Pippin > Recent Status Updates

up at 10:20 p.m. and reading abt brain parasites, SO ready to go to sleep rn

fuck me up suzanne i'm ready

high school journalism teacher told me to read this and i MUST do everything she says

i love homework from nancy and will of course have the correct opinion about this book 😅

save me urban design nonfiction

nancy and i don't argue she tells me to read a book and i do

not me being the only person on goodreads (dot) com to read this 💀

the college journalism of it all....

great now I'M barking

The fact that I had to leave for class right in the middle of That scene...jail

oh my GOD it's happening

Is it really true love if you didn't set a chemistry experiment on fire together? 👀

much ado about nothing epigraph?? oh no i'm gonna love this 🙄

i WILL be finishing the series that i have owned since literally before i was born, thank you (sorry nana 😔)

nooo he has a tail 💀💀💀

a villainfucker right of passage, if you will,

FINALLY

Starting this brick 😅 wish me luck

Right, so about halfway through the book, our priorities change immensely, and handled better, it would've made for a satisfying, subversive fairy tale read, but here, because the promise at the beginning is so specific, I'm growing in doubt that this book is going to pay it off successfully.

Not to add to decades worth of hype or anything, but that fight scene was absolutely gut-wrenching. It takes a long time for the set-up to pay off, but this sequence absolutely took my breath away.

Absolutely thrilled beyond measure to meet my first sand worm <3

All this man had to do was keep his mouth shut and leave....

This one has quite a slow build, but it's truly hypnotizing. Brilliant use of nonlinear storytelling, and––my kryptonite––a notorious math problem as a plot device.

fucking broke me

I've never read a book so unabashedly nerdy about the prehistoric and I've gotta say...I'd like to see more ghost trilobites and casual uses of "Cambrian" and "Devonian" in the future.

Anyway, I'm learning a lot, but it comes across in so little space that most of it is likely going over my head.

Most of the book is really solid (but again, dense) science journalism, but Quammen's chapter on viruses ("Going Viral," Chapter 6) contains a really fascinating, well-argued analysis of an idea: the relationship between transmission and virulence, the two qualities that mark a virus' success. The book is so concrete; it might've benefited from more inclusions of the same ideas in theoretical terms like this.

Particularly rich and information dense, yet not without the rare but appreciated touch of humor. There is a human component––particularly in the ten-page section on an ebola researcher and her time in a government quarantine facility called The Slammer––but it's still pretty taxing reading. The forbidding fact has finally dawned upon me: I have started a tome.