firecat

Media Consumption for February 1–7

My annual-or-so stab at doing a meme adjacent to Reading Wednesday. Maybe I can keep it up this year.
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The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa by Jonathan B. Losos

Cribbed from my review on Audible.

A delight for cat lovers of all stripes

Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary biologist. His primary research is on lizards but he spends a lot of time keeping up with cat science too, and teaches a college class on cat science. He reads the Audible version of the book and I found him easy to listen to.

Although the book is loosely strung together with the theme of evolution, the author ranges into a number of other subjects too, particularly the state of general scientific knowledge about cats (there are far too few studies, he complains), how new breeds of cats are developed and recognized, and ethical issues involving cats (indoor vs outdoor, wildlife vs feral cats, creation of breeds that vary a lot from the general traits of cats, such as the Munchkin, which has very short legs.

Anyway, I absolutely loved most of this book. It had just the right balance for me of “yeah I knew that” / "yeah I thought so" and “huh, I didn’t know that.” Losos does a great job of explaining scientific concepts so that they would be easy for non-scientists to understand. He is delightfully enthusiastic about his subject matter. The wide variety of material is organized well. I really liked the way he explained the need for certain research, described the research methods abstractly, and then included fun anecdotes about how particular studies actually went. (The parts about studying cats outdoors using GPS collars and cat cams were particularly enjoyable.) I especially learned a lot in the section about creating new breeds of cat, and found out I had some misunderstandings about domestic cat–wild cat hybrid breeds. I'm glad to know more and I feel a little less uncomfortable about them now than I did before.

There were a couple of things I didn't love as much. Losos has a habit of describing two sides of an ethical conflict and placing himself smack in the middle of the two camps with a smug "of course, I'm right" attitude. I also didn't like his enthusiasm for the idea of creating saber-toothed cats using CRISPR! Ew! But that's not a complaint about the quality of the book.

Here's what I just posted to audible.com about Aegypt (Unabridged) by John Crowley, narrated by the author

5 stars out of 5

slow, meandering, and beautiful

Crowley develops his stories slowly with lots of detail and writes beautifully. His writing and ideas are meant to be savored and pondered. If you like the idea of listening to a 15 hour and 29 minute poem, with another poem inside it, then you might well like this book.

Crowley narrates the book himself, in a flat middle-American voice, with a quirky, slightly self-conscious manner. The narration worked for me. I found his voice easy to listen to, and his reading gave me more insight into what his artistic intentions are. But the narration isn't going to please everybody.

I wrote it this way because the current top review of the book is extremely negative. Some folks on audible.com really don't like slow-to-develop stories, and some folks are fussy about narrators. (Me included, on that last one.) I wanted to describe the experience of listening to the book in a way that would appeal to someone who might enjoy it, and deter someone who might dislike this kind of book.

This is the first in what I hope to be a set of reviews/impressions of media I've consumed...I figure if I'm going to spend so much time on audiobooks, paper books, and movies, other people might as well know what I thought of them.

I just finished listening to The Cold Moon by Jeffrey Deaver, narrated by Joe Mantegna. I enjoyed it a lot.

( Cut for length and minor spoilers )