Reading

Read Still Life With Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains by Alexa Hagerty, nonfiction about the work of forensic anthropologists exhuming mass graves to identify victims of state violence and armed conflict in Guatemala and Argentina. Thoughtful, thought-provoking, and frequently difficult to read due to the sheer scale of the horrors that led to this work being necessary. In a way, I think Hagerty (a social anthropologist who did forensic fieldwork in both countries, but didn't make it her career) successfully pulls off the style/structure that wasn't working for me in Caroline Fraser's Murderland, weaving together snippets of different "plot" (for lack of a better word, as both books are non-fiction) threads to build up to a larger point— ping-ponging between then and now, in Hagerty's case, and meditations on grief, memory, mourning rituals, the balance of science and emotion in forensic human rights work, the cultural perception/hierarchy of senses (how touch is viewed as "base" compared to, say, sight vs. the vital role of touch in forensic practice - articulating skeletons, "tactile inspection"), myths and folklore, etc.

Currently reading The Book of Love by Kelly Link, and if I loved this less, I could talk about it more, but the gist of the plot (so far) is that three (four?) teens return from the dead to find that, as part of the magic, they are the only ones who remember that they were gone and the world has shifted to scar-tissue over the gap of their almost-a-year's absence. Reminds me, in more or less abstract ways, of Genevieve Hudson's Boys of Alabama and Katherine Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts.

Finished Dune! (At least technically; I listened to the last couple of hours on a late flight and suspect I may have dozed off at points? That, or there are some weird time skips, which I also can't discount because there were previously some weird time skips even when I was paying attention— look, I know I've been referring to Paul as Space Jesus, but I really didn't expect an actual resurrection.) My biggest takeaway is that there are fascinating (in a bewildered-to-derogatory sense) things going on in this book, gender-wise: Frank Herbert has written this all-powerful order of, like, magical female Freemasons, and Paul's whole thing is that he's the one (1) guy who can achieve (and surpass/perfect?) their exclusively "feminine" powers, but also I feel like the narrative just has such contempt for the handful of women in it, except maybe Alia...?

Finished The Angel Experiment - book one of James Patterson's YA series about Maximum "Max" Ride, a teenage avian-human hybrid on the run from mad scientists and also her destiny to Save The World - and ended up reading the equally if not even more batshit sequel, School's Out Forever. The School is the laboratory where Max and the rest of her "flock" were created and spent the first two to ten years of their lives as twisted science experiments (!); Patterson apparently really likes the "school's out" joke because he used it in the first book, too, although this one does also feature an actual school, as they are briefly fostered by an FBI agent and face their greatest challenge yet: being Normal Kids. (This is immediately replaced by other, bigger challenges, such as the whole "running for their lives" thing, but does leave me with two nickels re: YA novels from 2006 which inexplicably spends page time on sending its super-spy/superpowered teenage girl protagonist on a Normal Date with a Normal Boy.)

( Highlights )

Currently (re-)reading The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian, which so far is the second book I've read this year to feature extensive info-dumping about the 19th century whaling industry. Also started reading The Book of Love by Kelly Link; I'm only a few chapters in but it's already breathtakingly good.

Weekend reading

Reading Wednesday