celeste.is reading

Ecology & Climate (2021)

• ★★★★★ | Braiding Sweetgrass | Robin Kimmerer
  This wonderful book is a gift from its author, a professor of botany and member of the Potawatomi nation. Changed how I think about botany, agriculture, systems, ecology, science, culture, climate, language, the past, and the future.
• ★★★★★ | Entangled Life | Merlin Sheldrake
  Stupendous! I recommend this often. Exciting to read, and changed how I think of evolution, forests, life, symbiosis, etc.
• ★★★★★ | The Hidden Life of Trees | Peter Wohlleben
  Sometimes didactic in a German sort of way, but generally lovely. Tree communication and intelligence are surprising! Another illustration of how separating what we define as "human" characteristics from "nature" has blinded us to reality for centuries.

Fiction (2021)

• ★★★★★ | A Psalm for the Wild-Built | Becky Chambers
  This was just a lovely book to read. The world was vivid and pretty, everything was nice. Even cozier than Wayfarers.
• ★★★★☆ | Discworld Series (1-4) | Terry Pratchett
  A famously good time. Silly, riveting, creative, and funny. Some of the earlier writing isn't quite as good, but definitely still worth reading.
• ★★★★★ | Enchanted Forest (Series) | Patricia C. Wrede
  I loved these as a kid, and re-reading them was a lot of fun! Cimorene is a great character, its worldbuilding and magic are pretty good too. My five star ratings may be tinted by nostalgia, but the series holds up!
• ★★★★☆ | Gideon the Ninth | Tamsyn Muir
  Writing style was grating (to me) at first, but the story and world were totally engrossing. Creative! Hard to put down.
• ★★★★☆ | Harrow the Ninth | Tamsyn Muir
  A worthy and exciting sequel, just as quick a read as the first. Left me excited and hungry for the next installment!
• ★★★☆☆ | Ministry for the Future, The | Kim Stanley Robinson
  Eurocentric but sort of realistic climate change fiction, though the mentions of cryptocurrency were starry eyed and it's kind of capitalist realist. Fun aesthetic though.
• ★★★★★ | Siddhartha | Herman Hesse
  Pleasant and beautiful. A quick, spiritually uplifting read.
• ★★★☆☆ | The Fifth Sacred Thing | Starhawk
  Speculative fiction about an eco-anarchist-ish commune in San Francisco. Sometimes heavy handed, sometimes a bit silly, but very different from my usual reading and reasonably engaging. Super dark at times.
• ★★★★★ | Wayfarers Series | Becky Chambers
  I loved the imaginative world and characters and relationships in these sci-fi books. An engaging yet calm series. I always felt cozy reading them.

Fiction (2022)

• ★★★☆☆ | A Court of Thorns and Roses (series) | Sarah J. Maas
  Is it objectively good? No. Did I like the first couple books? Mostly. A Court of Mist and Fury was probably the best.
• ★★★☆☆ | Bone Season #1: The Bone Season | Samantha Shannon
  I had to suspend some of the more critical parts of my mind here, and the romance subplot is kind of messed up although I wasn't not into it? Good world building. Hard to put down. Felt like I was reading in anticipation of the rest of the series.
• ★★★★☆ | Bone Season #2: The Mime Order | Samantha Shannon
  Another fun read in the series, again a great world I enjoyed being immersed in. The ending was a bit telegraphed.
• ★★★★★ | It Ends With Us | Colleen Hoover
  Devastating, very of the moment, about relationship abuse. Talks about money too much but I liked it too much to downrank it.
• ★★★★☆ | The Gilded Ones | Namina Forna
  A fun fantasy read with great aesthetics. The plot is a bit straightforward, and it can be hyperviolent, but I devoured it and eagerly await the sequel.
• ★★★★★ | The Three Body Problem | Cixin Liu
  I just could not put this down. Fantastic sci fi. Has a little bit of a Lovecraftian-eldrith-sublime-vibe.

Fiction (2023)

• ★★★★★ | Braised Pork | An Yu
  Surreal and dreamy in a dark way. Very strange. I liked it a lot.
• ★★★★★ | Ghost Music | An Yu
  Unsettling magical realism, fungi play a central role. Fungi are very in right now. Murakami energy but without being unbelievably misogynistic. Even better than her debut, Braised Pork.
• ★★★★★ | Jade City | Fonda Lee
  Hong Kong-inspired magical gangster politics. If that sounds as cool to you as it did to me, you'll love it.
• ★★★☆☆ | Jane Eyre | Elly Bangs
  Depressing but not in a fun way. Talks about "physiognomy" a weird amount and like, skull shapes. I wanted sadgirl Jane Austen but I didn't get it.
• ★★★★★ | Polaris Rising | Jessie Mihalik
  I loved this sci fi book and absolutely could not put it down. Very fun. Steamy.
• ★★★★★ | The Priory of the Orange Tree | Samantha Shannon
  It's definitely an era of dragons (maybe because of all the forest fires?) and this one really checked a lot of boxes for me. Kind of long but I don't care.
• ★★★★★ | Unity | Elly Bangs
  Very cool and fun cyberpunk novel. Like if Neuromancer was better and not creepy.

History (2021)

• ★★★★☆ | How Music Got Free | Stephen Witt
  I just liked how the author told this story! Maybe a bit great-man-ish, but I can forgive it in context.
• ★☆☆☆☆ | Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, The | Jared Diamond
  Diamond has a habit of stringing togther "it could be possible"s in a big chain to connect his (often unintentionally biased) picture of reality to some tenuous conclusion. Interesting, but far too confident in and unwilling to question its own conclusions. Jared Diamond should read Oluo's Mediocre.
• ★★★★☆ | The Information | James Gleick
  Great description of information and theory, how it was created, and how humanity turned theory into practice. The section on African drum language was my favorite. Some misses, mainly around Ada Lovelace, who's more interesting than he gave her credit for (she really saw things).
• ★★☆☆☆ | What the Dormouse Said | John Markorr
  Counterculture, psychedelics and computing. A fun story and relevant to my interests, but very very focused on men of dubious quality.

Misc Non-Fiction (2021)

• ★★★★★ | Alex & Me | Irene Pepperberg
  A beautiful story of a very smart parrot by the researcher who worked with him for years. It made me cry.
• ★★★☆☆ | When Prophecy Fails | Leon Festinger et al
  The original text on congnitive dissonance, but so, so long and not super engaging if you're not in the mood.

Misc Non-Fiction (2023)

• ★★★★☆ | Wintering | Kathering May
  It's comforting and grounding to draw analogies between winter and difficult periods in life; winter has a particular function and doesn't last forever. This flavor of cyclicality is useful, and increasingly popular lately (probably because we're destroying the ecosphere in a more linear way). Not really targeted at people who worry about making rent.

Philosophy (2021)

• ★★★★☆ | Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness | Philip Goff
  Pantheism is very in, and this book makes a fun case for it. Well-paced; I found myself mentally writing letters to ask the author more, only to have him answer my questions in the next chapter. Changed how I think of physical reality, information (theory), and what could really be going on. Is it actually true? Probably not.
• ★★★★☆ | Ways of Seeing | John Berger
  I found the whole thing fascinating. What does art mean in the age of the reproducible image? What is art? What is image? What purposes do they serve?

Philosophy (2023)

• ★★★★☆ | Lost in Math | Sabine Hossenfelder
  Why are we dedicating so many resources to physics theories in which a primary motivation for belief is their elegance, yet which are rendered more inelegant by the day by supercollider data? Hossenfelder, who's brutally materialist and a talented science communicator, tries to figure it out. I share her trepidation at a "scientific" method of evaluating untestable theories.

Spiritualish (2021)

• ★★☆☆☆ | Jungian Spirituality | Vivianne Crowley
  Pretty weird, didn't stick in my mind. Jung fans are like that.
• ★★★★☆ | Old Souls | Thomas Schroder
  Stories about a man investigating reincarnation. Enjoyable read, if not exactly hard science.
• ★★★★★ | Tao Te Ching | Lao Tzu
  Beautiful and wise. A powerful mode of thinking. I find the random tone shifts from transcendent spirituality to practical political advice pretty amusing. I like that the sage (the practitioner) is called "she" in the translation I have.
• ★★★★★ | The Bhagavad Gita | Various
  I really enjoyed this! Grandiose and cosmic.
• ★★★☆☆ | Why Buddhism Is True | Robert Wright
  Good anecdotes, but didactic. Definitely a Western analysis. Felt more like a memoir mixed with an op-ed.