Rainy Day Reading

Incredibly enough, the weather forecasters are predicting rain for the So. Cal. area starting Wednesday and if they are right (emphasis on "if") we have some lovely curled up on a favorite seat, eating bits of this 'n that in a toasty warm house comforts coming up while the winds howl and the rain lashes the windows.  Oops - wrong place.  The Moors, maybe, but nothing so dramatic here.

Seizing every chance I can get to do nothing around the house, here are some recent reads that some of you might enjoy.

Chick Lit - The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman  Thumbnail:  widowed mid-30s woman with two small daughters and a job with a publishing company as an illustrator, gets inveigled into attending gardening classes for the publisher.  She and her sister are besties because they had a shitty mother.

(yawn) you say.  But this book is amazingly sophisticated, largely from such as:  "She has people skills like lions have gazelle skills."  "We had as much in common as a roller skate and a race car."  This makes for interesting reading for me because it is crammed with steal-able stuff.

Historical Chick/Women's Lib Lit - The Coroner's Daughter by Andrew Hughes  This tale is set in Dublin in 1816.  Apparently Dublin consistently has bad weather (fog, heavy rains, snow) or else Hughes just likes the dramatic possibilities.  The heroine is an only child, her father is the Dublin coroner; her mother is dead, apparently a suicide due to acute depression and fear of leaving her room.

Abigail Lawless shares an interest in her father's job and amazingly, he began teaching her science and dead bodies when she was 10 or 12 years old.  His job includes dissecting the body for cause of death and then presenting the findings to a jury which gets to see the dead body.  Clearly, they were hardier back then than today.  Our courts admit ghastly photos which can be bad enough.   Bonus Points:  Remember that they didn't have air conditioning in 1816.

Amazing Science - The Body Builders - Inside the Science of the Engineered Human by Adam Piore    Random chapter headings: 
The Woman Who Can See With Her Ears - Neuroplasticity and Learning Pills
The Birth of Bamm-Bamm* - Decoding the Genome and Rewriting It
The Telepathy Technician - Decoding the Brain and Imagined Speech
The Bionic Man Who Builds Bionic People

* Age three, Bamm-Bamm had six-pack abs, could scale a gym rope unassisted and waved 5 lb. barbells around like rattles.