Books!

[iesika]

Spent xmas and eve at Granny's, sleeping on an air mattress in an empty apartment across the hall from her. Baums gave me two pies, which I gave to the staff at The Arbor (Granny's assisted living place). The majority of my xmas gifts were books this year, which is a very good thing. Someone did try (and fail) to buy me a pair of shoes. They should have known better, as I can spend hours in a shoe store and not find anything that fits my bizarrely high-arched feet. I got a new bathrobe, too, which I needed, since Isis and her forerunners had put holes all in my old one. Anyway, I thought I'd share the wealth by reccing/bragging xmas gift books, some of which I've finished already (hey, it's a long trip home from Granny's). Some of these I'd asked for, some of them I think brother picked out (I know he was responsible for the Complete Hitchhiker's Guide - the title of which, btw, confused my Granny to no end).

So, I got The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which is OMG so good. Here's a bit:

Even if it weren't raining, with subway pumps stilled, that [flooding in the tunnels] would take no more than a couple of days, they estimate. At that point, water would start sluicing away soil under the pavement. Before long, streets start to crater. With no one unclogging the sewers, some new watercourses form on the surface. Others appear suddenly as waterlogged subway ceilings collapse. Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side's 4, 5, and 6 trains corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river.

Is it odd that I find this book incredibly uplifting?

Okay, number two (which I'm reading now) is The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison, by John Emsley. Very interesting read. Very dark humor sprinkled throughout. This bit is my favorite so far, and made me laugh out loud:

About one one person in ten has a level of mercury in their body that would make them unsuitable as food for any cannibals who followed the nutritional guidelines regarding excess mercury levels in meat.

Though I also really liked this:

Little Willie from his mirror
Licked the mercury right off,
Thinking in his childish error
It would cure his whooping cough.
At the funeral his mother
Brightly said to Mrs. Brown:
"Twas a chilly day for Willie
When the mercury went down.'

I also got Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach, The Omnivore's Dilemna: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Micheal Pollan, and Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer (which is about the dividing line between art and science).

 

Comments

[iesika.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to add:

The Elements of Murder really, really makes me want to write HP fanfiction. Really. Like, ever other page or so. How can I not when they're going on about Nicholas Flamel and Basil Valentine ("We are told that Valentine hid his manuscript inside a pillar of the church in Erfurt where the monastery was located, and there it rested until one day a bolt of lightning split open the pillar and it was revealed. In fact, there never was a Benedictine monastery at Erfurt, and no monk of this name has ever been traced" - and now in my head I see Slughorn and Snape arguing about The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony).

This should prove the level of my dorkitude.

[starherd.livejournal.com]

I think I have to go find The World Without Us.
I don't think it's odd to find that sort of thing uplifting at all, says the person looking forward to the next ice age XD

[iesika.livejournal.com]

When I was little someone told me that one day, the sun would explode. I was terribly excited, until he said "but don't worry, it won't happen for billions of years." I was so disappointed.

I think it's this same Imp of the Perverse (I'm misappropriating the phrase, but that was Poe's name for the crazy urge you get when standing on a cliff to just throw yourself off and see what happens, which is kind of fitting) that feeds into apocalyptic Christianity and other End of Days religions/cults. There's been a group in every generation for thousands of years of history who were convinced that the world would end in their lifetime.

In the same way that my alchemyThe World Without Us makes me think of X, and all those shots of jungles reclaiming the cities.

[starherd.livejournal.com]

*nod* for me, it's not the end of the world that's attractive so much as the end (or great reduction of) the human race. Post-apocalyptic movies, plague movies... I thrive on these things (I Am Legend FTW!). I love seeing ruins and nature reclaiming the land that man has taken from it, and it takes a surprisingly short amount of time, in my experience. ;-)

There's a theory popularized by the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" that the reason that the heat chimneys in the north atlantic are shutting down is because the ocean conveyor for regulating the world's temperature through ocean flow is also shutting down, due to the melting of polar ice caps desalinating the water. The conveyor shuts down, we get an ice age, the polar ice caps re-freeze, and all is right with the world again, more or less. This theory was totally freaking people out when they announced it on CNN, but for me... it just restores faith that the world can survive all the stupid crap we've pulled on it so far. ^_^;

(...So we'd better hurry up and get Mammoths cloned. Once the ice age hits and drives the survivors toward the equator, I intend to be leading a band of Mammoth hunters around after the herds and selling Mammoth meat to the people down south. XD)

[iesika.livejournal.com]

I loved The Day After Tomorrow. That was a great movie. Have you seen Cleolinda's Movie's in 15 Minutes? She has a Day After Tomorrow summary/parody that is to die for.

Whenever I hear someone talking about us killing the Earth, I want to say "You have obviously never run the Daisyworld simulation!" (on occasion I do say this, and I get very blank looks in response, to which I am all like "Buy SimEarth!" And they are all like "OMGWTF you are crazy").

About mammoths, because I think this is the coolest idea ever: The niche which was occupied by mammoths in the Americas has not been filled since their extinction. In Africa, where pachyderms are still around, there is a cycle that takes place best summed up by a Masai proverb - "Elephants grow grass, Cows grow trees." Grazing animals eat all the grasses, so brush and trees take over, and then move on. Then Elephants move in and eat the trees and brush, and the grass returns, and they move on, and the wildebeests (and Masai herders) move back in. There is a guy names Paul Martin who is advocating the reintroduction of pachyderms to parts of the united states as a way to recover from overgrazing. He's in The World Without Us. The idea was very, very intriguing to me. The theory is that a lot of our semidesert - all that land covered in mesquite and scrub - would return to a more fertile grassland if the cattle were rotated with heavy brush and tree browsers like elephants. And though it's not mentioned in the book, it would provide a huge tourism boost, and help build up a stock of wild/semiwild elephants in one of the few countries we can be reasonably sure they won't be shot in. (ramblerambleramblejessieisadork)

[moonypadlover.livejournal.com]

ehehe...^^ I'd actually like to get my hands on a few of those too, reading the descriptions....

[wood-rabbit.livejournal.com]

Cool! Thanks for the recs.