One read-aloud, and one book I made my way through slowly on the kindle.
The most recent book![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cattitude and adrian_turtle read aloud, to me and each other, was Joan Aiken's The Serial Garden, a collection of gentle fantasy short stories about the Armitage family, who a lot of strange things happen to. Mostly the strange things happen on Mondays (thanks to a wish made in the first story), and some but not all of them end at midnight.
The stories aren't a serial, and each one stands alone, but it makes sense to read them in publication order, because there is some continuity. One story is about the family acquiring a unicorn, which then turns up, mostly in small roles, in several later stories. A lot more strange things happen to the Armitages than to the people around them, but their neighbors treat a lot of the fantastic events as just part of life. So, they didn't want to be housing hundreds of displaced goblins, but if the council sent them, there's no point complaining further.
I enjoyed these, and will probably reread them in a few years.
I finished The Light Eaters, by Zoë Schlanger, just after midnight last night, and decided to count it as my last book finished in 2024.
The subtitle is "how the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on Earth." The author, and the scientists she talks to, are thinking about what "intelligence" means, what awareness is and how it works, and what is a plant anyway? Is intelligence (just) about making good decisions? (how) can any of this work without anything like a nervous system?
The book talks about plants as communities, which sometimes share nutrients via connected root systems, as well as the question of whether symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria are in some meaningful sense part of the plant.
People working in the field are (still) leery of saying anything like "plant intelligence" after the best-selling The Secret Life of Plants, the book that had people talking to their houseplants to encourage them to grow, but they can't find other useful vocabulary for their observations and theories.
There's a section on boquila, a vine that seems to have an incredible ability to mimic the plants growing near it, and people's guesses about how the plant does it. The question is both how does the plant know what the plant it's growing on or next to looks like, and the plasticity required for boquila to take so many different shapes. Did previous exposure to plants from the same ecosystem give boquila the ability to recognize and mimic a specific neighbor? If that's true, it pushes the "how do they know?" question back, rather than answering it, and there's at least one study that showed the plant can mimic a plant from a completely different, distant ecosystem. Is the plant responding to DNA or other info carried by bacteria?
The author notes that understanding boquila's plasticity might enable scientists to give similar plasticity to domesticated plants, to produce more drought-tolerant food crops, for example.
The most recent book
cattitude and adrian_turtle read aloud, to me and each other, was Joan Aiken's The Serial Garden, a collection of gentle fantasy short stories about the Armitage family, who a lot of strange things happen to. Mostly the strange things happen on Mondays (thanks to a wish made in the first story), and some but not all of them end at midnight.The stories aren't a serial, and each one stands alone, but it makes sense to read them in publication order, because there is some continuity. One story is about the family acquiring a unicorn, which then turns up, mostly in small roles, in several later stories. A lot more strange things happen to the Armitages than to the people around them, but their neighbors treat a lot of the fantastic events as just part of life. So, they didn't want to be housing hundreds of displaced goblins, but if the council sent them, there's no point complaining further.
I enjoyed these, and will probably reread them in a few years.
I finished The Light Eaters, by Zoë Schlanger, just after midnight last night, and decided to count it as my last book finished in 2024.
The subtitle is "how the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on Earth." The author, and the scientists she talks to, are thinking about what "intelligence" means, what awareness is and how it works, and what is a plant anyway? Is intelligence (just) about making good decisions? (how) can any of this work without anything like a nervous system?
The book talks about plants as communities, which sometimes share nutrients via connected root systems, as well as the question of whether symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria are in some meaningful sense part of the plant.
People working in the field are (still) leery of saying anything like "plant intelligence" after the best-selling The Secret Life of Plants, the book that had people talking to their houseplants to encourage them to grow, but they can't find other useful vocabulary for their observations and theories.
There's a section on boquila, a vine that seems to have an incredible ability to mimic the plants growing near it, and people's guesses about how the plant does it. The question is both how does the plant know what the plant it's growing on or next to looks like, and the plasticity required for boquila to take so many different shapes. Did previous exposure to plants from the same ecosystem give boquila the ability to recognize and mimic a specific neighbor? If that's true, it pushes the "how do they know?" question back, rather than answering it, and there's at least one study that showed the plant can mimic a plant from a completely different, distant ecosystem. Is the plant responding to DNA or other info carried by bacteria?
The author notes that understanding boquila's plasticity might enable scientists to give similar plasticity to domesticated plants, to produce more drought-tolerant food crops, for example.
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