Simon Singh, The Big Bang

WOW, that was weird - I must at some point have accidentally selected "Enable transliteration to Hindi" (not an button on one's computer that you'd think would be easy to hit accidentally, but stranger things have happened...) and as I started to type "Simon Singh, The Big Bang" it came out in Hindi, and for a brief moment I thought that my laptop was somehow asserting cultural/linguistic superiority over me, and showing off that it could not only recognize Singh as an Indian name, but also knew how to spell it in Hindi, and it was a tiny glimpse into a dystopic future controlled by machines. and then I realized that that was dumb/I was dumb and that I just needed to dink around in the settings tab until I fixed it. Anyway.
I promise I have read other things in the intervening months, but I will plead pregnancy brain and post-partum brain as my excuse (some of the reading has been things like "The Contended Little Baby Book" and "The Nursing Mother's Companion" which if anything tend to increase the postpartum stupor, so I refuse to discuss those on principle). However. Simon Singh! Simon Singh is fantastic. I love him. I will admit to reading his acknowledgement section at the end to find out whether he has a girlfriend or wife (ha! don't think so!) because if he ever moves to San Francisco, he is so mine.
The Big Bang is a concise-ish review of astronomy from the very beginning of the science (Aristotle, Ptolemy, etc.) through to the development and consolidation of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. I read it several years ago, but a) I had forgotten enough of it (i.e. most of it) and b) it's a really good read so I decided it was worth reading again, and this time I read it reeeeaaalallllllyyy sloooooowwwwly in an effort to actually retain as much of the information as I could, especially of the more basic early astronomy (e.g. how the size of the earth/sun/moon were figured out, the development of the heliocentric model of the galaxy, etc., all of which to my chagrin I have learned multiple times over, starting in sixth grade science lessons, but of which I had retained hold of only a few unconnected snippets (Tycho Brahe and his metal nose! Galileo muttering "And yet it moves" under his breath after his recanting at the Vatican! Ernest Rutherford and the thing about firing a cannon at a piece of tissue paper!) No guarantees that I will retain any of it this time around, but at least I have a few more random snippets which are colourful enough they they will stick in the cannon (Tycho Brahe also had a pet moose which died in a drunken revel at Christmastime! the Syrene well, the bottom of which was mysteriously illuminated every solstice!). I get lost (predictably) right around Einstein and relative space/time and space itself bending in funny directions, but since he also includes plenty of comforting quotes from people like Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman saying "If you can understand relativity and quantum physics, than you haven't understood it," I feel OK about it. I just went on Wikipedia to find out if SS has written anything else that I need to read, and he has! so exciting! an expose of the alternative/chiropractic medicine for which he was unsuccessfully sued for libel. yippee. stay tuned once I have read that.
The other thing I read recently which I just have to at least mention is Elizabeth Crane's book of short stories, You Must Be This Happy to Enter which is seriously goofy and very smart. My favourite was the story about Betty the zombie who goes on a reality TV show in which she competes with an anorexic, a shopaholic, a chronically shy person, etc. to see who can most successfully confront their various problems.