How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, Mike Brown (365 Books, Day 150)

A reminder: still doing reviews out of order, still somewhat behind, still reading a book every day. I hope to be caught up tomorrow or the day after.

I had been tangentially aware of the astronomer Mike Brown, and that he discovers objects in the Kuiper Belt, because of sovay winning the contest he held to name the moon of the dwarf planet Orcus; she named it Vanth.

I also vaguely remember the press surrounding the time when there were briefly maybe ten planets, and then maybe nine, and then Pluto was demoted and we wound up with eight. I had not remembered that that was sparked by Mike Brown's discovery of a larger object than Pluto beyond Pluto's orbit-- the not-actually-tenth planet.

Now he's written this fascinating, charming, and funny memoir about that period, and I can't recommend it too highly. This book really has everything; it's a neat portrait of how a working astronomer goes about things (the ins and outs of telescopes, telescope time, travel to odd bits of the world to use telescopes, computer programming, a lot of staring at sky photos), but also covers interactions with the press, his marriage and the birth of his daughter (which, surprisingly for this sort of memoir, are covered in a way which weaves neatly in and out of the astronomy and adds to it rather than detracting), and a truly amazing incident involving some Spanish astronomers, an internet chat group, and data theft, which I will not attempt to describe. His explanations of the issues surrounding the definition of the word 'planet' are clear and well-argued, as are his summaries of the ways things could have gone and the way they did go.

And throughout it all, he comes across as a good man and a good scientist, a person who is doing what he loves, and loves what he is doing, and who has the kind of infectious delight in his work that must make him an interesting professor.

This book is so lovely that I forgive, although I could not help but notice, a minor error early on in his description of the Norse mythology behind the names of the days of the week. Thor is not, and never has been, the king of the gods.

Apart from that, this is one of the best things I've read in a very long time, and I profoundly hope he writes more books; this is the sort of writing on science that will be a treasure for many years to come, and is definitely the thing you want to hand people when they ask why we used to have nine planets and nowadays have eight.

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, Mike Brown (365 Books, Day 150)

A reminder: still doing reviews out of order, still somewhat behind, still reading a book every day. I hope to be caught up tomorrow or the day after.

I had been tangentially aware of the astronomer Mike Brown, and that he discovers objects in the Kuiper Belt, because of sovay winning the contest he held to name the moon of the dwarf planet Orcus; she named it Vanth.

I also vaguely remember the press surrounding the time when there were briefly maybe ten planets, and then maybe nine, and then Pluto was demoted and we wound up with eight. I had not remembered that that was sparked by Mike Brown's discovery of a larger object than Pluto beyond Pluto's orbit-- the not-actually-tenth planet.

Now he's written this fascinating, charming, and funny memoir about that period, and I can't recommend it too highly. This book really has everything; it's a neat portrait of how a working astronomer goes about things (the ins and outs of telescopes, telescope time, travel to odd bits of the world to use telescopes, computer programming, a lot of staring at sky photos), but also covers interactions with the press, his marriage and the birth of his daughter (which, surprisingly for this sort of memoir, are covered in a way which weaves neatly in and out of the astronomy and adds to it rather than detracting), and a truly amazing incident involving some Spanish astronomers, an internet chat group, and data theft, which I will not attempt to describe. His explanations of the issues surrounding the definition of the word 'planet' are clear and well-argued, as are his summaries of the ways things could have gone and the way they did go.

And throughout it all, he comes across as a good man and a good scientist, a person who is doing what he loves, and loves what he is doing, and who has the kind of infectious delight in his work that must make him an interesting professor.

This book is so lovely that I forgive, although I could not help but notice, a minor error early on in his description of the Norse mythology behind the names of the days of the week. Thor is not, and never has been, the king of the gods.

Apart from that, this is one of the best things I've read in a very long time, and I profoundly hope he writes more books; this is the sort of writing on science that will be a treasure for many years to come, and is definitely the thing you want to hand people when they ask why we used to have nine planets and nowadays have eight.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Summers at Castle Auburn, Sharon Shinn (365 Books, Day 155)

Still jumping around, but this was yesterday's. I have three more reviews in backlog, plus today, so I think one more tonight and then three tomorrow and two the day after that. It will be good being caught up again; I hate being too ill to write, though I suppose I'm lucky it's only happening now when I've been sick since last October.

Anyway. This is one of those books I don't quite want to call a domestic fantasy because it's not quite on a domestic scale; it focuses entirely on one household, but everyone in the household is nobility or royalty and so their actions resonate out into a larger sphere, although we never really see the greater world. There ought to be a name for this sort of thing, a private drama lent weight by the public aspects of all its players. Mind you, I tend to feel with this kind of book, as I do here, that we don't see enough of the larger world to really make me believe in its existence, and so it plays as a domestic fantasy with the ranks and titles mostly determining the specifics of the code of manners everyone has to follow.

The protagonist, Corie, is a bastard daughter of an important family, and so she spends the summers at the castle and winters with her commoner grandmother studying to be a witch. This gives her a certain detachment from the aforementioned code of manners. Also there are elves, although they're called something else, and the humans have been enslaving them for a while. It is, as one would expect from Sharon Shinn in this mode, a romance in which the good end happily, the bad unhappily, and the heroine gets to set things right in a fairly non-dramatic sort of way.

I don't know how to tell you whether the book is any good, because I don't read this sort of book, and in fact I don't read Sharon Shinn, with any thought as to whether the books are actually good. This is the sort of book I read on airplanes, when I cannot have something too engrossing because I will have to catch a connecting flight and I cannot have something too dull or I will start to notice that I have no legroom. It works very well for that. I think this is better than her recent kind-of-similar YA series, because the world-building is marginally less bog-standard, but I would not go so far as to call it original. If you like this kind of book you could do much worse and probably not much better. My major problem with it was that I got up at six and I got to the airport and opened the book at eight and I was done reading it before ten a.m. and the plane hadn't taken off yet. I assume this is not a generalizable problem, so consider the book provisionally recommended.

Summers at Castle Auburn, Sharon Shinn (365 Books, Day 155)

Still jumping around, but this was yesterday's. I have three more reviews in backlog, plus today, so I think one more tonight and then three tomorrow and two the day after that. It will be good being caught up again; I hate being too ill to write, though I suppose I'm lucky it's only happening now when I've been sick since last October.

Anyway. This is one of those books I don't quite want to call a domestic fantasy because it's not quite on a domestic scale; it focuses entirely on one household, but everyone in the household is nobility or royalty and so their actions resonate out into a larger sphere, although we never really see the greater world. There ought to be a name for this sort of thing, a private drama lent weight by the public aspects of all its players. Mind you, I tend to feel with this kind of book, as I do here, that we don't see enough of the larger world to really make me believe in its existence, and so it plays as a domestic fantasy with the ranks and titles mostly determining the specifics of the code of manners everyone has to follow.

The protagonist, Corie, is a bastard daughter of an important family, and so she spends the summers at the castle and winters with her commoner grandmother studying to be a witch. This gives her a certain detachment from the aforementioned code of manners. Also there are elves, although they're called something else, and the humans have been enslaving them for a while. It is, as one would expect from Sharon Shinn in this mode, a romance in which the good end happily, the bad unhappily, and the heroine gets to set things right in a fairly non-dramatic sort of way.

I don't know how to tell you whether the book is any good, because I don't read this sort of book, and in fact I don't read Sharon Shinn, with any thought as to whether the books are actually good. This is the sort of book I read on airplanes, when I cannot have something too engrossing because I will have to catch a connecting flight and I cannot have something too dull or I will start to notice that I have no legroom. It works very well for that. I think this is better than her recent kind-of-similar YA series, because the world-building is marginally less bog-standard, but I would not go so far as to call it original. If you like this kind of book you could do much worse and probably not much better. My major problem with it was that I got up at six and I got to the airport and opened the book at eight and I was done reading it before ten a.m. and the plane hadn't taken off yet. I assume this is not a generalizable problem, so consider the book provisionally recommended.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

The Birthday Ball, Lois Lowry (365 Books, Day 154)

So after having reread all the Anastasia books, it occurred to me to wonder what Lois Lowry has been doing recently. I know she went through a phase of serious-and-relevant (and mostly pretty good) YA-- The Giver, Gathering Blue, etc.-- but that was a few years ago and I hadn't been paying attention since.

There was a new one in the children's section at the bookstore, so I sat down with it.

The Birthday Ball has illustrations by Jules Feiffer, and that is absolutely the last good thing I have to say about it, and I hope to God she gets over this and returns to her senses.

This is a self-conscious fairytale, the sort of thing whose genre model is Thurber's The 13 Clocks or, more closely, A.A. Milne's Once on a Time. Only it's terrible. There's the princess, and her family's ridiculous number of names, and the awful suitors she is trying to avoid, and the young schoolmaster she is obviously going to marry after the requisite rounds of mistaken identity etc. etc., but the thing is, Lowry clearly delineates a world in which every single member of the aristocracy is repulsive, autocratic, dictatorial, and stark raving bonkers but forgets to make the princess the exception. This is a book in which if I could have entered the text I would have started scattering copies of either The Communist Manifesto or The Fountainhead around indiscriminately because any system of government is better than being ruled by people who are, in a couple of cases literally, walking fart jokes. And everyone who isn't an aristocrat is afflicted with a curious case of not yet having started a violent revolution. I would think that this is a case of Lowry having some kind of meta joke on this genre but the text is not coherent enough to be that self-aware.

In short: every single character totally unlikeable, society completely repellent, jokes unfunny, morals clankingly obvious, plot silly, wordplay unplayful, what the fuck happened to the writer who wrote A Summer to Die?

Gah.

The Birthday Ball, Lois Lowry (365 Books, Day 154)

So after having reread all the Anastasia books, it occurred to me to wonder what Lois Lowry has been doing recently. I know she went through a phase of serious-and-relevant (and mostly pretty good) YA-- The Giver, Gathering Blue, etc.-- but that was a few years ago and I hadn't been paying attention since.

There was a new one in the children's section at the bookstore, so I sat down with it.

The Birthday Ball has illustrations by Jules Feiffer, and that is absolutely the last good thing I have to say about it, and I hope to God she gets over this and returns to her senses.

This is a self-conscious fairytale, the sort of thing whose genre model is Thurber's The 13 Clocks or, more closely, A.A. Milne's Once on a Time. Only it's terrible. There's the princess, and her family's ridiculous number of names, and the awful suitors she is trying to avoid, and the young schoolmaster she is obviously going to marry after the requisite rounds of mistaken identity etc. etc., but the thing is, Lowry clearly delineates a world in which every single member of the aristocracy is repulsive, autocratic, dictatorial, and stark raving bonkers but forgets to make the princess the exception. This is a book in which if I could have entered the text I would have started scattering copies of either The Communist Manifesto or The Fountainhead around indiscriminately because any system of government is better than being ruled by people who are, in a couple of cases literally, walking fart jokes. And everyone who isn't an aristocrat is afflicted with a curious case of not yet having started a violent revolution. I would think that this is a case of Lowry having some kind of meta joke on this genre but the text is not coherent enough to be that self-aware.

In short: every single character totally unlikeable, society completely repellent, jokes unfunny, morals clankingly obvious, plot silly, wordplay unplayful, what the fuck happened to the writer who wrote A Summer to Die?

Gah.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.