Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Between the bus trip to and from Montreal, and time spent reading while I was visiting rysmiel, I finished six or seven books in the last week, including one reread.

So:

Periodic Tales: A cultural history of the elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams: This is basically what it says on the tin, through a personal as well as British lens. This is I think best read as a series of interesting anecdotes, though I went "wait a minute" on enough things, from osmium being "the densest thing known" [me: what about neutronium?] to the claim (in the section on calcium) that the White House was so named for being whitewashed (in the section on calcium) that I would double-check any facts in here before quoting them.

Clockwork Boys (Clocktaur Wars book 1) and The Wonder Engine (Clocktaur Wars book 2), by tkingfisher (This is why it's "six or seven" books: the two parts are novella-length, and book 2 picks up immediately after the end of book 1.) I liked this a lot: it's a fantasy about a kingdom being invaded/ravaged by some magical(?) creatures, and the unlikely group sent in search of some, any, defense after a more plausible group vanished. Demon tattoos enforcing the group's obedience, if not loyalty. The group leader, Slate (a forger who was convicted of treason) recruits someone by asking if he'd like to go on a suicide mission. The story also includes attack tattoos--aimed at the wearers. Also gnoles, and I don't remember which other Kingfisher book they were in.

Unthinkable, by Helen Thomson: Thomson writes about a variety of people with unusual brains as ways of talking about the human mind and brain more generally. The examples include a woman who is always lost, a man with impressively good memory of his past, a man whose schizophrenia makes him believe he is a tiger, people who believe themselves to be dead, and a color-blind man with the kind of synesthesia that sees letters in different colors, whose brain sees colors his eyes cannot. The individual sections were interesting, but it felt as though the whole was less than the sum of the parts; on the other hand, that may depend on how much the reader already knows.

Exhalation, by Ted Chiang: a second collection of Chiang's sf and fantasy stories. I liked it, though there's nothing here as memorable as "Story of Your Life" (which is a pretty high standard of comparison).

Hawk, by Stephen Brust: another Taltos book, a bit more about relationships (and wanting some sort of connection) than some of the previous, as Vlad tries a complicated plan to get the Jhereg to leave him alone.

Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett: reread of a Discworld novel, which I enjoyed.