After a terrible reading year in 2012, things are going smashingly in 2013. Here are the books I’ve read so far:
Clearly I’m on a bit of a Nesbo kick. I’d recommend all of them, with the exception of Office Girl, which is thin and precious and boring. I reviewed four of them, two for Paper/Plates (Billy Lynn and Vampires in the Lemon Grove) and two for The Brooklyn Rail (Russ & Daughters and a forthcoming review of The Unwinding).
The Florida Keys from space, via Commander Hadfield. If you are not following his Twitter, you are seriously missing out.
• Daniel Defoe’s writing: precursor to new media?
• I am all for eco-friendly alternatives, especially when they consist of using tiny sheep as “eco-grazers,” as Paris is doing.
• Somehow I missed that people eat rhino horns, but South African wildlife managers are lacing them with poison so that people who consume them will become ill. They hope it will stop poachers.
• Climate change in the arctic is leading to some crazy animal hybrids: brolar bears (brown bears and polar bears), narlugas (narwhals and belugas), and others.
• Baseball stadium food, now more revolting: at the Pirates game, you can order a bacon-cheddar burger with glazed sprinkled donuts for buns. At the minor league West Michigan Whitecaps game, you can order something called The Baco, which is, and I am not making this up, a taco that uses bacon as the shell.
• One of Hitler’s 15 food tasters is 95 years old and lives in Berlin.
• The world of literary biographers is messy.
• Here’s a fascinating etymology of the word “rabbit.”
“Rabbit” used to be the baby name for the animal, which was actually “coney,” pronounced “cunny.” Originally, “rabbit” was the baby name for the animal, like “lamb” is for sheep or “calf” is for cow. The real deal was the “coney” (hence the name of the Brooklyn boardwalk, which was once an island chock full of wild rabbits), which hopped to English all the way from the Latin cuniculus, which meant the same thing.
Log cabin in a Norwegian boreal forest.
Contributed by Sergei Evdokimov.
This only heightens my desire to move to Scandinavia.
• When I am not attached to my laptop, I bake things like Lemon-Lemon Cake with Raspberry Filling.
• I ate a lot of waffles all over Chicago and then wrote about them. Also: learn about froffles!
• Going to a Cubs game this year? Here’s where to eat nearby. (Hint: not the Cubby Bear)
• Skip the Jameson—here are much better Irish whiskies to drink.
Me: My current goal is to get a grant to research ornamental hermits in the UK and write an academic paper.
Mom: That… is no one else’s goal.
Many methods were tried, some unorthodox, in an effort to lure the Loch Ness monster into camera range. Here brave divers execute a baiting using cow’s blood and a bait basket trolled at a 60-foot depth.
Photograph by Emory Kristof, National Geographic
• A cat left inky paw prints when it walked over a Medieval manuscript.
• It turns out that dried whiskey residue on your glass leads to beautiful photographs.
• “Vocabulary events” and other things about digital dictionaries.
• Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, the captain of the International Space Station, tweets out photos from space. And they’re amazing. I recently went back through his entire stream, and I can highly recommend taking about two hours and doing the same. He’s often hilarious and writes poetic captions. Also, I learned about the Pacific white line, center pivot irrigation, checkerboarding, and many other things.
• Before potatoes were introduced in the late 1600s, the Irish people had a very milky diet. And they were into bog butter.
And the Irish didn’t like their butter just one way: from the 12th century on, there are records of butter flavored with onion and garlic, and local traditions of burying butter in bogs. Originally, it’s thought that bog butter began as a good storage system, but after a time, buried bog butter came to be valued for its uniquely boggy flavor.
Oh, New York.
New York from space, taken by Cmdr. Chris Hadfield.
Coralie Bickford-Smith’s Fitzgerald covers.
