550-559: Geology and Meteorology Book Haul

Lesson learned: don't underestimate your local branch library. I thought I did pretty well here.

And this doesn't even include what was too heavy to carry home! I could have chosen books about the exploration of Mars, so I guess all rocks are included, even ones on other planets. Also, water and air are big topics. Sam Kean, who wrote The Disappearing Spoon, which I kind of read last time, also wrote a book about air, which, seriously? NPR called it "breezy" (LOL), and I got enough of that before, so I passed on that one.

So, top to bottom: The Audubon Society, best known for its interest in birds, seems to make field guides for just about every natural phenomenon, 20 in all, at least two found in this section: Weather and Rocks & Minerals. Of course I wanted a full-color enumeration of the 30 pages worth of different kinds of snowstorms and ice storms found on our continent! I won't hold myself to reading the "Essays" at the beginning, but I may have to read some of the "Text Accounts' at the end, especially of  "Mixed Skies,""Optical Phenomena," and "Obstructions to Vision." Those do beg further explanation!

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky was a "Best Book of 2012" in our little library, so I guess I'm late to this party. It attracted my attention because of course in church we are always talking about salt, as in, being salt. The first few pages have already captured my attention, as the author describes the surprising behavior of a rock of salt he brought back from Spain that reacted to sun, humidity, metals... and licking. So that's why chemistry and geology are right next to each other!

Now take a deep breath before you read the full title of the last book in the pile. Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28.800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. Donovan Hohn's subtitle reeled me in when he mentioned that he was a character in the story.... because you know I love stunt memoirs! The book is written in a companionable first-person style and seems to touch on everything from the manufacture of plastic toys to the floating garbage island in the Pacific that they end up in, with 350 pages in between and an epilogue that (finally) actually discusses Herman Melville's well-known novel of obsession with another, slightly larger and more useful, denizen of the sea. If I commit to this book, I suspect it may completely talk me out of plastic toys... at least floating ones...

540-549: Chemistry-- The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean

The Disappearing Spoon is not a book about chemistry exactly. There's a basic explanation of atomic structure and why elements combine; there's a bit of unpacking of the structure of the periodic table; and then Kean just riffs for 346 pages. I enjoyed learning that "the noble gases" are those that are self-sufficient, that have a 'closed' outer shell already containing exactly the right number of electrons, so that they don't react with other elements. I was surprised to learn that almost all the elements are considered metals, even those that we call minerals, like calcium, or salts, like lithium. There were many interesting and entertaining stories about idiosyncratic scientists that I didn't learn; that is to say, I can't recall them anymore. But what really made an impression on me was Kean's reference to Mark Twain's interest in chemistry.

It turns out Twain wrote a short story with the dreadful title of Sold to Satan-- well, it's more of a sketch, really, and as it turns out, the point is not to tell a Devil-and-Daniel-Webster story, but to give Twain an excuse to write about that exciting new discovery of the late 19th century, radium. Twain says Satan appeared to the narrator as  "a softly glowing, richly smoldering torch, column, statue of pallid light, faintly tinted with a spiritual green, and out from him a lunar splendor flowed such as one sees glinting from the crinkled waves of tropic seas when the moon rides high in cloudless skies." I won't be giving away much if I say this turns out to be because the Devil is made of radium, contained in polonium, and that the most interesting bit in the story is when-- right at very beginning of the 20th century-- he gives us a news report about Curie's activities in isolating this element and predicts the power-- and the problems-- of radioactivity.

Kurt Vonnegut also liked to throw a little chemistry into his fiction. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the title character at one point starts drinking with a group of volunteer firemen and ..."built gradually to a crying jag, during which he claimed to be deeply touched by the idea of an inhabited planet with an atmosphere that was eager to combine violently with almost everything the inhabitants held dear. He was speaking of Earth and the element oxygen." As it turns out, that's a bit of an oversimplification of the phenomenon of fire, but it does the job-- Vonnegut's job, after all, is often to make us pay attention to the basic weirdness of life.

And chemistry is pretty weird, after all-- or rather, the phenomena it studies are pretty weird. For example, it tells us that everything on this inhabited planet including ourselves is made up of millions of tiny solar systems of atoms, spinning around and swapping their electron planets back and forth so that they can all find some kind of stability, and that somehow this all works so that I am me and you are you and we don't spontaneously and violently combine with our atmosphere and go up in flames. So, although we are not "nothing but" chemical reactions, we certainly are that as well as "meat suits" (another Vonnegut phrase) as well as transcendent souls.

So, if you love chemistry, you should probably read some other, more serious book on the subject. If you don't love chemistry, read Twain's story, which is in the public domain. And maintain your sense of wonder about all the invisible processes that surround you!