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Best and worst reads of 2023

    Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted here! Things have been busy, and I haven’t had the energy for doing longer discussions here AND Goodreads posts. But an end-of-the-year wrap-up seems like a good one for a long-format location.   This was a pretty successful reading year for me, with most things I picked up being at least OK and quite a few new favorites! The standout highs and lows:   Best of the year (mostly 5-star books)   “This feels like it was written for me” SFF One Piece ( Omnibus 1 - Omnibus 16 ) – The new obsession I’ve been telling everyone about, because it has everything l like: Adventure, magic, found family, exploration of serious real-world-relevant themes but also tons of humor, anti-authority/military vibes (I mean, duh, it’s about pirates…but it doesn’t just coast on that!), well-written characters, a surprising amount of queerness, etc. (Rep: Japanese author; characters of varying ethnicities, queer rep that’s a bit up
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First impressions review: Little Mushroom, by Shisi

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  This two-volume story (‘Judgement Day’ and ‘Revelations’) is a really fun (and completely bonkers) blend of gritty sci-fi apocalypse and slow-burn enemies-to-lovers queer romance. This review will - unusually for me - contain no comment on the scientific accuracy of the scenario because…well, because the protagonist is a humanoid mushroom, for god’s sake!   The tale takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where the mysterious disappearance of earth’s magnetic field has led to an environmental crisis. Faced with a variety of dangerous mutated monsters, human civilization has shrunk and is now confined to two bases. But that’s not where the story starts. It starts in a cave, where a semi-sentient fungus had attempted to rescue a wounded human named An Ze. In absorbing his blood, the mushroom takes on his appearance and some of his memories. With the dying man’s blessing, he adopts his identity (with the name variant An Zhe) and makes his way to the Northern Base.
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First impressions review: Gathering Moss, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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  This little book took me longer to read than I would have expected – but that’s not a bad thing! As befits its subject matter, it was mostly quite calming to read, and I enjoyed sampling it a bit at a time.   If you pick this up, expect something more in the vein of John Muir rhapsodizing about sequoia groves than a field guide to mosses; if that’s what you are looking for, there is a helpful list of suggestions at the back. You will learn a lot about moss, mind you! It is just presented in a very personal/artistic way. As a botanist myself – but one who works with woody plants - I picked up some new facts and, for many of those I already knew, got to enjoy her immersive style of explanation.   For instance, I hadn’t particularly pondered whether animals like chipmunks or slugs might aid in moss dispersal before, so that bit was a delight. I also intend to look up her thesis work with moss as an illustration of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. More a
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Re-read review: Bully for Brontosaurus, by Stephen Jay Gould

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  It’s been a while since I’ve revisited Stephen Jay Gould’s natural history essays, which were one of my big inspirations when I was a kid when it came to thinking of biology as a career. I’m always pleased to find how well they hold up! Not always in terms of the state-of-the-science – it would be weird if there HADN’T been updates in the last 30-40 years! – but in terms of Gould’s wit and his ability to make his readers think about an issue more expansively and from new angles. I found myself pausing to consider if I needed to re-think how I teach certain evolutionary concepts in my own college courses, especially when I got to essay 10, which talks about the way stuff gets copied from one textbook to the next without anyone questioning why it is there!   Gould’s thoughts on biology and society also hold up better than many. One of my other science heroes when I was young was E.O. Wilson – who certainly made multiple key contributions to ecol
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