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My Beloved Brontosaurus, concluded

• As I said earlier, I’m not interested in dinosaurs. A few hours ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you much more than Tyrannosaurus had short arms, Triceratops had horns, Archeopteryx had feathers, and Velociraptor were those scary dinosaurs from Jurassic Park.
• But! Quoting from p. 121: “However, what we think of as Velociraptor was really Deinonychus. … An actual Velociraptor wouldn’t have been very threatening. While exceptionally well armed, the predator would have been about the size of a turkey, too small to consider a full-grown human a meal.”
• So, needless to say, I learned a lot reading this book. I did struggle to keep all the different dinosaur names and categories straight, and had to stop and refer to the index several times before I could remember what a sauropod was, so some kind of dinosaur ID chart would have been handy (though I suppose that’s what the internet is for…).
• But that’s just me. Otherwise, Switek’s writing is thoroughly engaging, with humor and pop culture references to keep it entertaining, but without overshadowing the solid science. And it’s not so scholarly that I couldn’t understand what Switek was saying.
• It’s about how we know what we know about dinosaurs. So not just this is what we know about dinosaurs, but also how early paleontologists may have reached the conclusions they did, and how scientists since then have come to different conclusions. I think it will interest both dinosaur aficionados and the general science reader.

The Summer I Became a Nerd by Leah Rae Miller

• The book in brief: for the past five years, Maddie has been determined to hide her geeky interests. She’s a cheerleader, dating the quarterback of the football team, and everyone seems to have forgotten the Spectrum Girl incident from sixth grade. Until, desperate to read the final issue of The Super Ones, she sneaks in to her local comic book store and the cute classmate working their recognizes her.
• This is one of those books I’d struggle to review, because while it was a pleasant, temporarily diverting read, and not a bad book, it also didn’t make much of an impact on me. I don’t really have much to say about it.
• There is a support small businesses! angle (Logan–the cute classmate–works at the struggling comic book store his parents own) and Maddie learns that her friends are more tolerant than she thought they’d be, but otherwise… Yeah, I don’t know what else to say about this one.

Today’s stats
Reading time: 4 hours
Blogging time: 35 minutes
Pages read: 404