At the Library

Now that I have this thing called free time I've been frequenting the library to borrow books to read for fun. The Cornell library has a massive selection of books, but unless I want to end up with La Chasse des canards or Harvest of grief: grasshopper plagues and public assistance in Minnesota, it’s really hard to browse. Even with the Library of Congress Classification System categories, looking at call numbers starting with PR – a fraction of a floor of one library – only narrows things down to the entirety of English literature.

So I've been going with the call numbers for random book recommendations in hand and this summer I've read a mix of science fiction, young adult fiction, and more “classic” novels.

I first read Arthur C. Clarke when I picked up Rendezvous With Rama at a library book sale a couple years ago. Over spring break, I finished the Rama series and this summer I've started on the Odyssey books. Thusfar I've read 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two. There are definite similarities in the two series – space travel and alien life being a couple of the themes that have made an appearance in all of Clarke’s books I've read so far. One kind of cool thing is that Clarke wrote about using Jupiter’s gravity to accelerate a spaceship deeper into space in a kind of slingshot maneuver, which is exactly what the Voyager probes did, before Voyager 1 or 2 launched. [I read a book about the Voyager probes last summer, and while it wasn't terrible, I was hoping for more about how the probe was designed and run and things that happened on its journey and the author focused more on exploration in general.]

My first library trip this summer, I went in looking for 2001 and was wandering the shelves in the English literature section when I found Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works. I decided not to pick up any Sherlock Holmes at the moment and instead went with The Lost World, in which a newspaper reporter, an academic, an adventurer-type, and an overbearing professor explore a remote mesa in South America, where, the professor claims, there are dinosaurs. I found part of the ending a bit anticlimactic but overall the story was interesting, with plenty of action in the second half of the book.

Moving on from dinosaurs to pirates, I borrowed a young adult book titled Pirate Cinema by Cody Doctorow as a quick read. The pirates in this book do not sail the seven seas, but instead illegally download things from the internet and stay in abandoned buildings. It was a less dense read than some of the other books I've been going through, and the storyline is rather relevant to today’s technology-filled world. The general feel of the book reminded me of The Thief Lord with laptops.

Finally, to round out my selection of two dystopian novels, two novels based in England, and . . . aliens, I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This book considers a world where people are raised from birth to have a particular intelligence, social class, and job. They cannot imagine being happy doing anything other than what they have been conditioned to do and if they ever start becoming unhappy, there’s a pill that can fix that. Brave New World is one of those books that’s on lists of “100 books everyone should read” and that comes up periodically on Jeopardy! and trivia quizzes, so I figured I should actually read it. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't want to live in the world Brave New World describes. So far I've liked everything I've borrowed from the Cornell library system and haven’t had to suffer through dutifully enjoy titles such as Feed and The Life Before Us that have been past summer reading assignments. I’m currently working on Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with the first two of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels still to come. If anyone has any book recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Carry On My Wayward Son

Or daughter. I have to confess that after only a month of being in charge of my own finances and groceries, I went out and bought this:

Yes, that is both crunchy peanut butter and raspberry jam with seeds in it. Two things that will not be found in my home (New England home, not Cornell) because my father does not like having little things to bite through in his condiments.

Other things that will not be found in my house since I left for college: dairy products including milk, cheese, and a 32 ounce container of yogurt. Apparently my parents have decided to try out soy milk and almond milk instead of cow milk. Both of the dairy milk alternatives aren't bad – I tried them when I went home at the beginning of the summer – but almond milk feels like drinking nuts and soy milk tastes less sweet than cow milk to me. Naturally, I decided to solve my non-dairy milk problems by mixing almond and soy milk, which tasted pretty good to me. Back at Cornell, I've returned to cow’s milk, which I like the taste of, so don’t even try to tell me about how humans aren't supposed to be drinking milk after the age of two or whenever.

As for the cheese, I like cheese and I like dishes with cheese in them and I currently have one and a half blocks of cheese plus a few cheese slices in the fridge. I even tried making macaroni and cheese the other day and it was good. Apologies to my parents who can’t imagine how something cheesy and creamy can taste good.

And then the 32 ounces of yogurt. It’s just cheaper to buy it that way, plus now I can have yogurt all week. One final note: don’t worry, I haven’t stooped to eating raw broccoli yet.

The Little Engine that Couldn’t

Last semester in p-chem II we learned about the Carnot cycle and the Carnot engine. Way back in elementary school, we read “The Little Engine That Could,” which taught that you can do things if you just believe you can. Unfortunately, this is the real world. Sometimes, you just can’t:

161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do, #141 and [#57]

141. Ring the giant bell in the Plantations

57. Have a [it’s] midnight [in China] picnic in the Cornell Plantations*

As a stereotypically cheap college student with no car, my main mode of transportation is my own feet. That plus the summer college students and ten billion** construction projects going on around campus making things not as quiet as I would like them means that I've been out to the Plantations a few times already this summer. Usually I just go out to the Botanical Garden, where I remember that I don’t actually like the smell of flowers, but a couple weeks ago I went through the Wildflower Garden and to the start of the Arboretum (1st picture from my last post). The trees to people ratio was much higher and I didn’t hear any 1) screaming drunk people, 2) screeching tires, or 3) heavy machinery. It was just me, the flies, and my penguins.

I've been out further before, once with my hiking class and once when a friend and I decided to go have an adventure on the Plantations. When I went with my friend, we hunted down the giant bell, rang it, and enjoyed the view. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me. Enjoy this picture of the Botanical Garden instead.

There was another day this summer when I biked out to the Botanical Garden on my lunch break, where I proceeded to have my lunch at the Cornell Plantations. I’m not sure I’m ever going to have a “it’s midnight in Ithaca” picnic on the Plantations, but it was definitely midnight in China when I was eating, so that’s my stand-in for now. I prefer to be sleeping at midnight in Ithaca, though apparently my problem sets last semester didn't feel the same way.

*Words in parenthesis added by me.
**This is only a rough estimate. The real value may be several billion projects off.

Summer

Summer is . . .

Blue skies and long grass

Bike rides

Dirt, and sweat, and long treks in the woods

Road trips

And construction.