Laura > Recent Status Updates

Jupiter is " a 'tweener: not a large planet so much as a failed star. Had Jupiter sucked up about ten times more detritus... It would have graduated to a brown dwarf, a star with just enough brute mass to fuse some atoms together and give off a low-watt, brownish light." Mind: blown.

On the career path of one awesome lady physicist and nobel-laureate: "Most schools tolerated [Maria]Goeppert-Mayer's hanging around to chat science. Some even condescended to give her work, though they refused to pay her... After World War II, the University of Chicago finally took her seriously enough to make her a professor of physics. Although she got her own office, the department still didn't pay her." Assholes!

I'm legally required to read this.

Gift from a coworker who got it when Canaday did a book launch at Wilson Center. Pretty interesting so far.

Intense and hallucinatory so far. Filkins talks about how if you stay too long, you became part of Iraq and can't shake its grim violence. Reading this I get an inkling of what he means.

Great, absorbing non-fiction essays/investigations full of fascinating people and crazy situations. Perfect bus reading.

This is going really fast. I love all the bits about doing archival research--it's like my job at SCRC! but with more witchcraft

Picked up originally because it was on the new bio shelf right next to Escape.

Slowly working through, mostly enjoying it but keep having to stop to look up medieval heresies.

One of my ALA pickups. So far an entertainingly odd collection of short stories.

King never should have updated the year to 1990. The politics are still so 70s, it jars me every time he mentions the supposed date.

This one will probably take me a while...

I decided Name of the Rose was too dense and long to get into right now.... so I picked up a 1000 page historical fiction, horror novel.

Like Willy Wonka meets The Time Machine. Picked it up since it's apparently the origin of the grandfather paradox.