Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Someday I may again add to the cornucopia of excellent reading reports available here on Dreamwidth. In a previous life, enjoying these posts would also add to my teetering TBR pile. Now I get vicarious thrills from how folks’ reading made them feel. In particular:

chestnut_pod
https://chestnut-pod.dreamwidth.org/?tag=books+are+the+meaning+of+life&skip=30

dhampyresa
https://dhampyresa.dreamwidth.org/tag/reading+wednesday

rivkat doesn’t tag and does post many, many great reviews
https://rivkat.dreamwidth.org

runpunkrun
https://runpunkrun.dreamwidth.org/tag/book+report

Any recent DW entry with the tag "books" https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest?tag=books

Self-rec: mostly reviews, but also about the mechanics of reading https://jesse-the-k.dreamwidth.org/tag/reading

Reading-focused communities
readingtogether
booknook

Let me know whose reading reviews you enjoy....

Thanks to oursin for these questions—if you’d like to continue the meme, raise your hand in a comment.

Have you read anything lately that really blew you away?

Cost of Living, an essay collection by Emily Maloney

Her precise, funny prose explores the interface between social norms and actual brains at personal and societal levels. Her neurodivergent thinking brings insight from her own experiences on both sides of the US medical complex. As a suicide survivor and psych patient, she acquired huge medical debt while getting inaccurate diagnoses and physical mistreatment. To pay down that debt, she worked as an emergency-department—based EMT tech, often in charge of doling out medications she was also taking. She translated medical studies into marketing copy for large pharmaceutical companies.

Two hundred words on the "opiate crisis" and pain prescribing:

( within )

If you were in a murder mystery, what part would you be playing?

The clueless guest who keeps asking “What’s going on?”

Is there is a musical instrument you wish you could play?

Sighs mournfully in F minor. The acoustic guitar I played daily from age 13 until I could no longer physically handle it, ca 33.

Favourite season of Buffy?

Season 3. I like the Faith-Buffy tension.

What kind of weather do you find most congenial?

Sunny with many puffy clouds, a fresh breeze, and temperatures between 50 and 65°F (10–19°C)

Find in library • DRM-free audiobook • BARD

As I hoped back in December, last month I found enough brain to tackle An Immense World by Ed Yong. I was convinced by pauraque’s extensive summary and review, and the 24 days I spent reading were a pure delight. Ed Yong is a great narrator: he fluently pronounces the Neo-Latinate species names as well as the international assortment of human researchers. He somehow manages not to giggle at his own (frequent) jokes.

He wildly succeeds at explaining the distinctive sensory worlds of many of our planet’s inhabitants. Along the way, he explores how scientists design experiments to pin down how, for example, a scallop sees or a leafhopper senses vibrations. He tells the truth that our current understanding is not necessarily the whole answer — that science means change. So much of the current state of the art began as theories mocked by the scientific establishment.

Yong is keenly aware of human as well as animal variety. When addressing the senses, he fluently acknowledges that not humans all have a standard complement—for example, his researchers are described as sighted when that’s relevant. He consciously seeks out women and non-binary researchers, as explained in his 2018 Atlantic article "I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories -- Here’s what I’ve learned, and why I did it.".

Most importantly, he’s such a good writer. He clearly loves his subject, and he plays with formal and informal registers. He provides enough detail to enthrall while lightly alternating between technical explanations and emotional delights. He organizes the books by sense, and each one almost stands alone. It helped that I gave myself permission to read for enjoyment, not trying to remember the details because there is no test. I'm looking forward to rereading it.

I do recall some stunning facts:

• Scallops have many eyes — from a dozen to more than 200.
• Owls have asymmetrical ears, enabling them to locate sounds both horizontally and vertically.
• Some creatures use the Earth’s very weak electromagnetic field to navigate—but we don’t know how. The signal is so subtle that it’s not contemporaneous: the whales, birds, and turtles must travel several miles before they can know if they’re headed in the right direction.

He starts with dogs, guaranteeing sympathy from half his readership. (I was charmed by references to his own Corgi pup, Typo.) In this 350-word excerpt, he introduces the canine olfaction expert, Alexandra Horowitz, and her dog Finnegan:

( Read more... )

Marissa Lingen MarissaLingen writes really lovely short stories — more than a hundred so far. She's disabled and her fiction generally includes the mundanity and creativity of disabled living. She lives in the Twin Cities. She's funny. She studied math and physics before turning to full-time writing — as of this writing she’s got 20 stories published in NATURE.

( Bit of history, three recs with excerpts )

Money, marriage, and madness:
The life of Anna Ott
Kim E. Nielsen

Nineteenth century feminists battled patriarchal definition. Learned men asserted that women's bodies were constitutionally subject to weakness and madness. This is sexism and it's also ableism. Men asserted our defective bodyminds disqualified us from public education, voting, and many kinds of work.

Nielsen writes about Anna Ott, an early 19th century Swiss immigrant. Ott married and divorced a doctor in Ohio, gaining enough money to move to Madison and purchase property just as the town was booming into Wisconsin's capital city. She married again and practiced medicine. Her violent husband committed her to the local insane asylum, where she lived for 20 years until her death. A handful of "newsy" facts about her can be found in local newspapers: her divorce, that every room in her house had two doors, her alleged deathbed confession to bank robbery.

Nielsen writes as an historian of feminism and disability. I found her prose, midway between popular and academese, to be quite understandable. She always recognizes Ott’s peculiar social status: negatives include woman, immigrant, "mad" while positives include: property owner, doctors, whiteness. Even Anna Ott, who was remarkable for several reasons, is more clearly seen by her absence from the historical record. Before I read this short work that statement would have mystified me. That most of the events are set where I live makes this an engaging read, even though it’s full of physical and emotional violence and repression. Content notes: forced commitment and treatment in 19th century asylums; domestic violence; children disappearing.

ETA: Thanks to tarascon for getting the book's title right!

425 words capture Nielsen’s style and philosophy:

( words words words )

Get yours here:

ebook - Bookshare - Find in library - U of I publisher - JSTOR

Reading her work is looking in a mirror that's also a magnifier that's also a portal. She captures the experience of chronic pain, midlife disability, fighting insurance companies, raising her son, loving teaching, wrangling with doctors — all in exquisite language: precise, funny, smooth. She has rheumatic disease (often misnamed as rheumatoid arthritis) and teaches creative non-fiction at Fairfield University. Lots of good reading at her site https://sonyahuber.com as well as on sonyahuber Twitter. Her most recent published work is:

Pain woman takes your keys and other essays from a nervous system
https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803299917/
Library – Ebook – Paperback – Bookshare

Her stuff is so good I had to sample 1000 words from four sources.

Her experience of COVID

( pain piggyback )

How It Feels When Your Body is Weather Sensitive

( swept away )

What Pain Wants

( prosaic poetry in conversation with the world’s most demanding roommate )

The Shadow Syllabus

The teacher may not say this out loud. She’s still also the person who was a university student.

( 4 of 42 items )

CoNZealand Fringe was a project of many genre-fiction fan communities, including book tubers, online-zinesters and podcasters.

In the tradition of Edinburgh Fringe and other international collateral events, CoNZealand Fringe has been created as a complementary programming series to the annual science fiction convention Worldcon. All our livestreams take place outside core CoNZealand programming hours and are not official CoNZealand programming items. CoNZealand Fringe is not endorsed by CoNZealand.

For their 15 panels, details of topics and panelists
https://www.conzealandfringe.com

CoNZealand Fringe YouTube Playlist
Autocraptioned, but YT is closed to 97% than 90% with these particular speakers.

Media queries were directed to Claire Rousseau, Adri Joy, Alasdair Stuart and Marguerite Kenner, Cheryl Morgan and Cassie Hart, so I assume they ran the show. I was impressed by the smoothness of their panels -- the mods were well prepared, they started on time, they handled the time-zone issue more deftly than the official WorldCon. I'm sure that WorldCon planning is like steering a battleship: these folks were a racing catamaran.

( Sensitivity Reading: What is it, who does it, who needs it? with YouTube embed )

The Tomboy Survival Guide by IvanCoyote explores growing up a tomboy AFAB and then transitioning. Coyote treasures the support they did get from their family, as well as detailing how strange it feels when everyone around you expects something you simply can't deliver. They spent a lot of time growing up in the Yukon, so there's lots of delicious Northern detail. Coyote's description of their tech-school harassment while studying to be an electrician brought back my experience as a "non-traditional student" in the 1970s. I'm very glad nobody pissed in my toolbox, though.

You are going to need to find your freak family. Your misfit soldiers and their weirdo army. Keep your eyes open. That little boy at school that the bigger kids are picking on. Ask him if he has a secret name he wants you to call him. Tell him yours. Tell him he is beautiful. Tell him you see all the ways that he is strong like you and it has nothing to do with throwing a ball. Tell him you will be there at the other end of the string between you, listening into that tin can if he needs you.

The world will be full of messages telling you to be something other than what you are. Telling you that you are too skinny or too fat or too dark or too hairy. Too poor for pretty. Low fat hide your belly quick loss how to love less and find a man maps to time machines that only ever go backward. The magazines are full of this nonsense.

Save those magazines. They can be very useful. You can duct tape them over your jeans to make shin pads for street hockey and quick, cheap armour for fencing or general swordplay. Touché.

https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/T/Tomboy-Survival-Guide

E Lily Yu’s story about a sentient hemlock was particularly relevant to my interests because I just finished a pair of novels by Sue Burke:

Semiosis and Interference

https://semiosispax.com/

Significant chunks of these books are told from the POV of an alien plant, interacting with the idealistic colonists fleeing Earth to create Pax, a utopian alternative to what they left behind.

( 136 words comparing the books )

I got confused by the ending. ( entirely spoilers — comments too )