Pick-a-Shelf discussion

What did you read for Science?

Did you learn anything new? Any particular bit that fascinates you?

I've read Recursion by Blake Crouch [9-dec-2020] ★★★

This book is about Barry who investigates False Memory Syndromea and about Helema who is a scientist. Some of the concepts are hard to grasp. I think it's very interesting, though also confusing. I liked the characters, suspence and originality of the story. I gave it 3 stars because near the end the book got repetitive.

Used for: Bookopoly 2021 and RAT
I'd like to nominate: friends-to-loves https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/...

I just read Ringworld by Larry Niven
★★

Colour me unimpressed. Don't get me wrong, this book is well written and I can see why it won awards. It's not for naught Niven is such a noted scifi author. However, I did not care for the protagonist, Louis Wu, which put a damper on my enjoyment. Of course, it is safe to say that he is not an unusual scifi protagonist for a 1970 Scifi novel. Sad to say, I missed my window for enjoying this by not reading it when I was a teen. Also, I expect more and better women characters than the two in this book, and, frankly, just cannot buy a lover relationship between a 200 year old man and a 20 year old woman, even if he has had some youth enhancing treatments. Also, I find it irksome that the other women is (view spoiler)[ quickly identified as a prostitute by Wu because she is one of only three women on a c. 40 person crew of a ship that travelled on missions for 24 years. Why not a more balanced crew in the first place? Who cares if she has to be adept at certain things because all they do is maker a better sex worker. (hide spoiler)] Plus, I wasn't particularly fond of his alien species--not that one has to like them all, but I have read a great deal more scifi than my shelves here show.

I have checked the descriptions of the next 4 books, and since they all follow Wu, I'll be passing. Yes, I realize that I am in the minority of my reading friends who have read this, but such is reading life :).

I nominate Music

I read The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley ★★½

I like the setting very much and the mystery was pretty good even if it's rather slow. However, the characters annoy me so much!! It didn't quite start out that way though as I think they were okay at the beginning but halfway through, I was getting quite frustrated with all their choices.

This was my second last MM20 book (yay!)

We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program - shelved as science by 12ppl - but i really question why - there was minimal science and not much actual space info - it was more about the civil rights era and the integration of black individuals into NASA...i've had it on my shelf for a while and was kind of disappointing :( - 2 stars

I nominate: Climate Change

In the spirit of the challenge, I've also listened to NF one: Dr Karl's Random Road Trip Through Science ★★★½

To be truthful, I'm not particularly keen on science books and as far as I'm concerned, I've left that behind at school. However, in the spirit of reading challenges, I thought this audiobook would, if anything, prove to be entertaining. I was half right as Dr. Karl provided not only stories of how some things are discovered and/or analysed and/or invented (I like most of the historical notes here), he also talked about some things I found curious (eg. why wombats' poos are cube-shaped, who invented barcodes, etc) but when he started on atoms and space, I was totally out of my depth. I think I may have done better reading it in print so I can go over sentences again & again until it somewhat clicked in my brain. While I'm not as 'passionately curious' as Einsten or Dr Karl, I am sometimes curious so I'm willing to try another of Dr Karl's books.

I read The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris.

Medical history fascinates me though the subject matter is quite gory and unbelievable. Just thinking of having surgery with anaesthetics makes me supremely grateful for the time I was born. But I remain amused that professional jealousy isn't at all new. Regardless, it was fascinating to learn about Joseph Lister, a quiet and unassuming man who valued patient care and was truly innovative.

I read Recursion by Blake Crouch★

The science in this did not make any sense. The characters made dreadful decisions and, as Lusie said, the ending became way too repetitive. This book is much more a thriller than science fiction which is probably why I didn't like it.

Coralie wrote: "I read Recursion by Blake Crouch★

The science in this did not make any sense. The characters made dreadful decisions and, as Lusie said, the ending became way too r..."

It's a scifi thriller, which is a real thing, but not everyone's cup of tea. This was 3.7 (so I rounded it up) stars for me, even though I am rather tired of time travel. I liked it better than his Dark Matter which is also a scifi thriller.

I read The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. I found this book to be fascinating and learned so much about how PTSD and developmental traumas affect the brain. Brain science was only one factor of the book. The part that was most interesting to me was the part about treatment options like neurofeedback and EMDR among others. I also appreciated the author's view that medications are not a panacea for treatment of trauma disorders.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
4 stars

This book takes a broad perspective to look at problems facing humankind now and in the next few decades. Essentially, the rapid social and technological changes mean we have no idea what 2050 could look like. Our current political and social structures are not equipped for the pace of global change already underway in AI, biotech, and climate change. The first half of the book was fascinating, raising so many insightful questions on this topic. The second half dragged a bit but was still good. He poked some huge logical holes in political ideologies, religion, and nationalism, which was interesting.

Used for bookopoly and TBR trim
I nominate 2020 releases

Martha wrote: "I read The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. I found this book to be fascinating and learned so much about how PTSD and developmental traumas aff..."

I'm so glad you liked it!

Coralie wrote: "I read Recursion by Blake Crouch★

The science in this did not make any sense. The characters made dreadful decisions and, as Lusie said, the ending became way too r..."

i dnf'd this one when i tried it - i should totally like his stuff, but it just doesn't work for me

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
3 stars

When i studied neuroscience (nearly 20 years ago now) i was blown away learning that scientists didn't know why we slept. It was such a great mystery. This book claims that science has now solved the mystery, but i don't think it fully has. Yes, sleep serves many vital purposes and going without it is catastrophic. But i still don't understand why we can't do all those things while we're awake. Obviously we can't but why?
I was also interested to read this because I've spent the last 3 years being woken by a child every 1-2 hours. I haven't had a deep sleep, let alone a full night, in years. The long term harm this is doing me is terrifyingly clear from this book! But i thought it was strange that parenting wasn't mentioned. Surely this is a very common and extreme period of sleep deprivation for many people.
Overall, this book had lots of interesting information, but i didn't love the writing. He'd use a lengthy winding paragraph when a sentence would suffice.

I nominate chick-lit

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
4 stars

This is a memoir by Dr. Hope Jahren. The author not only dives into botany, but gives us a look into her life. The book tell the story of her background growing up in Minnesota, her struggles as a women in science, and her relationship with her lifetime lab partner Bill. Jahren has a dry sense of humor and a passion for science.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

4.5*
Science fiction makes for the best short stories, and this was an excellent collection. So many wild ideas to sample. I particularly liked the story of the tower of Babylon, built so high it reaches the bottom of heaven. The title story about alien linguistics and the alternative science of creationism and reproduction in "72 letters" were other faves.

I nominate Japan

Meg wrote: "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams"

I read that book and felt like it should have been classified under Horror and retitled Why Nothing Fun Is Good For You.

I read The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster ★★★★ Shelved "science" by 8 people.

Reading this book in the pandemic year was beyond strange. Forster saw it all - video calls, thousands of virtual friends with whom to discuss "ideas", remote lectures, fear of touch, fear of leaving the house, an interconnected world where there's no need for "reality" anymore. I'm amazed that this book was written 111 years ago! And Forster wasn't even a sci-fi author.

*

I used this book for Bookopoly and Just Read It prompt 3.

I nominate 2020.

I read Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf.
4 stars

This book has a wide remit: everything about how our brains read, from the development of the earliest writing systems to what happens in cases of dyslexia. I thought that the early parts were covered very well, but it diverged in the middle, and the section on dyslexia didn't seem very practical or well supported with facts. For example the author fell into the fallacy of jumping from "some famous artists and architects are dyslexic" to "people with dyslexia make better artists and architects". Actually, we need to know what proportion of artists and architects are dyslexic, and what is the prevalence of dyslexia in the population, before we can reach that conclusion.

However, some of it was eye-opening for me. I didn't know that, while our brains are designed for learning spoken language, they are not designed for reading. Children must be taught to read (if they seem to pick it up by themselves, it's because they've been taught unintentionally by being read to a lot) and their brains create new pathways in the process. And those pathways are different depending on whether the words they learn to read are written in an alphabet (with a symbol for each consonant and vowel), a system with a symbol for each syllable like Japanese kana, or a representational writing system like Chinese. I found all of this fascinating.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
3.5*

When you study infectious disease epidemiology, you hear about John Snow and the broad street pump A LOT. So it was good reading a bit more depth and detail about this story and the social and infrastructure conditions of Victorian London that surrounded it.
I enjoyed this book, but if you aren't an infectious disease or Victorian London nerd, you will probably find it a bit dry. I would round my rating down to 3.5* based on the final chapter, which was a bit of a mess of ideas, and the speculation about the next big epidemic seems a little outdated in late 2020!

I nominate translated

I read Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom and gave it 3.5*.

When I started this book, I was under the impression that Nazis had made lamp shades from human skin...and fully expected that they would have bound books also. Nope. No proof found of either.

In fact, the culprits most often lived a long time before WWII and were usually physicians who loved books! Most often these men lived in times that had few laws about body parts like skin...and chose specific books for this type of binding.

The book is not as gruesome as you might expect. It is more history and research based...looking for the story behind the book at the owners, the binders, and, when possible, at the person who belonged to the skin.

I am glad I read it...although it did take me a bit as I could only read so much before needing a break from the subject of death.

I nominate cozy mysteries, because I need a lighter read right now.

I read The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis (1963) ★★★★

I found it to be a short beautifully written science fiction novel but also a very very sad one.

The action starts in 1985, when a fragile alien on a mission lands on the United States after being trained for the task for ten years.

I had gone into the book without knowing anything about it (besides that it had inspired a movie with David Bowie) but after a few pages I had to check the year of publication and, yes, it wasn't in the 80s but in 1963. The author had managed to imagine a believable society and technology for the 80s but I found something missing, the Zeitgeist of the 80s, perhaps, or some inherent flicker of optimism, something whose absence tinged the story with a sense of helplessness and futility that got amplified by the rampant alcoholism of some of the characters. The scientific element started being an important element in the story but eventually petered out in favour of a plot based on character interactions.

I liked the story a great deal but I have to admit it was slow and depressing and I'd be hard put to recommend it to anyone in this particular year...

Rating: 4 stars ~ Shelf nomination: Dark Academia

Aquagenesis: The Origin and Evolution of Life in the Sea by Richard Ellis
4 stars

Not a bad way to close out this reading year. This is probably the hardest science book that I've read outside of a science class. The first hundred pages, in particular, were something of a slog. The book is meticulously referenced, which is academically sound, but makes for a more difficult reading experience as a typical sentence says, "As Smith and Wesson (1992) found, blah blah blah." For the first hundred or so pages, there's a meticulous description of all the prehistoric non-vertebrate sea life for which we have a fossil record. This is fascinating stuff in its own way, but was largely inaccessible to this non-biologist/paleontologist. When I was a college student, I briefly enrolled in a class called Biology of Fishes. The class was way over my head and I had to drop out, but I'm sure I would have learned stuff in that class that would have helped me interpret this book.

Once we moved on to vertebrates, I was more engaged and found the reading absolutely engrossing. By that point, I'd also become more accustomed tot he scientific references and felt more able to breeze through them.

I'd recommend this book, particularly if you can bring yourself to just skip the first section if you aren't tremendously interested in invertebrate fossils. But the description of the development of land animals (and then the return of land animals to the sea) is amazing. I was that annoying person who kept saying to my family, "Hey, did you know that whales are more closely related to elephants than fish?" and "Wow, there's a really interesting theory that humans have an aquatic or semi-aquatic ancestor that we haven't really discovered."

Used for bookopoly and Trim that TBR.
I nominate futuristic

I read and really enjoyed Recursion. I'm still working on Quiet, but - since it's non-fiction - I only make progress at the rate of about a chapter a day. Otherwise, I find my eyes processing words but my brain taking in nothing.

I ended up reading five sciency books this month.

My favorite was Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death by Caitlin Doughty. This was quite entertaining. It answered a lot of questions I didn't even know I had. Who even knew gifting a loved one your skull after death was even a thing? (It's quite hard to do and not entirely legal....). I'm looking forward to picking up Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by this author. 4 stars

My next favorite was shelved science by 22 people. It's more psychology based and I'm not sure people would necessarily think to shelve it as science. It was Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb. A fascinating view into how therapy works as a therapist and as a patient. 4 stars

Then there was Euphoria by Lily King. I read Writers & Lovers earlier this year and really liked it, even though Euphoria had been on my TBR list longer. I didn't realize until after I'd finished Euphoria that it is supposedly loosely based on the life of Margaret Mead. I found the anthropology extremely interesting. The love triangle, not so much. 3.5 stars

For those looking for adventure travel linked loosely with science, The Sun Is a Compass: A 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds by Caroline Van Hemert was interesting. Insane, but interesting. I'm not very tolerant of cold so I spent most of this book going "you're nuts. You are all nuts." But I did relate to the author's ambivalence to becoming a full-time academic researcher and how far removed she felt from the birds and the nature that drew her into the career in the first place. It was a hell of an adventure but not one I'd ever contemplate taking personally. 3.5 stars

And, lastly, I read a book about a different pandemic, the bubonic plague or Black Death. Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, set in 1666, doesn't have a whole lot of science in it (10 people have shelved it as science) since, honestly, there wasn't a whole lot of scientific understanding to be had in 1666. But it did highlight the beginnings of the understanding that quarantining those that are ill will help slow the spread of disease. 3 stars

I used Euphoria for Bookopoly.
I nominate Urban Fantasy

Well, Kristina, your list of books read and reviews have now added 3 more books to my TBR Wishlist! Wow! That's half of the books you listed...plus I had read the Geraldine Brooks' book.

Bea wrote: "Well, Kristina, your list of books read and reviews have now added 3 more books to my TBR Wishlist! Wow! That's half of the books you listed...plus I had read the Geraldine Brooks' book."

I hope you enjoy them, Bea!

I read Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester.

★★★

This was definitely more of a collection of essays rather than a narrative with some far more interesting than others. Not a bad read but not particularly exciting or insightful either.

I will also nominate dark academia

Unfortunately the closest I got was a science teacher MC :-( Maybe next time around...

I finished Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking the last day of the month. I liked it. If you are an introvert, it will reassure you that there's not something wrong with you because you don't want to be the life of the party - and there may, in fact, be things you can offer the world that extroverts can't. If you're an extrovert, and have a child or partner who's an introvert, it will give you lots of hints that may improve your relationship, or perhaps just how satisfied you are with it. And everything she says is documented by research findings, sprinkled with personal anecdotes from people she's met.

I just realized I never put in my review of the book
The Science of Sci-Fi: From Warp Speed to Interstellar Travel by Erin Macdonald
Rating: 4 stars Finished 12/31/2020
Review:
This was an interesting listen. The author goes through many different television shows and movies to prove or disprove the science behind the technology in the shows. I learned a few things and this is probably one I will listen to again because its so much info packed into 4 hours.

Used in Bookopoly
I nominate: Urban Fantasy

A little behind on this one. I picked a book out and put it on hold at my library in early Dec and it just now available. I am listening to the audiobook, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art for December's topic.