January 2023: Ginger

Ginger is the general manager of Quail Ridge Books. While she can most commonly be found with a
novel in hand, a coworker encouraged her to base her Take Ten on favorite nonfiction works she’s
mentioned to coworkers in passing.

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
Journalist Imbler shapes their intriguing scientific research of various aquatic creatures into personal essays, unfolding to form a thoughtful, occasionally sorrowful, and sometimes euphoric queer memoir.
 

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
Linguist McCulloch has taken an accessibly-written yet serious look at how we communicate online—from the various eras of internet adoption and how that shapes our language use to the reason that emojis caught on so strongly to why the period at the end of this sentence comes across differently in a text.
 

Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between by Joseph Osmundson

Microbiologist Osmundson explains the wonder of viruses (most of which are harmless to humans) in loving detail, while in adjacent personal essays he grapples with living through his second viral pandemic as a gay man living in New York City in 2020 after having come of age during the AIDS crisis.
 

Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol by Mallory O’Meara
O’Meara took me on a global history of women and alcohol ranging from our first depiction of brewers through American rum runners to the role of small-scale, woman-owned drinking establishments played in opposing apartheid in South Africa.
 

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

Beaton spent two years as a young woman working on the hyper-masculine oil fields of prairie Canada because jobs in her beloved home province didn’t allow her to earn enough to pay down her student loans. This is a beautifully paced story with simple illustrations that sometimes broke my heart.
 

The Season: A Social History of the Debutante by Kristen Richardson

The author noted in an interview that her research into this book was frequently dismissed as unserious or frivolous, even though these women were the mechanisms by which power, wealth, and social caste were conferred and maintained in rituals with surprising staying power. 
 

ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal

Curator Dasal pulls intriguing pieces of art history out of the archives and into the light. A reformed reluctant museumgoer herself, her not-quite-hidden histories seem designed to make me want to head to a gallery and request better tours.
 

Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most by Cassie Holmes, PhD

Social psychologist Holmes presents the latest research into happiness in a way designed to increase the reader’s own. The chapters provide both the evidence for a behavior producing higher enjoyment and the exercises from her UCLA class to help form happier habits (Excellent for fans of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman)
 

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Physicist Prescod-Weinstein introduces readers to particle physics and all the unseen, misunderstood stuff of the universe. While not shying away from the issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia embedded in physics departments, she’s ultimately writing her hope for a more inclusive and joyous search for the rules that underpin reality. 
 

The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of Math, Category Theory, and Life by Eugenia Cheng 

Mathematician Cheng’s introduction to category theory is engaging and extremely low on numbers and arithmetic, and Cheng shows how this branch of mathematics helps one understand real life much more convincingly than any word problem. It is also, technically, a book that I am still reading, but since I won’t stop talking about it, it goes on the list unfinished.