firecat

Nicked from kingstoken

I have a blackout — I filled all categories on the card except for one (book from my birth year). OK, you could side-eye my choice of book for the craft/hobby/cookbook category, but Moby Dick does have recipes and how-to’s in it.

Of the substitute categories, I filled all but one, Disabled Author — and I’m pretty sure I covered that category but I didn’t research which authors I read are/were disabled.


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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.

Movies

To Catch a Thief
Hitchcock with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly (and Edith Head doing costumes). I haven't laughed this much over a movie in a long time.
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Movies

Advanced Style
Ari Seth Cohen has a street fashion blog called Advanced Style which focuses on stylish people (mostly women) aged 50 and over (usually a lot over). The blog has spawned a coffee table book, a coloring book complete with paper dolls and this documentary, which features a few of the women he photographs regularly. All of them live in New York City. You see them working (one works in a vintage clothing store, several teach), being photographed for ad campaigns, singing in a nightclub, being part of a flash mob at New York Fashion Week, visiting Los Angeles to appear on the Ricki Lake show, and more.

Edge of Tomorrow
Tagline is Lather. Rinse. Live. Die. Repeat. Time loop movie. Fairly entertaining in that twenty-teens excessively seriously dystopian way that movies can be. I liked the female protagonist, played by Emily Blunt, and that there was almost no (spoiler) romance between her and Cruise's character, although there was a little. (Wikipedia says the kiss between them at the end of the movie was unscripted and was Blunt's idea. I think it was a bad idea.) (end spoiler) I also loved the cranky old general character played by Brendan Gleeson.

Gravity
An astronaut and a scientist inexperienced in space travel get stranded in space. Much effort was put into making the space environment seem realistic, although the scenario is less realistic. If you can see it in the theater in 3D, definitely do that, but if not, it's wonderful in 2D on a large home TV also. Great soundtrack. Sandra Bullock is an amazing physical actress.

The Last Unicorn
Animated 1982 film of Peter Beagle's 1962 fairy tale. Liked it a lot. Proves that (spoiler) "the princess marries the prince and everyone lives happily ever after" trope could be subverted long before Frozen came along (end spoiler).

Men in Black 3
This one wasn't as good as the first one but was better than the second one. Doesn't pass the Bechdel test, but has Emma Thompson as the head of the agency. Boris the Animal and Griffin are fun aliens. Time travel to the 1960s is generally fun.

Shaft
Speaking of time travel to the 1960s...oh wait, this one was made in 1971, but close enough. One of the first and most iconic blaxploitation films, although apparently it annoyed white audiences for making too much of racism and black audiences for not making enough of it. (Gee not much has changed in 43 years.) The relationship between Shaft and his white contact in the police is fun. Everyone is wearing rust colored turtlenecks and lounging on fake fur rugs. Lots of product placement. If you want to make a point about male characters who would be called Mary Sues if they were female characters, be sure to mention Shaft. Now I want to do crossover fanfic with Shaft and James Bond.

Fiction

Up from the Grave, Jeaniene Frost (Night Huntress #7)
This is the last book in the Night Huntress series, although Frost has written other books set in the same universe. I'm somewhat incapable of explaining why I like these books, so have a collection of funny (some intentionally, some not) lines instead:

• "Baring the majority of my breasts"
• "That’s how two vampires, a medium, and a dog came to sit around a Ouija board in the back room of a floral shop."
• "The fact that I hadn’t known what I was doing when it happened was almost moot by comparison."
• "Groin cleavage"
• "Changing someone into a vampire was downright prissy-looking by comparison."

Oh, and I really didn't like the way she described Detroit.

The Sittaford Mystery, Agatha Christie
Audiobook, well narrated by Hugh Fraser, who does a wide range of voices well. Published in 1931. Not part of a series, although it was rewritten for a TV show in which Miss Marple became the crime solver. Set in Dartmoor (English title: The Murder at Hazelmoor). The rural nature of the area, along with its bad weather, and the fact that someone can hide upon the moor play into the plot, but not the beauty or loneliness of the scenery as in Conan Doyle's or Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes in Dartmoor mysteries. My favorite characters are the chief crime solver, Emily Trefusis, who is the accused man's fiancée; and Caroline Percehouse, a cranky and very smart old lady. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is mentioned in the context of his being interested in metaphysics. I had trouble keeping some of the other characters straight. Enough red herrings to feed an army.

Movies

Frozen

I loved the "Let It Go" song and scene, but otherwise I didn't like it that much.
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Movies

Appleseed: Ex Machina
2007 anime movie. A sequel to the 2004 Appleseed, which I saw but can't remember a single thing about. Deunan, a human, and Briareos, originally human but now in a cyborg body, are lovers and special ops partners. (Spoilers for general plot points) Briareos is injured in a battle and while he is recovering, the team leader tries to pair Deunan with another agent, who looks like Briareos used to look when he was a human, because he's a bioroid engineered from Briareos's DNA. Deunan is not happy about any of this. Some people try to take over the world with a satellite network, and the special ops team tries to stop them. I really liked this for the beauty of the fight choreography (especially in the opening scenes), for the relationships, and for the exploration of body and identity issues. It's a bit like Ghost in the Shell but more grounded, if that makes any sense.

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Movies

The Bodyguard
Thai gun-fu/wire-fu action comedy. We stuck it on our Netflix queue several years ago because we like Tony Jaa. We started watching it with few expectations and ended up REALLY impressed. The director-star, Petchtai Wongkamlao, is a SUPERB actor and comedian. There are lots of very long choreographic gunfights and kung fu fights in various styles. Tony Jaa is on screen for only a few minutes in a scene set in a supermarket. The funniest scene was (no, I'm not going to tell you, it's funnier if you don't know what's going to happen). The star is a little plump but nothing is made of this. There is another fat guy in the movie who wears outrageous costumes (normally I wouldn't like this, but the people making fun of this character are portrayed as ridiculous and he is portrayed as dignified; also they make fun of his costumes and not his size, so it didn't bother me). One of the actors appeared to have Down Syndrome. On the less enjoyable side, there was some sexism and body mockery among some minor characters that did bother me, but the rest of the movie made up for it. For all that I liked it, I wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to these genres.

Guardians of the Galaxy
I made a separate post about this.

Episodics

The Wire
Seasons 1–4 were the best serious television I've ever seen. We had heard that Season 5 was good, but not as good as the other seasons. We watched three episodes and were not very happy with it, so we decided to stop watching. The episodes of Season 5 we watched had moments, but overall it was feeling meaner than the previous seasons, and we thought that some of the character development wasn't right. E.g. it really bugged me that McNulty went from all-but-teetotaling throughout season 4 to drunk-off-his-ass and cheating every night starting in episode 1 of season 5 and no reason was given for the change at all. I also looked at the plotline for the rest of the season and I didn't want to watch Omar or Prop Joe or Snoop getting killed although I'm sure the actors turned in great performances on those scenes.


Nonfiction

Robert Greenberg, Mozart: His Life and Music
Series of lectures by a professor of music. He is way over the top; listening to him is more like listening to a stand-up comedian than to a typical professor. But if you don't mind that or like it, it's fun. Of course he spends much of the time vociferously debunking various myths about Mozart's life. (One I didn't realize was a myth, although I should have, is that "Amadeus" is not Mozart's real middle name; that is, he was not christened that and didn't use it during his lifetime, except as a wordplay.) There are bits of good music, if you like Mozart music and/or his contemporaries. I thought Greenberg could have done a more thorough job of explaining what to listen for in the music, but he did do some of that.


Fiction

Kerry Greenwood, Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher #1)
Continuing

Tessa Harris, The Anatomist's Apprentice (Dr Thomas Silkstone Mysteries #1)
Narrated by Simon Vance, who is very skillful but I am starting to hate him. This series "uses a fictional character Thomas Silkstone to examine the beginnings of forensic science, anatomy and surgery" (sez Wikipedia) and is set in the late 1700s. There's a lot of dissection/autopsy porn. It's got a classic mystery plot (country estate, lots of suspects, dark family secrets revealed, etc.) that's done well until just before the end. There's also a romance, which I didn't find very compelling. I didn't like the ending very much.


Games

A New Beginning
Daedalus point-and-click game/story about time travel and environmentalism. I got sucked into it (there's good voice acting and the Bent Svensson character is interesting), but I didn't really like the story. There is an interesting female protagonist but she gets verbally abused a lot throughout the story (for incompetence), she has a technical job but constantly has to ask male characters about technical stuff, and then she sacrifices herself at the end to save the male protagonist. There were some things I liked about the gameplay, but I am not clever at lateral thinking (or grinding through trying every combination of possibilities) of the kind that this game often relies on for its puzzles, so a lot of the puzzles were too obscure for me, and I used a walkthrough.

What are you currently reading?

When Gravity Fails (Marid Audran #1) by George Alec Effinger
I'm really glad I'm listening to the audiobook this time. I'm able to focus on some of Effinger's awesome writing that I missed before because I was gobbling the book to find out what happens next. I am really impressed by how much and what kind of attention is paid to the female/trans characters. Marid has a male gaze "gaze of people who find women attractive," but it's so much less othering than most male protagonists'. I just got through with a beautifully written section where Marid is describing his girlfriend put on her makeup. It doesn't seem like it should be hard to write this way, even for men, but I almost never see it. (Note, some of the language and concepts used to describe trans characters is outmoded and might be offensive.)

On the Edge (The Edge #1) by Ilona Andrews
Urban fantasy/romance. Ilona Andrews is the pen name of a husband and wife writing team. This started out OK but now the protagonist is being hounded and manipulated by two men with romantic designs on her, and she seems completely unable to handle it. I'm really sick of that trope, so I might give up. (If you have read it and can tell me one way or the other whether it gets past this, let me know.)

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin

Breaking Waves: An Anthology for Gulf Coast Relief edited by Tiffany Trent and Phyllis Irene Radford
Ocean-themed, mostly SFF short stories and poetry

What did you recently finish reading?

A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King (#3 in the Mary Russell series)
The mystery they had to solve in this novel wasn't all that great, but I love King's writing style, and I really like the character of Mary Russell, and I like how the marriage is progressing. So I will read the next one. And now I'm very curious why wild_irises said "I hate A Letter of Mary with the kind of blazing passion we reserve for books that break the "rules" we've decided to care most about." (I can think of several such rules that were broken, but I don't know which one(s) she meant.)

What books did you acquire this week?

The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan, which won the Tiptree this year

What are you currently reading?

A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King (#3 in the Mary Russell series)

The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner (Riverside #2), audiobook narrated by Ellen Kushner, Barbara Rosenblat, and others

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin

What did you recently finish reading?

Lilith's Brood, (aka Xenogenesis), Octavia Butler. I loved this so much even though I was seriously creeped out by it. Alien aliens! Real biology! Ambivalence, adaptation, allies, bonding, captivity, coercion, communication, conflict, consent, enemies, family, freedom, gender, genetics, genocide, healing, hierarchy, identity, knowledge, needing, reproduction, resisting, sex, symbiosis, telepathy, tribe, wanting, war, xenophobia.
These essays are linked from the Wikipedia page; I posted them before but I thought they were worth posting again.
"Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler’s XENOGENESIS" by Cathy Peppers
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist’s Response by Joan Slonczewski

August Heat by Andrea Camilleri (Montalbano #10). Audiobook. Montalbano is a Sicilian cop. Almost all the novels are about sex crimes, and I usually figure out the plot before the end, but I like them anyway. The translator and narrator are really good.

What books did you acquire this week?

The Wings of the Sphinx by Andrea Camilleri (Montalbano #11)

What are you currently reading?
Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler

Where Angels Fear to Tread by Thomas E. Sniegoski
I switched from audiobook to ebook for this series because I wasn't loving the writing style enough to want it read to me. I found the beginning annoying. But I've only read a few pages so far.

The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll (audiobook)

What did you recently finish reading?
Dangerous Mourning by Anne Perry, #2 in the Inspector William Monk series, set in the mid-19th century. Audiobook well narrated by Davina Porter, one of my favorite narrators. Although it's called the Monk series, this book's main protagonist is Hester Latterly—she does the primary footwork for solving the mystery. I really liked it for its attention to class and women's issues, and for character development. I also think Perry does a good job with dialogue.

Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series. Liked it a lot. McGuire does a great job of pacing and reveals and drawing out the story arc.

What do you think you’ll read next?
I'm going on a trip without much Internet access, so I downloaded several ebooks:

A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King (#3 in the Mary Russell series)
Larger Than Death by Lynne Murray (#1 in the Josephine Fuller series)
Cranford by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
The Vampire Files, Volume Two omnibus by P. N. Elrod (contains books 4–6 in the series: Art in the Blood, Fire in the Blood, and Blood on the Water)
Ventus by Karl Schroeder