ARC, Books

Book 778: The Mosquito – Timothy C. Winegard

Well if I wasn’t already so jaded from having lived through the last nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d be terrified mosquitos were coming to exterminate all of us!

I accepted this galley back in April when the pandemic was just really kicking off.* And then I promptly forgot about it for a few months, followed by avoiding it for even longer because it just didn’t feel right to read it with the way the world was going. I finally decided I needed to clear my galley backlog and this was the oldest so here we are. This particular quote caught me with all the rumors flying about where COVID-19 came from:

Zoonosis rates have tripled in the last ten years, and account for 75% of all human diseases. The goal of health researchers is to identify potential ‘spillover’ germs before they make a zoonotic jump to humans. (Ch. 18)

After reading this book, I feel like wherever coronavirus came from it was like “hey Mosquito, hold my beer,” and then it seriously underwhelmed when you look at the stats in this book!

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Books

Book 587: Longbourn – Jo Baker

I can’t believe I’ve had this on my shelf for as long as I have. It’s been almost TWO YEARS since I bought it. TWO YEARS! I’m not sure I would go so far as to say this is THE pinnacle of Jane Austen fan-fiction, but it’s pretty close.

I say this for a couple of reasons the primary being that Baker didn’t deviate too far from Austen’s characters, she stayed true to them and only played with the background characters (they’re less than minor) and filled in their back stories. The secondary reason I say this is because it received reviews in the major publications and was fairly mainstream for Austen fan-fiction/inspired fiction. I mean sure you’ve got the major adaptations like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Clueless, but those are both modern adaptations.

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Books

Book 429: The Arm of the Starfish (O’Keefe Family #1) – Madeleine L’Engle

I decided to go down the full L’Engle Murray/O’Keefe rabbit hole. It may take a while to finish with other books burning holes in my kindle/on my shelf, but I will finish them!

I wasn’t as sold on this book as quickly as I was with A Wrinkle in Time, but it grew on me. The final quarter of the book was really strong! (And she didn’t rush the ending, or perhaps she did and I’m just used to it now.)

It’s a bit confusing, but I think I have it sorted out as The Arm of the Starfish is the second book written in the Kairos super-series, the first book of the second generation O’Keefe Family series, and the fourth book chronologically in plot line. Looking at the publication dates, it looks like L’Engle bounced back and forth between the two series (and another one) while she was writing in the ’60s and ’70s.

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