Ten years ago, I was preparing for summer calculus courses to fulfill prerequisites for graduate programs in biostatistics. Good times. I ended up getting in to a top (and very expensive) masters program on the east coast, and then I lasted two weeks into the second quarter before admitting I’d made a terrible mistake, packing my few possessions into a rental car, and driving myself back across the country to an unfamiliar Sacramento apartment my partner had rented after moving north from Los Angeles to […]
“I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners of war”
After discovering that both my CBR 10 reading list and my personal library have been far-too-heavily skewed towards male authors, I was determined to make a correction, and I set out on my first trip away this year with a too-long wishlist that yielded a bonanza of books by women, sixteen in all, pictured here. I could easily have come home with twice as many but kept myself under control if only to avoid overweight baggage charges. After dinner on my second night in London, […]
Complexity should be your excuse for inaction
“The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.” This message is passed from a young girl to an elderly, dying Harry August late in his eleventh life. The trick is that Harry August can’t really die, at least not in the traditional sense. Each time he dies, he is reborn at exactly the same time and place to live his life again, recovering all memory of his past lives a few years into childhood. And he’s […]
So much talk of faeries, and none of it good
I love physical books. Aside from not being able to read e-books for any sustained period of time, I love the look and feel of physical books and wish every room in my home were lined with shelves that I could fill with a never-ending stream of new books. Hannah Kent’s The Good People is one of the most gorgeous physical books I’ve ever seen, with the murky underwater blues and teals overlaid with a metallic copper leaf that partially obscures the title and amplifies […]