Xi'an's Og

An unusual book review section in Nature, with eight science-themed novels. Confusedly entitled “Science fiction”. The books are

• Katabasis, by R. F. Kuang (2025), Dante’s Inferno redux, sitting in my to-read pile, set (again) at the University of Cambridge, UK
• Solar, by Ian McEwan (2010!), a comic novel on climate change that reminds me of the cruelly hilarious Changing Places by David Lodge (1975)

• The Royal Free, by Carl Shuker (2024), a thriller set during the 2011 London riots, with the excuse of the main character tasked with editing the British Medical Journal’s “eccentric style guide into a single document to keep miscellaneous fragments of medical jargon and English oddities consistent and clear”, which I could read, fondling connecting it to Biometrika‘s unique style guide

• The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love, by India Holton (2024), an Victorian academic journey in search of a mythical bird
• There are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak (2024), that sounds very promising, between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the current dramas in the Euphrate region
• Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus (2022), about being a single-mother ex-chemist TV host in California in the 1960s, possibly overly intricated
• The Love Hypothesis, by Ali Hazelwood (2021), “a classic romance in a lab coat”, well…
• Real Life, by Brandon Taylor (2020), Booker Prize, “an expansion on the campus novel, a genre that, he said, often lacked diverse characters” that seems intent on ticking all the boxes

• The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion (2013), which I read a while ago, with only memories of funny episodes (and which apparently I did not even review here)

This entry was posted on July 14, 2026 at 12:26 am and is filed under Books, Travel, University life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.