Good morning, folks! I’ve spent this week away at a residential school learning lab skills, which was awesome but means I’ve hardly had any time for blog stuff. However, look at the bacteria I made! They’re antibiotic resistant and fluorescent under UV light.
Note: for the concerned, which seems to happen more than I expected, it’s a proper lab with disposal procedures and so on. All the samples have been autoclaved by now, my lab coats have both been washed hot enough to denature anything from the lab, and the antibiotic resistance conferred on these bacteria is common outside the lab already; even if these were introduced into the wild, they wouldn’t do any harm.
In case that didn’t move you, here’s the now-traditional picture of my bunnies, as I’m still away from them:
But I’m not away for much longer! I’ll be back with them on Tuesday. Anyway, back to the books!
Received to review:
Yay, a new Adam Christopher book! I’d say gimme, but they have!
Bought:
This is about the gene editing tool, CRISPR, that I would maybe one day like to work with. Jennifer Doudna is one of the two authors of the paper that first talked about using CRISPR for gene editing, so this is going to be fascinating.
Read this week:
Sneak peek at ratings:
Four stars to: The Vaccine Race and The Emperor’s Railroad.
Three stars to: The Making of the Fittest, Incognito and 15 Million Degrees.
Reviews posted this week:
–Cold-Forged Flame, by Marie Brennan. I think I’d have enjoyed this more if the first book had been fresher in my mind. I love the world, and Ree, but the characters didn’t always click with me in this one. 3/5 stars
–Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrodinger’s Cat, by Rom Harré. Dodges the ethical issues which would’ve made the book more interesting to me. 2/5 stars
–The Shambling Guide to New York City, by Mur Lafferty. So much fun! And not gimmicky in the way I’d feared. 4/5 stars
–Death Before Wicket, by Kerry Greenwood. Fun as ever, but definitely missable. 3/5 stars
–Saturn’s Children, by Charles Stross. Way oversexualised and rapey. Consciously so, and not in a way that celebrates the rapiness, but that doesn’t mean I liked it. 2/5 stars
–The Ghost Train to New Orleans, by Mur Lafferty. A fun follow-up. Zoe can be a bit annoying at times in this one, but it’s a solid story for my money. 4/5 stars
–In Search of the Multiverse, by John Gribbin. Actually made more aspects of quantum physics and string theory make sense to me! 3/5 stars
Other posts:
–Top Ten Tuesday: Series I’ve Been Meaning to Read.
Worth noting:
I’m very conscious that most people are not here for non-fic reviews and that I’ve been posting a lot of them. I suspect that’s why some followers have already unsubscribed. That’s cool if you want to; I’ve never made a secret of being a rather eclectic reader and prone to going through stages, but if you jumped on during a different stage it could be pretty annoying to find me switching gears. I get it. But at the moment I’m going to try and mitigate it a bit by spreading out my non-fic reviews more. For the next couple of weeks at least, that’ll probably mean no new reviews on days when other posts are going up, i.e. Saturdays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
