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I loved this story: about how a man, caught up in financial woes of his own making, justified smuggling a tarbosaur from Mongolia, and how Mongolian patriots saw this as symbolic of something larger and used it as the cause on which to build a case for Mongolian scientific self-determination. But Williams loses sight of that story again and again, ultimately forgoing discussion of the scientific and ethical cases against dinosaur smuggling to digress into such minutia as: Eric Prokopi's daughter's wig at her birthday party, the number and locations of the five tattoos on a random side character who will never be mentioned again, the grisly fate of Mary Anning's sister (Mary Anning being a female fossil collector in 1920, who has no connection to the main story line. We also hear about how she was struck by lightning, though!) Eric's ex-wife's opinion on whether he should unpack his cardboard boxes (a plot point never to be discussed again), the legal drama of the opponent of the President of Mongolia, that a dinosaur was named after VS Ramachandran and so, so much more. I did something I never do and skipped the notes because there was just so much random information

One thing that really bothers me when reading is when authors define new terms for things that have perfectly good terms already. It feels very elitist -- actually, scratch that, deciding that your language is better than all existing language made by people who actually study the field for a living and therefore is the only language that should be used is very ingressive.

I think. That would require me to know what ingressive meant. Cheng insists loudly that ingressive doesn't just mean "masculine coded" but she's very inconsistent about what it does mean. For instance, standing up after every talk to aggressively ask questions of the presenter is congressive (the opposite), but being confident is ingressive. But she later clarifies that deserved confidence is congressive.

Ultimately, I don't think Cheng really has anything new to say about gender. It may be an interesting and non-threatening foray for people with no prior exposure to feminism and gender studies, and I'm sure Cheng is a very good mathematician, but in the future I'll stick to math books by mathematicians and gender books by experts in those fields.

Overall, I loved this trilogy, which had such amazingly beautiful and intense descriptions of a Pre-Colombian world and what happens when different powers and religions intersect and collide. I still love here the relationships among the individuals who serve as avatars, but I wish that not every single main character had become The Chosen One (although I overall love Xiala's story). I miss the greyer morality of the other books as Serapio continues to move towards being a more straightforwardly good character. Although I loved spending time with each of these characters - and I really do love all of the final five (Okoa, Serapio, Naranpa, Iktan and Xiala) -- this third book had a significant amount of bloat, and a lot of loose threads were left untied, especially in Okoa's case (my personal favorite). Nonetheless, this is still among the most inventive, imaginative and compellings works in fantasy right now and a satisfying story about trying to find the humanity within the destiny.

Like a modern Sholem Aleichem, carrying on in the rich tradition of Yiddish novels that are deeply engrained in Jewish diaspora life without necessarily a religious point of view. Similarly to classic Yiddish novels, this one also has a strong Labor-rights and immigrant rights focus. I just found this book downright fun without much else to say about it. I really enjoyed Little Ash and the angel, although I didn't love the sideplot about the angel becoming more mortal, and I also wish that some of the restrictions and supernatural elements about the angel would have been protected throughout the novel, instead of it learning to speak all languages. I felt a little funny at the inversion of Aramaic being the one language angels don't know to it being the only language the angel spoke, but this also seems accurate, in that no one else speaks Aramaic anymore. But, anyway, overall the world needs more Yiddish literature revival, even if it's in English (but I would pay a lot of money to have a copy of this translated into Yiddish.)

This is a sweet little book that is mostly about Sasha Sagan's life and gratitude to her parents, Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan. It is clearly inspired by their work: writing clearly and spaciously about how the marvels of science and the rational world can invoke a sense of awe and spirituality and exploring a non-supernatural intention for religion and connection.

It was interesting to me that for a book about atheism, it is also a profoundly Jewish book. When Sasha talks about the atheists that found meaning in awe in the scientific world being people like her father, Einstein and Feynman, it's not a coincidence that these are all Jewish atheists. To riff on a classic Jewish joke: the G-d they don't believe in is specifically the Jewish G-d. This is important because so many atheists in America are culturally Christian and talk about atheism in a way that is specifically about rejecting Christianity. For Jews, participation in ritual life is not predicated on belief, and the blending of ritual and spirituality with atheism is simpler. This is clear when Sagan talks about her atheistic approaches to Shabbat, Passover and other Jewish traditions.

A trainee came to my office in tears a few years ago, to ask how to move forward in a world where we are constantly caring for sick and sometimes dying children. The only thing I could tell him was that religion was the technology that humanity had invented and refined over millenia to deal with hardship and that using this technology did not require any belief, just a willingness to trust that feeling part of something larger, finding rituals that take us out of the day-to-day and being in community. Sasha Sagan paints a way to do this in a world where many people have religious trauma, and/or do not hold supernatural beliefs, reverse engineering the technology to include: textures of time that relate to the seasons/days of the week/times of day, moments for rest and recuperation, moments for self-denial and empathy for those with less abundance, moments for joy and grief and awareness of being alive and this being a temporary state.

It is more of a reflective piece than a practical piece, but I enjoyed it and will come back to it.