After reading and enjoying Hager’s Demon Under the Microscope, I was curious about his other work. The Alchemy of Air is about how we made the earth sustain more than 4 billion people by taking nitrogen out of the air and turning it into fertilizer. At the turn of the 20th century, mass starvation was a real threat–the earth simply couldn’t yield enough food to keep up with the growing human population. So chemists are tasked with solving this very, very big problem. Two chemists in particular, […]
A space game that’s not Ender’s.
This is one of those books that has just kind of stuck with me. The story arc is straightforward and not super exciting on the surface: man who is good at playing games plays a really hard game. The writing wasn’t bombastic; I wasn’t marveling at all the well-turned phrases. I didn’t particularly care for the main character until about halfway through, and the only other characters I sort of cared about were the droids. But…it has taken me about three weeks to sit down and […]
Gotta dance!
I was immediately intrigued by Melina’s review of The Girls at the Kingfisher Club. It looked like the kind of story that hit all my soft spots: Manhattan, fairy tales, Jazz Age, and, perhaps most importantly, ladies who shut down the dance floor. I cannot help myself with the dance stories. I love them all, from the cheesiest Step It Up #39 or whatever to the most discretely dramatic conversation during an Austen Regency dance, I will drink them all up. And I wasn’t disappointed! This is a […]
That’s What Friends are For
This is my second Senegalese novel (the first was the amusing Xala, last year) and so far one of my favorite African novels of the 13 or so I’ve read. So Long a Letter is the story of two Senegalese women, friends living in post-colonial Dakar, written in the form of a long letter from Ramatoulaye to Aissatou. Ramatoulaye is grieving the recent death of her husband Modou. We gradually learn that Modou was no saint, however, and that Aissatou also is without her husband, Mawdo Ba–because she divorced […]