Elizabeth > Recent Status Updates

siddhartha mukherjee: and then watson met crick and fell instantly in love
me: :o
siddhartha mukherjee: it was a platonic love, but --
me: no no no, don't walk back the truth. say your piece.

I want to pause here and thank Jonathan Meiburg for narrating his own book AND unhesitatingly doing his own bird calls. delightful.

It's strange to think agatha christie lived long enough to see computers and incorporate them into her stories. not as strange and off-putting as her still using "Jewish-nosed" derogatorily, but still strange.

oh! this one is very well done. i did have to pause about half-way through in order to google when, exactly, agatha christie finalized her divorce from her cheating husband, because the flow-of-consciousness is very 👀 😶

😬😬

between the flowers in the attic-esque sadistic mother character, the orientalism, the zionism, and the dated sweeping condemnation of women's lib, i don't think i'll reread this one. worth reading once though. i bet there's a paper somewhere analyzing all the ways those -isms intertwine w/ each other.

this one genuinely had my heart pounding at the end and i 100% fell for the red herring, only figured out the murderer about two paragraphs before the narrator. i haven't guessed correctly yet.

i'd read elsewhere that as she got older, christie got wiser about her -isms. this is ... er, not one of those. be forewarned.

oh! i was incorrect!! i was thinking of the twist in 'strangers on a train,' so count me double surprised by the twist in this lmao

somehow, despite having a mother who owned the full collection and all biographies of agatha christie, even the critical ones, murder on the orient express is the only i'm going into where i know the twist beforehand. the others i've read so far have all caught me off guard.

oh this one is /creepy/ creepy. got it.

I'd read and really liked Brannen's previous book and was excited to see this one published this year, but the mood is definitely more keanu reeves smoking meme. obvs books are allowed to be bummers, but i'm only getting through this one in small sips.

not unbiased, so as long as you've got one eye on that, it's /fascinating/. somehow i managed never to learn korolev had been a survivor of stalin's purges, which, you know, played a significant role in how he approached rocket science. WILD.

I understand that "inflation" is the right word for what the universe is doing and it makes sense to use it so often here, but ........ i am just ... too chronically online .....

oh we love deep dives into niche specializations in this house

ohhhhhh yeah, okay, this is a classic for a reason.

love that bill schutt is out here making science accessible and fun to learn but i espeCIALLY love that he occassionally just pauses the story to go "okay here's an idea for a grad student research project. take notes."

some of the books i read early on in my nonfiction phase haven't held up to a second reread, but not this one!! it still slaps. the medusa essay in particular is, just, chef's kiss.

The science is fun and assessible, and the plot boils along at a rapid clip. I can see why it caught fire the way it did. But - and I remember this from The Martian too - I just ... don't like Andy Weir's narrators. They consistently give me the vibes of someone who won't thank the bus driver or the waitress. This is fine, obvs, being uncomfortable is good for me, it's just. perisistent lol.

so the audiobook is narrated by ray porter, who sounds exactly like albert brooks as marlin from finding nemo but i KNOW i know his voice from something, so i imdb'd him and unfortunately. unfortunately. i think it might be the animated version of the book of mormon. terrible thing to have to type, even worse thing to remember.

the subtitle here says "fascinating and funny," but i'm four hours into a nine hour audiobook and i'm not sure we have the same understanding of what those words mean.

it's not a BAD book. it's a solid introduction to ancient greek culture. however, that's a very glutted field and many books do it better.

Def have a bone to pick with whoever curated this list - or titled it. 36 revolutionaries, sure, good idea, except: three women? (all white, one of them margaret thatcher for god's sake.) four men of color? i get that it's a compilation and thus is limited to lectures already published, but that almost makes the heavy skew towards western white males here WORSE.

Not as interesting as I thought it would be?? idk maybe i didn't commit enough bandwidth, but after the whole thing was done I wasn't sure I could name five new things i learned orz.

less a study of the revolutions themselves (although they are summarized) and more a look at the american journalists who were on the ground when they went down -- john reed, edgar snow, and herbert matthews respectively. i didn't read the entire summary before starting (oof) so this was a surprise lol.

always surprised when two books i'm reading cocurrently cover the same territory, especially when i'm not expecting it. this book and fossil men both posit the same conclusion: humans evolved into humans when we domesticated ourselves.

Library find! I liked Ed West's other irreverent english history books and this one was bite-sized, so it's my current "keep in practice reading physical books" pick.

oh yeah, this one definitely leans into the horror. or maybe it just feels that way because it's bugs.

definitely not an unbiased narrative lmao, but it kept my attention the whole way through.

I was saving this one as a Little Treat and it IS, it makes me giddy to think that you can take a map of supposed battle sites of the Gigantomachy (the great mythological war between the Olympians and the giants - that's Typhon et all to you Hades 2 players) and the most prominent Mediterranean fossil beds and they're THE SAME MAP.

oh man i forgot how HARD dunbar-ortiz hits. i need to get my hands on a physical copy so i can cover it in highlighter.

I was saving this one as a little treat and it was totally worth it.