A Jungle of Tales

  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 hypo...

  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 contribution...

  This book shouldn’t work. There are just SO many concepts packed in that it should by all rights be completely incomprehensible: Demigods that can feed off pain or love, a drug and a virus that wake up those latent god powers in supposedly-normal humans, AIs deciding whether to rebel against humanity, issues of identity, messed up parent-child relationships…there’s genetically engineered griffons, FFS. But somehow (even though no individual thread gets resolved like it would if it got more sole attention) it all comes together to create an exciting page-turner of a book.    Two key elements that make it work are the humor and the characters. Despite some really dark bits, most chapters had at least a line or two that made me chuckle. For instance: "'Councilman Stoker...takes personal responsibility for all the injustices that go on in the Eastern Cape. That's why he'll make an excellent premier one day, and I'll make sure he won't forget ...