Archimedes Forgets

Ooh, I had one of my moments of brilliance Thursday night.

For context, this also happened to be a night of torrential rain, because the clouds decided that after ignoring us for more than a month, they were really going to let us have it. So I was pretty well soaked when I got to the library.

I was there to sell books at an event I'd been trying to avoid - the author of What You Don't Know Can Keep You Out of College was speaking to the over-stressed parents of the college-bound. Not exactly my idea of fun. But Eliza, who had volunteered for the event, has never actually done one before, or closed out the store, so Ellen asked me to keep her company.

This is by way of saying that I really didn't know much about the book beforehand - I didn't even have the title until I got there and saw the books. All I knew was that it had to do with college admissions.

I got to the library before Eliza and Darwin showed up with the important stuff, like books and money and charge slips, and sat down with Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography, which has been on my TBR list for ages. I got a few pages into it, and then I was joined by a man who wanted to chat while he hung out by the program room.

We had a nice talk about the bookstore, and he took down Angier's name for his wife, since he thought she'd enjoy the book. (Fabulous book, by the way. Not so much for new information as for new ways of thinking about sociobiology.) And then, assuming he had come to listen to the talk, I asked if he had someone heading off to college.

He said, "No, I wrote the book."

I didn't do very well on coming up with excuses. Luckily, he didn't seem to mind.