Notes from a bibliophile

My friend Stacy Lewis recommended this to me at Halloween, but I was reading something else so I wasn't able to get to it until now. This is Gothic literature at it's finest. It's absolutely over the top. The language is flamboyant, the situations are outrageous; it's just a delightful pudding of sensationalism. It begins in a cathedral in Madrid where we meet some of our main characters. There's Antonia, a beautiful young girl fresh into town. She meets Don Lorenzo de Medina, and they pretty much immediately fall in love, as you do. But then comes the priest, Ambrosio. Even holier than holier-than-thou, Ambrosio is considered by all of Madrid to be without sin. But pride is the worst of sins, because it is the root of all the others. And Ambrosio hides his overweening pride so well. Wouldn't you be a little prideful if people were clambering over each other just to get near you? Antonia has come to Madrid with her mother Elvira because they are down on thei...

Today is January 17, 2017. In 2010, my mother and I were having some difficulties. I had been terminated earlier in the year, but managed to find work in about a month. My mother's birthday is in September, and she always takes the week off. That year, she came back to termination papers of her own. Since she's older, she just decided on retirement. It was fine for a while, but she began to feel a little run down. She visited her doctor to see if anything was wrong. Despite some other issues - including brown urine - the doctor told her nothing was wrong, probably just telling her she needed to lose weight. As Christmastime approached, mom would go to the mall to shop. She told me later that there were times when she was so exhausted, she thought she would pass out, and she wasn't sure how she would get back to her car. Things progressively got worse. We thought maybe she had the flu. One day I called her before leaving work and she wasn't making sense. I got home t...

The full title of this book is The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements. Whew! I think about half of those words could be edited out. I'm not going to lie to you, a good bit of this book is above my intellectual pay grade. The different shapes of electron shells and shearing off particles...ummm, OK, my eyes are glazing over. But those bits aren't that common. There were a few times I had to re-read a passage to see if I could actually understand it, and found that no, I in fact didn't, nor couldn't. Most of the book though is really engaging and written in a pretty layman style. You do not need to be a chemist to read and understand 90% of this book. And that extra 10% is not where the jokes are (disclaimer: there aren't any real jokes...I think). Here are some fascinating facts I learned from this book: Antimony (Sb atomic number 51) was once used as a laxative. "Unli...