{"id":3976,"date":"2018-05-11T01:45:07","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T01:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=3976"},"modified":"2018-05-17T02:57:55","modified_gmt":"2018-05-17T02:57:55","slug":"recent-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/11\/recent-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just finished rereading Peter Watts&#8217; <i>Blindsight<\/i> and <i>Echopraxia<\/i>. They&#8217;re both terrific, and I recommend them unreservedly to anyone who&#8217;s into wildly imaginative hard sci fi. The only downside is that now I&#8217;ll need to spend the next couple of months reading just the most interesting 10% of his citations&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Other good recent reads that I remember right offhand:<\/p>\n<p>John Kessel, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/30753686-the-moon-and-the-other\"><i>The Moon and the Other<\/i><\/a> &#8212; interesting look at gender through the lens of a future matriarchy.<\/p>\n<p><i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/28116739-other-minds?from_search=true\">Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n<p><i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/1544217.Genesis?from_search=true\">Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life&#8217;s Origin<\/a><\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/1544217.Genesis?from_search=true\"> <\/a>&#8212; good overview of the extant theories for how life on Earth got started. I also read parts of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/16691583-life-s-ratchet?from_search=true\"><i>Life&#8217;s Ratchet<\/i><\/a>, on the same topic, but I didn&#8217;t think it was nearly as good.<\/p>\n<p>Ellen Ullman, <i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/31450584-life-in-code?from_search=true\">Life in Code<\/a><\/i>, which had some really good bits, but overall was a bit weak, I thought. Or at least I didn&#8217;t enjoy it nearly as much as her novel <i>The Bug<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>And some rereads&#8230; Kate Atkinson&#8217;s <i>Life After Life<\/i>, Greg Egan&#8217;s <i>Diaspora<\/i>, <i>The Graveyard Book<\/i>, a bunch of nonfiction&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just finished rereading Peter Watts&#8217; Blindsight and Echopraxia. They&#8217;re both terrific, and I recommend them unreservedly to anyone who&#8217;s into wildly imaginative hard sci fi. The only downside is that now I&#8217;ll need to spend the next couple of months reading just the most interesting 10% of his citations&#8230; Other good recent reads that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Recent Books","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-3976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-128","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3976"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3996,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3976\/revisions\/3996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}