a different book

 I put "All Clear" aside for a little bit. It's good - but perhaps a bit TOO absorbing and I found I was staying up too late reading, and also was getting anxiety because of "will things work out, will the time travelers get home, or will they be killed in the Blitz? And what of (I presume it is) Colin who came through to try to rescue them? Did the retrieval team get killed?" 

I think that might have been part of my bad sleep Sunday night. 

So last night, I read a totally different book - non-fiction, which, I often find a good but not "upsetting" (so: no war, no true crime, no serious disease) thing to read. 

I have the subjects I particularly like: "social" history (how people lived: cooking and clothes and things like that), and the early/pre history of Indigenous groups in North America, historical linguistics (especially very early linguistics that borders on archaeology), history-of-science, and books about interesting natural phenomena or about taxonomic groups I don't know much about. 

The book I'm reading now is called "Spirals in Time: the Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells" by Helen Scales. I think I found out about it on Bluesky - I follow a number of bookish people and also authors, so I hear about new books coming out and often get enticed into ordering or pre-ordering them (this is how I found Sarah Beth Durst's excellent "The Spellshop" - and next year she has another book that is either a sequel or in the same vein coming out, and  I pre-ordered it on the grounds that I enjoyed "The Spellshop" so much, that I will enjoy a similar book)

This book, as you'd guess, is about molluscs (or mollusks, the more common American spelling - the author is British). Right now it's about the basic taxonomy and biology of them but often books like this range pretty far afield - "Our Moon" by Rebecca Boyle - which I read early this year - is similar, where she talked a bit of cosmology, a bit of archaeology, a bit of geology, a bit of space exploration - was similar. 

It's oddly restful to read. As I said, I often find this kind of nonfiction more soothing to read than a "story," even a pleasant and low-stakes story where nothing very bad seems likely to happen. 

I have more books kind of like "Spirals in Time" on the shelf, too - recently I ordered "Big Bone Lick" (snerk) about early paleontology in the US, and I have a couple more books about early native people in the US. And I have a big book from Folio Society about the history of the English language I want to read some time.