Bragan Reads Stuff in 2024, Pt. 2

All right, here I am with new thread for a new quarter, and hopefully lots of interesting new reading!

As usual, I don't have a whole lot to add to that, but here's a recap of the year so far:

January

1. 13: The Story of the World's Most Notorious Superstition by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
2. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
3. Monty Python's Big Red Book
4. The Letter of Marque by Patrick O'Brian
5. Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
6. Adventure Time, Vol 5 by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, & Braden Lamb
7. Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
8. Images of America: White Sands National Monument by Joseph T. Page II

February

9. I Am the Master: Legends of the Renegade Time Lord by Peter Anghelides, Mark Wright, Jacqueline Rayner, Mike Tucker, Beverly Sanford and Matthew Sweet
10. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
11. Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
12. The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss
13. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
14. Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger

March

15. If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe by Jason Pargin (aka David Wong)
16. Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
17. The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas
18. Adventure Time Vol. 6 by Ryan North
19. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
20. Toilets, Toasters & Telephones: The How and Why of Everyday Objects by Susan Goldman Rubin
21. Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips
22. The Colors of All the Cattle by Alexander McCall Smith
23. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: The Making of the Classic Film by John Tenuto and Maria Jose Tenuto
24. Married with Zombies by Jesse Petersen

And on to the first completed book of April!

25.The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson



Allan Karlsson is about to celebrate his 100th birthday, but instead of attending the party at his much-hated retirement home, he climbs out the window and walks directly into a series of ridiculous situations, starting with stealing a suitcase full of money from a criminal in the bus station and going on to involve several new friends, at least two murders, and an elephant. But none of it seems too bizarre to Allan, who it turns out has spent his life heedlessly wandering in and out of various major events of the past century, accidentally befriending heads of state and shaping world history.

The whole thing is utterly silly, and utterly delightful. You can't exactly call the main character a good person -- he's as amoral as he is apolitical, which is very, despite how often he gets caught up in politics -- but he is weirdly charming in his own forthright way, and vastly entertaining. The writing style is a lot of fun, too, and I have to give huge props to the translator for rendering something that feels exactly the right kind of humorous and quirky.

None of it is meant to be taken at all seriously, so don't start nitpicking it for historical accuracy or judging the characters' criminal activities. It's something you have to just decide to go with, in all its insanity, and then sit back and enjoy the ride. Which I did, immensely.

Rating: I think I'm going to give this one 4.5/5. It really is just that... did I use the word delightful already? Delightful.

>2 bragan: Your review made me smile! I tried The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden some years ago but it didn’t work for me at all. I gave up when they started lugging a nuclear warhead around Sweden, if I remember correctly.

>2 bragan: I agree completely with your review! Sometimes ludicrously silly is just what you need. There is a follow up book which I am yet to get to - The Accidental Further Adventures of the 100 Year Old Man.

>2 bragan: I was really feeling the need of reading a book like this soon, thank you! I really had no idea which book could be and this one sounds really interesting. Right now I'm just too shocked, I was really convinced that maybe my library wouldn't have it... they have it! Still need to confirm if it's really there in person (I still can't believe it).

>3 FlorenceArt: There are definitely a lot of nuclear warheads lurking around in the background of this one, but no one lugs any across Sweden. I honestly wouldn't have been entirely surprised if they had, though, so maybe the silliness is similar. :)

>4 Jackie_K: I've been wondering whether I should add the sequel to the wishlist, or if it's bound to just disappoint after how much I enjoyed the first one.

>5 dicentra8: Hooray! I see it's gotten a lot of very mixed reviews here on LT, but the negative ones, as far as I can see, mostly appear to be from people who have no sense of humor. Or at least, a very different sense of humor than mine, anyway. Here's hoping yours and mine do line up and you enjoy it as much as I did! (Assuming you are in fact able to get your hands on it.)

>6 bragan: I'm glad that once I get interested in a book I rarely check the reviews before reading it. I only start doing that when I'm struggling while reading something. But I really needed to read something the way that you described. "Utterly silly, and utterly delightful" really sounds perfect to me right now!

Yes, I really hope it's actually there. I said that because there was another book that appeared "available" on the online catalog. But everytime I go there, it isn't there. I think it's time to stop being stubborn about finding it by myself and ask if the book is really available or not.

>7 dicentra8: It might be there but mis-shelved or something. I do hope you find it! I think it may indeed hit the spot for you.

>8 bragan: Couldn't hold myself so I went there (I had one book to return). It's now with me, ready to be read soon.

The other book was sadly gone. I knew I was checking the right shelf but still asked for help this time. They already removed as being available from the online catalog.

>2 bragan: This sounds like a lot of fun. And my library has a copy! I've added it to my list there. Thanks for your description.

Happy new thread.

>2 bragan: Great comments. I read The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden years ago, and sometimes we just need to laugh. The book did make me laugh.

>9 dicentra8: Well, glad they did actually have that one, at least!

>10 Jim53: I seem to be causing a mini run on libraries for this book. :)

>11 BLBera: Sometimes that is absolutely what you need, and I think this was definitely one of those times for me.

>2 bragan: Sounds fun. Noting for when I'm in the mood for delightful.

>13 labfs39: Yes, I do think it's the sort of thing you want to be in the mood for.

>2 bragan: Happy new thread. Great review, this sounds like a very pleasant read.

>15 rv1988: Thanks!

26. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith



The Weinersmiths (authors of the interesting and entertaining Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything) initially set out to write a book about what we should expect from the exciting new era of space settlement to come in the not-too-distant future. What they ended up writing, after lots and lots of research, is a book about how very, very not ready we are to start living on Mars, or anywhere else that isn't Earth.

In particular, they focus on a lot of issues that advocates of space settlement tend to gloss over or ignore while they're busy thinking about rocket schedules and mineral abundances. Like, for instance, the fact that the longest anyone has ever been in space is about a year and a half and no one's ever lived in Moon gravity for more than a few days or Mars gravity at all. So we have zero data on what it would mean, physiologically, to spend a lifetime somewhere other than Earth, or whether we can reproduce there without problems. Indeed, there hasn't even been much in the way of good animal experiments on any of that yet. Then there are issues of psychology and government, because no matter what the most idealistic of space dreamers might want to believe, humans do inevitably take our own flawed humanity with us wherever we go. And what about legal barriers? Does current space law even permit this sort of thing? Do we need to have clearer and more useful international law on the subject first to prevent problems down the road? And is expanding into space going to usher in a new era of cosmic harmony, or is it likely to actually be a new source of conflict?

On top of which, the simple fact is that space is a terrible place. As is the moon, as is Mars. It is profoundly difficult to overestimate just how hard it will be to keep human beings alive there, never mind thriving, or how much of what we take absolutely for granted on Earth will have to be struggled for there. Antarctica is a garden spot by comparison.

None of which is probably anything space enthusiasts (of which I do count myself one, although never one who thought Elon Musk-style near-term Mars settlement was anything but a pipe dream) are likely to want to hear. But whether or not you're convinced by their arguments, they are very much worth listening to, and the authors are certainly right that not enough attention is paid to these topics.

I should say that, while this sounds like a massive downer, it is written in a pleasant, humorous style (even if it is sometimes a stretch to keep that up during long chapters about international law), and also that the authors don't think that cities on Mars don't sound awesome, or even that they're not a good long-term goal for humanity. Ultimately, their argument is for doing it when we're actually truly capable of doing it right... and that that is really not today.

Rating: 4/5

>17 bragan: Nice review! I personally never thought of settling outer planets as something we’ll do today or even tomorrow, but it’s certainly worth considering all aspects if we are ever going to to it.

I tried to read Red Mars years ago but couldn’t finish. Just the idea of being stuck on a spaceship (and later a planet) with a few hundred people, and the conflicts and politics of it (which were realistically depicted as I remember it) makes me want to scream.

>17 bragan: SF author Charles Stross has written several essays on his blog on this point: space is dangerous and we may not settle other planets absent some unforseeable progress in science.

>18 FlorenceArt: The number of characters expands in later books, but you're stuck with many of those people for all three volumes.

>18 FlorenceArt: Red Mars is one I fully intend to get to sometime. But, yeah, I don't even like being stuck in a room with a couple of people for very long. :)

>19 dukedom_enough: I think the authors of this one think the progress is actually foreseeable, but is going to take quite a while.

Stross's take on colonizing Mars is here.

A City on Mars looks interesting, and a good antidote to all we were promised in our idealistic youth. I'm still waiting for a book on why we don't have personal jetpacks yet. (Kidding... I can figure that one out for myself.)

17> I have, but haven't read that one yet - but I hadn't heard of Soonish so I'll be looking for that one.

I'm currently taking a class (adult ed) on "White Elephant Technology" - things that were invented, and built (at least in prototype) but never caught on. Last week's was all about variations on bicycles (and roller skates - want a 10-pound gas motor on your back, to power your skates?), the first one was cars and trains - including flying cars. Many of them actually more or less worked...just too large, too cumbersome...and none of them got into use enough to even consider (at least in what we saw) the _legal_ ramifications of hundreds (thousands?) of tiny planes flown by amateurs wandering around the skies of cities and their suburbs... Which is where personal jetpacks come in, they're just as bad with legal/license matters. Leaving aside weight, fuel, steering, rockets shooting down over (onto?) your rear end...

>22 dukedom_enough: Thanks, I've marked that to read later.

>23 lisapeet: A lot of people are still promising overly idealistic things from space, and while I have a lot of sympathy for the enthusiasm, reality checks are definitely in order.

As for jet packs, I have this book somewhere on my shelves, too, but I don't remember it being quite as good. :)

>24 jjmcgaffey: I do recommend Soonish if you want a very fun and readable, but also actually informative look at current cutting-edge technologies.

That sounds like a fascinating class. I had heard that prototype flying cars actually existed, but I never thought they were a particularly great idea, either. I have enough trouble driving in two dimensions!

27. The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays for Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond Tomorrow by Ray Bradbury



A 1972 collection of three plays that Bradbury both wrote and produced himself.

There's kind of a fascinating thing about Bradbury's writing that I think is particularly noticeable in this format. His great strength, unquestionably, is his beautiful, evocative prose, but it often seems like that just should not work when he puts it into the mouths of his characters. People will be going along having reasonably normal conversations, and then they'll ask a computer to show them Paris by saying things like, "Paris. The blue hour of twilight. The gold hour of sunset. An Eiffel Tower, please, of bronze! An Arc de Triomphe of shining brass! Let fountains toss forth fiery lava. Let the Seine be a torrent of gold!" It ought to feel ridiculous, pretentious, full of painfully obvious artifice, but somehow he actually does make it feel magical instead. And that, my friends, is some talent.

Anyway. Like I said, there are three plays included here. Specifically:

The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit: Six men pool their money to buy one much-desired white summer suit to share between them. It's an odd piece, really, but oddly charming and the way their brief, beautiful moments of getting to wear the suit are described for the stage feel downright poetic. There is, perhaps, some feel of stereotype to the way the Mexican-American protagonists talk (lots of "ay, caramba!", plus one of them is named Vamenos for some reason?), but there is never disdain for them, and Bradbury says in the introduction that he was drawing on people he knew in New Mexico and Arizona in his youth, as well as on his own experiences of being too poor to be able to afford your own suit.

The Veldt: A rich family in the near future (well, 1991, apparently, which was still an imagined future at the time), installs an immersive "playroom" that can appear to transport you anywhere. The kids become entirely too fond of the African veldt. I'd already encountered this story enough times in enough different formats (starting, I think, from when I wasn't much older than the kids in it) that I was worried I'd find yet another iteration kind of boring. But it'd been quite a while, and I find I came to it with interestingly fresh eyes this time. It's so easy, now, to compare the playroom of the story to the internet of today, and to regard the admonishment that the kids need, to use the modern parlance, to touch grass as downright prescient. On the other hand, from the vantage point of 2024, the housewife complaining that there's not enough to do because all she has to do is press buttons for everything seems downright laughable, and the parenting pendulum has swung so far from the attitudes that Bradbury is criticizing here (e.g. twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids being left so alone that their parents don't even notice when they come home past midnight) that that criticism seems a bit misaimed now. Still, it was definitely interesting to revisit, and the play version seems pretty effectively done.

To the Chicago Abyss: In a future world of ruined cities and lives both both materially and culturally impoverished, an old man remembers all the insignificant minutia of former existence, even though it's mortally dangerous to do so. This is shortest of the three plays, and I think, the strangest. I also found it perhaps the most affecting. Even as my rational mind thinks that, y'know, maybe restoring a future full of commercial crap isn't the best thing for humanity to strive for, my emotions remain powerfully moved by the old man's hymns of praise to vanished candy bars and lounge chairs (although maybe not so much the cigarettes).

Rating: 4/5

>26 bragan: Fantastic review. I've never read any plays by Bradbury. I agree with your assessment of how he makes even somewhat florid prose work. I another author's hands, it could easily sound pompous or pretentious. He does carry it off.

>27 rv1988: I think these are the only plays of his that I've read, although he did do the screenplay of a Twilight Zone episode I've seen.

Anyway, yeah, it is constantly amazing to me how well he pulls this stuff off.

>17 bragan: Before we even set up shop on Mars, of course we have to get to Mars. I highly recommend this book:

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach.

>29 rocketjk: Oh, yes, I've read that one, and highly recommend it, too! Actually, I think that and A City on Mars probably pair very nicely together.

>29 rocketjk: Oh, thanks for the reminder. I want to get this one. I found Grunt fascinating.

>29 rocketjk: I enjoyed that one too. To start with I thought it wasn't going to be as fun as her other books, and then she wrote about puking in zero gravity and I was hooked! :D

28. Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny



I'm slowly making my way through a big stack of old Roger Zelazny SF paperbacks I picked up at a library sale a while back. This one I'm pretty sure I'd actually read before, probably decades ago when I was in high school, but I remembered almost nothing about it.

It's an odd one, though, even for Zelazny. The basic premise is pretty nifty: there is a road that stretches through time, with entrances and exits at various centuries (ones that sometimes change if history is altered enough), and people who know how to find it can travel that road in cars or trucks or horse-drawn carriages or chariots. An imaginative enough conceit, but the structure and the various weird events in the story take it beyond that, to... well, I don't know what. The blurb on the back cover describes it as having a "kaleidoscopic treatment of time, character, and action," and that's probably the best possible description of it. It really does feel like you're looking at the story through a kaleidoscope. Short chapters show us glimpses of various people at various times without a great deal of context. It does all sort of add up to a full story, one focused on a man who drives up and down the road in his pickup truck searching for something, and on the people who are currently trying to kill him, but it does so in a weird, fragmented way that never quite lets you get your bearings very well, often while throwing some very wild images at you. (The Marquis de Sade riding a mind-controlled tyrannosaur, anyone?)

This does not work perfectly, but it does work better than you might expect. (I do also suspect it works best if you read the whole thing in something like one sitting -- it's less than 200 pages and not a very dense read, so that's entirely possible, but, alas, I did not do it that way.) There is ultimately something rather slight about it, and depending on how you tilt your head, it can all seem either pretty cool or utterly ridiculous. It was, in any case, a reasonably entertaining reading experience, though.

Rating: I cannot for the life of me figure out how to rate this. I'm going to call it 3.5/5, but I feel like it almost deserves an extra half star just for its sheer audacity.

>33 bragan: The Marquis de Sade riding a mind-controlled tyrannosaur, anyone?

That’s… disturbing?

>34 FlorenceArt: It was... strange. It was very, very strange. And possibly not meant to be taken entirely seriously. Maybe. :)

>2 bragan: I'd seen this book around but had no idea what it was like. You've made it sound really fun and I can definitely see myself being in the mood for it at some point.

>26 bragan: Good review, and I didn't know about Bradbury having written plays. Though like you, I feel like I've encountered The Veldt in so many forms over the years.

>33 bragan: Aside from the occasional short story in anthologies, I've yet to read Zelazny, though I do keep intending to. I'm not quite sure where to start, though probably not with this one, interesting as it sounds.

>36 valkyrdeath: Zelazny's work could be a bit variable, but at his best he was head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries, especially when it comes to prose style. I suggest starting with one of his short story collections, probably.

29. How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Shur



Michael Shur is the creator of The Good Place, a fantastic TV show, and almost certainly the world's only sitcom about moral philosophy. Unsurprisingly, this is a topic Shur himself is fascinated with, and in this volume he takes us through various approaches philosophers over the millennia have had to the questions of how humans should behave towards each other, what it means to be a good person, and whether you really need to put your shopping cart back where it belongs. Although it should probably be noted that a) it's hardly a comprehensive overview of the entire field of philosophy, b) he concentrates entirely on secular, rather than religious philosophy, and c) the emphasis is on Western philosophy, despite brief discussions of particular Buddhist philosopher and of the African concept of Ubuntu.

The approach here is simple and casual, taking ideas from people who wrote huge, dense, largely unreadable tomes, paring them down to some of their basics, and seeing what seems useful for us ordinary schmoes as we try to navigate this stupid and complicated thing called life without being complete jerks. Shur sees some merit in almost all of the philosophies he considers (Ayn Rand aside) and seems to regard them all as possible tools to pick and choose from in whatever situations they seem most appropriate in. His writing is clear, breezy, humorous, and pleasant, and much more interested in mulling over the questions than trying to dictate any hard and fast answers. I don't think I agreed one hundred percent with all his personal takes, but I find his approach in general very simpatico.

It's worth pointing out, by the way, just in case it's not clear, that the title is very tongue in cheek. This book will not only not teach you how to be perfect and get the answer to every moral question right, it's not even remotely going to try, because Shur recognizes that that's completely impossible, and not really the point, anyway.

Also worth noting is that although he does reference characters and ideas from The Good Place, because that show embodied a lot of the ideas he's discussing here, you don't need to have seen it to read the book. He also manages not to spoil anything from it, either, in case you want to go and watch it afterward. Fans of the show, though, will probably find it especially interesting and a nice little add-on to their viewing experience. If nothing else, having read the sections on Kant, I now completely understand why Chidi has a stomachache all the time.

Rating: 4/5

>33 bragan: I feel like I read Zelazny in my early teens, because I read ALL that stuff, but can't remember which book or any plot lines. But that sounds like something I would have really enjoyed at 14. Maybe I'll try him again at some point.

>39 lisapeet: If you read a lot of classic SF anthologies, you almost certainly did encounter something of his at some point.

>17 bragan: This sounds fascinating. It looks like the authors are asking questions that we need to ask before we start settling on other planets.

>29 rocketjk: I saw Mary Roach speak about this book, and she said that NASA was very accommodating but they didn't let her go into a shuttle to see what it smelled like. I love the way her mind works.

>38 bragan: You are reading some interesting-sounding books. I've noted this one as well.

>41 BLBera: I'm a bit jealous of getting to see Mary Roach speak. If she's a tenth as fun in person as she is in print, it sounds like a really good time.

Also, always glad to put some interesting books on people's radar!

>38 bragan: I see that The Good Place is on Netflix. I've added it to my watchlist.

>38 bragan: I hadn't heard about that book. It does sound interesting, but it's also made me want to watch The Good Place all over again.

>43 labfs39: Ooooh, excellent! I most heartily recommend it. I also strongly recommend finding out nothing whatsoever about it in advance. :)

>44 valkyrdeath: Yeah, I'm kind of feeling that impulse now, myself.

30. Clockwork by Phillip Pullman



A short, strange, dark little clockwork fairy tale, featuring fascinating, creepily blurred black-and-white illustrations. It's definitely aimed at kids -- at least, at kids who enjoy darker and scarier stuff than their parents probably think they should, which I'm betting is a lot of kids -- but it's also an interesting read for adults, with an odd, vaguely meta story-within-a-story-but-it's-all-the-same-story structure. Despite an ending that was perhaps a bit disappointingly pat, I enjoyed it a lot, and boy do the illustrations really add to the atmosphere.

Rating: 4/5

>45 bragan: I also strongly recommend finding out nothing whatsoever about it in advance. :) Easily done as I had never heard of it before!

>47 labfs39: Excellent!

31. The Soulmate by Sally Hepworth



This one starts out very promisingly. A couple has recently moved into a house by a sea cliff, after experiencing some sort of difficult times. But they quickly find out why they got a house in such a beautiful spot so much cheaper than expected: the cliff has a reputation as an excellent place to commit suicide. Would-be jumpers repeatedly show up, but fortunately the husband turns out to be very good at talking them down. Until one night he goes out to talk to a woman on the cliff, and through the window his wife first glimpses him standing way closer to her than he usually does, then looks out again to see the woman completely gone and her husband with his hands outstretched as if he just possibly might have been pushing her. And then later it turns out he knew the woman...

So, yeah, I was intrigued, and all ready to settle into a complicated story in which this guy's secrets would be slowly revealed, with lots of tension around the question of whether or not the lady actually jumped.

The slowly revealed secrets are here, but imagine my surprise when right after the cliff incident we start getting scenes from the POV of the dead woman's ghost, and immediately and rather anticlimactically learn the answer to the question of whether she deliberately jumped. Which, admittedly, doesn't tell us what actually did happen, but I found it weirdly deflating (not to mention just plain weird), and never recovered the pleasant sense of tension I felt at the beginning.

And without that... Well, it turns out I actually really just didn't care about these people and their secrets, and infidelities, and mental health issues, and horrible business dealings, and unbelievably poor decisions, and repeated reflections on just much they really, really, really, really love each other. Like, at all.

Rating: I'm giving this one a 2.5/5. Part of me feels bad rating it that low, because I'm sure this novel will be someone's jam, but it's definitely not mine, and I'm not feeling very generous after having just spent 300+ pages in these characters' very uninspiring company.

>49 bragan: Is this your first Hepworth? I can see that if you went into this expecting a mystery story that it would be disappointing. I saw a description of her work as "domestic thrillers" where I would say they are more domestic (i.e. family and relationships) than thriller.

I quite like Ms Hepworth in general and liked this well enough but had to put aside my qualms about the ghost (there was no other supernatural elements in the story/world and it felt like a bit of a cheat).

Thanks to your review I've just realised that there's one of her books I have yet to read. Does that count as a BB?

>50 rhian_of_oz: Yep, first and, to be honest, probably last. (Sorry! Although I do see from some of the LT reviews that several people who are fans of Hepworth were a bit disappointed by this one, so maybe I just picked the wrong one to sample.) I wasn't expecting a mystery, as such, but I was definitely expecting a bit less "domestic" and a bit more "thriller." Or at least more of a balance between the two. Or for the thriller elements that did exist to be a little more, you know... thrilling. Mind you, neither "domestic" nor "thriller" is exactly my most preferred genre, anyway. I mainly picked this one up on a whim because the premise sounded really intriguing, so it was probably always going to stand or fall for me on how well it did at keeping that intriguing.

The ghost definitely felt like a little bit of a cheat. As is probably obvious from my other reading, I have zero problems with the supernatural in fiction, but introducing it out of nowhere in a work that otherwise seems 100% tied to the real world always does make me raise my eyebrows at best, and can completely snap my suspension of disbelief at worst. In this case, I feel like it was a rather limp solution to the problem of wanting to have this person's POV in the story, but also wanting to kill her off a few pages in.

Not sure if it counts as a BB or not. Maybe, in an oddly backwards way! In any case, I hope you enjoy. Feel free to enjoy it for me too, since I probably won't be reading it. ;)

32. Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich



I think this one wasn't quite what I was expecting when I picked it up. I was excited to learn what there might be to know about ravens, but this often feels as much or more like a book about the experience of studying ravens as about the birds themselves. Or even about the difficulty of studying ravens, since they are skittish, highly individual, extremely smart, frequently unpredictable, and often impossible for even experienced humans to tell apart. Still, the author has a lot of very interesting things to say about the birds, both tame and wild, that he spent time with, about his observations of their behavior and what it might mean, and, at the end of the book, also some speculative thoughts about what it means for an animal to be "conscious" and whether ravens qualify. I found it a bit dry in places, but surprisingly exciting in others, and ultimately well worth reading, as it does do a good job of conveying just why ravens are so cool, so fascinating, and still so mysterious.

Rating: I went back and forth on this a bit, but despite finding it a little bit of an uneven read, I think I'm going to have to give it 4/5.

>52 bragan: Sounds intriguing. I think I am at least as interested in the research process as in the result. I enjoyed reading Konrad Lorenz a lifetime ago, and Jean-Henri Fabre slightly more recently.

>53 FlorenceArt: I read some Konrad Lorenz a lifetime ago, myself. I think he got a brief mention in this one.

The research process for me is sometimes more interesting in concept than in detail, but some of the details were worth hearing about.

>52 bragan: I like books about corvids and their behavior, so I'm taking note of that one.

>52 bragan: >55 lisapeet: I would like to learn more about crows. Is there a book you would recommend for newbies?

>56 labfs39: The only book-length work I own is In the Company of Crows and Ravens, which kind of toggles between dry and chatty, but it has gorgeous illustrations. Most of my info has been picked up piecemeal through books with a wider focus on wildlife or magazine articles. I've heard good things about Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays.

Two books I have with narrower concentrations that I'm looking forward to: The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London by Christopher Skaife and A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey by Jonathan Meiburg—which come to think of it isn't about corvids at all but about a caracara, which is a raptor. But hey, smart birds are all good in my book.

>57 lisapeet: Thanks, I am going to put Bird Brains on my list.

>57 lisapeet: Bird Brains does look interesting. I'm wondering if I should add that to my list as well!

I like King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz - it's old, but rich. He has a lot about how and why crows (I think it's crows rather than ravens) talk to each other, and he learns to talk to them a bit too (thus the name of the book).

>60 jjmcgaffey: That might have to go on my wishlist, too. Looking over my catalog, I think I don't, in fact, have anything by Lorenz... I thought I did, but I guess not.