The Best Book I Read This Month: Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin

The best book I read this month is the 20th installment in Ian Rankin’s John Rebus series: Even Dogs in the Wild. It’s my favorite in the series (so far).

I’d never read any Rebus books before last summer. The series was recommended to me when I mentioned that I was traveling to Edinburgh and that when I traveled, I liked to read books set in the place I was visiting. The Rebus recommendation was spot on.

Rebus is a Detective Inspector who lives and works in Edinburgh. He first appeared in Knots and Crosses way back in 1987. In the early books in the series, Rebus was not all that likable and felt pretty flat as a character. What I enjoyed most about reading those books was being in the city where the stories were set and seeing many of the story locations in person. For example, one of the Rebus books I read while in Edinburgh began with a murder in Mary King’s Close. I read those pages a couple days before my own scheduled guided tour of the close. Similarly, Rebus regularly walked up the Canongate and the Cowgate and through the Grassmarket—all places I walked while I was there. Reading about places I was seeing in person made my visit more meaningful and the stories more alive.

By Book 20, published in 2015, Rebus is retired. That, of course, doesn’t stop him from being involved in the latest case du jour. What set Even Dogs in the Wild apart, though, was the character growth. For the first time, Rebus seems to have grown. He felt like a real person, not a stock character. The same for his frenemy, Big Ger Cafferty, an aging mob boss. Both men show signs of change and vulnerability that they hadn’t shown before. It made for a refreshing and engaging read—enough so that I’m very much looking forward to reading the last two books (so far) in the series.

(All that said, you can read and understand Even Dogs in the Wild without having read the previous 19 books in the series.)

The Best Book I Read This Month: Inferior by Angela Saini

The best book I read this month was one that got me all riled up. Angela Saini’s Inferior is basically about how science has done women wrong.

For years, I’ve heard stories about how medical science has treated women badly, from doctors who dismiss women’s pain as hysterical to FDA studies that only tested medications on men to the lack of research funding for women’s cancers. I expected to find all of that in this book. I was wrong on that count. Saini addresses some of the above, but her discussion of women’s treatment in medicine forms only a very small part of the book.

Saini explores not only how medical science has dismissed, ignored, and mistreated women, but also how scientists across disciplines—neurology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, to name a few—aren’t quite sure how to account for women in their research. A number of scientists (mostly men, it seems from Saini’s examples) are hell-bent on finding genetic or biological differences between the sexes. Other scientists (mostly women, judging by Saini’s examples) insist that differences do not exist and that any difference between the sexes is cultural or environmental.

Saini convincingly illustrates the extent to which bias has influenced the methodology and conclusions drawn by researchers into sex differences and women’s roles and the extent to which these researchers have been dismissive of cultural and environmental influences—both on themselves and on their subjects.

As a woman, I am frustrated and upset by Saini’s examples, but as a reader, I am grateful that she makes the science so accessible. Her writing is not drowning in jargon, and when she does use scientific terminology, she explains it in terms that any non-scientist could understand. The book is short (about 185 pages without the endnotes and bibliography) and easy to read but packed with information. It was definitely a good reading choice for Women’s History Month.

Women's History Month: My Favorite (So Far) Women's History Books

March is Women’s History Month. I would love to spend the month posting biographies of my favorite historical women, but alas that will have to wait for a year when I’m not drowning in work. For now, though, here are my favorite history books about women (so far).

By next year, I hope to have even more to add to this list! If you have any recommendations of your own, please share them in Comments. I’m always looking for a good historical read.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

The best book I read this month was a fantastic read that swept me away. Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale is lush, lyrical, and Romantic. Not hearts-and-flowers romantic, but Beethoven Romantic. Lord Byron Romantic. Mary Shelley Romantic. Full of emotion and passion and nature and imagination.

Set in the early years of Tsarist Russia (roughly the 1300s), The Bear and the Nightingale tells the story of Vasya, the daughter of a Russian nobleman, in a village on the edge of the wilderness. Vasya is a wild child, headstrong and independent, but devoted to her family and her village. She inherits her mother’s gift—a connection to the spirits that inhabit the land and the home. (Russian folklore says that every house is protected by a hearth spirit called a domovoi.)

Vasya’s personality and gift bring her into conflict with her stepmother, the village priest, and eventually the whole village. She becomes caught up in a struggle between supernatural forces, and it is in this struggle that she encounters the bear and the nightingale.

Arden’s narrative reads very much like a fairy tale, which is fitting because the story she tells is very much of that genre, but it’s not the simplistic fairy tales spun by Disney and company. This tale harkens back to the original Grimm’s tales—dark and earthy and violent.

Vasya’s story continues over two more books, but I don’t know if I’m going to read them. This story felt very full and complete and satisfying, just as it is. The idea of reading more feels like ordering a second dinner while being completely stuffed from the first one.