false 18 166 43 true 5869324 read 2 true 770072 currently-reading 121 true 770071 to-read http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/73658944 Her Fearful Symmetry (Hardcover) by Audrey Niffenegger
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]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/73658911 The Three Incestuous Sisters: An Illustrated Novel (Hardcover) by Audrey Niffenegger
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]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/73658815 Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese (Hardcover) by Brad Kessler
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]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/15369499 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Paperback) by Azar Nafisi
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]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/72939794 Love Warps the Mind a Little (Paperback) by John Dufresne
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]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/10774890 Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics) by Vladimir Nabokov
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]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/72838549 Beautiful Children: A Novel (Hardcover) by Charles Bock
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]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/72838479 The Difference Engine (Spectra Special Editions) by William Ford Gibson
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]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/72838383 Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (Hardcover) by Tristram Hunt
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]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13492380 to: A Short History of Nearly Everything (Paperback) by Bill Bryson
I really only sat down to read this because of my deep and abiding respect for Bryson as a writer. I read a fair number of science books in a given year-- particularly dealing with cosmology and evolutionary theory, two of the prime subjects of this volume-- and I didn't especially feel the need for a primer.

I should have known better. This book is a primer, yes (it really ought to be a textbook for high school science classes), but more than that, it's a history of science as a branch of human knowledge. I knew a lot of the science going in, but the backstory, the origins of it and the personalities that brought it into being-- that was new to me for the most part, and that alone makes this a worthwhile read.

Also, not for nothing, but it's incredibly funny. Read this passage, where Bryson is touring the normally off-limits research departments of London's Natural History Museum with British paleontologist Richard Fortey:

This is a world where things move at their own pace, including a tiny lift Fortey and I shared with a scholarly looking elderly man with whom Fortey chatted genially and familiarly as we proceeded upwards at about the rate that sediments are laid down.

When the man departed, Fortey said to me: "That was a very nice chap named Norman who's spent forty-two years studying one species of plant, St. John's wort. He retired in 1989, but he still comes in every week."

"How do you spend forty-two years on one species of plant?" I asked.

"It's remarkable, isn't it?" Fortey agreed. He thought for a moment. "He's very thorough apparently." The lift door opened to reveal a bricked-over opening. Fortey looked confounded. "That's very strange," he said. "That used to be Botany back there."

If you don't think that's absolutely brilliant, then you, my friend, are not having enough fun in baseball.
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