What I'm Reading Now

This doesn't include books I am reading for reviews -- that explains the lack of science fiction here.

Richard Powers, Playground

I don't know how I've gotten this far into my career as an extreme reader without encountering Richard Powers, but I am delighted I have finally stumbled across him. I was about fifty pages into his latest novel, Playground, when I started saying how have a missed this guy? I looked him up on Wikipedia and learned he has won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and a McArthur grant. How did I miss all that?

Anyway! Playground is a great book, a near-future about four people whose lives intertwine. There's a lot about oceans, and about AI. The ending left me bemused, and I can't decide if I like it, but the book is very much worth reading. I've put all his other books (or those my library has) on hold.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Father Time

I've loved Hrdy's work for literal decades now. She's a biological anthropologist who focuses on what babies do to parents and to their communities. Here, she looks mostly at what babies do to fathers -- that is, what being around babies, taking care of babies, and interacting with babies does to the neurological and hormonal makeup of men. (These don't even have to be the actual fathers of the babies.) 

Conversely, she looks at what not being around babies does to men, in those cultures (like her own "tribe" of 1950s Texas) where men are kept from interacting with or taking care of babies for whatever reason. (In Texas, because that was "women's work.") Spoilers: a lack of contact with babies spells bad news for men, which frankly explains a lot about toxic masculinity.

This is a fascinating book which ranges through world cultures and looks not just at homo sapiens but also at primates, rats, and other animals. It's not just enlightening but, like all of Hrdy's books, extremely readable. Highly recommended.

Liana Moriarty, Here One Moment

Moriarty has written some brilliant books -- my favorite by her is What Alice Forgot. She also has three or four books that left me cold. This one, Here One Moment, is about a woman, Cherry, who suffers a kind of episode on a plane flight, and goes up and down the aisles, telling everyone the age they will die and what they will die of. Most passengers treat it as a joke, though others are freaked out, including one mother of an infant who is told her infant will die at age seven, by drowning.

This happens in the first pages of the book. The rest of the book follows the woman herself and several of the people on the plane, as the predictions begin to come true. It's mostly about the past and currents lives of these characters, and it is really well done. Cherry turns out to be the daughter of a professional psychic who has had some psychic moments herself. She does not remember the episode on the plane, and insists she cannot see the future; that no one should take her predictions serious. The narrative itself plays with the idea of whether the future can be seen, whether the future is fixed, and how we struggled to control our lives. I liked this one a lot.