a few Little Good Things
Dec. 16th, 2018 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateWe put up our tiny fake Christmas tree yesterday, on a tiny table in front of the TV instead of the window, since I set up a shelving unit for the Megatherium's calico critter & friends hoard(horde? both?) there last week. It is pretty and cheerful and so far the cat has not figured out how to get up & chew on the needles.
I got Abby Howard's Earth Before Us graphic novels out of the library (so far Dinosaur Empire! and Ocean Renegades!, but with an implication that we'll get a third one for age of mammals) and the Megatherium and I have been really enjoying them. Brand shiny new paleontology, well explained and gloriously illustrated, with a self-awarely silly frame story where a midgrade-ish black girl gets introduced to the wonders of the universe by her ex-paleontologist neighbor Miss Lernin. They travel in time through her recycling bin. Highly recommended.
Hard on the heels of that, I started Caspar Henderson's The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary which is both lovely and complementary. A polymathic ramble of creature essays and related topics of biology with marginal notes printed in red. Full of passages like: (regarding the allegorical descriptions of medieval bestiaries) "...as we increasingly reshape Creation through science and technology, not to mention our sheer numbers, the creatures that do thrive and evolve are, increasingly, corollaries of our values and concerns. The Enlightenment and the scientific method will, therefore, have made possible the creation of a world that really will be allegorical because we will have remade it in the shadow of our values and priorities." I shall probably need a copy of this for my (also newly-rearranged/established) shelf of naturalist books.
I got Abby Howard's Earth Before Us graphic novels out of the library (so far Dinosaur Empire! and Ocean Renegades!, but with an implication that we'll get a third one for age of mammals) and the Megatherium and I have been really enjoying them. Brand shiny new paleontology, well explained and gloriously illustrated, with a self-awarely silly frame story where a midgrade-ish black girl gets introduced to the wonders of the universe by her ex-paleontologist neighbor Miss Lernin. They travel in time through her recycling bin. Highly recommended.
Hard on the heels of that, I started Caspar Henderson's The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary which is both lovely and complementary. A polymathic ramble of creature essays and related topics of biology with marginal notes printed in red. Full of passages like: (regarding the allegorical descriptions of medieval bestiaries) "...as we increasingly reshape Creation through science and technology, not to mention our sheer numbers, the creatures that do thrive and evolve are, increasingly, corollaries of our values and concerns. The Enlightenment and the scientific method will, therefore, have made possible the creation of a world that really will be allegorical because we will have remade it in the shadow of our values and priorities." I shall probably need a copy of this for my (also newly-rearranged/established) shelf of naturalist books.