A peak into Emilie & the Hollow World and a last look into The Disappearing Spoon

A peak into Emilie & the Hollow World and a last look into The Disappearing Spoon 

I have been fighting a cold all week, so I am going backwards today for Book Beginnings on Friday hosted by Rose City Reader here is the first sentence of Emilie & the Hollow World by Martha Wells ... 

Creeping along the docks in the dark, looking for the steamship Mary Bell, Emilie was starting to wonder if it might be better to just walk to Silk Harbor. 

From The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, from the prologue again ...

...the symbol for mercury, Hg, consists of two letters that don't even appear in its name. Unraveling that mystery – it's from hydragyrum, Latin for "water silver" – helped me understand how heavily ancient languages and mythologies influenced the periodic table ...

Mercury(II) oxide

... I found mercury in literature class, too. Hat manufacturers once used a bright orange mercury wash to separate fur from pelts, and the common hatters who dredged around in the steamy vats, like the mad one in Alice in Wonderland, gradually lost their hair and wits.

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For The Friday 56 hosted at Freda's Voice here is something from the 56% mark of Emilie & the Hollow World

She managed to get headed down the waterway, away from the window, but another gunshot rang out behind her. Then something grabbed her ankle and jerked her under water. 

As you can tell, it is an adventure story - Emilie runs away from home and in a effort to stow away on a steamship ends up  ...  going somewhere else entirely. I thought this book was a lot of fun to read and I am looking forward to the next one.


And from The Disappearing Spoon for the last time, I promise ... at the 56% mark

http://www.periodictable.com/Elements/059/

This mark of aristocracy lingers on the periodic table, an influence you can read without an iota of knowledge about chemistry. Gentlemen throughout Europe received educations heavy in the classics, and many element names – cerium, thorium, promethium – point to ancient myths. The really funny-looking names too, such as praseodymium, molybdenum, and dysprosium, are amalgams of Latin and Greek. Dysprosium means "little hidden one," since it's tricky to separate from its brother elements. Praseodymium means "green twin" for similar reasons ..."