May 14 2023

What If? 2 by Randall Munroe

What If?, this book’s predecessor, hit the sweet spot of serious science mixed up with deadpan presentation, and proved a (periodically dangerous) garden of delights. The second book exploring “serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions” does just that, boggling and amusing in nearly equal measure. If the leitmotif of the first volume is “What if we tried more power?” the two of this one are creating black holes and eradicating all life on Earth. For a book with as many apocalypses as this one, though, it’s very cheerful, probably because practically all of them can be avoided by just not doing extremely silly things. Or at least hoping that geological disasters from Earth’s past don’t repeat anytime soon.

What If 2 by Randall Munroe

For example, in one of the short answer sections, reader Ian asks what would happen if Mount Everest suddenly turned into pure lava. Not to worry, says Monroe, even though Everest is large for an individual human, it’s small on the scale of the earth and outside of the local area, life would be undisturbed. Monroe’s reassurance, though, is limited. Much larger lava events — up to three orders of magnitude larger than an Everest of lava — have happened in Earth’s history, and

These outpourings, which create massive rock slabs called “large igneous provinces,” are bad news for life. There are five big mass extinctions in the fossil record, and all five of them were accompanied by large amounts of lava blorping onto the surface.
Eyes first evolved about half a billion years ago, and in that time, the Permian extinction is probably the worst thing they’ve seen. A large eruption of lava in what is now Siberia injected huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to spike. The oceans deoxygenated and acidified. Clouds of poison gas rolled across the land. Most plant life was wiped from the continents, leaving Earth a sandy desolate wasteland. Almost everything died. (pp. 138–39)

Fortunately for humanity, large igneous provinces seem to form over geologic time scales.

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May 12 2023

Under Her Skin edited by Lindy Ryan & Toni Miller

A Women In Horror Poetry Collection, Volume I

Usually when I read poetry, I read in great big chunks, especially when reading a collection from one of my favorite poets. Even larger anthologies from different writers go by quickly, or at least in big thematic pieces. So I was a little surprised, but not in a bad way, to discover that I couldn’t do that with this themed collection. The horror is so visceral and multi-faceted that I had to take my time, digesting as and when I could these almost uniformly relatable variations on very familiar subversions of day-to-day themes.

Over the course of eighty-eight poems (oh that number so beautiful to East Asians, but coopted and corrupted by modern fascists such that I can understand why it wasn’t trumpeted by the creators here,) the many forms of horror dreamed up by contemporary women and femme poets are put on full, gory display. Much of the work centers on body horror, because much of a woman’s life revolves around the body as a punishment, as an imperfection that we must exert ourselves to make acceptable to some faceless “them” or, worse, to all too familiar faces in our own lives. This struggle is perfectly captured in Amanda Kirby’s Sanctification, whose unnamed speaker lops off parts of herself in order to achieve salvation. Annie Neugebauer’s Pieces later on in the book echoes the same sacrifice, this time in the name of love, as does Nico Bell’s Smile.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/05/12/under-her-skin-edited-by-lindy-ryan-toni-miller/

May 11 2023

Skip To The Fun Parts: Cartoons And Complaints About The Creative Process by Dana Jeri Maier

It’s fitting that there’s an entire section on relatability in this part-cartoon, part-essay treatise on struggling with the muse. Skip To The Fun Parts is so deeply relatable for any creative who’s ever suffered from self-doubt — so, every creative — that it feels like Dana Jeri Maier has been watching me try to work and procrastinate and hate myself for not being superhuman. Most importantly tho, this book is her way of saying “I see you and I understand what you’re going through.” And honestly that’s a really valuable thing to have.

The short essays on the steps of the creative process are broken up by Ms Maier’s cartoons and doodles. The cartoons are as eminently relatable as the essays, tho I found the doodles to be a little less so. They’re filler, and they’re fine. Preexisting fans of Ms Maier’s work will love their inclusion here. Will they make fans out of people less familiar with her work? As someone who tends to place more importance on words than art, I can only safely say that her essays, at least, have made me take positive note of her work overall.

It helps, of course, that we’ve both lived and worked in Washington DC and its surrounding neighborhoods. So much of her life as described in this book feels intimately familiar to me, as she discusses commuting to a desk job, the impact of the pandemic, and how all that affected her creative work. But even divorced from these specifics, this book has lots to say about the joys and terrors of working in a creative field (tho mostly, let’s be honest, the latter.)

Because it’s hard, y’all! Book criticism is easily the least complicated of the creative work I do, and even that struggles to overwhelm me on the regular. At present, my weekly newsletter is a shambles, and I haven’t done any writing for role playing games in weeks! I’m a mess! But this book helped me feel less pitiful and alone. Other people have felt this defeated, too! And, miraculously, have come out the other side feeling better and happy and with, gasp, finished work in their hands!

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May 09 2023

Mossy And Tweed: Crazy For Coconuts by Mirka Hokkanen

What a delightful first graphic novel for young readers! As I’ve discussed elsewhere on this site, how can the discerning reader tell the difference between picture book and graphic novel? This volume falls firmly in that latter category, perhaps due to the more formal nature of having multiple panels on each page as opposed to a picture book’s preponderance of single images per page or double page spread.

Anyway, now that I’ve finished being pedantic (for now,) let me tell you more about this delightfully silly hardcover volume that thoroughly amused both myself and my reluctant reader middle child. My reluctant reader youngest child bailed out of reading it with me because, sigh, he’d already read one book that day, but Joseph happily obliged by reading this aloud with me.

As a member of the Space Gnome Discord server (and hello to any of you reading this! I will write some postcards soon, I promise!) I was absolutely tickled to be introduced to Mossy and Tweed, two bickering gnomes who live side by side in Gnome Forest. As they’re arguing the difference between being smart and being lazy one day, a strange item rolls onto their farm, flattening Tweed in the process.

Once they recover, they try to make sense of this new arrival. A label affixed to the rubber band around it implies that the hard, hairy item contains a beach vacation, which spurs our duo to attempt to open it. Mossy figures it out first, but Tweed is adamant that they try out all of Tweed’s ideas before even listening to Mossy’s. Hijinks ensue.

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May 05 2023

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

I wrote about Whispers Under Ground that I found the Rivers of London comfort reading, despite the uncanny events, the grisly murders, and the hints about horrible history in British magic. Broken Homes shows that I can still count on a narrator I enjoy spending time with, that there will be adventures and scrapes, and that Aaronovitch will show more of London’s magical side while delighting readers with his obvious love of the city. And while Broken Homes also keeps the promise of major characters surviving, it demonstrates that “not always unscathed” can cover a great deal of scathing. The book also shows Nightingale making some preparations for the eventuality that he will not be around forever to provide sage wisdom — and emergency backup firepower — to the next generation of Metropolitan Police officers who happen to be practicing magicians. Major characters might one day fail to survive.

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

Broken Homes begins quickly, almost busily. A fatal car crash in Sussex turns out to involve one Robert Weil, who is on the Folly’s list of probable unauthorized practitioners of magic associated with the Faceless Man, a villain whose story has been partly told across the first three Rivers of London books. Then there’s a report of a rogue magician. He’d meant to conjure a little bit of light to entertain the kids at a granddaughter’s birthday party, but he got a small fireball instead. Peter and company can’t connect him to any known British practitioners. When Peter asks him where he learned the trick, he answers “From my mother, of course.” (p. 33) Then there’s an odd suicide, committed by someone who was on the Folly’s list of potential magic users, but whom they had not yet gotten around to interviewing. He jumped in front of an oncoming Underground train, but Peter’s contact in the Transport for London police reports that his behavior was different from other suicides. Richard Lewis almost went out of the Tube before suddenly turning around and taking the escalator back down. His placement on the platform was also different from most other suicides. The contact — who worked with Peter in the case detailed in Whispers Under Ground — wonders if there wasn’t something supernatural going on.

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May 02 2023

Thinking Of You (but not like in a weird creepy way): A Comic Collection by Beth Evans

This is a sweet collection of affirmations featuring Beth Evans’ cute blobs telling you that someone is always in your corner, even if they don’t know you and you don’t know them.

Because it’s true, innit? There are millions of people like Ms Evans who genuinely care about the well-being of others. We may not know how to fix your problems, and we may not always approve of your choices, but we believe that you’re strong and worthy. Maybe not of lifting Thor’s hammer, but definitely of starting a new day tomorrow. Every day, every hour, every minute is a fresh opportunity to be your best self, to be kind, to do good, to spread love and joy while maintaining your own boundaries and sense of self-respect.

Which is absolutely what Ms Evans does with this book. Most of the pages are filled with positive messages spoken by cute, emotive blobs. Reminders of your self-worth are interspersed with motivations to do that thing that scares you, even if it’s “just” opening an email with potentially negative news. She urges readers not to wallow in self-doubt or to engage in self-destructive cycles, accompanying her bite-sized pieces of advice with disarmingly adorable illustrations. Interspersed with these pages are slightly longer notes about why she wrote this book that read like letters from a friend.

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May 01 2023

Der blaue Himmel by Galsan Tschinag

For some readers, Galsan Tschinag’s description of hard nomadic life in the Altai mountain region of Mongolia’s furthest western reaches in the 1950s will be enough. Der blaue Himmel — which could reasonably be translated as The Blue Sky or Blue Heaven — is a fictionalized memoir of a few years in a boy’s life, growing up in a family of shepherds in the Altai. As depicted in the book, it is a mostly self-contained, precarious, creaturely existence. Family members spend most of their time with the herds, and even the youngest have responsibilities as soon as they are able to fulfill them. By the time he is five or six, the narrator is looking after the small herd of sheep who cannot travel further afield — too young, too old, too lame, or temporarily incapacitated — to graze with the main flocks.

Der blaue Himmel by Galsan Tschinag

The family is not truly alone; in some seasons they keep their ger (Tschinag uses the word “yurt,” which seems still prevalent in German, while English was already trending toward the Mongolian term “ger” when I was there in 1999) near others from their extended family. The permanent settlement where the narrator will eventually follow his older siblings to school is less than a full day’s ride away. A medical emergency brings remedies from numerous sources, as word spreads among people willing to help. Nevertheless, Tschinag concentrates on a social world bounded by the narrator’s immediate family, most definitely including one dog (the family presumably has numerous dogs; this is so usual that a typical greeting as one approaches a ger is “Hold your dogs!”) that is very special to the narrator.

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Apr 30 2023

Wofür Frauen sich rechtfertigen müssen by Katja Berlin

The title of Katja Berlin’s book translates as Things for Which Women Have to Justify Themselves, and the cover shows a circle divided into four equal parts. They are labeled “Only children,” “Only career,” “Children and career,” and “No children and no career.” She is the creator of a pointedly humorous set of graphs that appear in the respected German weekly newspaper, Die Zeit. The series is named “Torten der Wahrheit,” or “Pie [Charts] of Truth.” The book collects about 160 of the best pie charts and bar charts that have appeared in the newspaper, and anyone who chortled at the chart on the cover will probably like the rest of the book.

Wofür Frauen sich rechtfertigen müssen by Katja Berlin

Some of the charts are applicable to modern life in general, such as the bar chart showing “Criticism of the Police.” A small bar on the left is labeled “From conservatives.” A slightly larger one in the middle is labeled “From left-liberals.” On the right, a bar more than four times taller than the others is labeled “From conservatives or left-liberals when radar catches them speeding.” Or the two-column chart titled “The Market”: on the left is a tall bar labeled “Probability that there is a market solution”; the far smaller bar on the right is “Probability that there is a good market solution.” In the chart “”Digital Sources of Aggression” a little less than 10 percent goes to “Shooter games,” while the rest is attributed to “Windows updates.” Some are gentler. “Autumn Activities” gives about 10 percent to “Reading Books” and the other 90 percent to “Buying Books.” Not that I would know anything about that.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/30/wofur-frauen-sich-rechtfertigen-mussen-by-katja-berlin/

Apr 28 2023

I Did It! and Let’s Go! by Michael Emberley

I was recently sent both of these delightful children’s books (one of them signed by the author, too!) and thought I’d do an appreciation post/review of both in one entry.

I Did It! was written first, and is probably my favorite of the two. Our unisuited protagonist is trying with the help of their friends to do very fun things, including build a block tower, climb a tree and throw a baseball. When their attempts are unsuccessful, frustration ensues. The friends then all come together to fix and ride a bicycle. Will they be able to accomplish their aims this time? More importantly, will they be able to stay positive even in the face of a seeming defeat?

While this is billed as a comic, it really has the feel of a traditional picture book. Tbc, both are great! My middle child read quickly through it with me, and we both deemed it cute and funny. It’s great for beginning readers, with its limited vocabulary and adorable, colorful art providing full context for the characters’ dialog. The book conveys so much with so few words, while modeling extremely useful sentences for children to know and use themselves as they tackle life’s challenges.

I also used this book to successfully help soothe my reluctant reader youngest child Theo out of a tantrum. My husband barred the kids from playing Doors In Real Life because someone always gets hurt and cries — as they did earlier today — which set off a fresh round of tears and protests because Theo wanted a chance to finally win. He was assuaged with some joint deep breathing and stretching in a calm environment, followed by reading this book, which both validated his frustrations and encouraged him to keep trying to manage his emotions.

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Apr 26 2023

Bitches In Bonnets: Life Lessons From Jane Austen’s Mean Girls by Sarah J. Makowski

Okay, I know that no retrospective of Jane Austen’s work is complete without Anne Elliott, but why on earth would she have her own chapter here when she is about as far from a Mean Girl as I can think of in this canon? Elizabeth Elliot, absolutely. Ending on Anne is just a weird thematic choice that I didn’t love.

There was a lot to love otherwise, tho (and at least one other thing I was fairly lukewarm about) in this fun retrospective of all of Ms Austen’s novels, including Lady Susan. Before I continue, I must say that while I’ve read all of Ms Austen’s published works, I am terrible at keeping hold of minutiae. I literally had no recollection of Lucy Steele, despite having read Sense And Sensibility at least twice. The book I probably remember the most about is Emma, and that’s only because I’ve seen the movie Clueless far too many times. My college debate partner even thought I was a total Cher Horowitz, which in fairness is a lot better than being a total Emma Woodhouse!

Emma, ofc, gets her own chapter here, as the queen of Ms Austen’s Mean Girls. Sarah J Makowski does a terrific job of analyzing why Emma is so terrible yet why we’re so ready to root for her, at least up to the point where she finally goes too far. And even then, we’re happy to follow along as she sets out, more or less, to redeem herself. Ms Makowski not only analyzes Emma’s thoughts and motives but sets them — and similarly for the other Mean Girls in this book — alongside sociological texts on female interpersonal relationships, bringing a fresh perspective to the characters’ actions.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/26/bitches-in-bonnets-life-lessons-from-jane-austens-mean-girls-by-sarah-j-makowski/