Nelle > Recent Status Updates

Alright, already this audiobook sounds like the Narrator from Hitchhiker‘s which I think is a symbiosis of the writing and the voice actor so I‘m in

Awkward baby queers using tapes of whale songs to hit on each other is so deeply mid 90s (when this book was written, not when it is set) I could cry

I love Boris - he is a perfect portrait of a field entomologist

Now a “Cat’s Cradle” reference! Be still my beating nerdling heart (it’s such a good science book but the style of writing is just as sparkling)

Hitchhikers joke!! Yesss

🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

I am in an emotionally abusive relationship with this book.

Look, Book, I already gave you props for the „parenting in the apocalypse“ convo - you don‘t need to come at me with honest renditions of „parenting as a widower“ too. Fuck!

Really grateful for the brief discussion of the Sophie‘s Choice that is opting into parenthood in this era of humanity. Wish it had been less fleeting, but also now bracing for more.

Author visits the Berlin Botanical Gardens on a lovely sunny day in September and makes space to mention how all the humans in the city parks are trying to soak up sunlight because the „loooooong, GREY winter“ is coming soon (the author does the audiobook). I feel both vindicated/seen and also annoyed, here on icy but sunny day in late November. Time to go outside.

Okay, so I am loving this but she‘s just committed what I am beginning to feel is some sort of cardinal sin of science journalism: claiming our boy Charlie Darwin‘s REAL passion was (insert subject of current book). Darwin was kind of into EVERYTHING, including yes of course carnivorous plants and orchids and plant sex but also barnacles and earthworms and rocks and life itself. There is enough Darwin to go around!

I love these stories on their own but also for giving me such excellent ideas for biographies to gift my history buff dad and brother

This book is going to be too short, I can already tell

Oooh Heinlein burn! Yessss

This is great fun and all but the time scale is off by a factor of 10 at least… 10.000 years is SO LONG y‘all. These people would not be speaking the same language much less retaining memories of people who died millennia ago (speaking as someone who can‘t remember last week with any clarity)

Geez everyone is just so mad.

I don‘t know what is happening in the tail end of this trilogy. Am I being punk‘d?!

As my book clubs pals now, one of my base expectation of any scifi novel is that it answers the question: “How do they poop?” Now I am otherwise really loving this meditation in solitude but I only know what is happening with the cow manure, and that the cat and dog doing their business outside. But what about the human? Does she have a latrine?! This is why I am so fun at parties, poop ponderings.

Oh right, I am reading a tragedy - just entered the section of horribleness that is going to last until the justified murders at the end. Fun!

Look, I am super enjoying this but the author chose to use the name Polydeuces for Castor’s twin (rather than Pollux) and the audiobook narrator’s accent renders that as Poly-JUICE-is and I’m just finding that a little distracting. Also low-key think the author ships Helen and Poly-wassis-name 🙃

This book is oscillating between charming and obnoxious. Some of this is the writing but much more is due to the audiobook narrator who makes choices about inflection and pronunciation that are sending me around the bend.

“…definitive as the end of an atmosphere…” 🤔 not sure if this is meant to indicate that the object decidedly does not have a clear edge or indicates a deep misunderstanding of atmospheric physics or (and this annoys me more than the second possibility) is an intentional error to trip up dorks like me to start in with the well achshullys

“Absorbed in training themselves to plumb the depths of nature, they were almost helpless in ordinary human affairs, where, for all their knowledge, they seemed pathetic and shallow. Perhaps the dedicated pursuit of science was so consuming, so competitive, that no time was left to become a well-rounded human being.“ - Sagan with the self own 😂

>:-/

This is audiobook only comment but I do always appreciate an accurate Ontarian accent ♥️🤍

Oh so this book is just going to repeatedly, gently and beautifully, STAB ME IN THE HEART 😭

I’m going to be That Guy and quibble that the Coast Guard, Canadian or American, use cutters (peacetime service ships) NOT cruisers (naval warships). Maybe the author is implying the CCG or USCG - unclear which - is making due with what’s around but it still caught this CG brat’s ear

Buddy read with my spouse 😍

Well I am flying through this! But not on any daft broom, mind you!

Once again I am asked to read a book that seems to be steeped in richly imagined speculative world of which I can have only glimpses because my sole narrator and point of view character is a windbag dickwad that every woman inexplicably must bang. “Often I have desired you - yesterday and today.” Truly a romance for the ages.