cahn

A. really likes me to read books that he enjoyed, and will keep gently pushing until I do (including adorably setting up a little reading nook for me with a pillow and book holder), so along with many Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, I have now read the first Keeper of the Lost Cities books (and am maybe a quarter of the way through the second one).

I first became aware of these books maybe five years ago, when D's niece told me how much she loved them (which then led to a rather distressing conversation with D's sister in which she said she didn't see the point of fantasy -- I need hardly say that D does not share this sentiment -- and in which she was probably not expecting my passionate defense of fantasy; to be fair to her, she has not objected to my giving her daughters fantasy books for Christmas almost every year since then). I read the first chapter and could see the appeal. Sophie, the main/POV character, is a 12-year-old blonde genius with a photographic memory who can read minds; she has never quite fit in with either her family or her world. In that first chapter, she meets a mysterious and strangely attractive boy who reveals to her that she is not human, but an elf!!

Yes, it is basically every wish-fulfillment and Special Snowflake trope you could hope for, all rolled into one; I can see why it has such appeal for the middle-school age group (which this is solidly aimed towards). I stopped reading there. When E was in sixth grade these books swept over her class like wildfire, and even E. who is impervious to her peers tried them out and liked them; however, because E. does not care at all whether I read the books she likes or not, I didn't read more until A. wanted me to.

In subsequent chapters, Sophie is taken to live in the elven cities (it's not entirely clear to me or to my kids where these cities are... one of them is Atlantis but others seem to be sort of... on Earth but I guess hidden really really well or in a pocket dimension or something??) which feature the beautiful, super-intelligent, magical elves who all wear fancy clothes all the time, eat super delicious food all the time, and also where there are dinosaurs and other such exciting creatures. Sophie, of course, is Super Special even within elven society; her telepathy is so strong they've never seen the like before. I think my favorite part is the bit where Sophie has brown eyes, but it turns out that this is exotic in elven society, where everyone has blue eyes. (I note that the author appears to have brown eyes.) Anyway, she then goes to elven school ("Foxfire") where she takes classes, attempts to catch up to many years of living with humans instead of other elves, and makes friends with the other elven students, all while trying to figure out her mysterious backstory that other adult characters will allude to without actually telling her things except when she manages to figure out enough stuff to confront them.

(If this is giving you super Harry Potter vibes, well... yeah, I was getting those too.)

Elven society appears to be extremely classist. There are "nobles": whether you are noble seems to hinge on a) whether you can get into Foxfire, the school that trains nobles; b) whether you have a Special Ability (not all elves do; Sophie, of course, turns out later to have more than one); c) whether you can pass all your Foxfire classes. If you aren't noble, you have significantly less status, you can't be in the government and such, and other noble elves will be mean to you about it. Also, if your parents are a "bad match" (it has not yet been explained what that means), that also lowers your status dramatically. So maybe eugenics in there too? I don't know whether this will be followed up on or whether we're supposed to conclude from the fancy clothes and delicious food that everything is A-OK with the way the society is structured, though I suspect the latter. (There are certainly hints, and eventually more than hints, that the society is not entirely stable, although I don't think the instability has to do with the rampant classicism. Maybe I will be proved wrong in subsequent books, though.)

The target audience is definitely middle school, and an adult might, er, have other opinions (about elven society, say; or the parallels to HP) than the ones a middle schooler might have. But I will say that Messenger does write compellingly, and it wasn't nearly as much as a slog as I was fearing. Which is good because there are, like, 9 of these (so far), and I think A. wants me to read them all.

So I spent the last month on three different trips, about which more later. Our family has now returned from the third of these trips, and very shortly thereafter got sick with covid (felt quite rotten for a day or two, not so bad now but still falling asleep at weird intervals) but also managed to read the rest of the Lodestar books.

A Snake Falls to Earth (Darcie Little Badger) - 3-/5. About Nina, a Lipan girl in a Texas much like ours, and Oli, a cottonmouth-person living in the Reflecting World connected to Nina's. I had high hopes for this book, having found Elatsoe charming, but this book didn't work well for me. Nina's sections were great, but the Oli sections just didn't work for me. The worldbuilding didn't seem coherent enough for me to understand when Oli and his compatriots would act like people in this world and when they would act like animals (as opposed, say, to LeGuin's "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" where it makes more intuitive sense to me, which I know is a flawed comparison for a host of reasons, but again, once I'm comparing you to Le Guin, you've probably lost the war), and, perhaps as a result, I never really felt like I connected with any of the Reflecting World characters (except, weirdly, Ami, who never says anything but whom I loved). I was looking forward to the Nina and Oli sections coming together, but it had the opposite effect from what I had hoped -- then the Nina sections also became less interesting to me, because there were all these characters I hadn't formed connections to.

Redemptor (Ifueko) - 3(-,+)/5. Sequel to Raybearer, in which Tarisai must deal with her Empire, uniting a bunch of countries, bring justice to the downtrodden, and make a journey into the Underworld. So -- the second half of this is pretty good! Ifueko has grown as a writer and doesn't fall into some of the writing traps that she did in her first book, although the integration of the subplots is occasionally still a bit rough, and the whole Underworld timing had the air of "eh, I said it would be a couple of years before Tar goes into the Underworld, but I ran out of plot hooks early, so we'll just get this over with early." But there's a lot that's good here -- the end of the Crocodile and what it meant for Tar, for instance; and her solution to the Underworld problem (probably predictable for someone who was paying more attention than I was, but still immensely satisfying). And the new minor character Adukeh is awesome in her little bits of on-page time :D Relatedly, one of my favorite elements is the chants and songs and stories that pepper the narrative, which I felt were integrated better into this book than Raybearer, or maybe I was more used to them? Anyway, I liked them a lot.

This is, however, Ifueko's first "second book," and the first half was such a slog for me because there is a real art to re-introducing characters and plotlines readers haven't thought about for a year, and Ifueko hasn't quite figured it out yet, and I was mostly both confused and bored a lot. However, I'm glad I pushed through because overall I think it was good. Anyway, I will chalk this up as a flawed but compelling outing, and I look forward to more Ifueko.

Lodestar voting:
Last Graduate >> Chaos > Redemptor > Victories > Iron > Snake

So, A. likes for me to read things that he reads, and E. doesn't like me to read things that she reads, but this year she has had this school challenge to read books in a bunch of different categories (this is genius by her teacher, because it's definitely gotten her to read books she wouldn't have read otherwise), and so I've had to read some books to see whether they were books she would enjoy reading. :) (And sometimes I got her books that were books I thought I might like to read :) )

And a question for the DW hive mind! One of E's categories she needs to read a book for is "political thriller," and it is stumping us because most political thrillers are, well, for grownups. I am not too worried about strict categories -- her teacher is flexible, anything that could even very slightly be described as such would probably work. The catch is that it has to be middle-school/at-most-YA, otherwise it will be too much for E. (Which rules out a lot of political SF, which otherwise I could use to fulfill the category. Hm... maybe Foundation would be at her level, although I worry it might be too dry for her. I am absolutely happy to count Foundation as "political thriller" for this purpose :P )

-Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Kinney) - I've now read a bunch of these; they're a series but don't really need to be read in order (though there's some continuity; e.g. you'd have to read The Long Haul to figure out how they got a pig as a pet). A. absolutely loves these. I have mixed feelings about them. I can see why he loves them and they're certainly awfully addictive -- even as an adult in my 40's I got sucked into them just about as hard as A. did. They have a sense of humor that is funny both to kids and adults, and the drawings are hilarious. On the other hand, Greg (the narrator) is also just kind of mean and not very nice, and is often just awful to the people he calls his friends. And then again, his meanness isn't at all condoned by the narrative, and he usually gets some sort of comeuppance for it at the end. A. and I have had some talks about when Greg does things that aren't very nice, and A. doesn't seem like any of the meanness is rubbing off on him, so I guess it's okay? Anyway, my favorite is The Long Haul, because there aren't any shenanigans with him being mean to his "friends," and the Terrible No-Good Vacation is one that any parent can empathize with :P and also the subplot with the pig I actually quite liked :PP

-Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger (Sachar) - My beloved third-grade teacher introduced us to Sideways Stories from Wayside School, which I adored, but I didn't know there were sequels until E. came along, and then apparently I didn't read them (E. did) until A. came along and wanted me to read it. These books are hilarious and very, very weird. Props to Sachar for really tapping into the third-grade geek mindset here -- they honestly do read as rather alien to my adult brain, and yet I remember the book making total sense to my third-grade self.

-The Outsiders (Hinton) - I'd never read this before, despite seeing it at the library countless times and knowing it was Great Lit :) This was for the category of "under-18" (one of the stupidest categories in my opinion) because apparently Hinton wrote it before she was 18, and it was the only book I could find that I didn't oppose her reading (well, I suppose there's Diary of Anne Frank, but she would have bounced right off of that one). Buuuuut I guess I'm glad for that stupid category, because this book is really good, there's a reason I'd heard of it so many times :P Of course there's no lack of grimdark YA today, but I can see how this was groundbreaking as the first, and it talks about class in a way that I think is still quite relevant today, and it's deftly written, it's written by someone who knew what they were doing, and it's really surprising that it was written by someone that young. E. liked it as well.

-They Called Us Enemy (Takei) - DNF, but not because it wasn't excellent -- what I read of it was excellent and I highly recommend it. What with... 2021... and everything... I couldn't take reading about the Japanese-American internment camps and anti-Asian sentiment. It was just too much. E. read it and liked it. (I forget whether she counted it as one of the history categories or the Asian-American category.)

-I'd Tell You I'd Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You (Carter) - Best title ever! This one's been on my radar for a long time, since Sarah Rees Brennan mentioned it off-handedly on her blog many years ago. Spy boarding school, what's not to love! This was for the "thriller" category. I think I would have liked this a lot had I read it as a middle schooler, but as an adult I ended up skimming about half of it. Partially it's that I'm just too old for it now; partially it's that the spy girl ends up lying and lying to the love interest character, and I don't like that as a plot device. (I'm glad to report though that it's not sanctioned by the narrative.)

The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (Fleming) - I knew basically nothing about the Romanovs or about the Russian Revolution before reading this book, which manages to make one both sympathetic towards the Tsar and his family, and also massively facepalming at them. (One of the quotes on amazon characterizes them as "doomed and clueless," which... yeah.) And the book brings in a lot of sources (quotes from primary, when possible) about what it was like for the peasants and workers at this time, which I really appreciated and which provides a lot of good context for what was going on. And the middle-to-high-school reading level really worked for me as a primer for stuff I didn't know anything about to start with. I really liked this, and will progress on to Massie once I've finished his other books (I'm reading Peter the Great right now) :D E. was frustrated by it and did not get very far; it is clearly a little beyond her reading level.

I’m really really pleased with the Lodestar nominees this year. Thank you Lodestar nominators! (I did not read any YA last year and so didn’t nominate anything, so I can’t take any credit for it.) I finished all of them except the Black (and I understand why that was nominated, I just couldn’t take more of that series) and they were ALL GOOD, what is this madness. (As opposed to last year, where I felt the quality of the nominees was abysmal.) I think that the overall quality of these nominees, taken as a group of six, is actually greater than any other fiction category this year!

I’ve already written up Catfishing and Deeplight (spoilers in comments), both of which I absolutely adored, though in entirely different ways.

Riverland (Wilde) - 4 /5. Sisters’ home troubles have magical consequences as well. This one sucked me in in a terrifying way and didn’t let up until I’d finished the book. Therefore I don’t know if I can talk about it rationally. It’s definitely an issue book, and there’s definitely a kind of reader that it’s looking for. I don’t know that I would have been exactly that reader, even as a child, but I think I would have found it resonant enough that while it might not have spoken to me directly, it might have stayed with me in indirect ways. Though... the lesson it teaches, to speak up to those who care and are listening, is a good one, but what if there isn’t anyone like that who’s listening, or what if there is but that person can’t do anything to help? IDK, maybe I’ve just been reading too many horror stories lately, but it did make me wonder.

Dragon Pearl (Lee) -3 /5. Fox-shapechanger-magicadolescent Min goes on a quest to find her brother, who may be mixed up with the powerful Dragon Pearl.

There were lots of things to like about this! Korean-flavored magic IN SPACE, yeah! Fox magic, yeah! Cadet friends, yeah! I liked it a lot more than Ninefox Gambit. I think I did have kind of a hard time with it because… so… Min is, what, 12? 13? And of her own volition she ( okay, I guess I can’t talk about this without spoilers ). And I realize that E is not a completely typical 10-year-old, but I just… can’t see her doing aaaaaanything like this in a couple of years and so my reaction was basically MIN IS TOO LITTLE FOR THIS OMG SOMEONE TAKE HER HOME. Heck, even Miles Vorkosigan didn’t get up to things like this when he was thirteen.

Also, perhaps partially because Min is 13, I found it curiously emotionally flat. She does things with pretty serious consequences, and she doesn’t seem to really care about those serious consequences for more than one or two perfunctory lines, and neither does anyone else. Well, except for what I thought was the most egregious example of this, which turned out to be a plot point, so… there’s that. I do kind of feel like the book fell into a bit of an uncanny valley for me, though -- it needed to either have Min acting in a way that had fewer serious consequences, or it needed to be a much more serious book.

Minor Mage (Vernon) - 4 /5. Huh. I read this right after writing up Dragon Pearl, and the interesting thing is that it takes a very similar tack thematically to Lee’s book but fixes the problems I had with it. In this book Oliver, the minor mage, is 11 or 12, and he’s sent off on a mission to make it rain that is way too hard for a 12-year-old, and he has adventures and in the course of the adventures does things that have pretty serious consequences.

I mean, it’s still rather a lot for a 12-year-old, though Oliver is realistically presented as someone who’s very practical and levelheaded, so it’s easier for me to suspend my disbelief. And the major differences are (a) Oliver doesn’t go on this adventure-that’s-way-too-old-for-him on a whim, he both realizes he's the only person who can and at the same time is literally forced to do it (and the fact that he’s forced to do it is something of a point the book is making and that Oliver has to work through; the book is concerned with what happens with groups of people in mob mentalities) (b) Oliver is trying to save people in immediate danger, with no adult help available, when he does the things that have serious consequences, which just makes me feel better than Min’s rationale of “I’m going to hare off to try to save my brother who I have no real reason to believe is in imminent danger and when I have lots of adults around that I could talk to about it” (c) Oliver is greatly emotionally affected by the serious consequences and his role in them, he thinks about them, and it’s believable that it will affect his entire character in years to come.

In addition, Oliver learns during the course of this book that his “minor” skills can be used for a variety of things with a bit of cleverness, whereas Min learned… that she was very powerful and her skills could basically beat up everyone else?

Anyway, I liked Minor Mage a lot. I feel like Vernon is just very consistent in giving me books that make me happy both in the text and the subtext way.

I will say that the beginning is rather depressing and I was sort of worried about Vernon, and was totally unsurprised to read in the afterword that she wrote the beginning in a difficult part of her life. It does get better, though it’s a more serious book than others of hers I’ve read.

Rating! Gosh, I’d be happy if any of these won (except I guess the Black, but I’d understand it, at least). This category was the hardest for me to rank so far.

1. Deeplight, which was just That Good
2. Catfishing on Catnet, which was exactly what I needed to read right now
3. Riverland, which was terrifyingly immersive for me
4. Minor Mage, which I’m unhappy about having at (4) because it was so good but I guess that’s a good problem to have?? IDK I might switch it with Riverland
5. Dragon Pearl
6. The Wicked King

4/5. Not-a-Hugo YA homework. I loved this book so so so so much. SO much. And I wasn't expecting to, as I only vaguely liked the short story it was based on. Partially it is clearly that it is just absolutely what I wanted and needed to read right now -- a cute book about people (teenagers, but who's counting) who form a deep friendship online that they tap into as Events Happen. And one of the characters in the book happens to be an AI, which is of course very important and relevant to the plot etc., but although perhaps that's the cerebral center of the book, so to speak, it's not actually the heart of the book, which for me very much was the online and real-life friendships (including the AI) and how they help and support the characters as they go through some tough things. Um. Not used to YA books being relevant to me any more, but this one... maybe kind of was :)

It reminded me of reading Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl and liking it but being a little dissatisfied with the way that fandom/online interactions were portrayed, or rather not portrayed -- this book gets it, where I felt like Fangirl didn't really.

The first... third?... of the book is fairly slow, which I didn't mind as to be honest I would totally love to read an entire book that was solely about regular high school shenanigans in a near-future -- there is an awesome and hilarious subplot about a robot that teaches sex ed (badly), for instance, and I'd definitely be up for the book that was only about How Steph And Rachel And Their Online Friends Get Better Sex Ed -- but then at some point the tension just starts ramping up and up and I was glued to the page.

I also thought the discussion of ( Implicit (fairly minor) spoilers. )

It's a YA book; none of the plot twists were very twisty to an adult reader. But the plot is not really the point, in the end.

I may have to vote for this to win, just because I loved it so much. But I guess I should read all the other Lodestar nominees first.

(Content note for abusive relationships. Really abusive relationships, not exclusively but including extreme physical abuse. I don't think any physical abuse is shown onscreen, and indeed much of the abuse is talked about second-hand, but there is at least one (short) scene of emotional abuse on-screen.)

...And visiting my sister means more exposure to wacky YA-dystopia hijinks!

Mind Games 3/5. Two sisters, a blind seer and an assassin, are forced to go to Evil!School to learn villainy. I am a sucker for assassin-school stories. And this one had some great ideas and it had an entertaining ending, and of course I always love sister stories. I liked a lot of things about it, but I could not get past the point where the blind sister was as dumb as rocks. Basically, her lack of learning from her mistakes, thinking things through at all, and steadfast lack of communication were the plot drivers for the entire book, and that annoyed me.

Vicious (Schwab): 3+/5. Okay, this one I liked. It's a dark take on superheroes (called EOs -- ExtraOrdinaries -- in the book). It suffers from the same problems I had with Soon I Will Be Invincible, which is that when your characters are a bit on the cartoonish side, even a grim cartoon, it's hard to be all that sympathetic. But the writing is good, the action ramps up well, and some of the sly tropes really amused me (such as how all the characters are centered around One Town even though they clearly had the whole world to play around in). One minor note: I found their university extraordinarily unconvincing. Everyone -- of different disciplines -- has to take a thesis prep class where each person announces the proposed thesis subject? Is this a thing in other universities that I don't know about? Or a superhero trope I don't know about?

So I was commanded to read some sequels, which were surprisingly not bad!

Dark Triumph (LaFevers), 3+/5, is the Assassin!Nuns! sequel to Grave Mercy, and is much much better than Mercy. The pacing is better, the characterization is better, the narrator (Sybella) is better (hilariously, Ismae, the narrator of Mercy, seen through Sybella's eyes, is a very sweet nice kid, even though she wants to act all tough in Mercy), the ubiquitous romance doesn't drag out quite as much. It's still not the Assassin!Nuns! book I wanted, but perhaps that's my fault for wanting something else; this one is a solid Stephenie-Meyer-esque YA that reminds me more of The Host than Twilight, while the first book was the other way around. Unfortunately, you kind of have to read the first book to read the second, and I am not really sure it's good enough that it's worth slogging through the first book. Maybe if you skim it, or read a plot synopsis. It also bothers me unduly because the style and the characters are so twenty-first century, while they're supposed to be fifteenth-century. I'm not asking for perfect congruence or anything, but rubbing my face in twenty-first century mores and style kind of irks me. It didn't bother me as much in the first book because I could pretend they were in generic fantasyland instead of solidly situated in 15th-C Brittany, but in this book there are enough references to England, France, etc. that it was harder to get away with it.

A Million Suns and Shades of Earth (Revis), 3+/5: I have to give these books credit, as soon as I finished Suns I wanted to go on to Shades. It's probably the best YA dystopia I've read for quite a while; on the other hand, as you know, that's not a huge bar. They are very readable books. The worldbuilding is pretty good for YA dystopia but has various gaping holes, and some of the plot (including the big plot twist near the end) is frankly kind of unbelievable, with characters shuffling hither and yon solely in support of the plot and not because they would actually do that. Shades also has this totally awesome line, spoken by the chief scientist on the mission (!):

"I talked to Frank, the geologist. He says there are minerals in the soil he's never seen before. We're talking about whole new elements to the periodic table!"

(And no, highly unstable radioactive soil is not a plot twist. Though that really would have been awesome.) Oh authors, why not get a science beta? Just one person who has actually taken chemistry in her life? Would it be so very hard?

I feel like I need to add in a percentage: how far I need to get into a book before I’m utterly hooked, which I think is a function of the writing and of how idficcy it is for me. For example, Sutcliffe and Card and Bujold all clock in at under 5%. These books…

Grave Mercy (LaFevers): 3/5, 75%. I actually quite liked this book when I was able to block out what it wanted to be versus what it actually was. What it wants to be is a historical worldbuilding fantasy alternate history of Brittany, something on the order of Kushiel’s Dart or Curse of Chalion, with assassin nuns. What it actually is, is something a little more like Twilight, with assassin nuns, and a little more politics. Which, y’know, is quite entertaining as long as you’re not looking for anything more. But man, I wish that I could have had the book about assassin nuns with Curse of Chalion-style careful worldbuilding.

Cinder (Meyer): 3+/5, 50%. I thought this book was hugely entertaining: Cinderella as a cyborg! In future!China! I mean, come on, really, how could you go wrong with this? It took a while to seriously get into — the storytelling is competent, and so is the cyberpunk!worldbuilding (which by its nature doesn’t have to be as detailed or careful as historical worldbuilding, or at least not in the same ways), but nothing super-special on either front (I’ve started the second book in the series and so far the storytelling seems to have improved), and the love story was frankly kind of unbelievable, but the cheerful outrageousness of the worldbuilding kept me entertained even before I got hooked.

The Silver Branch (Sutcliffe): 3+/5, 5%. I really, really liked this one while I was reading it, and a couple months later I could not tell you what it was about. Still, Sutcliffe is all kinds of awesome. I’m really glad — I’d started worrying that I’d lived past the age where I could be swallowed up in a book (see also the above), but Sutcliffe is consistently proving me wrong.

Rot and Ruin (Maberry) - 3+/5 - Well, the best zombie book I've ever read, for sure; and its worldbuilding is head and shoulders above the vast majority of the dystopian YA I am fed. It got a bit preachy at times, and a couple of the plot twists were telegraphed pretty heavily, and Benny is a bit much on the obnoxiousness. But I liked it! And it gets major points for sidestepping a lot of irritating things in the (small number of) other zombie books I've read.

A Severed Wasp (L'Engle, reread) - 4/5 - Another yuletide-reread. The best adult book L'Engle ever wrote, where she works out her thoughts on love and marriage and work, but always in the service of the story. I really, really like this one.

Little Brother (Doctorow) - 3+/5 - Doctorow is rather like Ayn Rand to me, in that I am not entirely sure he had a lot more to say in this book than he had in the last Doctorow I read (which I quite liked, don't get me wrong). The government is evil; don't give up your privacy rights. There, now you don't have to read it. Also I was highly entertained by Doctorow taking great pains (and here he is unlike Rand, who lived in a white world) to include Two Non-White Sidekicks. Who give Moving Speeches About Their POC-ness and then... disappear from the narrative. Clearly I have been hanging around social justice wank for too long...

Elementals (John Antony) - 3/5 - Antony's a quite good writer, and I was tickled to see that this YA dystopia is set in North Carolina, which never happens. I think though that this book was trying to do too much (dystopia AND magic powers! AND young boy who must discover his destiny AND threatening danger! AND love triangle AND family drama!), and as a result I spent most of it a little off-balance.

This was one of the later L'Engles that I read -- I had the hardest time finding it as a child -- and as a result I had built it up in my head as The Book Where Vicky Meets Unicorns. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was to find that there are no literal unicorns. This time around, I liked the book quite a bit better because I didn't have those expectations.

It was interesting to reread this. On one hand, L'Engle does the rapidly shifting POV and it sort of gives me whiplash. Did people do a lot more of this in the 80's? Because if I were reading a book like this now for the first time, I'd probably put it down and go away. I guess I've become a limited-3rd sort of person?

On the other hand, nolly once pointed out to me how completely awesome the families in L'Engle are, and that was kind of borne out for me, and is triply as interesting to me now that I have a kid of my own. In a relevant point, I think the title is awesome, but I also think that in a lot of ways this is not really a YA book, or at least it wasn't a book I was ready to read as a teenager, when the title completely went over my head and just left me with a lingering sense of betrayal that Vicky didn't meet unicorns.

On the third hand (foot), every time I read L'Engle I am reminded that she just really loved science, especially physics, and really just had no clue about it. Here there's very little explicit science and therefore fewer opportunities to get it wrong, but I was rather amused by the idea of a medical doctor being the World Expert on... lasers.