August Book CLub

Hey folks. Sorry I'm late! 

I fucked off to the beach yesterday--and finished reading the most recent Meg Lanslow mystery, Murder Most Fowl, which is not one of my favorite installments in the series but did make me chuckle delightedly at a couple of turns of phrase. I'm enjoying the fact that Donna Andrews, the author, is getting a little more subtly political in her characters' engagement with the world they live in: there's a major subplot about hate crimes in this one, and a line that made me laugh out loud describing a local municipality as being "between Dogpatch and Deliverance."  

Other than that, still a lot of nonfiction going on. I read Christie Wilcox's Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry, which is an interesting book on how venomous creatures work, more or less. I really enjoyed it, especially the sections on how venomous animals can calibrate their toxin toward the target--i.e., more or less painful, more or less toxic.

Possibly the most heartbreaking book I have read all year is Richard Lloyd Parry's Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone, which looks at the aftermath of the massive tsunami that also destroyed the Fukushima nuclear plant. This book doesn't concentrate on the Fukushima disaster, but on the families and fishing villages devastated by the enormous loss of life, and the psychological impact on the survivors, including court cases that followed.