This Week in Books – 24-04-24

This Week in Books is a feature hosted by Lipsy at Lipsyy Lost and Found that allows bloggers to share:

• What they’ve recently finished reading
• What they are currently reading
• What they are planning to read next

A similar meme is run by Taking on a World of Words.

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It’s been a busy week of reading! I finished Chocolat by Joanne Harris which I absolutely loved, and then moved onto Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier and The Mother Code by Carole Stivers.

In the small French village of Lansquenet, nothing much has changed in a hundred years. Then an exotic stranger, Vianne Rocher, blows in on the changing wind with her small daughter, and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church. Soon the villagers cannot keep away, for Vianne can divine their most hidden desires.

But it’s the beginning of Lent, the season of abstinence, and Father Reynaud denounces her as a serious moral danger to his flock. Perhaps even a witch…

Tracy Chevalier’s stunning novel of how one woman’s gift transcends class and gender to lead to some of the most important discoveries of the nineteenth century.

A revealing portrait of the intricate and resilient nature of female friendship.

In the early nineteenth century, a windswept beach along the English coast brims with fossils for those with the eye…

From the moment she’s struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is marked for greatness. When she uncovers unknown dinosaur fossils in the cliffs near her home, she sets the scientific world alight, challenging ideas about the world’s creation and stimulating debate over our origins. In an arena dominated by men, however, Mary is soon reduced to a serving role, facing prejudice from the academic community, vicious gossip from neighbours, and the heartbreak of forbidden love. Even nature is a threat, throwing bitter cold, storms, and landslips at her.

Luckily Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly, intelligent Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who is also fossil-obsessed. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty and barely suppressed envy. Despite their differences in age and background, Mary and Elizabeth discover that, in struggling for recognition, friendship is their strongest weapon.

It’s 2049, and the survival of the human race is at risk. Earth’s inhabitants must turn to their last resort: a plan to place genetically engineered children inside the cocoons of large-scale robots-to be incubated, birthed, and raised by machines. But there is yet one hope of preserving the human order-an intelligence programmed into these machines that renders each unique in its own right-the Mother Code.

Kai is born in America’s desert southwest, his only companion is his robot Mother, Rho-Z. Equipped with the knowledge and motivations of a human mother, Rho-Z raises Kai and teaches him how to survive. But as children like Kai come of age, their Mothers transform too-in ways that were never predicted. When government survivors decide that the Mothers must be destroyed, Kai must make a choice. Will he break the bond he shares with Rho-Z? Or will he fight to save the only parent he has ever known?

In a future that could be our own, The Mother Code explores what truly makes us human-and the tenuous nature of the boundaries between us and the machines we create.

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I’m currently reading Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson.

A ghost has no substance, but it has power – and presence – and it can appear in alternative forms. In the metaverse, we are all alternative forms. The Dead will join us.

Our lives are digital, exposed and always-on. We track our friends and family wherever they go. We have millennia of knowledge at our fingertips.

We know everything about our world. But we know nothing about theirs.

We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They’ve simply adapted and innovated, found new channels to reach us. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect.

To live amongst us.
To remind us.
To tempt us.
To take their revenge.

These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead – of those we’ve lost, loved, forgotten… and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be.

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My next read is likely to be The Old Woman With the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo, translated by Chi-Young Kim.

She never presumed she herself would live out her natural life, so she wouldn’t mind leaving this world through an untimely death.

Hornclaw is a sixty-five-year-old female contract killer who is considering retirement. But while on an assassination job for the ‘disease control’ company she works for, Hornclaw makes an uncharacteristic error, causing a sequence of events that brings her past well and truly into the present.

Threatened with sabotage by a young male upstart and battling new desires and urges when she least expects them, Hornclaw steels her resolve, demonstrating that no matter their age, the female of the species is always more deadly than the male.

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And that’s my week in books! What are you reading this week? Let me know in the comments! 😎