I’ve got three delightfully nerdy books for you to read: dinosaurs, Harry Potter, AND punctuation marks!
A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs by Ben Garrod
I have a father who is very involved in the Dallas Paleontology Society, and two little boys under the age of nine, so you can imagine that dinosaurs play a big part in my life. Despite that, there is still so much about dinosaurs that I don’t know! This book is aimed at adults who loved dinosaurs as kids and sort of…grew out of it? It’s written and narrated by adults who still REALLY love dinosaurs, which is so fun.
I love how much they reference Jurassic Park, et al. The first Jurassic Park movie caused a surged of interest in dinosaurs — and a surge of misinformation as well. And with the popularity of the more recent ones, that’s only gotten worse. The biggest difference is in the raptors. Garrod makes it very clear that the raptors in the first movie are NOT what velociraptors looked like. They were much smaller — like the size of miniature poodles. That’s its own kind of terrifying, really. New discoveries are made all the time in this field. The advances scientists have made in understanding how dinosaurs lived and what they looked like (feathers, y’all!) are astounding. They also frequently discover their own mistakes — in many instances, a paleontologist will dig up a fossil, think it’s something new and name it, only to later find out it was a juvenile version of an existing dinosaur, or something similar. It’s a fascinating, ever-changing field. And there are so many fields within it! One of my dad’s favorite paleontology-related subjects: coprolites. A coprolite is fossilized feces, and you can learn a LOT from it. Garrod interviews a woman who studies coprolites exclusively, and it’s amazing what she was able to share (and how passionate she was about it).
Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston
Oh, this was so fun. Houston introduces us to the history behind a dozen different punctuation marks, including ones I’ve never heard of (the manicule, which is a little pointy hand), ones I’ve never known the real name for (the octothorpe #, my new favorite word), and ones I’ve never seen used in print (the interrobang!). We learn the difference between a hyphen (-) and a dash (–) and how many people throughout history have attempted to create a front or symbol to indicate sarcasm (this is obviously of high importance). Through the book he provides numerous examples and lots of trivia.
And it’s funny: “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
The Bible influenced a lot of what we see in print today. Monks spending their lives copying pages over and over would try to come up with ideas to make their work more legible and accessible. The manicule, for instance, is literally a little drawing of a hand that would be doodled in the margin to indicate something significant.
Not all of our punctuation hails from centuries past, though. In the 1960s, an advertising exec came up with the interrobang, a combination of the exclamation point and question mark
. He thought it would look sleeker for rhetorical questions. It never quite caught on, although I use its alternate version (?!?) multiple times a day. This was a really interesting read, if you like this sort of thing at all. TONS of information I didn’t already know, broken into easy to read sections with lots of examples and fun facts. It was a great book to pick up, read a bit and put down to digest.
Harry Potter: A History of Magic (Harry Potter: A History of Magic Exhibition) by British Library, J.K. Rowling, Julian Harrison (Introduction), Julia Eccleshare (Contributor), Roger Highfield (Contributor), Anna Pavord (Contributor), Lucy Mangan (Contributor), Tim Peake (Contributor) , Owen Davies (Contributor), Richard Coles (Contributor), Steve Backshall (Contributor), Steve Kloves (Contributor)
I found this absolutely fascinating. I listened to the audiobook, which was wonderful because all of the contributors spoke their parts and Natalie Dormer narrated the entire thing, which was delightful to listen to. However I bet the hard copy would be amazing as well. I’m guessing there’s a lot of visual aids to enjoy. For instance, J.K. Rowling’s early drafts and drawings of the Harry Potter series are discussed extensively here. She apparently did doodles of characters when getting ready to write stories about them, and her thought process can be seen easily in those.
As much as I love Harry Potter, the examples of magic throughout human times were my favorite part. The book talks about the legends behind things like the Sorcerer’s Stone or love potions or magical beasts. This book is what I wanted Lore to be. It is a serious look at magic throughout history. Contributors selected aspects of the Harry Potter universe, discussed them in detail and compared them against similar stories in muggle history. The point of the book was to summarize the history of magic Exhibition at the New York Historical Society, hosted by the British Library. It’s too late to see it now, but this book does a fantastic job of recreating the experience. I might reread it again just to have the opportunity to look at the pictures in the paper copy.