This Week at the Library (24 July)

I've spent this last week recovering from over-doing it on the French front, zipping through no less than three Star Trek novels for relaxation while working on a science read I received in the post a week or so ago. I've just finished that one ("just", as in no less than ten minutes ago), and comments should follow within a day or two. I plan to focus on science for the next few weeks, and The Ghosts of Evolution was a great start.  There'll be a delay before that reading starts, though, because I just ordered the books. Among their ranks.....THE TELL-TALE BRAIN, by V.S. Ramachandran. Yes, after...two years of waiting, I'm finally going to revisit a man whose first work absolutely astonished me.  In the meantime  look for a little history (The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress) and maybe some fiction.

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 Grocery stores are excellent places to encounter ghosts. They lurk in the fruit section, feasting on anachronisms.

p. 7, Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsense Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms, Connie Barlow


Logically, Abigail should have felt torn between her two sides as a traditional New England woman and a fiercely independent personality. But she did not. The apparent contradiction felt to her like a seamless continuity. She could mend a  hem while engaging you in a discussion of Macbeth's fatal flaw. If that caused trouble for some people, that was their problem.

p. 14, First Family: Abigail and John Adams, Joseph Ellis

"It appears that the mother of your untaken road will be joining us," sighed Picard, "Lwaxana Troi is being sent by Betazed to be their representative at the joining of the houses of Graziunas and Nistral aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise."
"Do they ever miss an opportunity to send her off planet?" Riker wondered.
Picard glanced at him. "Would you?"

p. 28, Q-in-Law. Peter David

"Why would Sehra of Graziunas give you a naked young woman?"
"She didn't know my shirt size? I don't know!"

p. 122, Q-in-Law. Peter David.

"I'll get you some tea. Just the way you like it." Riker snapped out of his relationship with the numbers and turned to the replicator. "Tea, Earl Grey, hot."
"Sounds funny with you saying it," Picard remarked.

p. 81, Ship of the Line, Diane Carey