When working, I limit my reading to the materials pertinent to the topic. What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid when writing? That’s the book in which Wilson said, “Most children go through a phase of being fascinated by bugs I guess I never outgrew mine.” Wilson’s “Naturalist,” because it examines the events and propensities that shape a life in science. No, I don’t have a single favorite science book, but one I very much enjoyed and often recall is E. Those images definitely got me wondering about events and forces outside my little world.
I was in third grade then, but I still remember the illustrations featuring dinosaurs and the geological changes on planet Earth over eons. The Life magazine compilation called “The World We Live In,” which came out in 1955, was probably the first science book I read, or at least paged through. What books first got you excited about science? Also Agnes Clerke, who lived through a scientific revolution that she chronicled with enviable clarity in “A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century.” Partly because I grew up in a family of doctors and dentists, I very much admire the medical writing of Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Oliver Sacks, Naomi Rosenberg and Anne Fadiman. I could plead the same excuse as above, or the Fifth Amendment, but I feel confident naming Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin and Rachel Carson. I can safely respond only to the poet part, by naming Diane Ackerman, whose collection of poems about the solar system, “The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral,” launched our long friendship. Most of my friends are writers, so this question is impossible to answer without offending someone. Which writers - novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets - working today do you admire most? As soon as it ended, I felt compelled to listen to it again, and then I needed to get the book to see it on the page and figure out how he’d done it. I listened to the audiobook, which Doctorow himself read aloud in his own understated but perfect intonation. I should also mention “Andrew’s Brain,” the last novel E. I generally judge whatever I’ve read most recently as “the last great book.” In the present case, it’s “The Girls of Atomic City,” by Denise Kiernan, about the World War II production of bomb-quality uranium in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Several are advance reading copies, including “Earth in Human Hands,” by David Grinspoon “The Wanderers” - a novel about the first three astronauts going to Mars - by Meg Howrey and “Waves Passing in the Night,” by Lawrence Weschler. I never read in bed, so there are no books on my night stand. What books are currently on your night stand?
The science writer says that while researching her new book, “The Glass Universe,” she read fiction about the time period, such as “The Custom of the Country” and “O Pioneers!”
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