I'm currently reading
Fuzz by Mary Roach -- sometimes I wish I were Mary Roach, she gets to go and do and write about such interesting things -- which is about human-wildlife conflict. I found out some wonderfully strange things about bears:
Quote:
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Black bear hibernation isn't the same as sleep. They're just sort of slowed down and out of it. Surreally, black bear sows give birth halfway through their hibernation. They deliver a couple of cubs, snack on the placenta, then go back into hibernation, nursing and tending their cubs in a state of semi-alertness until spring. According to a scientist who has taken blood samples from hibernating black bears, they do not have sleep breath and their dens don't stink. They smell like roots and earth and that is all. (p. 31)
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Now I want to write a bear poem (and I might steal that last sentence, which is in perfect IP).
The last two books I finished were
Boys and Girls Together by William Goldman, and
Leviathan Falls by James S. A. Corey.
Boys and Girls Together was blurbed as a coming-of-age story about five friends putting on a play in NYC. In actuality it was 600ish pages of thoroughly unlikable characters behaving horribly toward one another, and the only one worth rooting for (spoiler) kills himself in the penultimate chapter. I don't know why I finished it.
Leviathan Falls is the ninth and final full installment in Corey's sprawling space opera The Expanse (now a TV show also). I started reading this series last year and have really enjoyed it. The setting is an unusual one for sci-fi: there are many novels about humanity's life out among the stars, but I've read very few that deal with that middle period when we've settled throughout our solar system but not outside of it. The political and ethnic conflicts in the series are not drawn between racial or national groups as we know them now, but between "Inners" (citizens of Earth and Mars) and "Belters" (those who have grown up in space, either on stations or on low-gravity settlements on places like Ganymede). It's really well imagined and they're all big fat novels and completely engrossing.