Bridget Collins, The Betrayals: I loved the structure and the internal resonance and so on and so forth to the extent that I didn't even mind that That's Not How Diaries Work.
(You do not get more detail because it is BEDTIME good grief, but -- okay I lied a bit -- queers! cocreation! complicity! choices! delighted.)
... but only one of them is even arguably a cookbook (it apparently contains some recipes but is primarily Popular Writing About Vegetables). Good job me.
In this instance precipitated by finding a pointer to Hurts So Good: the science & culture of pain on purpose (Leigh Cowart), which is extremely relevant to my current Thinking And Reading About Pain (related: I am going to try to get my act together to actually write up some thoughts on The Way Out, a book on the topic of pain reprocessing therapy, but I make no promises). The cheapest place I could find it was Oxfam. Oxfam still have a flat £3.95 postage charge regardless of how many objects you buy from them (some exceptions apply).
I also acquired a copy of I Contain Multitudes (Ed Yong), which I expect to want to reread or at least dip into; Crush, because to date I have read approximately none of Siken's poetry and I suspect I will find it easier in hard copy; more Tufte (Envisioning Information) because it was right there; and Touch (David Linden), because it was cheap and looked vaguely interesting and the library doesn't have a digital copy, and which also turns out to have at least one chapter focussed on pain.
... and some CDs for A, and some clothes for me, and as I say NO MORE COOKBOOKS. Good job, self.
This morning I finished reading Tales From Out There: The Barkley Marathons, The World's Toughest Trail Race, by Frozen Ed Furtaw. This recounts the history of, well, the Barkley Marathons, from its inception up to prep for the 2010 race, from the perspective of the first person to complete the course, in the third year it was held. (Whereupon Gary Cantrell/lazarus lake made it harder, as he subsequently has every time someone actually manages to demonstrate that the current instantiation isn't actually impossible.) Last year's race got a fair bit of news coverage, especially in the UK, because Jasmin Paris was the first woman to complete all five loops of the post-1995ish course. There was also coverage here on Dreamwidth, courtesy of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rydra_wong, who has been attempting to lure people into this particular extreme sports fandom since well before March 2024, but this time round I actually had the brain to engage! ... only to discover that at that point, for some reason, Furtaw's book (which I turned to once I'd watched documentaries etc, was Rather More Expensive Than Usual on the second-hand market), so I resigned myself to Getting It Later.
Which I duly did! And then on Friday last week I finally finished the non-fiction I'd been slogging through and turned, with glee, to Reading More About The Barkley. I am not sure this is a document that I would recommend unless you are either Interested In The Barkley or interested in a very particular style of Nerd Storytelling? But I enjoyed myself a lot.
Next on my list was the new Craft Wars book by Max Gladstone, Wicked Problems. (I think I have not talked about the Craft Sequence much recently, but after bouncing hard off the first chapter of Three Parts Dead on my first attempt, I wound up loving it enough that I worked out a plausible volcano-associated rock for An Important Piece Of Jewelry featured in Full Fathom Five and then scouring Etsy for an appropriately shaped bead.) I had not even (despite having bought it more or less the week it came out, as I recall) managed to get as far as putting it onto my ereader, so that was step one, and while I was at it I merrily transferred several of the other books that have been lurking in my calibre library but hadn't actually made it across to The Device, and then I settled in to read.
... and was confused and somewhat apprehensive to find that it opened thus (not actually spoilers for Wicked Problems):
The room she ushers him into smells of stale cigarettes and air freshener. The decor is ’80s mil-spec Holiday Inn. Dark-green carpet, striped armchairs, a smoked-glass table, a print of two F-15s trailing vapour set high in a gilded frame. The scream of their engines outside has been softened in here to a dark, low-frequency roar.
While it is not set in our world, I think I can safely say without particular spoilers that one of the technically-I-suppose geographical features of the Craft universe is a Rift In Reality. So it was not... totally out of the question? that Gladstone might have chosen to have do this unsettling and alarming dislocation? Like, it's a hell of a first paragraph to find oneself in media res, but it's Extremely Evocative and for all that I was mildly alarmed and thinking, approximately, but I don't WANT a cat I want a CHEESECAKE, I love the Craft Sequence enough to keep going and see what the fuck he was doing with this.
By the end of chapter three I was a bit "... ooooookay this is... not... structured the way I would anticipate him structuring doing this kind of thing" and yet (rydra_wong, vass, I hope you at least started cackling several paragraphs ago) it was not until partway through CHAPTER SEVEN that I FINALLY went "no, seriously, WHAT GIVES" and actually double-checked the title.
... so anyway that's how I realised that I had gone from The Barkley (lured by rydra_wong) into Prophet, also VERY MUCH rydra's fault, courtesy of tapping on a different title to the one I'd intended, because I'd just added a bunch of new books to the ereader and eink still doesn't refresh all that fast.
(My reading plans have been thoroughly derailed. I am now committed. I might shriek in comments as I go along.)
The most recent part of Otherlands that I stalled on:
It is not a clean process, and the continents crumple, throwing land skywards under its own momentum and down into the mantle, the crust becoming nearly twice as thick as under the average continental plate. The principle is exactly that of a buckling car bonnet in a crash test, where mountains and valleys emerge from the previously flat metal sheet.
Because, per title: NO IT ISN'T.
You are getting the rant copy-pasted from elsenet rather than something freshly made, but I am laughing a bit because I indignantly made Adam read it & his reaction was almost entirely "... seems fair enough?" and to be fair I had asked because I suspected this was a quartz situation (see also the associated explainxkcd) but even so.
( Read more... )
Otherlands, Thomas Halliday, through which I am trudging extremely slowly and with some resentment despite the occasional excellent paragraphs about specific species: I have been grumbling that it feels like it wants to grow up to be a podcast.
I was wrong.
It wants to be a David Attenborough documentary. And it's relying on its readers supplying the images to go with the voiceover! And I'm aphantasic! But that's the source of the cadence and the pacing and the zooming in and out on ecosystems -- all of it Wants To Be A David Attenborough Documentary, and I'm aphantasic.
Thanks to this revelation I am feeling much better about it not quite landing with me!
I was grousing... yesterday? yesterday. about my library having SEDUCED ME with promises of having digital copies of ALL THREE books, only to find (upon finishing the first) that while I could place a hold on the second, which showed up as available to do this with!!! ... It Would Only Get Fulfilled If My Library Acquired More Copies.
I spent some time checking whether any of the local bookshops had copies and deciding that this was silly and I should just buy the EBOOK if I were going to buy it AT ALL (because while I would have to faff with deDRM I at least would not need to faff with going to WALTHAM CROSS), but was balking somewhat (for some reason) at the concept of buying book #2 and only book #2 of a trilogy.
... this morning. I remembered. that libraries also, frequently, contain physical books.
So I checked the catalogue.
AND LO MY CLOSEST BRANCH HAD A COPY. ON THE SHELF. RIGHT THERE.
So I finished doing All Of The Cooking Faff and I ate a slightly questionable lunch (yog! persimmon! hazelnuts!) aaand then I betook myself Out Of The House to acquire A Book and also A Charity Shop Object I did not buy yesterday but had managed to talk myself into over the course of the evening, and which happily had not gone home with someone else in the intervening 24 or so hours.
I followed this up by sitting down and going Steadfastly through a bookshelf at my parents', extremely carefully, for like the third time (both parents having also been through it at least once in addition to having sorted through various other bookshelves) AND SUCCESSFULLY LOCATED THE ENORMOUS CROCODILE. Which is extremely exciting because -- okay, so, for Animals Week (2023) I wound up explaining to Adam that I had Secret Plans and Clever Tricks for (some) of the proceedings, and he was not familiar with this phrase, so I have spent almost two years failing to dig it out and also failing to buy a copy. BUT THIS EVENING I FOUND IT, and Adam spent a bit of time doing a Dramatic Reading of about half of it before we got distracted by Scrabble, and we have both discovered phrases in our idiolects that did in fact originate from this book that we'd both wholly forgotten the origins of, and I have also experienced some PRIMAL EMOTIONS upon observing, for the first time in quite possibly actual decades plural, illustrations I apparently imprinted on much harder than I'd realised.
Books! Physical books! They exist!
Didn't manage to talk myself into getting a Traveler's Notebook set-up from the Galen seconds sale before the colour & size I was interested in had sold out. Did pine about this somewhat.
... jumped on being second in line when a Moterm in deep teal came up on the FountainPensUK buy/sell/trade group over on Facebook last week. And it arrived today!
So far I have fondled it happily and peered at its workings and contemplated the notebooks it came with (blank/lined/grid); blank can be for poetry (maybe), grid is extremely multi-purpose I just need to decide on a purpose (given that I've got lots of potentials), and I am not thrilled about lined because I mostly eschew lined paper but idk I'll come up with something. (These days I am dot-grid all the way.)
So obviously I happily added the new notebook to the list of notebooks I've bought in the notebook where I track that (this notebook is discbound, and also includes keeping a vague record of how fast I go through the ludicrously expensive conditioner, how many pens exactly it is that I own, Irish irregular verb tables, and Notes On Computer Games). Which all starts to feel a bit recursive, so then I went and bought some cookbooks.
(This is an unhelpful summary. In fact I blithely quoted Molesworth at somebody, realised I didn't know if they recognised a Molesworth and clarified that it was Molesworth, they were one of today's lucky 10,000, and now I've got two copies of the compendium en route to me for really not much money, one for them and one for lending. In the process of noodling around eBay for cheap books I somehow wound up putting in a second order with a different vendor for a different 20% off offer, and now en route to me are Short and Sweet so I can add the recipe in there I definitely care about to the EYB account; the unrevised The Perfect Scoop, because the library doesn't have it and I'd forgotten a revised and updated version exists; and Leiths How to cook... Desserts, which was the only one of that set of four I still didn't have. Booksss.)
on the one hand: digital borrowing from the library is great! I can get books out at 3 a.m. from the comfort of my own bed!
on the other: there is no option to return your digital loan late. it self-returns automatically. this is a pity when you're going to be about ten pages short of the end of the non-fiction with the multi-month hold queue when your loan period is up.
on the gripping: screenshots.
(This has the notable disadvantage that unless I was willing to apply slightly more thought than I actually did, for the last ten pages I wound up having to turn pages backwards. Crucially, though, I finished the damn book, by dint of taking screenshots of the last 15 or so pages -- i.e. not enough to be a real nuisance to screenshot, and also few enough to be really annoying to have not Quite managed -- 6 minutes before it was going to return, and then keeping going as long as possible in Libby...)
Still chewing over what I made of the actual book (NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman). Thoughts to follow, possibly.
... and leads with an explanation of "opponency" that I did not quite manage to follow, for reasons that have more to do with typesetting of the ebook than anything else, but which problem I addressed by Visiting Wikipedia.
The wikipedia page on opponent process begins
The opponent process is a color theory...
... and indeed when my eyebrows raised and my eyes flicked over to the table of contents, I was unsurprised to see a section titled "Criticism".
All of which led inexorably on to impossible colors and, delightfully, the line of purples.
Yong has not thus far (I am a little under halfway through the chapter) even gestured vaguely in the direction of the immediately-obvious-to-me-from-the-opening-sentence-on-wikipedia Controversy about opponency, which means that I (i) have no idea and (ii) am poorly equipped to judge how this particular Controversy compares with The Controversy About Mantle Plumes wherein the small number of people who think thermal convective upwellings Aren't What's Going On for a long time were also the only people who cared about the wikipedia page on mantle plumes, which has at some point in the last decade been extensively edited to reflect actual current scientific consensus. Which in turn means that I am unsure how large a grain of salt to take with everything else Yong says!
Meanwhile,
Our [human] lenses typically block out UV, but people who have lost their lenses to surgeries or accidents can perceive UV as whitish blue. This happened to the painter Claude Monet, who lost his left lens at the age of 82. He began seeing the UV light that reflects off water lilies, and started painting them as whitish blue instead of white.
There are thousands of different animal opsins, but they are all related.* Their unity creates a paradox. If all vision relies on the same proteins, and if those proteins all detect light, then why are eyes so diverse? The answer lies in light’s distinct properties. Since most light on Earth comes from the sun, its presence can hint at temperature, time of day, or depth of water. It reflects off objects, revealing enemies, mates, and shelter. It travels in straight lines and is blocked by solid obstacles, creating telltale features like shadows and silhouettes. It covers Earth-scale distances almost instantaneously, offering a fast and far-ranging source of information. Vision is diverse because light is informative in a multitude of ways, and animals sense it for myriad reasons.
* In 2012, evolutionary biologist Megan Porter compared almost 900 opsins from different species, and confirmed that they share a single ancestor. That original opsin arose in one of the earliest animals and was so efficient at capturing light that evolution never conjured up a better alternative. Instead, the ancestral protein diversified into a wide family tree of opsins, which now underlie all vision. Porter draws that tree as a circle, with branches radiating outward from a single point. It looks like a giant eye.
Island dwarfism, one half of the general rule that island animals tend towards a medium size, was first noted in a Cretaceous fossil site in Haţeg, Romania. At the time the limestone of the Gargano caves was being laid down beneath the European seas, Haţeg was a largish island, and housed dwarfed dinosaurs. Their small size was thought to come from the lower resources of islands, with enormous creatures unable to survive on the limited nutrients available. This is not limited to creatures as big as dinosaurs. Over time, in the absence of ordinary predators, many large animals whose size would otherwise offer protection against predation -- such as deer, and, on other islands, hippopotamuses and elephants -- become smaller as food is scarcer. Small animals, which cannot store energy or water as easily, become larger, aiding the survival of the population through periods of scarce resources. [...]
On different Mediterranean mountains, the niche of small mammalian herbivore has been filled by supersized or shrunken versions of whatever happens to have colonized the island upon isolation. On Gargano, there are the herds of Hoplitomeryx. On Mallorca, a minute goat with a disconcerting forward-facing stare prunes the box shrubs. Box is notoriously toxic, containing large amounts of alkaloid compounds that normally deter predators. Myotragus has a behavioural solution to this toxicity, however: it eats small quantities of clay from the riverbed, which neutralizes the toxic alkaloids in the leaves. This abrasive mud antidote wears down their teeth, so they have evolved rodent-like ever-growing incisors, and molars with very high crowns, which explains the meaning of their name, 'mouse antelope'. The pressures of island life often produce such unusual responses. Physiologically, Myotragus is even rather unlike most mammals. To avoid problems with fluctuating nutrient supplies, the dwarf goat can vary its metabolic rate. They grow slowly, speeding up only when times are good, exactly as ectotherms, or 'cold-blooded' creatures do. On Menorca, the role of medium-sized herbivore is filled by a giant rabbit, Nuralagus, wombat-like in its hapless, hopless, rollicking gait and tumbleweed figure.
(Chapter 3, Deluge, ~5.33 million years ago; Wikipedia links my own, because I don't love you enough to type up the actual book's actual list of sources; more generally, see allopatric speciation)
Some months earlier I had begun writing my second novel without a contract or an advance. I had assured my agent, Victoria Schuster, that I didn't need one and it would help keep away the pressure of a deadline.
"But that's the only way you write, Joe," she said. "You come over all Lapsed Catholic and guilty because you have signed the deal and that gives you the discipline to finish it."
"Well, yes, that was true in the past," I agreed. "But this time it will be different."
"A likely story," she said, accurately discounting any chance of seeing a manuscript within her lifetime. I vowed to prove her wrong and enthusiastically began tapping at my keyboard. I had completed 25,000 words, only to find that I had written myself into a cul-de-sac. There were only two characters in the novel and I discovered to my incredulous dismay that I had killed off both of them. This was a fairly major plotting error.
so he moved house about it.
So rydra_wong does a pretty good line in dragging me into tiny non-fictional fandoms. Most recently I have tripped and fallen into reading about the Barkley Marathons.
Obviously, I decided the correct course of action would be reading The Book written about the first n years of their history. And there was a copy at Oxfam! cheaper than from eBay, even! Fantastic, thought I, and kept that tab open, and settled down to browse through ... all ... of the food-and-drink books. And to double check my To Acquire list. Because, you see, Oxfam has a flat postage fee for ordering any number of items from any number of individual shops (assuming you're not ordering anything they want couriered), so it makes sense to get Several Things. Totally.
Possibly it could have occurred to me that what with the Barkley Marathons being very much in the national news I might not be the only person who had had this thought, and nonetheless I was surprised when I went to check out and the book that had kicked this whole endeavour off... had been bought by someone else.
But, well, at that point I'd got a stack of six other books plus one CD for A, so...
(The books: Nature's Palette; Gaia's Garden (don't remember which of you I saw mention that but pretty sure it was one of you); something else by the author of the book on psychosomatic illnesses I mentioned yesterday and have subsequently finished, the penultimate chapter of which further complicated my feelings about... everything... so I'm now second-guessing this purchase in particular; The Beckoning Silence, by the Touching the Void dude, i.e. another special interest via rydra; Tamarind & Saffron, even though I haven't actually read my last charity shop cookbook yet, because I know what I like and I appear to be precisely its target audience; and Sally Rooney's Normal People, which I borrowed digitally from the library some time ago and have Many Feelings about and wanted to own a copy of.)
made the BRILLIANT choice this evening to unstick myself from the sofa and go do my Pilates at the literal cliffhanger in Touching the Void.
obviously knowing it turns out as a more-or-less safe landing* makes it slightly less [aaaaaaah], but at the point I was gazing through the ceiling and berating myself for Leaving It On A Bit Of A-- I had to stop. and stare with slightly more focus. and try not to just entirely dissolve into giggles.
(At the moment my brain is letting me read non-fiction and very little else. This is VERY FRUSTRATING given the amount of fiction I would REALLY LIKE TO BE READING, thanks.)
* safe landing: everyone walks away. good landing: you can use the plane again.
It is arriving on Saturday.
I have spent some of this evening hanging dirty, soggy, wash powder-encrusted clothing out to dry.
Elsewise I am mostly reading What Happened to You? (Bruce D. Perry & Oprah Winfrey), and having lots of happy bubbly thoughts about it, but I have been gently informed that harrowing developmental trauma is not actually a good bedtime conversation or indeed a relaxing light lunchtime conversation. Possibly I will get around to actually writing this one up; definitely it is the case that a day or so ago I Admitted that I was going to want to take enough notes that it was worth breaking them out onto their own pages, instead of continuing to intersperse them among the daily minutiae composed of such things as "hanging out the laundry"...
As I think I mentioned I have instituted, in my notebook, a Running List Of Unread E-mail And Tab Counts. I started the month with 782 tabs open in my browser; I am presently at 673.
Part of the problem is that I have been an Alex of Very Little Brain for some time now, so I have probably several hundred academia-related tabs open for when I can muster the focus to actually read paper abstracts and work out if they're relevant to me.
There is the not unrelated problem, also, that I tend to find short fiction Difficult -- my best guess is that's because of all of the task-switching involved. Nonetheless there are a lot of people whose short fiction I really do enjoy if I can get myself to settle down to it, and today has mostly been a case of gradually working my way through some of those tabs.
Highlights so far include John Chu's Beyond the El, Yoon Ha Lee's The Second-Last Client, and SL Huang's As the Last I May Know. (From the datestamps in those URLs you can tell how long I've had them sitting open...)
On a tangentially related topic: those of you in the US and possibly in NAm more generally, there's currently a Pratchett Humble Bundle on. (ALAS I appear to be region-locked out of it.)
Last year I read Spirals in Time (Helen Scales), and the main thing that stuck with me (apart from the section on byssus cloth, which turned out to be relevant to Hands of the Emperor...) was the concept of morphospaces (see Raup 1962, Raup and Michelson 1965). The book introduces this fantastic imaginary museum filled with glass shells hanging on strings, the shapes varying systematically in space according to Raup's parameters -- and I am most put out that this doesn't actually seem to be something that exists digitally (the closest I've found is Leggio et al. 2019). (Related: an R implementation for plotting your ammonoid data).
It turns out that people have (inevitably) gone "... I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that", but I love the idea. At least a bunch of Raup's art is available for perusal...
Meanwhile, I have spent the past few days dipping in and out of Gavin Francis' Recovery, which consists of a series of short essays. One of the later ones includes the almost-afterthought line
Suzanne O'Sullivan is a neurologist in London specialising in what are now called 'functional illnesses' and used to be called 'psychosomatic' illnesses.
This is referenced to one of her books -- which I've now got on hold with the library -- and I am fascinated to read more about this, because I'd been increasingly aware of "functional illnesses" but had totally failed to register that this was terminology that was displacing "psychosomatic". For me the Big Thing is the way this suggests a shift from the default assumption that such illnesses are Something The Patient Is (in some sense) Doing to, instead, the idea that just because you can't find it via dissection -- just because the disorder arises not from physical structures but from the ways in which they work -- doesn't mean there isn't a (transient, short-lived) physical basis. And then there's the shift in focus from etiology to management of functional impairment, which I am also fascinated by.
recessional managed to dig up for me [an NHS resource that corroborates this shift in usage]:
Functional Neurological Disorders (FND's) is the name given for symptoms in the body which appear to be caused by problems in the nervous system but which are not caused by a physical neurological disease or disorder. Health professionals sometimes call these disorders ‘medically unexplained’, psychosomatic or somatisation. We prefer the term ‘functional’ which just means that the body is not functioning quite as it should.
This is also tying in to some things Migraine (Katherine Foxhall) has me musing on, about the lines we draw between comorbidities (illnesses that occur together at a rate greater than can be plausibly explained by chance) versus syndromes (clusters of signs and symptoms, some subset of which is sufficient for a diagnosis to be given). The extent to which headache has been considered an essential feature of migraine -- or nausea, or aura, and so on -- has shifted over time; I don't have any conclusions about what constitutes a meaningful diagnostic unit (or atom, I suppose), but I'm definitely interested in looking for more writing on the topic.
Now about half way through it, and very much enjoying both the illustrations (the copy I have access to is a hardback with gilt edged pages, and it's gorgeous) and Reading Choice Snippets Aloud. Rundell doesn't cite all her sources, but she does cite enough that it's been possible for me to track down everything I went ?! about; I'm not convinced by her use of one of the less-well-supported theories about Amelia Earhart & Noonan's disappearance to introduce hermit crabs, but it does actually have some basis in fact.
There is a definite and decided focus on the threat of extinction of each species, and the various factors that contribute to this. She's being pretty scrupulous about using "BCE" and indigenous names for species.
And it's lyrical and loving and funny and precious, and I think I Would Quite Like More Pop Sci Books Like This, Thanks. Any recs?
Definitely Contemplating both of them. The library has the former as an ebook -- though I'm not convinced the illustrations will benefit from digitisation -- but not the latter. Alas there is too much else going on for it to be likely that I'll manage to inhale either of them while I'm still in the same physical place as the copies I currently have access to, but such is life. (Possibly I could manage The Golden Mole with some dedicated breakfast reading...)
From a chat where I am liveshrieking about this (because the person who asked me to read it was actually sufficiently into knowing my opinion that they bought me a copy when I told them the library hold queue was three months long even though I'd said I was probably going to buy one myself, which is pretty much as clear an opt-in to stream-of-consciousness keyboardsmashing as it gets):
................. okay well I made it a whole two and a half paragraphs before screeching to the abrupt halt of "EXCUSE ME? I AM GOING TO NEED? SOME MORE DETAILS? ABOUT THE GEOLOGY HERE???"
Whereupon. This Fucker. Sends me a screencap. Of a tumblr post that reads:
reminder to worldbuilders: don’t get caught up in things that aren’t important to the story you’re writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
and this is the most personally called out I have been in at least five minutes!!!
Also! I wasn't very far into it before I went "The Hands of the Emperor, you say? Hmm... that sounds awfully Vorkosigan Saga......." and have promptly dragged another friend (who got added to the liveshrieking chat) into A Deeper Season courtesy of explaining that I do indeed come with feelings about Fealty and Touching The Emperor's Hands pre-installed.
Anyway, 15% of the way through it (according to my ereader), having a grand old time so far, more probably to follow!
regnakrja