While my work is in history, I love to read science non-fiction. I bounce around from Mary Roach books and other things in a similar vein, and about half of my podcast listening is science based as well. When reviews of James Hamblin’s If Our Bodies Could Talk started sliding in I thought it sounded up my alley. Somewhere along the way, I discovered that Hamblin did his own audio and added that to my queue list at the library. In If Our Bodies Could Talk […]
Cracked, plain and simple.
Have you ever read a Cracked.com article? It’s a website with clickbait-y titles (6 Animals That Are Secret Badasses! 5 Ways College Makes You Dumber!) with pretty substantial content. It’s been around forever. I’ve been reading it for 7 or 8 years and it’s definitely older than that. If you’re familiar with it, do you like it? If so, good news, this is basically 200 or so pages of Cracked articles. Your mileage with that, I guess, depends entirely on whether you enjoy Cracked.com. The […]
I did not enjoy it.
And I’m pretty bummed about it. I wanted to like it. I liked the first half, in which nerd genius Laurence and young witch Patricia meet in middle school and become half-assed friends. I liked its many, many beautiful lines. I liked young Patricia and to a small degree, adult Patricia. I liked that it was a book by a trans woman that got mainstream attention without her trans-ness being the reason. I liked the cover art. I liked that a nonbinary character who used […]
Fun Read with Tiny Print
Best for: People looking for fun, quick explanations of common machines (like helicopters or washer/dryers) and nature (like the night sky). In a nutshell: Creator of xkcd brings his cute drawings and research skills to a large-format book. Line that sticks with me: None really, but I did chuckle a bunch. Why I chose it: I thoroughly enjoyed his book “What If” — it was one of my top books last year. So it seemed natural to pick up his next one. Review: This is […]
Come for the Science; Stay for the End Notes
Sam Kean is my favorite science writer, for a few reasons. For one thing, he is a complete mad man about research. In chapter 2 of The Disappearing Spoon, Kean records the longest word in the English language. This champion of all English verbiage turns out to be a word that describes a protein on the first virus ever discovered and measures 1185 letters. (I’m not going to record it here because proofing that shit would take up the rest of my day.) What impresses […]
Pseudoscience and Nonsense
Man, this book was not good. Maybe not terrible (although, maybe terrible), but really not good. The premise was okay, but the writing was almost painfully bad. No, it wasn’t as bad as the dumpster fire that is Lola Montez Conquers the Spaniards (I’m linking to it not so you’ll read it, but so you can see the cover & know to never, ever pick it up). And it was marginally better than the very poorly written America Pacifica (again, please don’t read, just be aware […]
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