I've got in the habit of checking the beginning and end of books to see if there is "extra" stuff, like glossaries, pronunciation guides, maps, family trees, appendices, timelines, footnotes masquerading as endnotes etc. And sticking a sticky note tab where necessary so I can check back.
Just finished: Tales from Russian Folklore: a New Translation by Alexander Afanasyev (Alma Classics). The book is a charming collection of Russian folk and fairy tales that nicely compliments the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Some are highly amusing, others meant to teach a lesson. I especially loved the longer tales that involve Baba-Yaga, the Firebird, Finist the Falcon and Koschei the Deathless. There are also some delightful proverbs which feature regularly in these tales: “morning is wiser than evening” and “you cannot pluck a falcon’s feathers before catching it”; also the amusing ending to a fair number of tall tales: “I was there. I drank mead and wine. It flowed down my whiskers, but did not go into my mouth.”
It also makes me want to re-read: The Shining Falcon by Josepha Sherman and Tales of Old Russia (Prince Ivan / Firebird / The Golden Horde) by Peter Morwood.
Last week I finished: The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter, which is not(!!!) a kiddies book.
Angela Carter can write. No doubt about that. She paints wonderful, evocative and compelling images. However, after reading all 200 pages of the Magic Toyshop I'm not sure what the point of the whole thing was. The plot was thin and vague, the toyshop not particularly magical, and the people were flat and not particularly likeable to me, nor apparently to each other. There is a whole lot of symbolism in this novel, some of which I probably missed. But at the end of the day, this book was strange and left me feeling slightly icky.
There is a discussion going on on the site about "literature". Considering my lack of enjoyment of most "literary fiction" and "classics", I am apparently a literary troglodyte!
Before that I finished a popular science book: Life Changing: How Humans are Altering Life on Earth by Helen Pilcher
This is a broad survey with numerous examples of how humans are altering life on earth - specifically focusing on the deliberate and accidental human impact on the genetics and evolution of the flora and fauna around us. Pilcher takes a look at the species that we have deliberately engineered for a specific purpose, such as dogs, domestic animals, spider-goats, GM mosquitos, day-glow tropical fish, and AquaAdvantage salmon (i.e. GM Salmon). She discusses the wide variety of methods used for fiddling with a species genetic makeup, including selective breeding the old-fashioned way, cross-breeding, as well as various biotechnological methods to produce specific results. This is a fairly balanced book that covers a variety of diverse (and often contentious) topics such as domestication, cloning, urban evolution, transgenic species, invasive species, de-extinction, rewilding, and conservation. The examples cited are fascinating, with a decent number that I haven't come across before (e.g the Kakapo* conservation/breeding efforts and the coral breeding efforts). Pilcher has an easy-going writing style that doesn't bog the reader down with too much irrelevant material or information that is too technical. The book is a bit light on the more technical aspects of the science involved, but in terms of a popular science book, this is one of the more interesting and well written ones that provides food for thought.
* Green, flightless parrot that lives in New Zealand