Rebecca Reads

I listened to Mr. Feynman’s memoir, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, as I drove for the last few weeks. Although some aspects of the Nobel Prize winning physicist’s life were rather interesting, overall, I am surprised I stuck with his story for so long. It was not a favorite of mine.

When I joined the 2009 Science Book Challenge, I didn’t intend to focus on neuroscience, but it turns out that that branch of science is absolutely fascinating to me. These two books I read really have convinced me that science and art are inextricably related each other, for art is perceived and appreciated by the [...]

For those that read this blog regularly, it is probably no surprise that I prefer art, literature, history, and social sciences to mathematics and science.
Before this month began, I hadn’t read any books in the Dewey Decimal 500s category or the 600s category (for the Dewey Decimal Reading Challenge) in all of 2009. I also [...]

Sometimes I read nonfiction to get a general idea about something I don’t know anything about or a person who intrigues me. Other times I read nonfiction to learn something specific in depth; such books may be hard to read cover to cover, but they still merit a careful reading.
The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin was [...]

When I mentioned at the beginning of the month that I don’t like science fiction, someone reminded me that “dystopias” are a type of science fiction. Since I have enjoyed the few dystopias I’ve read, I thought I should continue to give the genre a try.
In response to my post about Anthem, Stewart suggested I [...]

A few weeks ago, I overheard an eight-year-old girl say to an adult in all seriousness, “I’m so hungry, I’m going to die!”
I couldn’t help thinking to myself that she had no idea what true hunger was; nor do I. In Hunger: An Unnatural History, Sharman Apt Russell details what it means, physiologically, to be [...]

Tom Ang’s Fundamentals of Photography is aptly subtitled “the essential handbook for both digital and film cameras.” As a very amateur photographer, I was fascinated by the technical explanations for photography: how cameras work, how light is best captured, and how to process photographs appealingly. While I will never again photograph using film cameras, I [...]

In The Planets by Dava Sobel, one learns of the trivia and facts associated with each planet, as well as the moon and sun, in poetic terms. Scientist Dava Sobel, a New York Times bestselling author, shows that science can be beautiful and lyrical, not technical. Among other things, she tells of the mythology of [...]

When we found out in early 2007 that a little bundle of joy would be joining our family, we headed to the bookstore. Alexander Tsiaras’s lovely coffee table book, From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, came back home with us. I loved pouring over the graphically enhanced photographs of babies in the womb, imagining [...]

The Chef’s Craft in Every Kitchen?
I have mixed feelings about Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen.
The Elements of Cooking is one-part opinionated essays about cooking (pages 1-50) and one-part alphabetic encyclopedia of opinionated “essential” elements to cooking. There are things I liked about both parts and other [...]