Category Archives: Book

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Read Exit Party Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★★

“I think if you live long enough,” Nico said, “you become a migrant from another timeline. There’s the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there’s nothing left of it, but you’re still here. That’s what I mean.”

And

He locks the studio door behind her, thinking about the poem again. The point isn’t that the candle won’t last the night. Everything is temporary. The point is that the light is gorgeous while it lasts.

Following several characters across two alternative worlds, the story moves from voice to voice, places to place and back and forward in time. Sometimes written in the close third other sections in first person. I enjoyed all of this.

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Read: Ashland & Vine by John Burnside ★★★★ 📚

Now I was beginning to wonder if she had just been bluffing. Maybe there wasn't even a Wes, though I'm not sure about that. She'd had a look in her eye, a mix of apprehension and pride, like you see in certain types of pit-bull owners, and I really didn't want to test her story.

Film student Kate, bit of a mess, starts listing to an older woman Jean's stories of her family and life. American history, WW2, Vietnam, culture & counter culture is only a bit of it. Relationships, death, grief is another. Tempted to re-read this immediately.

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Read Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★

In Yupik, a language spoken by the Inuit along the Bering Sea, there is Ellam Yua: a kind of spiritual debt to the natural world, or a way of moving through that world with some measure of generosity, of grace, or a way of living that acknowledges the soul of another human being, or the soul of a rock or of a piece of driftwood; sometimes translated as soul, or as God, but meaning neither. In a Mayan language, K’iche, there is the Nawal: one’s spiritual essence but separate from the self; one’s other, not exactly an alter ego or merely an avatar but a protective spirit that cannot be summoned.

And

How deep in our genes is the longing for flight embedded? We always were a species of nomads. Eli found it easy to imagine an instinct passed down generation to generation, a permanently thrown breaker on a genetic switchboard: flight or fight, and a switch jammed permanently in the flight position, the limitless longing for travel pulled down by hooked genes.

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Read: The Ghost of the Mountains by Kulbhushansing Suryawanshi ★★★★ 📚

Our review of the world’s studies on snow leopard populations had found that less than 10,000 of the estimated 3 million square kilometres of the snow leopard distribution range had been surveyed by researchers using rigorous scientific methods. The total snow leopard habitat in the state of Himachal Pradesh alone was 25,000 square kilometres.
The largest area to have been surveyed was a mere 1,500 square kilometres in the Gobi in Mongolia.

…..

We decided to take the challenge head-on and estimate the snow leopard population for the state of Himachal Pradesh – an area two and a half times larger than all the previous surveys put together. An area the size of Belgium covered in some of the tallest mountains and deepest gorges in the world.
The survey would test us to our limits. Not only our physical ability to walk such a large and mountainous area to collect the necessary data but our ability to think through technical problems of study design and analysis.

A personal history of studying snow leopards over 20 years. Interesting in surprising ways. Connects the conservation efforts to politics, tourism, & local people. Nicely personal. The changes over time are especially powerful.

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Read: Ubik by Philip K. Dick ★★★ 📚

Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee.
Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name.
I am. I shall always be.

Long time since I’ve read any pkd. Plenty of twists & turns between life & half-life, psychics & anti-psychics. Great sucker punch at the end.

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Read: The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino ★★★★ 📚

The fact is that the whole time my brother had to do with it, outdoor Masonry (as I'll call it, to distinguish it from the kind that later met in closed buildings) had a very rich set of rites, which involved owls, telescopes, pinecones, hydraulic pumps, mushrooms, Cartesian divers, spiders, Pythagorean tables. There was also a certain display of skulls, not only human but also craniums of cows, wolves, and eagles. Such objects and still others, including the spades, squares, and compasses of the regular Masonic liturgy, were found at that time hanging in the branches in bizarre juxtapositions and were likewise attributed to the madness of the baron.

As a twelve year old the baron to be leaves his house, in a dispute over eating snails, and live the rest of his life in the trees. This don't stop him having a rich life exploring & embodying various philosophies. Simply told & sometimes laugh out loud.

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Read: The Given World by Melissa Harrison ★★★★ 📚

Angela had realised with a start that despite being in her mid-thirties her daughter hadn't yet understood how fleeting things were, that cherry blossom and blackbirds singing weren't a constant backdrop but a clock that counted you through your life: each thing there for only a moment, and then gone until next year.

Some events in the novel are leaving forever not just till next year. Chapters go through the seasons and characters. Each having a main one who reappear or you learn more about in later chapters.