Wednesday Reading

So, yeah I haven't done this for several weeks. Let's see how much I can get through here... .

Finished The Undoing Project. In the end, it was a biography of a collaboration, and the ending was rather sad: as one half of the partnership (Amos Tversky) became more famous and was offered more opportunities, the other half (Daniel Kahneman) realized that his collaborator was to some extent stifling him, not because Tversky didn't want Kahneman to have success, but because he wanted his partner to always be there when he himself needed a sounding board. In the end, Tversky received a MacArthur Genius Grant and other honors, then died too young of cancer. Kahneman went on to win the Nobel in Economics, which he could not share with his former collaborator because the Nobel is only awarded to the living. The subject matter (basically, what goes into human decision-making) interested me enough that I have bought (on deep markdown) a book by one of their more casual collaborators, Richard Thaler, and have added Kahneman's award-winning popular book Thinking, Fast and Slow to my wishlist.

For something completely different, I turned to Jackalope Wives, a collection of shorter fiction by Ursula Vernon. The works include not only the award-winning title story, which I had not read, but The Tomato Thief, which I had, and which won the Hugo in August for best novelette. Vernon is a great writer with a natural yet elegant voice and a wicked sense of humor, and I enjoyed the book.

I then read Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Gypsy Game, a sequel to her The Egypt Game. Egypt was important to my childhood, but as an adult, I'm much more conscious of concepts such as cultural appropriation. For this reason, I had put off reading this sequel. Actually, Snyder does take a shot at dispelling some of the more harmful myths about the Rom, and I'm not sad I read the book. I may not ever re-read it, though: it was kind of slight.

Next up was Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch, which was available as a Kindle deal a few weeks ago. The deal did its work as a loss leader, because at the end, I discovered that a sequel, Akata Warrior, had just come out, and I bought it at the full price. Books are my kryptonite. The two volumes concern the adventures and growth of a young "akata" girl, Sunny, who is an albino and gets almost as much grief from her Nigerian classmates because of that as she does for being born and partially raised in the United States ("akata" means an African American and is not a flattering term). Sunny discovers that she is a "Leopard person," which is one who can use magic. She becomes part of a small team with a shared destiny involving the destruction of a great evil. The books make an interesting compare-and-contrast to the Harry Potter series, and the Nigerian setting was completely new to me. I enjoyed both books.

Currently, I'm reading The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman. It's reminding me of Martha Wells' Ile Rien books in setting and tone, although Cogman doesn't seem to have as much of a sense of humor as Wells does. There are several sequels, so I am hoping I end up liking this one.