room on airplanes! Phone trees are incomprehensible! Tech support isn't based in the USA and also doesn't like to help you! Women don't like their bodies as they age! Men are slobs who like sports!

Also, speaking of aging with indignity, many of these jokes didn't age well. About three essays in, when we got to TV channels, I double checked the publication date: 2013. Huh. OK. And then an Anna Nicole Smith sent me to double check...2013. Eight years didn't feel that long ago, but I was ready to buy it until the mysterious object called the “Roomba” was discussed with great pomp AND Roach expressed indignity about websites not having phone numbers to call, google sent me to the Reader's Digest archives, where I found that most of these essays date back to the Dubya era...the first term. (If I hadn't figured it out by then, an essay featuring receiving netflix in the mail and an iPod shuffle would have given it away.)

What else didn't age well? Two different jokes making fun of Native American languages. And an internalized misogyny thinly disguised as self-deprecating humor. But the timeline raises more questions than it answers: in My Planet, Roach presents herself as appalled by the extremes of her aging face and body, incapable of adapting to new technology and tottering towards senescence. This feels impossible to reconcile with a woman who in 2008 agrees to have sex in an MRI (wikipedia tells me I'm remembering it wrong and it's an ultrasound...) and then 8 years after that bullies her way into an Army base in Djibouti to investigate diarrhea. The answer is that Roach was an ancient 43 when she wrote this book, an age that feels way younger than these essays read. I wonder which Roach is the real one.

And this is the rub: I'm a Mary Roach fan because she makes my work in the weird biochemistry of the body feel seen and relevant. When I read her other books, part of the joy is imagining her coming to interview me and giggling like old friends about some hilarious joke I tell with the punchline involving an organic acid and the tandem mass spectrometer. When I read this book? And I imagine this woman obsessed with her body shape and gender essentialism and very, very well-trod punchlines...if this woman ever wanted to interview me at work, I'd pawn it off on the fellows. (Maybe she's both things – the adventurous, witty, dry humorous writer and the cliched wine mom type and it's my own internalized misogyny that won't let me reconcile them. Who knows?)

This is the sort of book that only Chabon could have written. An exemplar of the Noir genre (probably the best of its class for the past several years) – Sitka, Alaska is a dark place, inhabited by a plethora of morally gray characters and equally gray bureaucracy. Meyer Landsman is a man on the edge of life, struggling with alcoholism; emotionally dependent on being a police officer, but too emotionally broken to consistently be a good one.

Added to the mixture is a generous helping of Jewish culture, Yiddish language and a not entirely kind treatment of the relationship between spiritual beliefs and good deeds.

Much has been noted about how, although set in Alaska, Union points a critical eye to the non-alternate history Jewish settlements in Israel, which, while true, is incidental to the greatness of the book.

One point of criticism: I am not sure how approachable this book would be to a non-Jewish reader. I was highly critical about the pre-existing amount of culture knowledge needed for Oscar Wao, and by comparison there is more foreign language and far more cultural and religious references in Union.

I'm having trouble coming to terms with this book. Add it on the pile of my ambivalence about Michael Chabon. I think the thing that bugs me the most is the potential for greatness here.

An aging Sherlock Holmes is coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer in his prime and preparing himself for death and battling senility? Awesome, awesome premise. As a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes, I usually refuse to touch modern interpretations, because I don't trust authors to give me what Conan Doyle did to make Holmes so compelling. On this aspect, Chabon mostly delivers: he captures Holmes' greatness in his dedication and flashes of brillance and tempers it with his moodiness and self-destructiveness. It's not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Holmes mystery, though, failing in the complete lack of explanation of how Holmes deduces anything (and really, failing as a compelling mystery all over.) Holmes is aging, his brain isn't what it used to be, don't tell us that, show us by having Holmes try his famous Holmes deduction. Show us him missing clues, or thinking slowly, or coming to the wrong conclusions. It's an insanely original, compelling idea, that mostly only reaches it's full potential when Holmes reflects on a post-Blitz London with anger that London still exists in the post-Holmes area and that the Blitz and WWI have allowed it to change and grow into something else. I love the idea of what happens to the characters we love when they move past what they once were.

I think the big reason that this book fails is that while Chabon is good at many things, the novella is not an ideal format. His books become compelling over time, as you become more enmeshed with the characters. Pages give his language room to proliferate and his sprawling sentences feel less suffocating in longer books. There are so many ideas here, ripe for the picking. I can't possible imaging saying to myself “I have an idea for a book that's about an aging Holmes, in WWII, meeting a mute orphan, who will act as his foil, who has a parrot, who knows secret numbers, which may be the key to German codes, prompting discussion of the lengths one will go for national loyalty and exploring the tension between commitment to country and commitment to Jewish orphaned refuges in the middle of the holocaust, while also discussing the morally grey characters who form this boy's foster family and I want this story to be an exemplar of the modern mystery novel. That sounds like it can be done in 170 pages!” Everything loses in the brevity.

What really bothers me is that in the author's note, Chabon writes about the respect he has for “genre novels” and that he wants people who normally don't read genre to pick up this book and it to make them want to go back and read more mysteries. It's insulting to authors who frequently write genre. I agree that genre can be the most compelling form of fiction; it's freed from constraints; it can explore the worlds of possibilities and use that to reflect on the way our world is. This is not a great genre novel, and although Chabon has been a great friend to the melding of genre and literature in Kavalier and Clay (superhero/comic book) and Yiddish Policeman's Union (a much better version of mystery/noir), he should have left this one to the mystery writers.

This is a book that I would have absolutely loved as a high school student. I wished I were a high school student while I was reading it. Digesting it in huge chunks at a time. Hanging out in the study hall area before school, debating and quoting and dissecting with four or five other nerds who were reading it simultaneously. (That's how I've read most of the science fiction that I've really loved in my life. It's the best way to do it.) The problem with classic science fiction is that science fiction is a genre that eats it own and constantly regenerates ideas. So was Neal Stephenson's [b:Anathem 2845024 Anathem Neal Stephenson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1224107150s/2845024.jpg 6163095] a complete homage? Yes, in many important ways. And certainly, it was influenced by Canticle, which proceeded it by 30+ years. But I read Anathem first, so Canticle comes off looking the derivative one. I feel bad, because I know it's historically inaccurate, but I'm just kind of over post-apocalyptic-humanity-is-doomed-to-repeat-its-own-mistakes-and-perpetually-destroy-itself. There were a few tropes I loved - most notably the dilemma of is a species technologically generated by humans to replicate humans less than human? However, that was really only considered for a sentence or two.

I, academically speaking, basically grew up on tales of Linear B. I mean I distinguished myself on the residency interview trail by being the only medical student to have spent several semesters TAing cryptography; meeting [a:Simon Singh 10894 Simon Singh https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1263127928p2/10894.jpg] is one of the highlights of my life. And Linear B is basically the epitome of a code-breaking story: elegant statistics, linguistic analysis and finally, a successful decryption.And at the same time, there is something so deep in the human experience about decrypting a language, rather than just a code. I am a deep believer in the idea that written language, more so even than DNA, is the heritable code of humanity, and Linear B is one of the very first written human languages. This is a beautiful portal to 3,500 years ago. It turns out that people 3,500 years ago were people. They recorded things, they thought, they counted, the preserved themselves for us – how freaking amazing is that?I've never read anything by [a:Margalit Fox 650994 Margalit Fox https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1360786032p2/650994.jpg] before, but she really does justice to these compelling ideas. She never walks away from the “riddle” part of Linear B – she drops tantalizing hints. Nothing compels reading like hearing: “and this tablet would be the key to solving the puzzle, 20 years later.” Her narrative really reads like a mystery.Finally, Fox is the first author to give Alice Kober her full due in the decryption and Fox does not give short shrift to the gender issues that have prevented Kober from being fully recognized until now. Fox obviously feels deeply for Kober, who died prematurely, likely of cancer – she tells the story as a tragedy, and certainly that adds another layer of this story about learning of the humanity of our ancestors.

I started medical school only a few years after imatinib was successfully approved by the FDA. One of the most memorable lessons from those first few years was about CML and imatinib's use for it. I was dazzled by the very logical chain from translocation to fusion protein to proto-oncogene to inhibitor to cure. There are only a handful of moments that direct someone's life, and this was one of mine: I decided to do cancer genetics (it wasn't until years later that I would drop the “cancer” half of the career plan.) I spent two years in a cancer genetics lab, got involved in one of the first off-label uses of dasatinib and spent time speculating about all of the tyrosine kinase inhibitors of the future. And I've lived in the future, where even having walked away from cancer, I got myself intertwined with lung cancer and EGFR inhibitors and the disappointing resistance that occurs.

So, the Philadelphia chromosome story is a story that is near and dear to my heart. Nonetheless, I found Wapner's rendition of it particularly fascinating. First of all, she doesn't miss a beat: she starts from the very beginning about how dubious scientists were that the Philadelphia chromosome was a spontaneously occurring, somatic, balanced translocation and goes straight through to the ways in which the TK inhibitors that followed were kind of disappointing with the rapid-onset of resistance and the difficulty of detangling primary causative mutations from carrier mutations. Secondly, she really places each step along the research in the context of where science was at the time, keeping track of each of the details ultimately necessary for drug development (several of which I didn't know). And finally, she tells the story in a way that speaks to the broader picture of drug development – the difficulty of investing in orphan diseases, the tension between industry and academia, the fear of testing a drug that might have unforeseen consequences.

It's rare that a popular science book is equally readable by lay and expert audiences, but I think Wapner's done a great job of making this work accessible but detailed.

As the pandemic picked up, I switched over to almost entirely English reading for daf yomi, and the Noe edition held up to this as well. Rarely did I feel like I was missing something crucial (for wordplay and mnemonic devices the shoreshim are including in the English translation as well.) I wish this volume had more information about the personalities – the superscript P's don't continue on very much for Rabbis discussed in Berakhot and I would have found it helpful to continue to have annotations about who they were. (Aslo, Shabbat is a profoundly dense tractate, often very foreign to the modern reader...or perhaps it's just me who no longer treats jaundice by shaving donkeys, bloodletting them from their head and then anointing patients with the resulting blood. Good thing – you have to really be careful doing that because if the blood gets in the patient's eyes it blinds them. And also it's controversial whether you can do that on Shabbat)

This was a cute little pro-reading book for kids. The core messages: work together and read books, were a little heavy-handed for an adult reader. The puzzles were cute, but relatively slim (the characters solved any of the puzzles quite quickly, so the reader didn't have a lot of time to puzzle through.) It's hard to tell as an adult reader whether this will hold up to true classics of the genre, such as the Westing Game, but I'll definitely get it for my daughter when she's old enough.