Consider Phlebas

Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks, 1987, the first book of the Culture series. I kind of think of my reading as breaking down into four-ish categories: trying to stay on top of the wave, stuff trailing right behind the wave that I didn't quite get to in time, older stuff that comes up in conversation that I'd like to be familiar with, and obscure older stuff that nobody's likely to refer to, I would just enjoy it if I read it. (Oh, or five, reading along with my kids.) This was definitely type three - it had seemed for awhile like the Culture novels were the one SF series that came up most frequently that I'd never read any of - and a gap in other things to read seemed like the right time to finally tackle it. And now I have. And what the fuck did I just read.

Spoiler cut for the rest of this. ( Read more... )

going up, going down

Two good picture books we've read recently (I plan to stop reading picture books to the 7yo when he asks me to, and even then I might still read picture books myself sometimes, picture books are awesome.)

Mission To Space by John Herrington is a very basic nonfiction about Herrington's experience as a real-live astronaut, illustrated with photographs, with the neat twist that Herrington is Chickasaw, so while he's in the Shuttle his nation is presenting a blanket to NASA and dancing and celebrating, and when he gets to the ISS he mentions that he brought his eagle feather to space, and, look, I am always here for space, I would have been into this just for a dude doing a spacewalk, but I always get extra-emotional about people bringing their personal signifiers with them and, like, bringing their culture or their narrative into the empty space of space? And then the best part was a glossary at the end of how the Chickasaw Language Committee created the vocabulary to talk about space exploration in Chickasaw, such that an astronaut is literally an "above walker", blasting off is "exploding it goes", gravity is "holds it at the ground", outer space is "way up there", the Shuttle is a "flying canoe", the ISS is "the place in outer space where they live", and a rocket is an "exploding arrow". I just think the whole project of "how do we describe this novel situation with the words we have without just using loan words" is neat. Not that I ever got more than a paragraph or two into Uncleftish Beholding despite an actual love of chemistry, but, like, my favorite word in Spanish was always "ovni", un objeto volante non identificado, a UFO. (I liked that it was also an acronym, like, Spanish wouldn't necessarily have to use the same approach to coming up with this word, but they did.) Anyways, Q was surprisingly engaged with reading through this glossary and sounding out the pronunciations of the Chickasaw words, and I appreciate books in which Native American people are still here and doing things as opposed to only showing up In History.

Otis and Will Discover the Deep, Barb Rosenstock and Katherine Roy, is beautifully illustrated nonfiction about the 1930 first dive of the Bathysphere deep-sea submersible. I thought this did a good job of balancing the risk and scariness of this with the wonder of the deep ocean - there's a great double-fold-out at the climactic deepest point teeming with fish and squids and krill. Q tried to close the book when he saw the author's note but he let me read him a few more facts about how deep the Bathysphere eventually went and how deep the Trieste went later, and he thought it was interesting how the illustrator had people pose for reference photos looking through, like, the circular window in a play tent to stand in for a porthole.