Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.