A Jungle of Tales

    In this story, two "gentlemen of the road" 1 travel through 10th century central Asia. The pale, skinny, morose Zelikman and Amram, an African ex-soldier with a Viking axe and a Zen attitude, are an oddly matched pair with a delightful dynamic. In the course of one of their cons, they get saddled with a Khazar prince whose family has been deposed. The prince, Filaq, is not at all pleased with the setup and keeps trying to run away, drawing them into a series of adventures and shenanigans.     There are lots of amusing and delightful details in this book, from the chapter headings (eg. "On the observance of the fourth commandment among horse thieves"), to the unexpected prominence of elephants, to the little nods to well-known history or culture, to the use of the not-so-well-known lost Khazar kingdom as a setting. Almost all the named characters are Jewish 3 , illustrating the diversity of cultures that can fall under that general heading.

This book focuses on scientists' quest to categorize bacteria and understand their evolution, the discovery of horizontal gene transfer, and what it means for evolution and our understanding of ourselves. As a quick summary:      Bacteria were always hard to fit into traditional taxonomy of organisms because A) they are very small with fewer distinguishing features to help sort them, and B) they don't reproduce sexually, so the biological species concept - the dominant species concept used for animals that says a species is a group organisms that interbreed with each other but not members of other groups - doesn't work for them at all. As DNA sequencing became a thing, scientists began to realize several things. First, there were two very distinct types of "bacteria" or, rather, some of the things we had lumped in with bacteria were different from the others in their DNA and lifestyle. These organisms are now known as archaea, and they may ev

OK, so everyone knows this trilogy, but if I'm going to do reviews of books I've read more than once I had to start here, because I read LOTR every year between ages 9 and 18 or so, and have read it several more times since. What I love about it: 1. Tolkien's world-building is justly famous. Every place in Middle Earth has a history and a language and a culture and, to a certain extent, an ecology. It feels like a real place, and every time I read it I wish I could visit Lothlorien (the elf city built up on platforms in the stately golden-leaved mallorn trees), or the mysterious depths of Fangorn forest, or the cozy hobbit holes of the shire + . 2. This is a classic epic adventure, but the people the story truly turns on - the hobbits - are everyman characters. They aren't magic users or big strapping warriors, or in any way the classic hero archetype. They are literally the little people of this world, but

            This is one of the most distinctive "post-apocalypse" stories I have ever read. Set in Thailand, the apocalypse in question is a combination of climate change and genetic-engineering-run-amok. However, while it is not exactly a happy story, it does not fall into the same grim-dark aesthetic as many post-apocalypse tales, which is refreshing. Instead it is infused with a sense of tropical sunlight and fecundity - of "life finding a way", even when humans don't like the manner in which that happens !             Future Bangkok is even hotter than it is now, and the only thing that keeps the city from flooding due to rising sea levels is seawalls and energy-intensive pumps. But most other uses of fossil fuels are banned, and things run largely on human energy and springs that are wound up by genetically-modified elephant beasts 1 . "Calorie companies" have semi-accidentally ended u