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Summer plans + Recent reading
Jun. 10th, 2015 07:13 pmI am currently buried under a mountain of graaading, but soon it will be summer! This weekend I am headed north for a board meeting in my environmental organization, and then I'll stay there visiting friends for a couple of days (it's in the town where I lived before). I have this worry that my friends there think I visit them too often (I was there over Easter, too) but I hope that is not the case. I think it's not the case. *insecure*
After that I am going to a cousin's wedding, and then back to work for a while. Then it's time for a week's tree climbing camp, and then later in July a camp for doing inventories of vascular plants in an area which is threatened by mining. Then I go home to move and help clean the house. I still have nowhere to move, but if all else fails I can stay with my parents for a while. Then five days of forest inventories in August. Yeah, I guess that's my summer plans. No mountains this year, sadly.
***
Odinsbarn [Odinschildren] by Siri Pettersson (originally in Norwegian, read in Swedish)
This is YA fantasy set in a Nordic-inspired world - I read a glowing rec for it and picked it up on a whim. It's pretty good, although it didn't blow my mind. Probably not available in English.
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer (audiobook, #1 in the Southern Reach trilogy)
I've seen lots of praise for this, and since it's supposed to be about the relationship between humans and nature, I thought I might enjoy it. But it didn't really work for me. It's about a team of explorers sent by a sinister government agency entering a mysterious place called Area X; the protagonist is a biologist. You could say it's a story of a rational person encountering an irrational world (written slightly differently, it would be a horror story). But I'm not sure what the point is? Sure, the world is irrational in many ways, and that's a worthy topic to explore, I guess. But the world in the book feels so obviously constructed, and I feel like I can sense the author behind the scenes constructing this strange world just to be weird, and it annoys me. I did like the ending more than I thought I would, but as a whole, this was not for me. (Also, nitpick: the biologist at one point says "It looked like a moss, but I could see it was actually a fungus or other eukaryotic organism." WTF? Mosses and fungi (and humans and trees) are all eukaryotic organisms.)
Anyway. This is first in a trilogy, and maybe it all would come together if I went on, but I'm not sure I will. Has anyone else read this? Should I go on?
After that I am going to a cousin's wedding, and then back to work for a while. Then it's time for a week's tree climbing camp, and then later in July a camp for doing inventories of vascular plants in an area which is threatened by mining. Then I go home to move and help clean the house. I still have nowhere to move, but if all else fails I can stay with my parents for a while. Then five days of forest inventories in August. Yeah, I guess that's my summer plans. No mountains this year, sadly.
***
Odinsbarn [Odinschildren] by Siri Pettersson (originally in Norwegian, read in Swedish)
This is YA fantasy set in a Nordic-inspired world - I read a glowing rec for it and picked it up on a whim. It's pretty good, although it didn't blow my mind. Probably not available in English.
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer (audiobook, #1 in the Southern Reach trilogy)
I've seen lots of praise for this, and since it's supposed to be about the relationship between humans and nature, I thought I might enjoy it. But it didn't really work for me. It's about a team of explorers sent by a sinister government agency entering a mysterious place called Area X; the protagonist is a biologist. You could say it's a story of a rational person encountering an irrational world (written slightly differently, it would be a horror story). But I'm not sure what the point is? Sure, the world is irrational in many ways, and that's a worthy topic to explore, I guess. But the world in the book feels so obviously constructed, and I feel like I can sense the author behind the scenes constructing this strange world just to be weird, and it annoys me. I did like the ending more than I thought I would, but as a whole, this was not for me. (Also, nitpick: the biologist at one point says "It looked like a moss, but I could see it was actually a fungus or other eukaryotic organism." WTF? Mosses and fungi (and humans and trees) are all eukaryotic organisms.)
Anyway. This is first in a trilogy, and maybe it all would come together if I went on, but I'm not sure I will. Has anyone else read this? Should I go on?
