Wednesday reading

Recent reading:

A Short History of Queer Women, by Kirsty Loer -- bits and pieces, ancient Greece to the present, mostly Britain and the United States, but the author doesn't limit herself to white or middle- and upper-class women.

Once upon a Tome: the misadventures of a rare bookseller, by Oliver Darkshire. The author fell into this line of work by accident, after being fired from a variety of other jobs, and notes how unusual that is. The book is mostly about the other people who work at the bookstore, and a variety of the customers, book collectors (overlapping sets) not-actual-customers who wander through. It's based on (sometimes fictionalized or exaggerated) posts he made on the store's social media account, starting when nobody there had any idea what social media was, and they were still figuring out how to use computers in their business at all.

Best Foot Forward and Nocturnal Quarry, by Celia Lake. Two more of Lake's loosely connected historical romances set in a world where some people have magic, while still dealing with historical events like the first world war. I'm enjoying these, including the parts where the characters are looking very nervously in the direction of Czechoslovakia.

Kraken: The Curious, Exciting and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid, by Wendy Williams. Squid (and other cephalopods), and the scientists who study them, and what we've learned about humans (especially neurology) by studying squid.

The book doesn’t assume a lot of science background, or expect the reader to start out knowing much (if anything) about squid.

Williams says she started writing this because she was intrigued by how useful the axon of some species of squid has been for studying human (and other vertebrate) biology and neurology. She talks about squid intelligence, pointing out that it's hard even to formulate useful questions on the subjuect, and harder to do research that might answer them.

locust trees

The locust trees are flowering locally, and so I discovered yesterday from the scent that there are a couple of locust trees across the street from our new apartment.

I discovered locust trees as an adult, while we were living in Inwood, and came to like them a lot. They were a popular tree to plant in the northeastern US a few decades ago, but no longer are. Volunteer locust seedlings can be a nuisance, because the young/thin trunk branches have spines, presumably to protect them from being eaten by bison or horses or something. (They're native to North America.)

I'd seen locusts through the windows of moving buses and trolleys in the last few days, but wasn't sure of the identification--there are other kinds of tree that flower in the spring and produce clusters of white flowers.

We are still getting to know our new neighborhood, including finding some of the spring-flowering shrubs and trees.