elfbiter

Ian McDonald - Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone

(This is repost from LJ)

( His palms bring madness )

Greg Bear - Queen of Angels

(This is repost from LJ)

The year 2047 is coming. Nanotechnology is commonplace and forensic investigators can examine the crime scene molecule by molecule. Recycled organic waste has replaced oil.
( Nanotech in four storylines )

Bernd Heinrich - Winter World

(This is repost from LJ. This was the first BookCrossing book I received, from the NYC. Reading it in the middle of the local heat wave felt somewhat paradoxical…)

Bernd Heinrich is an US biologist I had only heard about before I received this book. In this particular book he writes about various wintering habits of various animals, partially based of his own experiences in New England and Vermont. Heinrich uses mostly the metric system but does present a conversion table. He has illustrated the book himself.

It may sound Heinrich is somewhat callous when he honestly tells about some of the research methods (in addition to saying that the sample birds were "collected" he also states that they were in fact shot.) However, personally I might have picked the injured turtle down, not driven over it and decapitated it…

Some animals resist freezing when others promote it, both in order to stay alive over winter. Some of these include changes in the animal metabolism like squirrels having supercooled blood and still preventing brain death; turtles buffering their blood with potassium and calcium ions to reduce the lactic acid; muskrats carrying more oxygen in their blood; frogs have glucose that restrict ice-crystal formation outside the membrane cells; and so on.

Clinical interest may outweigh intellectual curiosity if some people effectively want to turn into bears to maintain their muscle tone in passivity, like the bears do during their hibernation (effectively recycling waste products to keep their muscles healthy.) I bet pro-cryogenic transhumanists would read that with glee.

Book is also full other details of animal life, including kinglets who incubate their eggs by warming their feet, squirrels reusing bird nests, packs of hibernating turtles under the ice and multispecies bird flocks.

In addition to quoting others in his field, Heinrich also has his own theories, including speculation that that feather's originate as insulation against cold and wetting before becoming flying aids. However, I disagree with Heinrich's assertion that there are no theistic entomologists.

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Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

Cal(liope) Stephanides is a intersexual (to be exact, a pseudohermaprodite male with mixed genitalia) whose Greek-born parents raised as a girl. And that's about it.

( ”Misleading )

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Simon Ings - City of the Iron Fish
(This is a repost from LJ)
( Is there only the city and nothing else? )

Richard Wiseman - Luck Factor

( Actually noticing the gorilla still would not make me rich )

Samuel Hynes - The Soldiers' Tale

This is a book about war narratives - not war as such. Even if Hynes wrote one himself.

( Did he study too few narratives? )

Ben Shephard - A War of Nerves

Warfare causes more than just physical wounds – but the mental side of the toll of war was really not studied for centuries (mainly because common soldiers were expendable anyway). So the study really started only around the World War One. Ben Shephard traces some of those developments, mostly based of Western European and US records.
( From shell shock to PTSD )

Pat Cadigan - Mindplayers

(This is repost from LJ, And this is just one of the first written by Queen of Cyberpunk)

Alexandra "Deadpan Allie" Haas, this world's equivalent to a drug junkie, is caught red-brained using an unlicensed psychosis and the Brain Police gives her a choice - train yourself to become a shrink or go to jail. So she goes to J. Walter Tech to become a professional.
( Cyberspace the psychiatrists' way )

Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind

(This is a repost from LJ. The following books of Ruiz Zafon have not been as good as this one).

Everything begins in Barcelona in 1945 when the scars of the Spanish Civil War are still evident. Old bookstore owner takes his 10-year-old son Daniel to the Cemetery of the Forgotten Books. Daniel selects a novel The Shadow of the Wind by an unknown author Julian Carax. And thus begins the tale of tragedy, deception and passions.

( Mystery of the unsuccessful author )