Weekend Reading: The I Wish I'd Read More Things Edition

I want to start this week's post by saying that I am thinking of the folks facing Hurricane Patricia, and hoping that they'll all make it through OK. The same El Niño conditions that have made the water at our beaches unusually warm and that promise to bring us some much needed rain this winter are making this a terrible storm. I hope we don't wake up to read about a disaster tomorrow.

Now, to the links.

One of the reviews of Unspotted that I was waiting for came in, and I couldn't be happier with the result. The wildlife biologists at Dispatches from the Field loved Unspotted.

In other publishing related news, we're running a GoodReads giveaway for Okay, So Look- go enter if you are so inclined.

Still talking about books and reading... over at The Atlantic, James Fallow wrote about reading on a screen vs. in print, and he got a couple of really smart notes back from his readers. Whenever I see the handwringing about on screen reading, I always wonder if there were similar debates when the written word moved to books from scrolls. I also think about the fact that it is fairly well understood that the switch to writing stories from the oral tradition had an impact on our language and our brains, and wonder why no one is advocating we go back to memorizing all of our stories and transmitting them orally.

You can thank Bad Mom, Good Mom for that last link, and also the next two, about the return of the novella and the problem of what to call a non-fiction "novella." I really wish I had a good answer for that last one. It would make my emails to potential reviewers much easier to write.

Bad Mom, Good Mom writes a lot of good, thought-provoking posts, and posts cool pictures of her sewing projects. Go check out her recent post on why the future of diesel engines matters for a taste.

I'm glad the compounding pharmacies will be able to offer competition for the medicine that Martin Shkreli jacked up the price on... but I'd still rather we solve the underlying problem instead of using this work around. As a consumer, I'd rather take a medicine produced under a validated manufacturing process with a validated quality control system than have to rely on a compounding pharmacy. That's not to impune the work of pharmacists at compounding pharmacies. It is just to say that when you can have a repeatable process and quality control, it is nice to have those things and it seems silly to have to give them up just because some finance guys want to be a**holes.

The title of this is too good to change: Why Angry Old Men Calling a Meeting to Yell at a Woman Is Always a Spectacular Failure.

On the falling number of working women in the US.

Apparently some big news site decided to poll its readers about whether they would go back in time to kill baby Hitler, and the internet spent a good part of the day talking about that. The best response I saw was someone who linked to this cartoon.

That's all I have. I saved a lot of other interesting looking things to read, but I didn't get to read them. So let's end with some happy stuff. This is all sorts of awesome:

This. Is. AWESOME. “@JeaneanThomas: Dear teenage boy at the skate park... pic.twitter.com/AOsuvt40Js”

— Susan Arendt (@SusanArendt) October 21, 2015

And this is really funny:

We've been had: pic.twitter.com/GiJJbtBdOI

— John Fitzpatrick (@j_c_fitz) October 21, 2015