Author: D. A. Hosek
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Dewey Decimal Project: 540 NEW The New Chemistry
Continuing through the 500s and science, I get to chemistry. In high school, I was a chemistry wiz. I took two years of chemistry, acing both years, but somehow between the end of high school and the beginning of college, I managed to persuade myself that I wasn’t good at chemistry and I barely passed…
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Beautiful Sentences: Genevieve Valentine
Of course, like most unkind advice, it was correct, eventually, somehow. Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.
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Dewey Decimal Project: 530 FEY The Character of Physical Law
When I was a college student, I read Feynman’s autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. It was a breezy fun read (and I was young and dumb enough not to notice the misogyny and other problematic aspects of Feynman’s personal life). Feynman has a reputation for presenting challenging topics in an accessible way, so with that…
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Beautiful Sentences: Sigrid Nunez
In the news: Thirty-two million adult Americans can’t read. The potential audience for poetry has shrunk by two-thirds since 1992. A “rent-burdened” woman worrying how she’s going to survive in New York City decides to try writing a novel (“and that’s going well”). Sigrid Nunez, The Friend.
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Dewey Decimal Project: 523.1 ALE The Jazz of Physics : The Secret Link between Music and the Structure of the Universe
Continuing through sciences in the Dewey Decimal system, I decided that this would be a good option for something to fill the Astronomy slot since I’m a musician and for a year or so of college I was a physics-English double major. The book itself is what I would call the academic memoir, in which the…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 510 BEN The Magic of Math: Solving for x and Figuring Out Why
As I was scanning the bookshelves filled with math books, this caught my eye because I knew Arthur Benjamin back when he was a brand new professor at Harvey Mudd College. I spent a summer working in the college’s math department computer lab, some of it paid by the department, some, assorted freelance TeX-related projects. A…
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Beautiful Sentences: Tommy Orange
She presses the Home button and for a second, just for a small moment, thinks she should open her other Facebook feed. On that other Facebook, she’d find the information and media she’d always been looking for. On that other Facebook feed, she’d find true connection. That is where she’d always wanted to be. Is…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 509.2 YOU The last man who knew everything: Thomas Young, the anonymous polymath who proved Newton wrong, explained how we see, cured the sick, and deciphered the Rosetta stone, among other feats of genius
The title of this book overpromises a fair amount. I’d argue that Young is far from anonymous given his prominence in the history of physics for his demonstration that light must be a wave from the two-slit experiment (although I imagine “anonymous polymath” may refer to the fact that he published a number of his works…
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Writerly resolutions, May status
I made significant progress on the novel (the graph at the right shows the progression of my word count over the month). A first draft of chapter 11 is done and I’m nearly finished with the rewrite of the chapter. I think that this might be a chapter that can stand on its own as a…