Sunday, January 04, 2009

What is Jennifer Ouellette reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Jennifer Ouellette, author of Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales From the Annals of Physics (2006) and The Physics of the Buffyverse (2007).

One paragraph from her entry:
For bedtime reading, I prefer non-fiction with shorter chapters -- if I get TOO engrossed in a novel, I'll stay up all night to finish it, which really isn't the point of bedtime reading. Most recently, I've read Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, a highly literate memoir that makes me proud and a bit awed that such an eloquent, thoughtful person is going to be our next president. Mary Roach's Bonk was a sheer delight, particularly the hilarious footnotes -- you definitely don't want to miss those. Tom Parker-Bowles' The Year of Eating Dangerously was interesting and amusing, but the vivid accounts of all that gastronomic excess (he claims he gained 20 or so pounds while writing the book) made me feel a bit ill by proxy -- so perhaps not the best bedtime reading. Right now I'm working my way through Steve Dublanica's Waiter Rant, about the dark side of waiting tables in a trendy Manhattan bistro -- based on a popular blog of the same name.[read on]
Jennifer Ouellette is associate editor of APS News, the monthly publication of The American Physical Society; and writes for the American Institute of Physics’ TV project, Discoveries and Breakthroughs in Science, as well as its Inside Science News Service. She was also a contributing editor for the now-defunct The Industrial Physicist magazine; a 1997 article on concert hall acoustics garnered her an award in science writing from the Acoustical Society of America.

Ouellette writes about science in the popular press, most notably for Discover, Salon, New Scientist, and On Earth. She holds a black belt in jujitsu.

Learn more about Jennifer Ouellette at her website and at the popular general science blog, Cocktail Party Physics.

Writers Read: Jennifer Ouellette.

--Marshal Zeringue