More reading.

Books I've read in the last couple of weeks:

The Blind Side made me sort of confused in an inspired way; Norwegian Wood made me sort of depressed; Feeding a Yen & The Soul of a Chef both made me hungry & want to cook and then eat some fucking food right now; and The Ghost Map made me think, which isn't an adjective like the others, but oh well.

The Ghost Map--which is just generally brilliant stuff about maps, and cities, and diseases, and technology, and science, &c.--contained a passage I really liked, from p.96 in the hardcover:

There is a lovely symmetry that comes from telling the story this way, because a city and a bacterium are each situated at the very extreme boundaries of the shapes that life takes on earth. ... In a city like Victorian London, unchallenged by military threats and bursting with new forms of capital and energy, microbes were the primary force reigning in the city's otherwise runaway growth, precisely because London had offered Vibrio cholerae ... precisely what it had offered stockbrockers and coffeehouse proprietors and sewer-hunters: a whole new way of making a living.

I approve of all of these books.