The reading nook

Because I was going to do this yesterday, but time is soup.

What I've recently finished reading:

I went back to the Nantucket Trilogy and read the last book, On the Oceans of Eternity by S. M. Stirling, which yay, did deliver on the exploration of the American continent which I complained about in my review of #2. But I think these books could have done with some rearrangement and editing and maybe being four books instead of three, because this was a (virtual) doorstopper, and it still felt as though a few of the threads came to abrupt ends. I mean, I liked it overall, though I did skim battle battle battle battle. And the characterization is pretty minimal - none of these characters are particularly compelling, or distinctive other than by tricks of locution, and the Evil people are Evil and the Good people are Good and Good wins yay. But the characterization of the situation is pretty good, the whole "modern people dropped in the Bronze Age" thing is just great, even if it does strain belief that they have enough intellectual resources and physical skills to make a go of it.

What I've recently listened to:

I recently found out that an acquaintance of mine, a neurologist, started a podcast late last year, and as I wanted to listen to something while running that wasn't politics for a change I picked out an episode from February (there are only nine episodes) that sounded interesting. Stranger Tongues, Stranger Tides is about communication between humans and non-humans; it starts with his own experiences with a scrub jay in his back yard, and moves on to discussions of experiments in communicating with animals, and attempts to communicate with his autistic son, and eventually communication with (possible) aliens and "AI" LLMs.

I really enjoyed it, and I think that if you liked Ed Yong's An Immense World and/or Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series (and especially if you read my post from 2023 about Ezra Klein's interview with Tchaikovsky and their discussion of how his work is an exploration of personhood and AI) you may too. The entire podcast series is available at https://www.significant-podcast.com/ but I just typed Significant into my podcast app and found it that way. I plan on listening to the rest!