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Totally fascinating and well written

Totally fascinating and well written

Cannot believe I didn’t remember anything fr reading this book. Did I really read it?? It is the most gripping terrible novel I’ve read in years. It is a total mystery if I’ve read this book before and couldn’t remember everything. I am totally puzzled. And totally engrossed in this story…

Woah, this book!!! 🌟🧡

It is so strange reading this book. I am supposed to have read it a long time ago but can’t remember anything! But reading makes me remember being in Freetown. Was a very special experience. First time travelling to a place with bedbugs, heat and not functioning toilets in a very long time. I remember the first night in the YMCA thinking ‘I am too old for this now’ 😂🧡🌟

I started reading this book again 15 years later. I don’t remember much but already now I am looking through photos of Freetown and trying to remember my visits to Sierra Leone. Looking forward to living in this book for a while. It’s hot. Dusty. Lizards that turn blue.

Wonder if I will ever travel to Africa again….

Argh - had to return this to the library before really starting it. To be continued…

Love how the animals connect the humans in this book. Love Forna’s precision. Love seeing both a London I know and don’t know at all - which in fact could have been other big cities elsewhere as well, I believe. The fox living in a vent at the National Theatre, I wonder if it could be true. Wonder if I’ve ever been on Old Kent Road in this city of so many neighborhoods….

This book is amazing. I am learning connections between hydrothermal vents (what I didn’t know what was!), fermentation and anaerob photosynthesis (that I know some practical stuff about) and cancer cells!!!
A tour de force of a lot of acids and enzymes and carbon varieties I don’t really understand. But I am still getting the general patterns. Wow.

This book is really fascinating but also making clear how complicated experimental biochemistry can be! I’m dying to learn more about this little universe of energy-making in our organisms. But I’m actually starting to be happy I haven’t trained in a laboratory after all…

I’m on my way down a natural science shaped rabbit hole called biochemistry… Can I start another university degree at ago 48…?? Or just somehow study biochemistry….?

This book is so intense. I am underlining something on almost every page. This is so touching to read at the same time as it is quite difficult and full of detailed footnotes at times taking up as much space on the page as the main text. This is a book questioning life and death and how we classify our understanding of the fundamentals of existence. Our human bodies are bodies of water like the aquifer…

I believe this textbook style book may be the slimmest anthropology book I’ve ever read. It’s intriguing because it tries to frame entrepreneurialism in a form of neutral language - critical but still kind of supportive of the subject of entrepreneurship. Wonder if there is a good read out there on the history of entrepreneurialization of life from a more political point of view. Probably is…

“Songs weren’t composed but received whole from animals, plants, or storms. Antelope gave mothers lullabies, thunder and wind gave medicine songs, bears taught hunting songs.” (At crow fair, p. 157)

“Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.”

“There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both morality and invigoration. Cascading water equates loss followed by loss, a momentum of things falling in the direction of death, then life.”

“People have asked in the past, ‘What do you do out there? Don’t you get bored?’ The problem seems to be something else. There’s too much of everything here. I can’t pace myself to it.”

“Disfigurement is synonymous with the whole idea of a frontier. As soon as we lay our hands on it, the freedom we thought it represented is quickly gone.”

“I laughed at myself, then went inside and wrote to a friend: ‘True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere’.”

Absolutely beautiful opening to this book!! Love academic work which is so personal and told with such a passion. Looking forward to bring with this important world view for a while. She is so definitely on to something profound here.

Wonderfully relaxing entertaining read about women in Uganda in the 1970s and 80s and how gender options are changing, merging with traditional tales and various forms of family dramas. Perfect for the last weekend of summer before schools start again