Review Me Twice - What If? by Randall Munroe

Alex picked the book this week but in all honesty, I probably would have picked it up sooner rather than later.  It's been flying off the shelves at my job and has had tantalizing pictures luring me into its pages.

This book is, in the truest sense of the word, a coffee table book.  You can stick it on your coffee table or a side table and people can pick it up and read snippets of it, and then put it back down.  It's fun and it's funny and it's informative and it's a conversation piece all in one.  Considering it's a book about stick figure web comics and science, that's REALLY hard to do.

But Munroe keeps you interested and engaged and amused and not to mention makes you a little smarter by the end of the day.  Everyone should go out and buy this book.  That's right, I said BUY it.  I mean, ok, you should read it to, but go buy yourself a copy.  You'll be really happy you did.

Review Me Twice - Gulp by Mary Roach

Ok, so here is the thing about this book.  I really like Mary Roach.  I liked this book.  It was interesting and informative and it wasn't super boring.  Roach gets REALLY interested in whatever it is she's researching, and she always researches the things that no one really thinks about.  She researches and talks about the things that kind of gross people out.  Stiff was all about cadavers and how we die and what happens to our bodies.

Gulp is along the same squicky vein.  It starts out innocently enough:  it's all about taste buds and what we eat and why we eat it and where it goes and what we taste when we eat it and the nutrients we get in our mouths and what our teeth do, not to mention, she always finds the coolest stories about it.  I mean, some of the medical things that are going on are just awesome.

That being said, three fourths of this book are about poop and your butt.  I mean, I learned more about the colon than I honestly probably ever needed, or wanted to know about.  Not to say it wasn't interesting (apparently, Elvis died due to an over-sized colon and his own waste product finally exploding within him and killing him.  Not the the drug overdose as is believed), but let's face it.  It's a lot of a book about poop.

So if you don't really want to read about how we poop and how our bodies make waste... then this might not be the book for you.

I loved this book! The focus on poop and whatnot didn't really bother me, because I help my husband study for med school all the time.

My favorite parts were the chapters about taste, and how it relates to culture and personal preference and how all of that works. And, of course, every time Mary Roach said something funny, which was really often. This was a really funny book and, at the same time, a really informative one. I had a great time reading it and I'm so glad Cassy suggested it.

Let's Learn A Little Anatomy

This week, we're reading Gulp by Mary Roach.  And while we do want you to go read the book and learn all about the digestive system, I'm thinking just a little bit of background might be for the best in this case.

Do you remember that song about the bones you learned as a kid?  You know, "the toe bones connected to the foot bone."  No?  Well, here's a little reminder.

The digestive systems is kind of the same way.  Your mouth is connected to your throat, which is connected to your stomach, on to your small intestines, large intestines, down to the colon where it all comes out.

Now, of course, it gets a lot more complicated.  There are nutrients being pulled out along the way so that your body can power itself and the food is being broken down so that you can push it out the other side.  You also have tons of taste buds so that you put something in your mouth to begin with.  If food was nasty, we wouldn't really want to nourish ourselves.

So why is our digestive system to important that Roach felt the need to write a whole book on it?  Well, we started out as the digestive system.  We started eating and wasting before we started walking and talking as a species.  Evolution decided that if we were going to be eating, we should have a way to go find that food.

So brush up a bit on your digestive system before diving into our book this week.

Review Me Twice - A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

I was actually glad that Alex picked this book.  It was a short book, so I figured I'd get through it pretty quickly, I like stars and space and astronomy, so I figured I would enjoy it, and Stephen Hawking is supposed to be pretty funny, so I thought that would translate into the book.

None of these things happened.  Yes, it was a short book, but it was so dry, that it took me way longer than it should have to finish.  I do like astronomy, but the book was filled with a lot of technical jargon, making it hard to follow.  That's not to say that I didn't learn ANYTHING from the book, I did, but it was really hard to follow SO MUCH of this book, and if you didn't understand what he was talking about, he referenced back to things a lot later in the book.  I often found him referencing things I hadn't understood earlier in the book to explain things later in the book, making me then not understand them because I had grasped the earlier concept.

He also didn't let his supposed humor really show through in this book.  I felt like it was filled with hubris more than anything else.  A Brief History of Time is supposed to be the common man's version of physics, the stupid man's physics if you will, and I had a really hard time grasping some of it, which makes me wonder what the smart version is like.

This is a book that you need to read two or three times to really get a firm grasp of what he's trying to tell you, but it's such a dense book, I'm not sure I could get through it again.

I started off really liking this book. I thought it was pretty funny, in the way British humor (which I love) is funny. Later on, it got a little denser, like Cassy said, but I still enjoyed it. It's not something I would pick up for fun usually, or read over and over, but it was still interesting.

I definitely learned things, but there were also things that went over my head, which I fully expected. It was easy to start, harder to finish, but interesting all around. I'm glad I finally read it (it has been on my "someday" list for a few years). If you like physics/cosmology, but aren't a physicist/cosmologist, I would highly recommend this book.