November 2025 Reading

Published: 2025-12-01 9:00 AM

Category: Books | Tags: scifi, joe mungo reed, keving grange, grizzly bear, chris sweeney, feathers, biography, biology

Three books finished in November! A marvel of reading during the school year. I even managed to read and retain some nonfiction this month.

Terrestrial History: A Novel - Joe Mungo Reed

I enjoyed this a lot. It spans four generations and takes plenty of time developing each narrative. I don't think I read it quickly enough, so I had to keep refreshing myself of who was narrating at a given point and what had happened to them so far.

It's a time travel story but not in a heady sci-fi way. I had to think about the ending for a while because it wasn't until the final few pages that everything really clicked for me.

Grizzly Confidential - Kevin Grange

Kevin Grange is an outdoors person, but terribly afraid of bears. This book is his journey to learn more about the American brown bear in order to overcome his fears. His writing takes him all over the northwest United States to see, learn about, and be with wild grizzly bears. He talks with scientists, teachers, field researchers, and other field experts and shares his experiences in an easy to read, enjoyable way.

What he finds is that if we, humans, are predictable and controlled, experiences with bears can also be safe, predictable, and controlled. Much of the human-bear problem interactions are due to human behaviors. By living in a way that is bear friendly, there is no reason for bears and people to come into conflict.

The Feather Detective - Chris Sweeney

Roxie Laybourne lived at her lab table after growing up through the great depression and entering academia as a woman without a PhD. It didn't matter - she became the world's leading expert in bird identification based on feathers alone. Her expertise was under appreciated for much of her career and, only near the end, did she get the recognition she deserved.

All of her achievements aside, I can't help but think that her life was consistently lonely. She often pushed people to a breaking point because they couldn't meet her work expectations. Those that could rise to her expectations often had the same relational and familial problems in the end. While she wasn't alone in her work, I did feel sad that she couldn't maintain a healthier relational balance in her life.

Heading into December, I threw some books on my list that I happend to find while looking for different books in an effort to broading my reading a little bit. See you in a month!