Spring came down with a vengeance and dumped 1/4″ hail stones yesterday afternoon. I was glad that me, the dog and the baby plants were all tucked safely inside.
Since I can’t be outside, I’ve been spending more of my time indoors reading. Our weekend in Seattle included a trip to Half Price Books where I gleefully stocked up on more non-fiction. For some reason I’ve been crushing on Enlightenment-era history of science books. I don’t know why. Highlights include:
Age of Wonder — A well-woven string of mini-biographies and research histories surrounding the players and personages at the Royal Society at the dawn of a voracious scientific era in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The Jewel House — Elizabethan London and the nascent Scientific Revolution.
The Mapmaker’s Wife — The first 2/3 of the book deals with a once highly contentious question: what is the true shape of the earth? Then details the French expedition sent to Ecuador in the 1730′s to measure degrees of longitude and latitude at the equator. The last third becomes a survival story of a woman alone in the Amazon jungle.
Next up:
The Lost City of Z — Given that I just finished another Amazon survival story above, I thought I’d stick with the theme and follow British explorer Percy Fawcett in his search for El Dorado in 1925. My guess is that the expedition does not end well.
I love to see what other people are buying in the express lane at the grocery. As if those three to six items can be distilled into a picture of the individual purchasing them. What does this apple/pack of tampons/mechanical pencil say about me as a person? The bookstore works the same way. I had to laugh when I saw Matt’s biography of Nikola Tesla/Secrets of Free Masonry/Cults/historical life of Jesus Christ. Sure, I put two of those books in his hands but all together they make such a great picture. My stack was more of the same. Oh, the siren call of half price research opportunities.
At this rate we’re going to need another bookcase to hold our treasures.
