“Throne of Jade” by Naomi Novik

This is the sequel to His Majesty’s Dragon which I wrote about previously (you can find it here). This follow up comes right on the heels of that book, and also deals with some consequences from the finale of the first book.

As Temeraire has been revealed to be a Celestial dragon from China, we get dropped into a meeting that several British officials are having with Chinese officials with Laurence in England. Laurence has been separated from Temeraire as they negotiate whether to return Temeraire to China or not. Of course the British officials don’t want to, but they also do not want to anger the Chinese officials since the relationship between China and England is not the best. This eventually ends quite predictably with Temeraire getting annoyed, grabbing Laurence, and flying off. He returns to the other British dragons just in time for a fight, which Laurence joins in since he’s basically going to be accused of treason after this.

After the battle, they decide to send both Laurence and his crew with Temeraire to China. Laurence even gets his previous second-in-command from the navy to sail them there. And they have to take the whole Chinese delegation with them. The Chinese prince tries throughout the voyage to get between Laurence and Temeraire by feeding Temeraire Chinese food, which is much more elaborate and similar to what humans eat, so Temeraire takes a liking to it. He also enjoys learning poetry that dragons in China have written. Laurence survives a few attempts on his life as well, although he cannot prove anything. Throughout Hammound, the translator from Britain, tries to spin all of this in a way where they can get a British embassy in China and they butt heads quite a few times.

Once they get to China, the most striking thing is that dragons are treated essentially like people. They can go where they like, spend money, write, and everything. The Chinese prince turns out to have an albino Celestial dragon, a sign of bad luck. The others avoid her, but despite that dragons roam throughout the streets and don’t cause any alarm. Temeraire sees this and loves it as he has been pining for more freedom in England. Things come to a head when a gang tries to kill Laurence and his crew, Temeraire was off with a lady dragon and gets mad, so when the next attempt on Laurence’s life comes in the middle of a performance, he kills both the assassin and the Chinese prince. The albino dragon is enraged but the death of her companion causes her to stand down. Laurence is then adopted by the Chinese emperor to both cause the Celestials to stay in the Emperor’s family, and gain some favor for Britain in China.

By far the most interesting part of the book is the contrast between the treatment of dragons between England and China. As a reader, it is revealing to see this and realize that yeah, dragons don’t have freedom in England. But you don’t question it too much in the first book because you’re still learning about the world so Laurence’s assumptions are your own. Seeing Temeraire get slowly radicalized and then enthused about returning to England to change the treatment of dragons is really exciting to see, I’m most interested in seeing how he decides to pull that off back in England.

The other aspect of the book that is slowly bothering me more and more is the treatment of characters within the crew. We are given snippets about them, some characters just have names and others have more of a personality, but the bulk of the ones that die have little more than a name. It feels a little frustrating as a name gets dropped and you don’t have a context or a background to pair it with. When a character is killed off with just a name, it feels like you either should know more about them to mourn them more, or just shouldn’t know them at all and not have this burden with it. I just wish it went more one way or another, are these throw away characters or are they actual people we should be upset over? And since they’re all essentially in the army it isn’t uncommon for characters to end up dead or drowned but there also doesn’t seem to be a real decrease in the number of people in the crew anyways.

I already got the third book in the series, I’m excited to see where it goes from here! It has been a while since I got this into a series so this is really nice.

This Is Beautiful: Sick Days

Bear with me a little on this one, I ended up getting a cold last week that absolutely knocked me on my ass. I was down for the count Thursday and Friday. I think because it's the first semester I was teaching without a mask on, I got my first real cold in a while, and my body just wasn't used to functioning with that.

Anyways, this is beautiful though because 1. I can take time off without losing money. I'm a graduate students so I'm not making a ton but that isn't decreased by this. And also, I think I just really needed a day to lay on the couch? It wasn't like, a fun day on the couch, but it did force me to do that.

So yeah, take days off when you need them/can take them. It's good for you. 

“The Search” by Gene Luen Yang

I think this is the first time that I picked up this graphic novel of the Avatar universe (see here for the prequel to this). In some ways, this is the follow-up to the series that fans want after the animated show ends since it deals with what happened to Zuko’s mom.

The book starts with Zuko getting the gang back together to travel with Azula to the town that their mom is from. Azula is cooperating on and off with them, with the gang arguing that she’s too dangerous and Zuko trying to work with her and save their relationship. Along the way they meet another brother/sister pair who is looking for a spirit in the woods that can heal the brother’s face. Aang speaks to the spirit and the spirit agrees to one favor, which is when Azula cuts in to get information about their mother. It’s revealed that the spirit gave their mother a new face and altered her memories to not remember Zuko and Azula. The spirit disappears without helping the other pair, causing Aang to follow it and enrage the spirit. They smooth things over eventually, and the brother’s face is restored. They then head to where Zuko’s mom is to restore her memories. This way, they are able to repair a relationship between a brother and a sister, and a mother and a son.

This book feels much more… complete than The Promise. The Promise was primarily plot driven to update people on what the characters are doing post show. You would expect this one to be much of the same, given that so many fans want to know what happened here, but it’s got so much more going on thematically.

Relationships within families play a huge role. There’s the obvious ones like Zuko/his mom, but there’s also sibling relationships like Zuko/Azula and Sokka/Katara. Azula manages to escape in the end, leaving her without a redemption and also without repairing her relationships to either her mother or her brother. But it highlights the different parallels really well between the broken and the supportive relationships.

There’s also identity and how faces and memories construct a person’s identity. Zuko’s mom is still his mom, even if she doesn’t remember it. But once her memories are restored, you see her appearance change as she looks more stately. Same thing with the brother having his face restored, he clearly becomes more of a character who can speak for himself after that.

I need to make time to look at the rest of the graphic novels, but for now they work really well in between when I’m waiting for other books since it’s a quick read. But it is amazing that I haven’t gotten to them all yet and how good they are!

This Is Beautiful: Paper Published

 A paper that I have been working on for the past year has finally been published! It is "The methodological and ethical concerns of genetic studies of same-sex sexual behavior" and it is out in AJHG as of last week! I'm so glad that this paper is out in the world and out of my brain, it represents a lot of work on my end and I really hope this makes a positive change in the scientific community.

“His Majesty’s Dragon” by Naomi Novik

I picked up this book because I walked into a bookstore and just needed to read a book with a dragon on the cover. It does indeed have a dragon. I also flipped through it and one of the reviews said that it was this year’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and that’s one of my favorite books ever so I knew I had to pick it up.

This book is (similar to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) a fantasy alternate universe story that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars. The captain of a ship in the British navy, Laurence, takes a French ship that ends up having a dragon egg on it. It quickly becomes clear that the dragon is going to hatch before they make it to land, so the sailors draw lots for who gets to harness the dragon. (A quirk of the dragons in this universe is that they have to be harnessed immediately or they fly away, and whoever harnesses the dragon becomes the dragon’s rider and caretaker.) Laurence manages to not have his name pulled, but when the dragon hatches it chooses him anyways. He names the dragon Temeraire. They travel up to Scotland to begin their training for the British Aerial Corps, a group of dragon handlers that fight from the skies.

There they meet many more characters, there’s Lily the Longwing who spits poison and her female handler (the Longwings only have female riders). And while Temeraire grows and develops, they get sucked into a few battles. It quickly becomes clear that Temeraire is no ordinary dragon, they knew that he was a Chinese dragon but during battle he roars and splits a boat apart, revealing him to be a Chinese Celestial dragon, one of the rarest and most highly prized.

I had a lot of fun reading this book! The characters are entertaining and the world being built is highly inventive. I love seeing the dragons incorporated into the world, there’s talk of wild dragons and dragon breeding programs (English dragons are bred for speed and Chinese dragons are bred for intelligence). Temeraire and the other dragons also talk and are well-formed characters themselves, there’s a dragon that runs the training program in Scotland even. It’s a fun world to be exploring in which definitely keeps me turning pages.

This book also focuses on the dragon handlers themselves. There’s the Longwings which have female characters and allow the book to not just be men only which is so nice to see. Women are allowed to fly around and fight, but to keep to the time period they usually hide it from the rest of society, and it is pretty clearly only because the Longwings prefer women. So it integrates rather well.

There’s also the interesting case of a poor dragon who is continually ignored by his handler. It really shows how the dragons are not lesser beings, but have full sentience in that this beast stays loyal to his handler, but suffers mightily when ignored. Unsurprisingly, this is due to nepotism in the Corps as well, and shows that they aren’t an idyllic group in the slightest. Laurence does try to intervene but is eventually told off and can’t help the dragon any longer.

I’m very excited to read the rest of this series, I already put in a request at the library! It truly is the ideal dragon series for me, with the dragons talking and flying and excellent world building. I can’t wait to see what comes next!

This Is Beautiful: Lab Retreat

 This past Friday was my lab's retreat, it was really nice to both take a day off from science and also to get to know my lab mates a little better. In science we forget so frequently that science is done by people, and done by the people around us. We need to take more time to remember that and just think about our work less. But hey, that's my hot take. I get so frustrated when "retreats" involve just talking about work on the weekend, this was a nice breath of fresh air where we weren't thinking about science at all.

“Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries” by Kate Mosse

I was gifted this book by a friend for my last birthday, and I finally got around to cracking it open! The book is really interesting, the idea is that it is an overview of women who historically have been overlooked by history and whose legacies are mostly unknown. The entire thing is framed by Mosse researching one of her ancestors, Lily, a woman who wrote many books and articles in her lifetime but is unknown now to historians.

The result is a fascinating mix of the personal and the historical. Mosse talks about how frustrating it is to not find letters from Lily talking about how she felt and what she thought. Lily is anti-suffrage for women and Mosse talks about how she really wanted to agree with everything Lily thought. But despite it all, she thinks she would like Lily.

Because the sections on Lily are not that wrong and most of the other women get a paragraph or two it is a big book but a quick read. You get snapshots of the women, not biographies. But there are so many women that I had not heard of before in here, I actually flagged a few pages for when I am teaching later this semester.

The only comment I have is that Mosse has a pretty distinctive writing style where she likes to leave off paragraphs with something pithy, and trail off… It is fine a few times but starts to get a bit predictable after a while. You just want her to end the paragraph simply and move on! Transitions are probably the hardest thing to get right and I don’t blame her at all but still… (haha).

It is an informative read and a quick read, with the personal touch really sucking you in. I’m pretty pleased with it as my birthday gift!

This Is Beautiful: Done With Cell Work

 I finally got the ok from my mentor to be done with cell culturing and it feels sooooo nice! No more daily media changes! I didn't even go to lab a few days this week. With teaching at a different university and swapping to analysis, it's really nice to be on my own schedule more, and to boot I don't have to worry about parking at the university either. What a great time, I still have a few more experiments to do, but they won't take very long and certainly won't involve weekend work. So nice!