Bowie Bevy of Brainy Books

Let's hold another book sampling session -- bring stuff you've read and can recommend!

Zoom meeting link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86192814968?pwd=NkRvd1FzWnY0eVVBZG5FMjNueG5sdz09

For our Book Sampling, think of 1-3 science-related books you've read that might be of interest to the group. We'll go around the group, and each person will present a book at a time: why would we enjoy it? Why did you like it? That will probably spark everyone else's memories of related titles, so we might chat about them for a while. Everyone will hopefully come away from the meeting with a bunch of new titles on our reading lists.

The rules:

• Books should be at least science- or medicine-adjacent. You decide what that means to you.
• Books can be fiction or non-fiction, even though we've never read a fiction title in the club.
• Books can date from any year, even though the club usually sticks to books written in the last decade.
• You don't need to have read the book recently; it can be your favorite book from childhood, something you read in college, or a new book.
• Don't present your own writing; this is for books you've read!
• It's OK if you don't have any books to present and just want to sit in the audience.

Our 2024 Book Selection meeting will follow immediately afterwards. You don't have to attend both events; feel free to show up at 8pm Eastern for the selection discussion!

In this meeting we'll look at our list of suggested books, discuss them and add new titles, and assemble our 2024 list of books. The link for the Zoom meeting is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86192814968?pwd=NkRvd1FzWnY0eVVBZG5FMjNueG5sdz09 .

A starting list for discussion will be in our book-selection Google Document at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cBalvdsZM9RtXTuqQ1adq4epD7fMsp7iBFNrgQbBpWQ/edit .

You can add your suggestions to the Google Doc, but please point them out at the meeting. Or you can email suggestions to amk@amk.ca, and I can add them and

Publisher's summary: The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.