Tangled Mind

...our ‘evaluations’ are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.[loc. 2829]

Neurologist Oliver Sacks' compilation of twenty-four of his most interesting clinical cases, organised into four sections: 'Losses', 'Excesses', 'Transports' and 'The World of the Simple'. ( Read more... )

‘Aunt Isra, I’m a Librarian, and – as you’re doubtless aware – Kai here is a dragon. We don’t live in stories the way that you Fae do.’
‘Ah, but you do,’ Aunt Isra said, unruffled. ‘You just don’t recognize it. Nobody ever does – at the time.’ [loc. 2549]

The finale of the Invisible Library series (first of which was The Invisible Library, read in 2015 and reviewed with the comment 'sets up admirably for a sequel or three' -- The Untold Story is the eighth). There were several unresolved plot threads at the end of The Dark Archive -- Irene's parentage, the balance between chaos and order, the nature of the Library itself -- and these are satisfactorily, though not predictably, resolved.

There was a hole on the Blue Crown, in the centre of the brow. Here the uraeus serpent, the symbol of kingship, had reared its lordly head. ... ‘Poor little king,’ I said whimsically. ‘Without the guardian serpent on his brow he was helpless to prevent the humiliation of being passed from hand to greedy hand, and exposed to the gaze of the curious.' [loc. 472]

Egypt, 1922: Amelia Peabody and her family assemble to plan more excavations in the Valley of the Kings, but their attention is diverted by the appearance of Magda Petherick, writer of sensational novels and widow of a notorious collector of antiquities. She claims that the small golden statue she's brought with her is cursed: she deems it responsible for the death of her husband (and her dog). ( Read more... )

“Haunted? This is Rhode Island, not Germany.”
“Agreed.” While it was possible for magic to root itself in inanimate objects, it had become so rare — especially in a place as new as the States — that the claim felt incredible. [loc. 260]

Rhode Island, 1846: Merritt Fernsby, moderately successful novelist, has inherited remote Whimbrel Island in Naragansett Bay, and the house that stands there, unoccupied for years and reputedly haunted. ( Read more... )

'Sadly, or heroically, depending on the way you look at it, books do kill people.’
‘In places where books are forbidden, of course, but not here. Not yet. Knock wood. What I’m trying to say is that a certain sentence of the book — a written sentence, a very powerful sentence — killed Flora.’
Louise was silent. After a few moments she spoke. ‘I wish I could write a sentence like that.’[p. 171]

The Sentence opens with Tookie, an Ojibwe woman with some reckless habits and a sharp, mordant sense of humour, being sentenced to 60 years by 'a judge who believed in the afterlife'. Her crime? Accidentally smuggling a cocaine-laden corpse across state lines. Prison is not as awful as it might have been, because Tookie realises she has a library in her head, made up of all the books she's ever read. And people are working towards her freedom: after ten years, she's freed. She marries Pollux, the tribal policeman who arrested her, and takes a job in a bookstore specialising in Native books.

In another novel, that would be the novel. Here it's the setup, the first fifty pages.( Read more... )

...there it was, neko – cat. But it was different to how it was written normally. The normal way to write the character was 猫 – with this radical 犭 on the left. The character Ogawa had sent had 豸 on the left. That was the tanuki radical. This must be an older version, relating the cat to other shapeshifting animals like the badger, fox and tanuki. [loc. 1656]

A series of interlinked stories set in Tokyo, in what's turned out to be an alternate, Covid-free reality where the Tokyo Olympics of 2020 weren't postponed to 2021. ( Read more... )

He tried to imagine what it would be like to actually believe this stuff. To feel invisible danger all around. To not know if the next person you met was human or something else entirely that was out to get you, one way or another. When they’d studied the superstitions of early cultures it had never occurred to him just how stressful it would be, just how paranoid it must make you feel. [loc. 942]

Rab lives in Stack 367-74, Delta Grid, Northwest Europasia. It's far in the future, after the Catastrophe Ages -- the Nadir, the Flood and the Bulge, the latter an immense population explosion which led to the Alexander Decision and antaphrodisiacs in the drinking water. Rab wants to be an archaeologist, and his mother is keen for him to move ahead, move out: she buys him a Retro-Dimensional Time Wender with Full Cloaking Capability, a wearable time-machine which will transport Rab to a different time while keeping him in the same geographical location.( Read more... )

Had they known me, they would have realised that ‘I wouldn’t try to go that way if I were you – it’s difficult’ is one of the three main motivational hiking phrases a person can say in my vicinity, along with ‘There’s a great pub at the apex of this route’ and ‘This hill is well known due to the coven which is said to have practised in the copse at its plateau during the middle of the seventeenth century.’ [loc. 151]

What I like most about Tom Cox's writing -- here, online, in Villager -- is the immensity of his enthusiasm for and curiosity about things. ( Read more... )

Man had emerged from the Ice Age to become a weapon of mass extinction. Here we were, divorcing ourselves from Nature, wreaking havoc with the climate, and crucifying biodiversity. [loc. 1692]

Alice Roberts examines seven burials, ranging from the 'Red Lady' of Paviland (34,000 years ago), via the Amesbury Archer (4,500 years ago) and the Pocklington chariot burial (2,300 years ago), to the cremation -- very unusual for the time -- of archaeologist Pitt-Rivers (120 years ago). She uses these examples to discuss the waves of migration, and the 'restlessness', of the past, and to explore ideas about race, gender and culture.( Read more... )

Leaving the therapy center, I raise an exhausted face to the white sun. Did I need that? Once again I will have to look deeply into myself. I think of the bear. If he’s alive, at least he is living his bear life free from attacks like this, symbolic and actual, without paying this price. [loc. 600]

In 2015 Nastassja Martin, a French anthropologist who was studying the indigenous Evens in Siberia, was attacked by a bear. ( Read more... )