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tannat

Tannat

Not so much a blog; just lots of books

Currently reading

The Grace Year
Kim Liggett
The New Voices of Science Fiction
Jamie Wahls, Sarah Pinkser, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Rebecca Roanhorse, S. Qiouyi Lu, Darcie Little Badger, Kelly Robson, Nino Cipri, Amal El-Mohtar, Sam J. Miller, E. Lily Yu, Alice Sola Kim, Suzanne Palmer, Alexander Weinstein, Rich Larson
Progress: 13%
Engineering Animals: How Life Works
Alan Mcfadzean, Mark Denny
Progress: 125/314pages
The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization
Nicholas P. Money
Conservation of Shadows
Yoon Ha Lee
Progress: 22%
Le premier jour
Marc Levy
Progress: 180/496pages
Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)
Herman Melville
Manifold: Time
Stephen Baxter, Chris Schluep
Progress: 99/480pages
The Long War
Stephen Baxter, Terry Pratchett
Progress: 68/501pages

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Seveneves: A Novel - Neal Stephenson, Will Damron, Mary Robinette Kowal

This is basically two books published as one, which is better, I guess, than arbitrarily splitting a long book in the middle. I’m not sure whether listening to the audio version was a mistake on this one. And although I didn’t dislike Will Damron’s narration, I’m not entirely sure why it was decided that Mary Robinette Kowal wouldn’t read the whole thing. It reinforced the whole two books thing. Admittedly, neither of the “books” could really stand on its own, but that hasn’t stopped publishers in the past. The first book covers everything up to the Hard Rain and its aftermath, then the second book jumps ahead five thousand years.

 

Don’t get me wrong; I did find large portions of it interesting. It’s just that explanations tended to go on too long and everything seemed to be discussed at a remove. Ok, not everything, but there were long digressions. I remember that I one point delta vee was defined in a way I found patronizing (it didn’t just explain delta vee as a change in velocity; it called “delta” a common mathematical shorthand*). Some of the political stuff I found frustrating while at the same time being able to admit that it was perfectly reasonable for people to do stupid things out of a sense of disenfranchisement.

 

I was glad when it was over, but there also didn’t seem to be much of an ending.

 

 

*Yes, it is a common mathematical shorthand. It’s so common that I don’t see why it was defined. It’s called knowing your audience, not patronizing them.