Mark Salzman's Lost in Place is an amusing memoir of his teenaged years. It chronicles his attempts to learn kung fu, the Chinese language, and jazz cello.

Cory Doctorow's A Place So Foreign is a book of short stories. All a bit weird. All good. (I liked it better than Down and out in the Magic Kingdom). I'll have to read the rest of his stuff.

Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is one of those books that was interesting, yet took me a really long time to finish since I rarely ended up reading much of it at a time. It talks about all the various ways that people ignore science, distrust science or disbelieve science, and how science is a good thing.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 4:22 PM