shanaqui's reviews
1145 reviews

What an Owl Knows, by Jennifer Ackerman, is a fun exploration of owls as a species, how they're adapted for what they do, how they're adapting to changes made by humans, etc. There's a certain amount of "oh wow I touched a bird" personal stuff, and canned biographies of people who've interacted with owls for various reasons, but also plenty of facts and discussion thereof.

I learned some fascinating things, e.g. the fact that some owl species will adopt the owlets of other pairs, if the owlet gets into their nest or somehow interacts with them demanding food -- even if they don't currently have owlets of their own. And the fact that some screech owls grab blind snakes (they're tiny) and use them as nest cleaners, resulting in healthier, quicker-growing owlets.

It also contradicts some other stuff I was reading lately about owls being stupid, pointing out that they have small, densely packed neurons, as some other birds do -- allowing a high degree of intelligence, even if their kind of intelligence isn't as readily measured as that of primates or crows.

Overall, enjoyable and informative, if sometimes a bit padded with filler-statements about the majesticness of owls (you can only take it so often).

I wasn't a big fan of Jonathan Silvertown's Selfish Genes to Social Beings. Ultimately, it's as the subtitle ("A Cooperative History of Life") suggests, rather than focusing on the question of how cooperation arises from "selfish" genes, or trying to dissect the evolution of altruism. It's probably best read keeping that in mind.

Even so, I found it slow, and sometimes strangely organised. It works back through time... more or less. Sometimes it's more like it's working back through scale, finding fresh simulated surprise as smaller and smaller living things turn out to cooperate (a fact which should not be a surprise, since we know our own individual genes must cooperate). Sometimes the examples didn't really contribute to a narrative, and I found the pop-culture references (like references to songs) cringey, like Silvertown was trying to add readability through pasting in some song lyrics.

Whiiiich is the other problem: I couldn't put my finger on why, exactly, but I constantly found my attention wandering before the end of a paragraph -- or sometimes, the end of a sentence. It's not that I can't focus on this kind of thing, because I love reading non-fiction. It's also not that I know it all already (though I did), because I can happily read popular science about my pet subjects even when it contains absolutely nothing new. What's required is usually just enthusiasm and a will to put across one's own point of view.

I did find some of his later chapters more interesting, since his discussion of the RNA World hypothesis went deeper into it than my previous reading, but I still found this a very slow read and, ultimately, not for me. The stuff about kin selection has been discussed ad nauseum in many other books, and I didn't feel that anything particularly fresh was added to the discussion.

Jack Strange's Look Up, Handsome is a cute Christmas romance set in Hay-on-Wye, based around the fact that one of the romantic leads (Quinn) owns Hay's only queer bookshop... which is under threat of eviction, without much chance of being able to set up anew. The other romantic lead is Noah, a romance writer who grew up in Hay, came back for a book-signing at a festival, and got stuck due to snow. 

The two predictably flirt and seem close to forming a relationship, in and around efforts from Quinn and his friend Ivy to save the shop, but then it becomes clear that Noah actually has a partner already, which obviously complicates things greatly. (There's no actual cheating by the letter of the law, so to speak, but it comes very close and the intent is there: if Quinn hadn't put the brakes on, I don't think Noah as written would've done so. So bear that in mind.)

There's also a bunch of other relationships in the book which help make it feel alive: Quinn's friendship with Ivy; Ivy's fling with another character; Quinn's relationship with his mother, step-father and sort-of cousin; Quinn's work for Noah's mother (an Oscar-winning actress hit by scandal), when he becomes her ghostwriter; Quinn's vague knowledge of his assistant in the shop, Daniel Craig (who ends up in a relationship with a guy called James Bond)... and there's Hay itself, written with love and an eye to Welshness (there are some Mari Lwyds!) that was appreciated by this reader. I didn't actually love Hay an enormous amount myself on a brief visit, but this book made me want to go back and give it another shot -- maybe in less miserable weather.

I think there could've been a bit more attention to the villain of the piece, though; he comes across as very one-dimensional, and it makes him feel like a pantomime villain. I think it's realistic that he doesn't come round and change his mind, to be clear, but it felt weird that he had no redeeming qualities in the present. There are some faint hints of supportiveness in the past, but... I think it would've felt more rounded if he'd been a little pained by what he's doing, rather than being a clean-cut out-and-out villain.

Overall, it's basically one of those small-town romances where everyone comes together, there's a clear bad guy, and yes, there's a happy-ever-after in the end. It felt more well-rounded and more grounded in a real location than I expected, though, and ultimately I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's probably somewhere between three stars and four, but I'm rounding up because I enjoyed the Welshness and the fact that it's centered around a queer bookshop. Shout out to places like Portal Bookshop (York) and The Bookish Type (Leeds) for being great places for queer people to get books and community.

If you've already read about conspiracy theories much before, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey's Conspiracy Theory doesn't offer a lot that's new. They try to tackle the history of conspiracy theories, the psychology of why we believe them, and also what can be done about them, which is a big ask in a small space.

The history manages to be reasonable thorough, or that's my impression: I only vaguely knew about the original actual Illuminati, and there were aspects of historical USian conspiracy stuff that I didn't know a lot about. It discusses Kennedy's assassination, of course, but also more recent stuff like Pizzagate: it's definitely modern and relevant, though feels slightly weird that it doesn't address Trump's new presidency and what that might mean for conspiracy theories (which is not the book's fault, to be clear -- it was released only just after the US election).

In a way, that fact makes the book feel defeated right away once we get onto the stuff about what to do about conspiracy theories, to be honest. How can one focus on deplatforming people who spout conspiracy theories when Trump's about to be president again? The chapter on defanging conspiracy theories is also quite short, because I think if that was the problem you want to solve... you wouldn't want to start from here. 

Ultimately, it was interesting but didn't really add much for me. Rob Brotherton's Suspicious Minds (which the authors reference) is better and more in depth.

I was really not a fan of Joseph Jefferson Farjeon's No. 17, alas. I read it via Serial Reader, and that's pretty much the only reason I was able to stick with it, because it came in bitesize chunks, one section a day. The reason for this is... the main character, Ben the Tramp, a former sailor down on his luck who is an absolute total coward whose dialogue is rendered phonetically.

The book would be a quarter of the length if Ben didn't spend every scene making no sense to anyone, trying to run away, interrupting, etc, etc. Even once Fordyce arrives, giving another steady character to drive the story, he spends so much time getting Ben to explain things, arguing with Ben, and being interrupted by Ben, that it takes forever to get anywhere.

Add that to a bit of insta-love as a minor sideplot, and it's just unbearable. I did enjoy some of Farjeon's other work (the books republished by the British Library Crime Classics series), but Ben the Tramp is definitely not for me.

The third volume of Chip Zdarsky's The All-Nighter certainly goes places. Alex's been kidnapped by the Takers, and everyone else is trying to figure out what the new rules are. The found family splinters for a bit, each trying to figure out a way forward, and God shows up.

Yeah, God. Or at least, the God humans tell stories about, in the same way they tell stories about vampires, werewolves, etc. It's a reasonable development from what we know about how stories work in this world, giving birth to monsters and heroes, but I'm going to guess it'll make some readers profoundly uncomfortable. However, it doesn't preclude God really existing, if you read carefully. The "God" we meet as a character is a made creature, but that doesn't mean there's no real God in the world of The All-Nighter. It's pretty wild to speculate about, but Zdarsky didn't go there.

Anyway! It goes kind of predictably from there, because of course Lucifer shows up, amongst other developments like the found family all saving each other (though not without loss). 

The idea behind this series isn't super original (stuff like American Gods leaps to mind, but also -- though not set in our world -- Michael Scott's Paedur the Bard books, and quite a few others that I'm just not retrieving from memory in this second), but it's a fun enough exploration of it, which maybe nudges the idea in a slightly different direction by having superheroes a la Marvel also be part of the mythology that comes to life.

"Season Two" of Chip Zdarsky's The All-Nighter picks up not long after the first volume, with everyone trying to reckon with the disappearance of Ian at the end of the volume. We see a bit more of the "found family" aspect in this volume, even if it fragments a bit toward the end, and we also see a bit more development of Cynthia as a character.

And of course, come the end of the book there are some preeeetty big consequences for Alex's actions, and everyone's thrown into even worse turmoil. 

I haven't said much about the art so far. It doesn't bowl me over but it works, characters and events are pretty clear and easy to follow.

Overall, the middle volume is okay, and the ending sets things up for an explosive finale.

I read all three volumes of Chip Zdarsky's The All-Nighter in pretty short order, so apologies if I get the events of each book a little overlapped! The basic premise of the series is that stories have the power to create the creatures they discuss -- Dracula came into being for real thanks to Bram Stoker, Frankenstein's monster due to Mary Shelley, etc. They remember their fictional pasts, but they've also lived on since then. And there are, of course, rules. They must not reveal themselves, or The Takers come.

So there's a bunch of vampires running a diner, appearing only at night, and trying to fake that they're just humans to avoid a run-in with The Takers. This isn't always a very satisfying life, though, and one of them (Alex) ends up giving into his urge to show off his strength and power by playing the hero and rescuing someone. It turns out to be a loophole: he can pretend to be a superhero, instead, a vigilante hero who works at night, Batman-style...

And obviously things go wrong. There's a found-family situation at the diner and of course they get dragged into it, though most of them (other than Joy) aren't fleshed out much in this first volume, which makes it a bit more difficult to care about that.

In the end, they all come together to solve the mess Alex has caused as all kinds of creatures come out of the wordwork using the same loophole of superheroes and supervillains... but obviously the genie can't be put back in the bottle.

Anna Kopp and Gabrielle Kari's The Marble Queen has some lovely art and character design (though it didn't always look consistently great -- there are some panels that really lack polish).

Story-wise, the pace is a bit meh, since we're meant to believe that Amelia and Salira are in love really quickly, enough to overrule Salira's love for the woman she meant to marry instead. (This is kind of "handled" in that Salira says that she no longer loves that woman because of the circumstances, but it comes across as pretty thin.)

It's a fun concept: Amelia is the princess of a kingdom practically besieged by pirates, married off in order to cement an alliance. To her surprise, she's married to Queen Salira... and unable to ever leave the country again because of magical reasons. She accepts all this remarkably quickly, manages to notice plots that Salira was completely oblivious to, etc, etc, saves the day, etc, etc, happy ending.

It all just goes too fast, probably not helped by the format (it's harder to do lots of quiet pining scenes in a graphic novel). Even when something goes wrong and Amelia is imprisoned, it's literally just for a night and suddenly everything is fine again in the morning.

There are upsides -- Salira and Amelia are adorable. There's also some discussion of Amelia's anxiety, which is represented throughout the story by briars grabbing hold of her, and a little bit of Salira's. Ultimately, though, the book just doesn't linger with any of its themes, and the more I think about it, the more it crumbles.

Elizabeth Anthony's Dramatic Murder has the subtitle "A Lost Christmas Mystery" in the British Library Crime Classics series. And it's technically true: it is set at Christmas, opening as Dr Harley and Katherine arrive at the Scottish home of a playwright, Dimpson McCabe -- and find him dead, electrocuted while working on the lights for an enormous Christmas Tree. 

The descriptions of his home and the tree are atmospheric but... somehow none of it screams Christmas. It's basically the fact that there's a tree and a brief mention of giving out presents from the deceased afterwards that reminds you -- barely -- that it opened at Christmas. The story doesn't really revolve around it at all, except that the lights provided a method for murder.

So not a super seasonal read, but I found it a fun mystery. After a certain point it becomes blindingly obvious who the murderer is, though it takes a bit longer for the motive to be spelled out as clearly. It's still very tense, though, because you don't know quite who might be in the firing line next.

The police character, Smith, is a fairly background one, but not exactly cast in the usual mystery mould somehow. He seems so mild. The main "detective" is Katherine, I suppose, but really we get to see the mystery unfold from the point of view of the whole cast of suspects, which adds to the tension as they all seem to feel a sense of foreboding and danger.

Overall, I think I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's kind of hard to say because for a while, as I was reading it, it felt a bit fragmented. But at the end, looking back on it, it came together well, and there's certainly some very fine writing.