Well, I took a trip to the public library. I think I wrote about finding Erica Jong, but I also found Ed Yong (interesting names there) and his remarkable 2015 book about microbes. I know, yuck, but he’s such an excellent writer the topic reads like a novel! Plus the science itself is superbly interesting. Did you know that an entirely new category of living thing was RECENTLY discovered? A whole new life form, right here on earth, no need to travel to the final frontier. Archea, formerly known as archeabacteria because they were thought to be ancestral versions of bacteria, have been identified as different from all other life forms on the planet.
(As a closet Trekkie, or maybe not-so-closeted Trekkie, anything that hints of science fiction gets more than a passing glance. This is science FACT, and so much the better!)
Plus there’s more…I’m still reading, but our medical history of the discovery of “germs” and the idea that they are inherently dangerous and bad, well, my eyes are opened. There’s a link to the book below.
The other thing I picked up last week, thanks to a tip on a writer’s group on social media (the Site That Shall Not Be Named) is a book by Dean Koontz. My millennial aged son read Koontz in his teens; exhaustively and I was not particularly interested, having burnt out my taste for horror on Stephen King in the eighties. (Somewhere I wrote about finally reaching the end of my rope with being terrified by a book…..) But THIS book, and this writer…wow. Yes, it is a Koontz book, but I did not know that this author creates some of the most beautiful pictures of the world with his words. He’s got a capacity for metaphor that is original and nearly poetic. I swooned over some phrases to describe rain, for example, or how the sun shone. The story is there, too, compellingly, but the writer’s mastery of language has captivated this reader.
So those are my offerings for today. The links below are affiliate links: if you click through and ultimately buy from Amazon using these links, it helps to fund my next book. And don’t forget your public library! Neither of these books is new, so the library may be just the ticket.