Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses by Ashley Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars You Can’t Taste Soy Sauce with Your Testicles! *There is no such thing as color. *Our pupils dilate when we’re moved, so we find big pupils warm and compelling, which is why Renaissance women used nightshade (belladonna!) to dilate their pupils. *The key part of our hearing apparatus mediating between the inner and outer ears evolved from the gills of fish. *We lift our hands to our faces once every two minutes of the day, partly to smell them and what they’ve touched. *Coffee has eight hundred different odor releasing molecules, but the brain turns them into one thing, coffee. *Garlic improves our body odor. *We tend to prefer the smell of t-shirts worn a few days by people from our own university to that of people worn by other universities. *Catfish taste with their bodies, flies with their feet. *Our fingers have two hundred nerve fibers per centimeter, our back nine. *When dogs defecate and cattle graze, they tend to line up north to south. *A tick has a limited sensory experience of the world compared to us, but it’s rich to the tick! Those are some of the many savory items in Ashley Ward’s Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses (2023), an engaging and stimulating book about how we perceive the world via our five (or fifty-three!?) senses (faculties that detect specific stimuli by means of receptors dedicated to those stimuli). Ward explains how we sense and why and how our senses have shaped us individually and as a species. His first five chapters cover the five main senses, the sixth introduces unappreciated senses, and the last explores how perception works. Throughout, Ward uses easy vocabulary, defines the occasional scientific jargon, provides plenty of compelling examples (from human and animal and plant life), cites plenty of interesting scientific studies, and generally entertainingly illuminates perception and the senses. Here are some of the things that I should remember from the book: *Our senses are all interconnected with each other. *There is no universal human hierarchy of the senses (European cultures prioritize sight, other cultures taste or smell, etc.). *We have more than the five basic senses. *Everything about our perception of the world is influenced by our biology, experiences, personality, mood, health, and cultural biases. *Each of us perceives the world uniquely (no one’s “red, bread, or Beethoven” are the same as anyone else’s). *The brain is miraculous in the vast amount of data it processes and interprets and uses to predict and fill in gaps and coordinate based on our different sense receptors and our interior and exterior conditions. *To study perception and the senses effectively, multiple fields are needed, including biology, psychology, economics, and medicine. *We still can’t figure out the relationship between the objective reality of the world and our subjective experience of it. Audiobook reader David Morley Hale is deliberate and clear and has an appealing, vivid north England accent, pronouncing the u sound in words like some, up, us, come, study, just, much, etc. like the oa in soap. I’m grateful to Nataliya for reading and reviewing this book so as to make me want to read it! View all my reviews
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City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “…it is my responsibility to see it.” “Did the street just change? Just at the corner of his eye? Though it seems impossible, he’s sure it did: for one second, he did not see the tumbledown building fronts and deserted homes, but rather immense, slender skyscrapers of gleaming white and gold.” Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy-mystery novel City of Stairs (2014) has an interesting premise: for seventy-five years, this hitherto enslaved India-like culture has been occupying the formerly dominant and expansionist Russian-like Continent (AKA the Holy Lands), turning the tables by killing their gods, a side effect of which being that the “miracles” the gods had performed or enabled vanished, including, for instance, most of the works accomplished by the builder god, such that whole temples and other buildings and infrastructure instantly disappeared, along with whatever people happened to be inside them at the time. Even the climate changed. The former enslaved Saypur have imposed on the Continent draconian World Regulations, such that no one can worship, research, or even refer to the former gods or attempt any divine miracles or even study Continental history. While Saypur is thriving as the dominant world culture, the backwards and demoralized Continent languishes in poverty and disease. Needless to say, both the people of Saypur and the Continentals hate and Otherize each other. The plot develops from the brutal murder of Efrem Pangyui, a Saypur reformer/historian who’d been living in the central Continental city of Bulikov, supposedly to research their culture and history. Sent to investigate his murder is Shara Komayd, ace agent for the Saypur Ministry of Foreign Affairs and great-granddaughter of the legendary man who found a way to kill the Continental divinities. Shara is accompanied by her “secretary,” a giant northern “barbarian” Dreyling (Viking analogue) called Sigurd who seems made for violence, has preternaturally acute hearing, knows no frostbite, and picks hot coals with his bare fingers to light his pipe. Sixteen years ago, Shara committed an infamous breach of protocol (exposing the corruption of a high-level official) and hence has been unable to return home to Saypur, having to stay permanently out in the field on the Continent doing dangerous dirty work with Sigurd, cleaning up divine remnants or supernatural beings left behind by the main gods. Complicating her murder investigation in Bulikov is the Continental rich man Vohannes Votrov (“Vo”) with whom she’d had an intense sexual relationship in their university days. Plenty of fraught unfinished business between them. One of the nice things about the novel is how Bennett gradually (and efficiently) reveals the back-history of characters like Vo, Sigurd, and Shara through mostly well-integrated flashbacks written in past tense (the main plot occurs in present tense). Violent action starts after a few chapters, when Shara and Sigurd attend a fund-raising party at Vo’s mansion, and fanatical attackers make things interesting for the bored Sigurd and for the primed reader. (Vo is the leader of the New Bulikov faction, dedicated to improving the quality of life and economic health of the city and bitter foes of the reactionary Restorationist faction, who want to restore the “glorious” past.) I found the main characters compelling, the narrative world original, the themes relevant, the writing vivid, and the plot unpredictable. I enjoyed reading the book: a fantasy novel where the protagonist is a thirty-five-year-old bespectacled woman spy-historian with a giant, ultra-capable male “secretary” operating in an occupied city, with some resonance for contemporary situations like Israel and Palestine: “Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power—all I see is privilege and its consequences. States are not, in my opinion, composed of structures supporting privilege. Rather, they are composed of structures denying it—in other words, deciding who is not invited to the table.” I liked the questioning of whether gods direct their followers or vice versa; the concept of different realities for different gods and their followers; the complex situation whereby the former enslaved state/people are now occupying their former oppressors; the “miracles” and effects of the gods; the relationships between Shara and Sigurd, Vo, and even the scary cynical Vinya (Shara’s aunt and boss); the dialogue (mostly) and descriptions (especially); and Shara’s increasing unease with her career path as patriotic agent of the state and the cold-blooded status quo forced on her and the Continent by the realpolitik of people like her aunt. I like how the history of the cultures and characters are worked in little by little via flashbacks and chapter epigraphs as the story develops. I liked Bennett’s imaginative fantasy writing: “The sun, bright and terrible and blazing. It is not the huge ball of light she is so accustomed to: it is like the sky is a sheet of thin yellow paper, and someone is standing behind it holding an oily, flaming torch.” Despite a couple kvetches (e.g., it shouldn't take Shara longer than me to identify the villain, and despite the title stairs play no big role), I enjoyed the novel a lot and look forward to the second and third ones in the trilogy. View all my reviews
Death's Master by Tanith Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “What hero is greater than Lord Death?” OR “Love is not enough. Nor life. Neither sorcery.” OR “…half-smiling at an unremembered love…” Whereas Tanith Lee’s first Flat Earth series book, Night’s Master (1978), is a composite novel made of linked short stories featuring the relationship between Azhrarn the Prince of Demons and humankind and the world, the second one, Death’s Master (1979) is an epic novel depicting the conflict between Uhlume Lord Death and his “human” servants and their enemies, with interference from his rival Azhrarn. (“There was this between Lords of darkness… a sort of allergic yet loving rivalry, a sort of unliking affection, a scornful unease, xenophobia and family feeling.”) In addition to the enigmatic black-skinned white-haired Uhlume, who can go anywhere anything has died, and the sublime Azhrarn, who hates boredom and likes mortals who do interesting things, the novel features monstrous and compelling characters who are both beyond human and very human: Narasen the proud leopard queen, who prefers women to men, makes a desperate deal with Death, turns indigo, and broods on vengeance; Simmu her strange child who, conceived by his masculine mother’s coupling with a (dead) feminine father, can change gender at will, and who, abandoned in a tomb as a babe and raised by demonesses, fears nothing living (not even cobras) but fears everything dead (even sparrows) and communicates by graceful gestures and uncanny glances; Simmu’s childhood friend Zhirem, who is invulnerable and, perhaps, joyless after having been comprehensively burned at age five in a sublime fire; Death’s witch-servant Lylas, who’s 230-years-old but physically and psychologically fourteen; the beautiful merchant’s daughter Kassafeh, whose real father is an aethereal being and whose strangely changing eyes see through any illusion; the grotesque buffoonish “slit-purse, night prowler, seller of ineffectual potions,” Yolsippa, who is a “shrewd fool” incontinently attracted to any cross-eyed person of either gender. Etc. Tanith Lee sure created augmented, alienated, crooked, and charismatic characters and wove ironic and moving interconnected destinies for them! Despite being monstrous, we care about them as we (in morbid fascination) watch them working towards their tragic destinies, which concern mortality and immortality, love and hate, annihilation and redemption. Despite the many typos in the DAW first edition, like “heaving” instead of “hearing,” this was one of those rare books that I wanted to read more and more quickly, because I was so curious to see what surprising appalling thing the characters would do next, but that I ended up reading more and more slowly to prolong my immersion in it and its world, my pleasure in its prose and irony. To list the pleasures of the novel: 1. Awesome Lines… “To lie with any man is abhorrent to me... To lie with a dead one makes no odds, and may be better.” … Including Neat Conversations (at times reminiscent of Jack Vance) “Sorcery is a strong wine, and you are drunk on it.” “Do not anticipate I shall sober.” 2. Ubiquitous, Delicious, Wicked Irony Almost every page twists with wry lines and ironic flourishes, from small scale descriptions to large scale plot developments. Check, for example, this chapter ending: “And, being a dutiful descendant he bore the skull [mistakenly thinking it’s his father’s] home, and went without food that he might have built for it an expensive tomb just beyond the village. The tomb was the wonder of the district, and pointed out by parents to their children as the deed of a good son. Then, one morning, as chance would have it, the skull of the real father was washed up in the cove below the village. But, not recognizing it and reckoning it unlucky, the fisherfolk threw it down a dry well, and shoveled in dirt to obscure it, avoiding the area thenceforth.” 3. Fertile Fantastic Imagination with Teeth “His eyes, which had seen centuries snuffed out almost in a blink, were impossibilities—two things made of light which was black, two searing flames the shade of unmitigated darkness.” “Lylas the witch had forgotten she was dead. She turned luxuriously in her slumber and stretched out a languid hand to seize the collar of her blue dog. Her hand closed on air. She opened her eyes.” “And she grinned a hag’s grin with his own dead mother's teeth.” “Their eyes might have been made of glass. It was as if without knowing or being troubled by it, they were slowly calcifying, the calcification beginning with the topmost layer of the skin, creeping inward till it reached the organs and the mind.” “The motives of the demons were both complex and simple. What intrigued them, they permitted liberties and rapture. What was fruitless or insolent or unwary, they eradicated. What bored them, they overlooked.” 4. Plenty of Sex (the original DAW cover calls it “an epic novel of adult fantasy”) The sexy scenes often have an Arabian Nights-like earthy humor, but may turn sensually sublime, as Azhrarn demonstrates. And the sex is meaningful. It is a means to magical knowledge and power, as the mage who tries raping Narasen earned his by being penetrated by his master once a day. Or it is a way to work a great change in the world, as Simmu realizes. Or to companionably pass the time in a wasteland, as Simmu and Kassafeh find. And to fundamentally alters a relationship, as Simmu and Zhirem discover. 5. Messed-Up Characters “Narasen was brooding… like venom fermenting in a vat.” “Simmu began to laugh. And as he laughed his eyes were full of the tears of that utter panic-stricken loneliness a man feels who knows he will never be alone again.” “Death is all I ask, and all I may not have.” 6. Exquisite Prose (tight, poetic, witty, awful, beautiful) I reread, savored, typed up, reread, savored, etc. SO many passages, like-- “When she was fourteen, wandering home late from some orgy of an obscure sect over the hills and the hour before dawn, Lylas the witch had met Death. It was at a place where the ground was unloved, a place of thorns, and nearby three men had been hanged. Lylas had been well schooled, and she knew a thing or two more than most. She paused under the creaking gallows when she recognized the ebony Lord in his white clothes, and into her shrewd and youthful brain there came an inspiration. It was an inspiration of the sort to set heart banging, teeth jittering, hands cold and mouth dry. It was of the sort which comes only once, and must be hearkened to and acted on--or let go and ever regretted. Lylas chose not to regret. So she went up to Death and addressed him humbly.” I’m looking forward to Delusion’s Master (1981) View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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