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Book Chain, etc, Week 8
Feb. 23rd, 2026 05:11 pm#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book
With some assistance from Talpa – a search engine associated with LibraryThing that can search books by cover features like colour or what's depicted in the cover illustration – I've settled on:
Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes by Simon Lamb.
Simon Lamb is a geologist who has spent decades studying the processes that create mountain ranges. The book is partly an explanation of what is known about those processes and partly a memoir of his field trips to Bolivia studying the geological history of the Andes. The memoir parts remind me of things like David Attenborough's memoirs of making his nature documentaries.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book discovered using ‘Browse Similar Books’ on one of your favourite books
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
A small crew of astronauts and scientists are sent on a desperate interstellar mission in a last-ditch attempt to find a solution to a problem that threatens all life on the planet. There's a joke I want to make here but I'm not sure if it would count as a spoiler (there's a curveball thrown in at the end of the first act that the blurb of the book just hints at; on the other hand, the trailers for the upcoming film adaptation are making it an explicit selling point).
This is science fiction of the old school, where the plot driver is "Here is an interesting scientific puzzle; watch the protagonists figure it out". There's one big central puzzle – the threatens-all-life-on-Earth problem – and a bunch of smaller ones that they have to overcome along the way. The characters have enough personality to lend colour to the narrative, but there are no real character arcs and nobody ever really does anything except to advance the mechanism of the story.
( Read more... )
With some assistance from Talpa – a search engine associated with LibraryThing that can search books by cover features like colour or what's depicted in the cover illustration – I've settled on:
Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes by Simon Lamb.
Simon Lamb is a geologist who has spent decades studying the processes that create mountain ranges. The book is partly an explanation of what is known about those processes and partly a memoir of his field trips to Bolivia studying the geological history of the Andes. The memoir parts remind me of things like David Attenborough's memoirs of making his nature documentaries.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book discovered using ‘Browse Similar Books’ on one of your favourite books
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
A small crew of astronauts and scientists are sent on a desperate interstellar mission in a last-ditch attempt to find a solution to a problem that threatens all life on the planet. There's a joke I want to make here but I'm not sure if it would count as a spoiler (there's a curveball thrown in at the end of the first act that the blurb of the book just hints at; on the other hand, the trailers for the upcoming film adaptation are making it an explicit selling point).
This is science fiction of the old school, where the plot driver is "Here is an interesting scientific puzzle; watch the protagonists figure it out". There's one big central puzzle – the threatens-all-life-on-Earth problem – and a bunch of smaller ones that they have to overcome along the way. The characters have enough personality to lend colour to the narrative, but there are no real character arcs and nobody ever really does anything except to advance the mechanism of the story.
( Read more... )
