A Fan's Playground

I've been having a grand time reading this book a few pages a day for months, and I finally reached the end! It calls itself an "advanced" birding book, which at first intimidated me because I thought it meant I had to be advanced to understand what it was saying, but no, it's a book that is designed to take any birder and teach them the skills needed to become more advanced.

I loved the underlying mindset of the book, that the best way to be a birder is to bird in the way that makes you happy, and a good birder is a birder who finds joy in the experience, however they approach it. And this book is merely meant to be a resource for the kind of birder who's into getting really careful and detailed about bird ID, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to bird, and this approach isn't for everyone.

But this approach IS for MEEEEE.

The book starts with an extensive section teaching you things that are relevant to ID for any type of bird: about the structure of feathers in wing, tail, and body; about molting and other changes to feather appearance over time; about behaviour; about songs and calls; and so forth. Then it goes on to illustrate its principles by discussing specific groups of birds for whom ID can be challenging, and what you can do to help you better understand what you're seeing in these contexts.

The example birds are all North American, so it's a book that may be best for a North American birder, but the first section is relevant for birders no matter where they live and what birds they're looking at.

I found it very engagingly written, not dry at all, and I have learned SO much from it. I have started looking at birds in a whole new way since getting into this book, and it's added so much to my birding experience!

I also appreciate that it's very practical, discussing what you're likely to experience in real world contexts, and what to do about it. So for example in the chapter on seabirds, it's like, you're almost certainly going to only ever see these birds in the context of a chartered birding experience on a boat, with an expert on board to point things out, so here's some good ways to help you to make the most of that context.

I will admit I did a bit of skimming in the chapter on Empidonax flycatchers. The author makes it clear in a number of places throughout the book that sometimes the correct ID answer to a bird you see is "there isn't enough information available to me to make a certain ID" and that is particularly emphasised in the Empids. For a number of Empids you can only really be certain about your ID if you hear the voice, because they look so similar and the amount of visible variation within a species can overlap so much with the variation between species. So reading through careful descriptions of what kinds of barely noticeable field marks MIGHT be a mildly useful sign in pointing towards one Empid over another just....didn't feel worthwhile to me personally to spend that many pages on, at least at this stage of my birding skills. It's possible I'll feel differently once I have a lot more experience in looking at birds and recognizing extremely subtle variation, and then I can come back to Empids and feel like it's an exciting challenge instead of a "wow no thank you."

But other than the Empids I read through every page with fascination, even for birds that live in parts of North America that are nowhere near me, because it was still teaching me more about how to look at birds, even if that particular bird isn't relevant to me.

And I will definitely be regularly referring to this book in the future for help with some of these difficult-to-ID groups!

One of Rose Lerner's early books, and I don't like it as well as her later works (I AM NEVER GOING TO BE OVER HOW PERFECT TRUE PRETENSES IS) but I didn't have anything strongly against it.

Part of my complaint is that there's just really a lot of plot. More than I care about. I was going to briefly sum up the premise here but like.... Too much going on, really. A lot of stuff about spies though, which is not really my thing. I liked the leads and believed in their interest in each other, and my interest was maintained through the book sufficiently that I finished it, but.....just not really nearly so much my thing as I usually expect from Lerner.

My biggest complaint is ( spoilers )

Back in the days after I'd started keeping a list of all the books I read each year but BEFORE I started posting reviews of them, I kept desultory personal notes (ranging from a single word to quite a few paragraphs) on some of the books. And I always vaguely forget I have, and forget where exactly to find them, and I'd like to just have them on my dw so they're FINDABLE again for me. And also some of you might find these interesting/amusing? (N.B. some of these contain what I would now classify as INCORRECT OPINIONS.)

SO HERE'S THREE YEARS' WORTH OF BOOKS IN ONE POST, OKAY GO.

( expand this cut to see nested cuts listing all the books )

Second in the Rivers of London series. Another enjoyable book!

( Read more... )

I think my main take-away is that spending 2.5 months slowly reading through a book about the history of money makes money start to feel really really fake. I mean I already knew it's a human construct that we all collectively agree to give meaning to, and which would otherwise have no objective worth, but the whole thing is just feeling a little more ridiculous now.

Anyway: this is a good book! And very interesting! Does a good job of challenging some assumptions that the field of economy is based on, which tend to ignore the complicatedness of human relationships in favour of equations based on rational self-interest. Also the myth of barter.

It was fascinating to read the anthropology/history about the ways various groups of humans throughout time and space have approached concepts of debt, trade, cash money or lack thereof, etc. A good reminder that our current understanding of these things is by no means obvious, universal, or the best way to do things.

I wasn't expecting this book to come out nearly so strongly in critique of modern capitalism at the end as it did. I remember this being a popular book when it came out, and North America as a whole is pretty pro-capitalism! So that was a bit of a surprise. Though maybe it shouldn't have been given that the 2008 financial crisis formed the impetus for the author to write this book.

First: shoutout to china_shop for recommending Courtney Milan's historicals to me last year and giving me spoilers for Duchess War and Heiress Effect - it was helpful to have a sense of what to expect from these books before I'd read enough to get a handle on Courtney Milan's trustworthiness as an author!

So this is the first half or so of the Brothers Sinister series, read slightly out of order because my hold on the Heiress Effect took too long to come in. (The Heiress Effect will be in my next post about the Brothers Sinister, which will be after the Turner trilogy and also some more Tamora Pierce.)


( The Duchess War )

( A Kiss for Midwinter )

( The Governess Affair )

( The Countess Conspiracy )

I was really excited to start this book! But from the very beginning I was disappointed, and it never managed to live up to what I hoped from it.

I mean, it starts by saying that it hopes to act as an introduction for both what queer is and what theology is, and I'm not exactly in need of 101 level discussion of either of those things. So it's possible that this book would have more to offer to someone who is a beginner on these subjects, since a lot of the book is a) defining terms, and b) acting as a lit review of previous relevant works on the subject of queer theology.

BUT even so I disagree with some of his beginner elements?? ( Read more... )

GOSH I LOVE FRANCES HARDINGE. This is a sequel to Fly By Night, which I read earlier this year and which was my introduction to Frances Hardinge. And after finishing Fly By Night I determined that I clearly needed to read everything Hardinge writes because it was SO GOOD. And this book, a sequel to Fly By Night, does not disappoint!

I'm...not exactly sure what to say about this book? I'm not sure if there's much of anything I can say without spoilers for Fly By Night, for starters. But I can and will say this: Mosca remains one of the BEST leading characters I've ever had the pleasure to read about in YA fiction. She's just so Mosca AND I LOVE HER.

Anyways it is clearly imperative that I continue to seek out the other books Frances Hardinge has written.

What a great secondary-world fantasy that doesn't involve any human characters at all. Also, this is now two books in a row I've read involving shapeshifters, but I am five million percent more into this book's shapeshifters because they are FLYING LIZARDY HUMANOIDS instead of werewolves. Wings win every time, sorry werewolves.

( Read more... )

The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities, edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

This is a zine (which you can read free online!) and does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a great read, with lots of really thoughtful and personal pieces by people with experience in the subject matter. And frankly I'm just gonna not step on their toes and say that if the title sounds like something you'd would find interesting or useful, I encourage you to read it.