I enjoyed the early sections of the book, which dealt with the author's early life in Ireland and then her move to Canada. Her bloodline is very blue, she was orphaned at an early age and instructed by Druids. She encountered misogyny in her Canadian research posts, even though she was highly intelligent.
The latter part of the book, which dealt specifically with trees, climatr change etc did not interest me. I skimmed it.
I enjoyed the 1st half of the book. It was a straightforward SF story that included murder and a deadly meteor heading towards an earth that had already been greatly destroyed by nuclear war, with only the non technological Mennonites having survived in the Waterloo area.
I greatly lost my interest in the story when it was revealed that the Martian had been assessing the revived astronauts and convicts to see if they were suitable for Martian society. They weren’t of course, so the people who chose to go to Mars were kindly given a separate living dome instead of being left on earth to die. The story became a shallow sociological treatise and I began noticing plot holes. How could an advanced society have not noticed a huge rock heading towards earth much earlier? How in the world can you transfer consciousness into a computer? What even is consciousness?
This book was billed as a health resort horror story. It took place in 1913 in a TB sanatorium in a part of Germany that now belongs to Poland. The primary horror turned out to be the misogyny of the men, to the extent that they thought women might not even be fully human. I found out that even my hero Darwin thought women were inferior beings, because they didn’t have to struggle to survive. Sheesh. Nature, of course, took revenge on men in this village, demanding an annual sacrifice.
The protagonist turned out to be intersex, and at the end, adopted their female persona. WWl started, and a reset occurred. The book was filled with mostly useless conversations by pompous men, and yet I enjoyed it. It felt like a lived experience.
This book was much too wordy so I mostly skimmed it. It was about the development of the Icarus project which will use satellites to retrieve data from tagged animals, which will help us track what is happening on our planet. My favorite part was the author’s reference to Western civilization’s biggest failure… ignoring the world of animals in its philosophical systems, concentrating only on physical sciences.
I enjoyed this book more than I expected. It really is well done. No need to repeat the plot. It’s well known.
As I read it, I began to think of this book as a comedy. One after another, Frankenstein’s dearest died, and he experienced overwrought passions yet again.
I liked the idea of the book being a comedy because the deaths were actually very sad. And I was failing to see why this book is so popular and a classic. Then I read the monster’s soliloquy at the very end, and I suddenly loved the book. The monster was despised for what he looked like, by people who were no better than he was. In fact, the Monster was a refined being with deep feelings. This ending turns the entire book over on its head.
This book about Medusa was choppy, and some of the mythology was unknown/forgotten by me, making parts a bit tricky to follow. For example, I don’t know if Perseus did as much killing as Medusa’s head states. Also, what was it with the weird ending, where a lonely Athena commits suicide by looking at Medusa, whom she herself created into a monster.
On the other hand, the book had a pleasantly ironic sense of humour, which made me laugh in parts. And making Medusa’s head sentient was quite clever, but it took a bit long to get there.
