WHAT AM I READING?

 

Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport. Just a few chapters in, but I'm already liking it. Part of the mystery of the book is figuring out what has happened and why. The narrator calls itself a "worm," special but one among many, it would seem. The novel begins in media res with a murder in an airlock of a generation ship of a noble from a powerful administrator family, planned by this "worm" (who seems to be a product of a human-AI hybrid, or at least, that's my best guess, so far.) The novel then moves back to the genesis of the being and the cold, calculated murder of vengeance that we witnessed at the start.

Perfume by Patrick Suskind. This is the next book in the series for our High Strangeness book club. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, and my reaction is kinda meh to it. It's set in pre-revolutionary eighteenth-century France, with a foundling who receives the name Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. The child seems disquieting because he has no personal odor at all, yet has a preternaturally powerful and discriminating nose himself. His growing obsession leads him eventually to murder.

Rebound by Kwame Alexander. This is a verse-novel that I cataloged back when I was temping at the Bolton Public Library. It has received a lot of love in the public arena. And I want to read a verse-novel, as a modern revival of the classic genre.

Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes by Nathan H. Lents. This nonfiction title details how evolution has engineered and broken the human genome. For example, how the human retina evolved to be backwards, how the ACL evolved for quadrupedal movement but is vulnerable for bipedal locomotion, how our wrists and ankles have too many bones, and why we need to consume essential vitamins and minerals to survive. It's