Category: Reads

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

This book is a significantly dense read, measured as new-information-for-Swathi per word-read. Due to this, the book has lent some difficulty to my memory, while simultaneously serving as one of the most fascinating reads from this year. To do justice to this work, I’m planning to write a review per chapter of the book, focused on the things I learnt from it.

Chapter 1: Milk:

I feel silly for not having known any of these before I read this chapter, but as a pampered youngest child, I never grew up around infants/babies in a manner to see these in reality. You’d probably have heard some of this at home growing up if you have a younger sibling. Perhaps. Or maybe you grew up with more superstitions and you’re not sure of what’s based on science – so this list could help!

Feeding Basics:

  • Apparently, human babies aren’t given water until they’re 6 months old! If they’re thirsty, they should be given more milk or formula.

Non-Human Mammals are also Weird:

  • Platypuses don’t have nipples: newborns lick milk from milk patches on the mother’s stomach.
  • When today’s leather-egged (typically reptilian) offspring are ready to hatch, they lick up the egg-coating goo. It’s usually their first meal.
    • Totally unrelated, but I finally learnt what century eggs in Asian restaurants are! They’re eggs preserved in an alkaline medium like clay, which causes the yolks to blacken and the whites to brown. It also adds a sulphuric flavor from the ammonia in eggs. The Chinese name translates to something like “leathery eggs,” and that tenuous connection made it feel acceptable to shove this fact in here.

Colostrum:

  • Humans didn’t believe in the importance of breast milk, and believed colostrum to be rotten milk. In the 15th century, a German author Bartholomaus Metlinger wrote:
    • “The first 14 days it is better that another woman suckle the child, as the milk of the mother of the child is not as healthy, and during this time the mother should have her breast suckled by a young wolf.”
  • Colostrum is dense with immunoglobulins: antibodies designed to respond to pathogens that the mother’s body identifies as dangerous. Before the discovery of penicillin, cow colostrum was used as an antibiotic. To date it’s believed to be effective for some conditions in humans.
  • Meconium, a baby’s first poop, is alarmingly green, tarry, and thick. It’s mostly broken-down blood and protein that the fetus ingested before delivery, and it’s important that it’s discharged soon after birth. Colostrum acts as a laxative, helping wipe the baby’s stomach clean. This is why newborn babies typically lose weight after birth, until the colostrum switches to milk and the baby can start digesting food and fats.

Biotics:

  • Breast milk is mostly water: it also contains proteins, enzymes, lipids, sugars, bacteria, hormones, maternal immune cells, minerals, and oligosaccharides. These stand out since they’re not even digested by the baby’s body – they’re prebiotics that ensure the growth of friendly bacteria in the baby’s gut! The prebiotics help promote good bacteria and annihilate harmful ones.
    • Probiotics = ingesting bacteria that the human body should already contain. Prebiotics help these bacteria thrive.
    • Apparently, synbiotics are a combination of prebiotics and probiotics, and postbiotics are what the probiotics create when given prebiotics…now that seems like crazy-town.
  • C. difficile infections, which threaten the lives of patients who have been subjected to heavy doses of antibiotics, occur due to the annihilation of good bacteria from the patient’s digestive system. Recently, they’ve found a reliable treatment for it: pumping a brown slurry of a healthy person’s poop into the patient’s intestines. Fecal Matter Transplant is being studied in the US.

Mechanical Engineering of the Nipple:

  • Montgomery glands are responsible for creating a lubricant over the nipples to prevent chafing from a baby feeding.
  • The nipple is packed with nerves to detect a vacuum being created by the baby’s mouth and sucking, which starts the chain reaction of oxytocin being released. This is why we can use a breast pump to simulate the same reactions.
  • Baby’s saliva creates a feedback loop for the brain: it’s a two way communication. The saliva is used to understand what the baby’s body needs, and the brain creates the appropriate mix of proteins and hormones in the mother’s milk to feed it. This is not replaceable by a breast pump.
  • Human bodies are more expressive on the left side than the right, and 60-90% of women preferentially feed their babies on their left side. This is mind-boggling to me.

    Cautionary Statistic:

    • Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death in women, after cardiovascular diseases. We’ve become better at managing the impact of breast cancer by learning to diagnose it sooner, and testing more frequently. The incidence rate of breast cancer in humans has not changed, and is around 1 in 8 American women over their lifetime.

    Pachinko: An immersion

    ~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

    Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko is a masterwork. The story begins with Hoonie, a quiet, resilient man whose death leaves behind Yangjin and Sunja. But as the pages turn, the focus shifts from mother to daughter, to in-laws and grandchildren, each carrying generational scars in their own way.

    In Sunja and Kyunghee, I felt the pain of women in the extreme patriarchal society of Korea, hated Yoseb for being the head of the family, for overruling the women in his household who often made better, and more practical decisions. In Solomon, I recognized parts of my own daily struggles as an immigrant: of not knowing when I fit in and when I don’t, or even when I want to, and when I don’t.

    The book is based on 20th century Koreans, primarily set in Osaka. With it, it brings the background of Japan’s annexation of Korea, racism, subjugation, and loss of identity of Koreans displaced, stories of families who move from Korea to Japan in search for stability. Min Jin beautifully narrates these struggles with historical context, first from annexation, through colonial oppression, later the second world war and the bits of pieces of news Sunja’s family hears about the Americans and the wars. At their best, Sunja’s was middle class family of Korean immigrants settled in Osaka, at their worst, they’d endured starvation, deaths, and unimaginable losses. Even at the very end, in Solomon’s adulthood in the 90s, we see impacts of stereotyping and racism on Koreans. The author doesn’t take us through the struggles of war from the front-lines, but explores it from the confines of the day to day of the hopes and dreams of Sunja: through their worn-out clothes and ingredients in their pantries.

    I’d happily recommend this book to someone who’s looking for a deeply emotional work of fiction: one that is similar to Ruth Ozeki’s or Jhumpa Lahiri’s prose.

    Early Indians by Tony Joseph

    ~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

    I gave this book a second shot after dropping it over a year ago. A friend insisted it was an informative read, so I dove back in despite the denseness of the author’s writing. I still found the writing to be strained, and the author struggles with explaining scientific concepts and genomic research fluidly. His writing about history is much more enjoyable to read, but the science is necessary to comprehend the history which made the overall read a tad arduous. The effort is worth it though – I personally learnt a lot about Indian pre-history, the answers that DNA research has now brought to light that didn’t exist even 10 years ago, and how that corroborates or contradicts stories and theories I’ve heard growing up.

    On Writings and Maps

    My other overall gripe with this book is the poor use of imagery and maps. They exist, yes, but they were undoubtedly added as an after-thought. Perhaps the editor thought the sub-200 paged book would ‘not cut it’ and added padding with some maps and illustrations. Whatever the reason, the book could have benefitted from illustrations that were more relevant, and better placed with the narratives.

    Example below depicts my annoyance: the page on the left is incomplete, with a half-sentence hanging off that would need the reader to flip past the map to complete the author’s train of thought. In doing so, oops, you’ve now skipped the map that would have helped understand the geography of what the author is speaking about, so you need to go back.

    Sometimes, the images are irrelevant to the current topics of dense, scientific explanations – this left me infuriated a couple of times. Here is a page from early in the book where the author sets out to explain some pretty complicated genomic science, how mtDNA and Y-chromosomes are passed along generations, and how they have been helpful in our current understanding of history alongside archeological evidence. Alongside this complexity, we get some fairly irrelevant cell diagrams: the connect is ‘biology’, I guess?

    Here’s another page for comparison where I’d argue that the architecture of the prose and imagery were done right! We have the author narrating early Indian evidence and humanity’s first artistic endeavors from the Bhimbetka caves in Madhya Pradesh, and after a crisply ended sentence we see images of both the caves, and the early Homo Sapiens’ art in the photos provided – we just needed more of these, and less of the cases above! Would have made the read a lot more pleasant!

    Fascinating Lessons

    Alright, gripes about the editing of the book aside, here are some fascinating things I learnt from this read!

    1. India has not invested enough in the understanding of our early history. The resources provided to archeology seem quite minimal, leaving a lot of unturned places of history. Tony Joseph says that one of the places we should visit to get a sense of the grandeur of the Harappan Civilization would be to visit Dholavira in the Great Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, a 7 hour drive from Ahmedabad. Dholavira was a crucial hub for the Harappan Civilization’s overseas trade with Mesopotamia!
    2. Unicorns were a part of Proto-Indian history too! The commonest seal in the Harappan Civilization, about 60% of all discovered seals have the image of a unicorn. So much so that it is believed to have been a ‘state symbol’ similar in importance to the Ashoka Chakra today. (Did anyone else think Unicorns were a western fascination?)
    3. Reconstructed Proto-Dravidian vocabulary helps identify the timing of when Proto-Zagrosian and Proto-Dravidian languages (and hence people) separated: not before animals like goat and sheep were domesticated, or early forms of agriculture, but not after writing was invented. ‘Tal’ which means to push in Proto-Dravidian, means to ‘write’ in Elamite (language spoken in Elam, in present day Iran). McAlpin explains that the original meaning of ‘Tal’ was to ‘push in’, and since early cuneiform writing involved clay tablets with the same action, the word went on to take the second meaning of ‘writing’ in Elamite after writing was invented. Proto-Dravidians must have separated from Elamites before writing was invented, and therefore the word never acquired this meaning! The word for writing in Dravidian languages instead derives from ‘drawing’ or ‘paint’.
    4. The worship of the phallic symbol could have been as old as the Harappan Civilization. After Indo-European language speakers reached South Asia, the language of the Harappans became limited to South India, while the culture and myths melded with those of the new Indo-Aryan-language-speaking migrants to create what we now perceive as the core of Indian culture.
    5. Those who brought Dravidian languages to south India (around 2800-2600 BCE) must have been pastoralists.
    6. One of the ways scientists determined where Dravidians had lived was by analyzing the names of towns and cities at different points in history: a name that ended in ‘palli’ or ‘halli’ would have been derived from Dravidian languages, and would help point to the latest stage at which the population used a Dravidian language for daily interaction.
    7. Languages spoken by Indians today fall into four major families. That I hadn’t learnt this before stunned me.
      • Dravidian: A fifth of Indians (including me!) speak a Dravidian language which has no language-kin outside of South Asia
      • Indo-European, is spoken by over 75% of Indians today and is spread all the way from South Asia to Europe
      • Austroasiatic: spoken by just 1.2% of the population in India and is spread across South Asia and East Asia
        • The short explanation for the presence of Austroasiatic language in India is that it arrived from South-East Asia around 2000 BCE as a part of the farming migrations in China. Based on the sub-species of rice harvested in India and in China, science has also shown that rice farming was not brought to India from China.
        • These fall within one of two families of languages: Munda, or Khasi. Both these are related to Mon-Khmer languages of Vietnam, Cambodia, and parts of Nepal, Burma, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and southern China. Nicobarese is also an Austroasiatic language.
          • Munda is spoken in eastern India, particularly Jharkhand, and in central India in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra
          • Khasi is spoken in Meghalaya and to some extent in Assam
      • Tibeto-Burman: spoken by under 1% of Indians and is spread across South Asia, China, and South-East Asia
    8. The Yamnaya, a civilization from Kazakh (and a part of the Steppe Herder lineage) burst upon Europe around 3000 BCE, a thousand years before their descendants reached South Asia. The new influx into Europe by these migrants were identified using their Corded Wares, a distinctive style of pottery.
      • Yamnayas were a male centric population. A small number of males must have been wildly successful in spreading their genes, based on genomic evidence. Local pre-existing Y chromosomes get wiped out dramatically after the invasion by Yamnayas.
      • Basque is the only indigenous non-European language left in Western Europe today (derived from pre-Steppe migrations)
      • These migrants from Steppe had a clear preference for a non-urban, mobile lifestyle which could be part of the reason why India had to wait for over a millennium after the Harappan Civilization for its second urbanization.
    9. On the Vedas:
      • Indian culture is not synonymous with Vedic culture: Harappan civilization precedes the earliest vedas, and hence also the earliest instance of the caste system
      • Rigveda denounces ‘Shishna-Deva’ or phallic-worshippers, while the Harappans leave no doubt that phallus worship was a part of their faith. In fact, archeologists have found clear evidence of the deliberate destruction of phallic idols and symbols in Dholavira and other sites.
      • There is no horse-related imagery in Harappan culture, and an abundance of it in the Rig-Vedas
      • Rigveda has a word for Copper ‘ayas’, since later when Iron was discovered, the word ‘krsna ayas’ was used to describe it – settling the timeline for the vedas to have been written somewhere between 2000 BCE and 1400 BCE: meaning the earliest veda post-dates the Harappan Civilization.
    10. Caste System materialized out of nowhere, literally. It did not come with the Aryan migration (or the Steppe/Yamnayas), nor was it created at the same time as the Rig Vedas. In fact, DNA evidence shows that even until 100 CE, the populations in the sub-continent were mixing with each other. Around 100 CE however, genetic evidence shows that the inter-mixing stopped: as though a new ideology imposed on the society new restrictions and a new way of life. “It was social engineering on a scale never attempted before or after, and it succeeded wildly, going by the results of genetic research”. The 4 varnas are mentioned in the part of the Rig Veda most likely believed to have been written later, and the oldest veda also makes no mention of occupational roles for these varnas.
    11. Genetics and Food Habits: Consumption patterns for dairy in India point to a clear demarcation that northern and western parts of India consume more milk and milk products than southern and eastern Indians. They also consume less meat and fish than their southern and eastern counterparts. It’s been shown that a specific mutation 13910T which originated in Europe 7500 years ago is responsible for allowing humans to digest milk beyond infancy. (Fun fact: Humans are the only species to have known to develop this mutation and be able to digest milk past infancy. All the cartoons we see of an adult Tom drinking milk is a lie, and milk for adult cats is mildly poisonous to their lactose intolerant selves. Kittens can drink milk, just as all human babies can digest milk.) This mutation is of particular interest here since a countrywide screening of DNA samples shows that lactase tolerance reduces as we move from North-West India to South-East.

    Overall, this was a fascinating read that I’d recommend, one that is worth the wrestling with some dense pages.

    Wonderful Read: City of Djinns by William Dalrymple

    ~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

    Dalrymple can always be trusted to create poetic travelogues, and his year in Delhi in this book is not a letdown! He traverses the lines between anecdotal story telling and lessons in history easily, although not as masterfully as his other books.

    My own visits to Delhi — short days in mid-2000s — made some of his 1980s references feel distant; I also hadn’t realized the depth of Mughal influence in Delhi. One passage to me, in particular, captured the way Dalrymple weaves history, legend, and the enduring presence of the mystic in Delhi:

    “Standing there in the dark temple, as the rain lashed down on the ghats, I realized that of course it must have been the sadhus here on the banks of the Jumna who had preserved this most ancient of Delhi legends: the story of the Ten Horse Sacrifice and, long epochs before that, the tale of the sacred shastras emerging from the river flooded by the monsoon cloudburst. It was a wonderful legend: the mythical story of Delhi’s first birth linked with the undeniable fact of its annual rebirth in the monsoon rains.

    Indraprastha had fallen; six hundred years of Muslim domination had come and gone; a brief interruption by the British was almost forgotten. But Shiva, the oldest living God in the world, was still worshipped; Sanskrit – a language which predates any other living tongue by millennia – was still read, still spoken. Moreover, the sadhus and rishis – familiar figures from the Mahabharata – remained today, still following the rigorous laws of India’s most ancient vocation: giving up everything to wander the face of the earth in search of enlightenment; renouncing the profane in the hope of a brief glimpse of the sacred. In these wet and dishevelled figures sitting cross-legged under the neem and banyan trees of the river bank lay what must certainly be the most remarkable Delhi survival of all.”

    Eye-opener: Humankind by Rutger Bregman

    ~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

    Rutger Bregman subtitles this book as a ‘Hopeful History’, and as someone who has read and feared Lord of the Flies, it served precisely as that. Some of the points raised in the book were so poignant that I had to re-read sentences several times, and review the supporting evidence over and over before even beginning to accept it.

    1. Over 50% of soldiers in the front lines of WWII did not shoot. On a cold wintry November morning in 1943, Colonel Samuel Marshall decides to do something groundbreaking: he decides to interview groups of servicemen in war.

    …he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One frustrated officer related how he had gone up and down the lines yelling, ‘Goddammit! Start shooting!’ Yet, ‘they fired only while I watched them or while some other officer stood over them’.

    While some of Colonel Marshall’s claims have been doubted, the evidence supporting his claim that “most soldiers are not killers” has only been growing, and becoming further irrefutable. Studies from the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil war showed that most of the 27 thousand muskets retrieved from the battlefields were fully loaded. Since priming a musket takes several steps, and more importantly, takes time not spent shooting, this is truly surprising. More shocking still, is that over 12 thousand of them were double loaded, and half of those were triple loaded. Much later, historians deciphered the sentiment behind this: loading a gun was an excuse to not shoot it.

    Most of the British soldiers killed in the Second WW were killed remotely, over 85% of them through grenades, mortars, aerial bombing, land mines, and booby traps. Over time, weaponry has gotten better at remote violence, in a way to overcome the issue of soldiers on the front line being unwilling to shoot at each other.

    In the face of such evidence, what I was left pondering about was the cause of violence today: in cities, where a single shooter, or a car driver murders dozens. I wonder what Rutger Bregman says about that.

    From the discovery and story telling about Easter Island, to how the government reacts to situations of crisis, Rutger Bregman’s hopeful history is not only compelling in rewriting how we think about humanity, but also points out the dangers of being too cynical. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, it can be argued that the government’s misconception of the state of law and order in the city caused the governor to take drastically violent measures when they were not necessary – literally taking away innocent lives in effect.

    Bregman also warns us against using empathy as the solution to our problems today: firstly because it is a very narrow tool – one that takes time to build. And secondly, because empathy alone will still lead to consequences we do not want:

    One thing is for certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with our victims, the more we generalize about our enemies.

    From debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment, to diving into details of shipwrecks that emulated the set-up of Lord of the Flies to debunk the anarchist explanations of human-motivations, this book does it all, and serves as a powerful reminder of not only what Humankind could be, but what Humankind already is – and it’s an uplifting read.

    A trite read: Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel

    ~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

    Kaikeyi, a character from Ramayana is rich with possibilities. She’s one of the wives of Rama’s father, the cause of Rama’s exile from Ayodhya, and by all accounts of the Indian mythology: an egotistic female filled with jealousy and surrounded by bad advisors.

    Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel’s parallel with Madeline Miller’s Circe is impossible to ignore: they’re both books that centered on a smaller female antagonist from the Epics they belonged to, and aimed to rewrite the story with a new, feminist perspective.

    That’s also, unfortunately, where the similarities end. Where Circe is poetic, Kaikeyi is trite. Where Circe is a character still bound to make mistakes and missteps, Kaikeyi is ever misunderstood and mistaken. The magical elements in Kaikeyi are only part explained, and when they are – they seem rather rudimentary anyway. Some of the supporting reasons to believe in this positive spin of Kaikeyi are also very forced – particularly Ravana’s story arc.

    All in all, this isn’t a read I would recommend, but if it’s on your bookshelf already – nothing sharp I would say to dissuade you either.

    Moving Read: The Namesake by Jhumpa Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri

    ~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

    Given that the book is rooted in identity crisis borne from a child’s name, it only seems right to name the author with her full Bengali name. A name that she was given in London, UK by her immigrant parents who later immigrated to the United States when she was 3 years old. That Lahiri deeply understands identity shifts for immigrants was clear on display in the short stories of Interpreter of Maladies; in Namesake, it rubs you raw.

    From the start of the book, I was hooked. I was hooked with dismay, as I realized I was in for an emotional read of yearning, longing, growth, grief, and heartache. So much heartache. The book is set in Massachusetts, revolving around the family of Gangulis – Ashoke, and Ashima, a newly married, arranged-marriage couple who settled in a land distant from Calcutta where they’re from. Ashima, having moved after the wedding to stay with her husband, goes through the heart-wrenches of missing festivals back home, missing her family, missing the food, and the Bengali culture, just like each of us who moved here from thousands of miles away. And just like each of us, Ashima and Ashoke slowly settle in, finding their circles of friends who substitute as uncles and aunts for their kids, finding their neighborhood Bengali supermarket, and tailoring new traditions around their festivals. Gogol, their first child, remembers with annoyance how all his birthdays were reasons for his parents to get their friends together, how the boisterous group of Bengalis would crowd in their living room, the pans of cooked food still in their cooking utensils atop the dining table, the endless rounds of food, drinks, and more food. The story then moves to focus on Gogol, as it would for the remainder of the book. I didn’t like Gogol, I didn’t like his entitlement, his disrespect for his parents, or his resentment of all things Bengali. Maybe I saw too much of myself in his parents, it’s hard not to.

    As Gogol grows up, we see him make choices – from his friends, to romantic relationships, city he chooses to settle in, and who he chooses to settle with. We see the influence of the choices his parents made reflect in his choices, sometimes directly, sometimes through rebellion. The book follows Gogol’s life, through the everyday, but what touched me the most were the aspects of his parents, and his family back in Calcutta.

    The book was heart-wrenching to read, for me, perhaps because it hit a little too close to home.

    Good Read: Tits Up by Sarah Thornton

    ~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

    Sarah Thornton is a sociologist and writer. Most importantly for this book, she is also a patient of a mastectomy, and all the following breast implants and lift surgeries deemed as a package deal. In undergoing these procedures, she started to wonder more about her breasts, and the socio-cultural stigmas and taboos around it. And thereby started her journey of discovery, research, and writing for this book that beautifully presents the issues with how we view breasts, and the implications of it.

    The book is broken down into chapters that focus on breasts in different ways: from the sexualization of them in strip clubs, the mammalian function of lactation, to cutting through the flesh in surgical theaters, designing bras for the right fit, and religious and pagan beliefs about breasts, Thornton covers each research area masterfully. She never judges the subjects of her conversation, and in the odd places where she does have biases and opinions, she mentions them explicitly for the readers. The chapter on the operations of Milk Banks in California, which explains the rise and dangers of formula as an alternative to breast milk was particularly insightful.

    I learnt so much from this book, which I think makes for an excellent read especially alongside Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution which I’m currently also reading. Some fascinating, startling, and terrifying quotes and pieces of information were:

    1. “In some western African countries like Cameroon and Guinea-Bissau, the presence of breasts makes women so vulnerable to sexual violence that an alarming number of mothers and other family members subject their pubescent girls to a painful process called breast ironing, whereby breasts are cauterized, pounded, and bound over months to try to delay breast development.” https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/breast-ironing-cameroon-harmful-practice-girls/
    2. In Mali, ‘she whose breasts have fallen’ is a respectful term for an older woman, not a slur betraying derision or disgust.
    3. In Hindu mythology, Sati Mata, an aspect of Shakthi, sacrificed her life in an immolation in a sacred pyre. Her ashes are believed to have been strewn all across India and the Indian subcontinent, and there are temples associated with each of her body parts, including her breasts and vagina, which are all considered sacred. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakta_pithas
    4. “I recently asked my niblings, who attended a public high school in an affluent suburb in New York City, what words their friends use for breasts. My nephew, a 16 year old sophomore who socializes with his mates on the soccer team, openly rattled off six terms, starting with “rack” and ending with “tits”. My niece, an 18 year old senior, said that the only word the girls in her grade used regularly was “boobs”. This disparity in vocabulary is symptomatic of the gender inequalities embodied unconsciously by many Americans. It is also indicative of the larger problem of who defines and controls women’s bodies.”

    So, what can we do? We can educate ourselves about our bodies, and refuse definitions and depictions from male-dominated society, we can reclaim our words and the power of our vocabulary. We can recommend and promote this book to our friends. We can stand tall, walk with our shoulders back, and walk with purpose and confidence, which we will also henceforth call, ‘Tits Up’.

    I’ll end this review by thanking my friend for recommending this book to me, and for letting me borrow her copy of it.

    Satisfying story-telling: The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin

    ~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

    A satisfying wrap-up of all the different plot-lines, scientific theories, and character arcs. That Liu Cixin managed to tie everything together is astonishing to me – a feat I thought impossible even halfway through this read. I found this book to be more challenging of a read than the prequel (The Three Body Problem). There were more rambles, more story-lines that were seemingly unconnected to everything else, more characters, more scientific conjectures produced, and no semblance of a structure to the chaos. That the book skipped chapter markers caused me further pain.

    All of which brings me back to this: that the book has a satisfying end to the chaos is mind-blowing to me, and the simplicity of that end is stunning. I think this might be a divisive opinion though, but one I’m happy to hold.

    This was a frustrating read, one I’m happy to have gotten through for the story, but I had to stop myself from reading the preview of the last book in the trilogy, knowing that would only suck me into several more hours of this confusing read.

    Masterful prose: Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem

    ~ Swathi Chandrasekaran ~ Leave a comment

    A completely immersive read – the world set up by Liu Cixin is complex, multi-layered, and utterly befuddling in the most compelling way. Even as certain mysteries get explained, more intrigue is created. The prose is confusing – cutting across timelines, geographies, virtual and real worlds back and forth. There are several rambles that don’t make sense in the context of other sub-stories being spoken about, but later tie everything together. The storytelling is utterly masterful – it is inconceivable to me as to how someone could have devised this form or narration, and the translation by Ken Liu reads so naturally it is easy to forget about it entirely.

    I purchased the second part of the book with a sense of urgency by the end of the first one, and hope to unravel more of this intricately knotted plot.