Welcome to Litsy!

I read this book for the second time this year. It soothes my mind and my heart as no other book has

Did anyone else watch #universeinverse yesterday? It was so good!

I‘m absolutely thrilled about Popova‘s book winning a Los Angeles Times prize. Also thrilled that the judges placed it in the Science and Technology category.

https://youtu.be/Rg9pA4MC_y0?list=PLdgePvblfv94vi2LEAkHWu1SD8sWGaWwg

Next weekend I plan on organizing my shelves. I want to make an "on deck" shelf with all my books to-read! One I'm excited about is Figuring by Maria Popova. #bookshelf #getorganized2020

Where would you go if you had a time machine? (And a stash of antibiotics)

I was going to go outside and take an Autumnal picture with my book, but then it started to rain...

I'm wondering what category this book falls into. Non fiction fiction? Littered with quotes that make me want to take notes!

I can't recommend this book strongly enough, nor do I know where to begin. I delayed finishing it because of how much I knew I would miss it.

Lots of audiobooks this month. 😎

A long & mesmerizing #audiobook narrated by Natascha McElhone, this begins with Kepler in the 17th c & ends with Rachel Carson. In between is a tapestry of the interwoven lives of scientists & artists—with a focus on queer women—showing the cross pollination between art & science, the way poetry & music have inspired discoveries & invention. If you love Popova‘s Brain Pickings blog, you will love this too. ❤️ #LGBTQ #Feminist #nonfiction

A world without insects would be as dark as a world without stars, shorn of the stardust which makes a world a world.

Having received more congratulatory calls from friends after the Peanuts nod than after her National Book Award, Carson joked, “I found that true immortality seems to rest in being included in a comic strip.”

The very term ‘pesticide‘ seemed no longer appropriate to Rachel Carson, for designating any organism as a pest to be decimated for the benefit of another organism, the human animal, was an affront to the elemental interconnectedness of nature. She thought ‘biocide‘ better captured the impossibility of violating earth with such poisons without making it unfit for all life.

Nuclear fission would prove to be one of the most powerful and most dangerous discoveries ever made. This triumph of the human intellect over the mysteries of nature became a failure of human morality, as it led to the invention of the atomic bomb.

(Internet photo of Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission.)

“It is one of the ironies of our time that while concentrating on the defence of our country from enemies without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.” —Rachel Carson, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post.

Book synchronicity: I just finished Erin Nations‘ autobiographical trans man narrative Gumballs, and then I listen to Maria Popova quoting Emily Dickinson: “Amputate my freckled bosom / make me bearded like a man…”
#LGBTQ

Urania had taken on a different meaning. As sociology and medicine sought to classify identities that diverged from heteronormative sexuality, uranian, coined before homosexual, came to signify a person of a third sex. First, a female psyche in a male body, then more generally those whose attractions differed from the normative standards of their anatomy, or what we today might call queer people.

#top6reads I would highly recommend all of these, for different reasons. Vuong, Roy, and Oz are masters of emotional resonance. Figuring celebrates queer women who changed American history with their lives' works. Brusatte spins a great yarn with nonfiction. And Anzaldúa changed how I see the world.

"There is a singular strangeness to those moments when we find ourselves unmoored from our own being, when something seems to pull us beyond ourselves and shock us into the recognition, however momentary, that the self is not the static monolith we take it to be but something dynamic and situationally sculpted into various possibilities of being."

As has become my norm, all of the library books came in at once (+2 more hard copies). But Maria Popova's Figuring is amazing!! I already have so many highlights, notes, and more books added to my TBR list, and I'm only at 22%!

I have so many quotes from Figuring, many of them meditatively deep as this one, that choosing a flower from the bouquet is a job...

I don‘t think that I have ever read a book quite like this one. Besides being a great accomplishment in weaving together the lives of all these magnificent women in terms of research, it stands out in combining beauty and truth much the same way each of the historical characters actually worked and lived. It inspires further reading into the works of Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Rachel Carson et al. I really recommend it.

I took a lot of time with this audiobook because it is perfection. And now I have to buy a physical copy because I need to reread it. Already got a copy for the mother for mother's day.

Started ‘Figuring‘ out what this is about: It‘s obviously an extremely well-read, discursive, tour-de-force of the life of many important western thinkers, but less obvious a story of how they create meaning scientifically and emotionally. More precisely: How does truth and beauty combine? I learn a lot and the language is beautiful.

Took an audio walk around my sister's neighborhood with this fantastic book. All of the spring flowers are happening, from the wild flowers to the beds, this garden had plenty of both.

There‘s a lot of deep thinking in this book...the anecdotes about brilliant scientists and writers over the years were really interesting. Some parts were a solid 5/5 but other parts dragged a bit for me. It also made me wish I could just read and think all day instead of doing my day job😜.

Finally finished this brilliant book. It‘s dense with language, ideas, and history and I am feeling an uncommon sense of accomplishment at having read it from cover to cover. I do recommend it to lovers of history, poetry, science, and damn good stories.

#ImmersionReading this very well-written and thoroughly engrossing book! #CurrentlyListening

Popova uses a seemingly tenuous thread to connect the biographies of several luminaries. When the last page was read I was in awe of what the author accomplished. I am definitely going to reread this. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

If biography has traditionally been the craft of drawing out the line of a life from the cobwebs of history, in Figuring, Maria Popova traces each thread of silk in the web of thought that connects her subjects of study. This rich, enlightening journey through feminism, transcendentalism, environmentalism, and philosophy could only be penned by the author of Brainpickings and is sure to break your heart even as your mind soars with every page.

“We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgement and chance.”

Popova‘s Figuring is a love song in which she celebrates the lives, relationships, & thought of a dozen or so well known (& lesser known) writers and activists (mostly women, mostly queer) of the last few hundred years. A bit meandering at times, the detours are a joy, like strolling through a garden with a brilliant and engaging philosopher. I found sections relating to Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, and Rachel Carson particularly satisfying.

Only on chapter 2, and loving this book so far. Read with a dictionary near by!! A daguerreotype is a photograph taken by an early photographic process using and iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapors. 🤓

For the first third or so of the book I wasn‘t quite sure what Popova was really getting at. There were a lot of historical figures surrounding her “main” subjects and I was having a little bit of trouble keeping up with the jumps back and forth (and I kept confusing Maria Mitchell and Margaret Fuller, oops). But then Popova got to her chapters on Emily Dickinson and just wow. Blew me away. That was when the book began to gel for me.

https://www.brainpickings.org/

This a website, or maybe it's more of a blog, that I really enjoy. I've discovered many amazing books and a couple interests and insights because of it. I just thought I'd share it in case anyone else might enjoy it.

- Maria Edgeworth to Mary Somerville, regarding Somerville‘s The Mechanism of the Heavens, as quoted in Chapter 5 of @brainpicker Figuring, out in February.

Maria Edgeworth has accurately described a book hangover and I‘m stealing it. Also, this book is a really fascinating look at the links that connect so many brilliant people through the generations.