Thursday night, with books and unusual weather

[bironic]

Just back from Barnes & Noble and Chinese/Japanese dinner with synn, who is moving too far away too soon. Enjoyed the usual fandom talk and work rants, and made some progress on fic-writing.

Accidentally bought three books while waiting to meet her there: medical writer Atul Gawande's new book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, which I've already started and am excited about; Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, a collection of Natural History essays by astrophysicist and science writer Neil deGrasse Tyson; and The Nasty Bits by irreverent travel writer/chef Anthony Bourdain (for my sister). I haven't finished a book since January. This is going to be fantastic.

The full moon tonight is orange, visible through clouds high in the south. On the other side of the overcast sky, we're having almost constant cloud-to-cloud lightning, which isn't typical for this region. It's wonderfully spooky. No rain yet. Thunder very dim still.

Comments

[nightdog-barks.livejournal.com]

Accidentally bought three books ...

*grins*

Isn't it amazing how that happens? The books leap into your hands, and you find yourself carrying them to the front of the store ...

Did not realize there was a full moon tonight. Must be why I am listening to Laurie Anderson turned up loud and wrote a John-maybe-shoots-Rodney nanofic. Heh.

[(Anonymous)]

It's a feast-or-famine scenario with me in bookstores, these past few years -- either I wander through aisles feeling like the publishing industry has gone to hell and I'll never want to buy anything again, or I can hardly make up my mind which ones to pick up and which to save for later. Tonight I was just browsing idly because I arrived first, and the next thing I knew, there were those two I absolutely had to have, and I was lamenting to the cashier that that wasn't supposed to happen -- my friend wasn't even there yet! Heh.

Ooh, nanofic. Will check out in the morning. For now, bedtime. 'Night!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Er, that was me. Forgot I'm using IE because Mozilla keeps crashing tonight.

[elynittria.livejournal.com]

I bought Better as part of a twofer deal along with Complications at Amazon.com a few days ago. I'm looking forward to reading them both, but I need to wait a bit since I just finished How Doctors Think (which I highly recommend) and don't want to OD on medical books.

Death by Black Hole sounds interesting, not to mention handy background material for writing SGA fics.

I miss bookstores.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I miss them too. Aside from one trip to Borders to meet up with synn a few weeks ago, I hadn't been in one for months. Maybe that's how I found three books within five minutes.

Death by Black Hole sounds interesting, not to mention handy background material for writing SGA fics.

Ha. Yeah, sadly, I thought that too. But that wasn't a factor in why I bought it; I've been an astrophysics fan since before I knew the word, thanks to watching lots of science specials on TV with my dad. I was the kind of geek who read A Brief History of Time in middle school for fun. :)

Complications is really excellent. Gawande is really excellent. I've only read the first chapter of Better, and it's good, and I know one of the later chapters about the history of obstetrics and C-sections is good because a version of it was in The New Yorker, but I can't imagine it's better than his other book.

Will check out How Doctors Think; sounds intriguing. Thanks!

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

We had a storm up here earlier that seemed freakin' apocalyptic. The flag on our porch was ripped off the pole, my mother's hanging decoration things were blown all over the place, the yard and the road were covered in tree branches -- one tree broke in half and is on my lawn -- and the car that wasn't in the garage has some hail dents on it. My satellite receiver had to be reset and the modem on our oldest computer fried. It was CRAZEH.

Dude, the flag wasn't even torn off the pole a couple years ago when two or three tornadoes came through here. wtf?

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Yikes. We must have skirted the edge of whatever it was, because it never went beyond the heat lightning, which I couldn't even see once I got inside.

[musicisbelievng.livejournal.com]

Yay Anthony Bourdain :)