Although A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine isn’t as remarkable as A Memory Called Empire, I still really enjoyed it. Some of the enjoyment was momentum from the first book. I also liked the mystery of the aliens and the exploration of shared memories and awareness πŸ“š

Added this to my “brains are fascinating” note: How memories persist where bodies, and even brains, do not

It seems that a 44-year-old French man had gone to hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. Doctors learned that the patient β€˜had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus – water on the brain – as an infant. The shunt was removed when he was 14.’ When they scanned his brain, they found a huge fluid-filled chamber occupying most of the space in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue. The patient, a married father of two children, worked as a civil servant apparently leading a normal life, despite having a cranium filled with spinal fluid and very little brain tissue.

Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs is about so much more than whales. Beautifully written, Giggs uses whales to talk through society, culture, environmentalism, evolution, and history, along with lots of good natural history on whalesπŸ“š