Augh! My bookshelves are so disorganized! Must re-catalogue soon but there's no time because Pizzamas starts in six days!

Good Morning Hank, it's Tuesday.

Let's talk about books--specifically some great books you probably haven't read, beginning with some fiction. 

Want to spend some peaceful hours enjoying a great mystery series? Crash Course co-founder, Stan Muller, introduced me to Ann Swinfen's novels. This book, "The Bookseller's Tale", is the first in my favorite series. It's set in Oxford in 1353 and the world of medieval bookmaking is just such a great backdrop.

If you want to belly-laugh and be truly astonished by linguistic acrobatics, I recommend "Tuff" by Paul Beatty. Now Beatty is more famous for his books, "The White Boy Shuffle" and the Booker Award Winning "The Sellout", but I first read this book twenty years ago and I've been thinking about it ever since.

A book that makes me both sob and feel hopeful? Jacqueline Woodson's "Miracle's Boys". This novel is ostensibly for kids ten and up, and I know many kids who've loved it, but I am a forty-four-year-old person and I also love it. It's about impoverishment and grief and surviving loss, but above all it is about brothers. And Hank, as you know, I love a book about brotherhood, and this this one might be my favorite.

Okay, on to infectious disease, because that's where my brain always goes. I really love the book, "The Black Death" by Rosemary Horrox. It's a collection of first person accounts of the four year period in which approximately half of all Europeans died of plague. 

Another disease book I love is Frank Snowden's "Epidemics and Society". It helped me understand that infectious disease has, like, always been one of the most important historical forces. Like, we think about Alexander the Great and Cleopatra and whatever, but it's mostly microbes. And the book also explores how racism and other forms of discrimination shape disease burden, which in turn shapes history. It's a reminder that disease does not treat people equally unless society treats people equally.

A physics book: I love "The Disordered Cosmos" by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. I think about it every day. This book taught me that we don't know why there is matter in the universe, from which I have not recovered. It also helped me to understand the big bang and dark energy and lots of other stuff, even though I have like a fourth grade level of physics, but it is also a book about gender identity, and race, and lots of other stuff. It is just brilliant. I have never read anything like it.

Another book that acknowledges that we are not, like, observers of reality, but participants in it: "Phosphorescence" by Julia Baird. It's about living with cancer, and creatures that make their own light, and the science of human joy, and it is so, so good.

Alright, a sports book. I realize I'm biased here, but "All Together Now" by long-time AFC Wimbledon CEO, Erik Samuelson, is so enjoyable! I mean, it is the greatest underdog sports story of all time, told by one of the people who made it happen.

Essays: I know Mary Oliver is famous for her poems, but I love her essays, especially the ones collected in "Upstream". I dog-eared almost every page of this book, but one quote especially stuck with me, "I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life."

Speaking of that kind of reading, I love "Pilgrim Bell", the new book of poems by Kaveh Akbar. He writes the kind of poems that get richer and more interesting the more time you spend with them, and in the last month I have read this book over and over and it just keeps giving me new gifts.

Lastly, you have probably not read this 1945 cookbook, "How to Cook and Eat in Chinese" by Buwei Yang Chao, a Chinese physician who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s. This book has been out of print for decades but it is a wonderfully post-modern cookbook. Like, one of the first sentences in it is, "I did not write this book." It is also hugely historically important; it introduced many Americans to Chinese cooking techniques and coined English language terms like "stir fry" and "pot stickers", and it is full of these pithy witticisms like, you know how it is with modern daughters and mothers who think we are modern. Somebody put it back in print!

What are some books I probably haven't read that you would recommend to me? Let me know in comments. Also, I made a bookshop.org list with all of these books if you're interested, plus a couple other recommendations, link in the doobly do below.

Hank, I will see you on Friday, and then you will see me on Monday.