What are y'all reading?
Glad you asked. I'm mad at my tennis group, some of my caving friends are mad at me, and I am boycotting my favorite beer joint- so what I do is read. The people at the library smile in anticipation of big overdue fines as I check out bag after bag of all kind of books. Listed below are the ones I think would be of interest to awaders, listed in the order of what I imagine you folks would be interested in most.
SEX: A natural History - Joann Ellison Rogers
"Whoa! Hang onto your seatbelts, kids, Joan Ellison Rogers is gonna take you for a helluva ride." - review by Laurie Garrett. Whoa! I bet that's right. I skim read parts of this book and Whoa!, I'm saving it for dessert. Whoa!
MAD ABOUT PHYSICS: Braintwisters, Paradoxes, and Curiosities. -Christopher P. Jargodzki and Franklin Potter
Great! If the library didn't offer renewals I would buy this book. Five stars.***** Three hundred-ninty-three thought-provoking questions boxed by a hundred quotations from Lord Kelvin X-rays will prove to be a hoax. to Richard Feynman If all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back exactly one week.
Dolphins - Michael Bright
Companion book for BBC programs on dolphins as seen on the Discovery Channel. If dolphins could somehow walk amongst us we would declare half of them Saints and hang the others with a rope around their non-existent necks until dead for high crimes and atrocities.
NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD: A Writer on Writing -
Margaret Atwood
Well thought and well written. Who is this chick? She acts and thinks like Wordwind.
DISTURBING THE SOLAR SYSTEM: Impacts, Close Encounters, and Coming Attractions - Alan E. Rubin
Dr. Rubin synthesizes a great deal of modern research in geophysics and planetary science. - review by E.C. Krupp. Well presented too.
ART : 21 - Art in the Twenty-first Century - organized and introduced by Suzan Sollins
Twenty one modern artists are featured in 350 illustrations in this companion volume to the PBS series of the same name
with commentaries by five notables of contemporary art.
Mmmmmm? Some, I think, are interesting and some are not. But this is the sad fate of art. Or is it?
ICE: The Ultimate Human Catastrophe - Sir Fred Hoyle
A brilliant book. Unfortunately it was not the revised 1991 edition that I wanted to reread. The one where Sir Fred and his indian assistant Chander...? speculated on a method to save earth by storing a reserve of heat in the oceans against the Ice Age that will soon come. And when a Ice age comes, it comes quickly. It would be prudent for us all to hurry and read the revised edition before the event.
KILLER WHALES - Mark Carwardine
Another BBC book. Full of good stuff too. I will extract the interesting facts and post them on Miscelany.
THE ICE CURTAIN a thriller - Robin White
"A true find, a book that makes an exotic locale come to throbbing, pulsating life while telling a story that blasts across the landscape like the Trans-Siberian express. -Stephen Hunter".
E.E.CUMMINGS AND THE CRITICS - edited, with an introduction by S.V. Baum
Very dated. In the main they say that ee didn't edit his trivial from his great. They are correct.
MILESTONES OF SCIENCE - National Geographic. Curt Suplee.
Pictorial walk through the discoveries of the answers to fundamental aspects of the physical universe.
SKINNY LEGS AND ALL - Tom Robbins
In keeping with my intent to read the all of Tom Robbins, the good as well as the bad.
STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER - Tom Robbins
I told you.
A MATHEMATICAL MYSTERY TOUR: Discovering the Truth and Beauty of the Cosmos - A. K. Dewdney
Dewdney searches the world of mathematical constructions so as to answer the question - What is the cosmos?
THE MEASURE OF THE UNIVERSE - Isaac Asimov
Always a good skip read to keep a sense of scale.
