#kamreadsandrecs

If the first book made me so deliriously happy that I had to bury my face in a pillow and scream out all my feels, this book...well, this book ripped by heart out and danced all over it. And I don't mean that in a fannish way; I mean that in the way that something reaches right into you and pulls out some very painful issues that go so long into the past and go so deep that the surfacing of those issues is like emotional surgery without anaesthesia. But, like surgery, it's painful but necessary, and I am so very, very glad this book did just that. It's like Kafka said: sometimes you need a book that hurts you, that is "an axe to break the frozen sea", and this is what this book was for me. I just hope there's a sequel though, because there were so many plot threads that didn't get answers, and I'd love it if those got wrapped up. (Also I'd love to go back to these worlds and read about these characters again.)

Now, while my standards for my guilty pleasure reads are significantly lower than my standards for the other kinds of reading I do, I have to say that this book didn't quite meet even those lowered standards. The story seemed to ramble around pointlessly for three-fourths of the book, and then all the action came in a rush towards the end, reaching a climax that I didn't even particularly like because it just didn't make sense. If there's a sequel to this one I hope it's a lot better than this go-round.

#nowreading #ThePeoplesPolice by #NormanSpinrad .

#nowreading #TheWallofStorms #DandelionDynasty by #KenLiu .

But aside from that, and aside from the fact that the first chapter really isn't as engaging as everything else (this has nothing to do with that mythological faux pas), this book is actually fun to read. Offit has an engaging narrative style, and his ability to weave together the strands of history, science, and current events is pretty fun to read. This book is also an important reminder to all of us that we should always, ALWAYS be skeptical of everything - yes, even science: an important lesson in this day and age, where the word "science" is increasingly more like a branding strategy than treated as the rigorous discipline it actually is.

Well, obviously, this isn't very impressive, but I got hit with a reading slump pretty hard all throughout the month, and I wasn't able to really do much reading. I wound up spending more time playing video games, because for some odd reason my brain still craved engagement with narratives, just not the pure-text kind. Finally wound up breaking it when I picked up Ancient Worlds by Michael Scott again after putting it off for a long time, and that's what got my reading mojo back :D. Hopefully June will look a lot better, stats-wise.

You know how sometimes you open a package and don't get what you expect? Sometimes it's worse, and that's not great, but sometimes it's better, and that's always a plus to be sure. But sometimes, it's also nice to open a package and get exactly what you expected - and that's definitely the case with this book, at least for the most part. In the Introduction Scott promises that he's going to talk about how the ancient world was actually a lot more connected than we've always assumed, and that's exactly what he does. He shows how civilisations like ancient China, ancient Rome, ancient Greece, ancient India and the great shifting cauldron of cultures that's the Near and Middle East. These cultures tend to be discussed separately in schools and universities, but Scott suggests that maybe there's more to be gleaned by viewing them as connected instead of separate: a bigger, broader view of history that shows how humans do not and have never existed in isolation. That's something important to keep in mind, I think, especially in the 21st century.

However, much as I love this book (and pretty much every other thing Hurley has written), I do kind of wish that this had been longer. While I'm quite content with it the way it stands, I found myself wishing that there'd been just a bit more plot, just a bit more story, by the time I got to the end of this book - probably because there was so much to the setting and characters that I really wanted to know more. Still a great read though - if you've got the stomach for it.