I loved Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter and Longitude and I figured this would be equally engaging. It is. She writes the creation of the universe with awe, as it deserves, and quotes the first chapter of Genesis a lot with her reverence properly directed at the universe and the solar system, not at the Judeo-Christian god. After discussing the sun--I had never known it takes millions of years for light produced at the core to escape the star's gravity, but of course that makes sense--she starts the planets with Mercury and refers to Greek mythology just as much.
I started listening while walking to the post office. Now it's a mile away instead of a few blocks, but I saw a kestrel and what looked like a mutated magpie, with more white on it than should be. It looked so peculiar that when I first spotted it I thought it was a plastic bag caught in a tree, even though the shape and the tail-flipping were magpiesian. I paused, watching in wonder, until it flew off. Let's all be reverent together about this great planet we've got.
Then I got to this bit: "Jupiter more than doubles the mass of the other eight planets combined. Compared to the Earth alone, Jupiter measures 318 times Earth's mass and 1000 times Earth's volume. The diameter of Jupiter, however, is only 11 times that of Earth, since the giant compacted itself as it accreted so its diameter expanded at a fraction of the rate at which its mass and volume increased." That sentence asserts that the volume of a sphere functions discretely from its diameter, twice its radius, but the volume of a sphere is calculated by 4(pi*radius3)/3.
Even Homer nods, of course (this saying was much more apropos at UConn, since the Homer Babbidge Library nodded its facade right off about two days after it was pasted on): Jean Craighead George writes in Julie of the Wolves about Miyax looking at the constellations of the southern hemisphere. I was reading it aloud to RDC, and I hadn't read it at all in years, and I do sometimes editorialize our reading (as Lucy and Susan walked Aslan up to the Stone Table, I called them Mary and Martha). George was the Rachel Carson of my childhood, and I was Sam Gribley under (if not in) my own hemlock and Miyax with my dogs and so my first wild, accommodating thought was that maybe the southern hemisphere stars are visible during sunless arctic days. But no. They're not. (Whoa, I just emailed Jean Craighead George. I thanked her for Frightful and Tornait.)
RDC says that Orion is in the sky over South Africa right now as winter begins. I accept that: Orion sets from the northern hemisphere for the summer. But he doesn't claim to see Polaris, and I want that geometry explained to me.
I'm not sure that RDC finished listening to this: he said she wrote with the adoration of a kindergartener and that was offputting to him. I noticed that tone too, but I'm a sap and enjoyed it, like Walter Cronkite saying "Oh boy!" as Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.
Jorge Luis Borges. RDC heard about this on NPR and thought he could surprise me with it but it was already on my wishlist because I'd read about it in The Week. Since Yule, it's served well as a bedtime book because each being gets only a page or three. If I wanted to read my actual book, I did; if I was tired enough that I knew I wouldn't last, I read Borges. This and Invisible Cities and Dictionary of Imaginary Places need to be together in the library.