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Wow, I loved this! I find her writing fascinating. She world builds in a way I find immensely appealing, woven in, like stream of consciousness to characters' daily lives. There is no "conflict" driving the plot other than just being human in a world that has been shattered by the capitalist trajectory we're on.

Is this a post-apocalyptic story? Is it a mid-apocalypse story? I'm not sure it matters - the world has been, IS, shattering as we speak. What would it be like to have a narrator a century old still spry, living their life, raising a child (their great-grandchild) with love and awareness of the past, yet not caught up in mourning about their present. It just is, the way our lives now are what is. We know our context but we're not constantly talking about it, we're adapting to it. We have memories but we don't live our lives stuck in what's lost (I hope) rather we think about what's for dinner, how to get to work, laundry, grocery shopping, chatting with the neighbors, how's the kiddo doing at school? These mundane things are a lot less mundane to read in a vastly changed world, but I loved that this was a book driven by love and kindness (and not in a fierce "against all odds" US style way).

OK, I stopped struggling and just decided to let this book be fun (must I overthink everything?) What would this book be like without a love/hate relationship with the city? Who knows?! Detaching myself wasn't doing me any favors, but indulging in my memories lets me sink in and take a romp with these characters.

Ironically, just as I was getting rolling with this, I needed to read a bookclub book and then a library hold came due. As I own this one - and since I discovered it has a sequel coming out, I ended up pausing it. My guess is I'll just be frustrated if it ends on a cliffhanger and I don't have the 2nd book yet, so I may as well read through my stack and come back to this one. Especially now that I know what kind of mood I should be in when I pick it up.

Well, I can't say this was super well edited, I found a number of typos in the last section, which made me think my confusions and struggle to get hooked by this book may have had more to do with the text than I'd assumed. I think it may be an instance of a busy academic trying to write a popular book and doing it in chunks without anyone really looking to see if the sections flow well together, if there's a narrative.

So ...enh? Do I feel smarter about stuff that I really knew very little about to start? I think I gained an appreciation for how groups may have moved across the arctic - and that it's all a LOT more complicated than I might have imagined. That's cool.

I found myself wondering about this same work for Europe - how did populations flow across those land masses? But I think actually I find the particularities of which group did what where a bit tedious. At least if the writing/editing is on par with this book.

But I gave it a shot!

@eldang bear with me! This is my first status reply! I take it you mean Origin? (I don't love the layout of this page, so it's not 100% clear to me which book you mean.)

Origin - I've been jumping around a bit (as sometimes happens with nonfiction) trying to find a place that'll grab me. I realized one huge incompatibility with my brain and getting hooked here is that I've never been good at time. Like 200 years feels like 600 years, I can't get the sense of the difference. So big revelations like "they thought it was 12000 years ago but it's really 18000 years ago!" is just... I can't feel it. So my eyes glazed over a lot in the whole first section which was a lot of "here's what white people used to think" and while some of the stories were fascinating, I couldn't really glean more overall than there were a lot of really wrong racist ideas that were really entrenched.

So I turned to the second section, where she talks more about her specific work, and I'm finding that more engrossing, but I'm not far into it and it's due back on Thursday. So, I may not have many conclusions!