The true challenge is to keep myself only restricted to the books I have already chosen. However, the fall-back of working at a library is that new and interesting books are constantly floating by my office. The following two have been including in my reading challege as well:
- Neptune's Ark: From Ichthyosaurs to Orcas by David Rains Wallace: I have read a book by Wallace previously called Beasts of Eden: walking whales, dawn horses and other egnigmas of mammal evolution and The Bonehuners' Revenge: Dinosaurs and fate in the Gilded Age. Beasts was a great books and Wallace does a great job of melding science onto a timeline and at the same time keep the science relevant and current. He also has a knack of really capturing the passion and drive of many of these researchers. This is an easy task for the grand old men of paleontology (Cope, Marsh, Brown and Simpson) and also easy for blatant self-promoters (Baker, Sereno) but not so easy for current and less flamboyant researchers.
- Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catelogue Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys: Well, I love taxonomy and I hope this books does for taxonomy what Wallaces' book did for mammalian paleontology.
So far, very little time has been devoted to reading. Work, baby and thesis dominate most of my time (in that order). I have been getting maybe a 1/2 hour a night before I retire, at best. Still working though Gandhi's Passion but I should be finished before the end of the week. Next one is going to be either God is Dead or Neptune's Ark.
cheers,
No comments:
Post a Comment