(""Special Topics in Calamity Physics")

[fiefoe]

As soon as I saw Marisha Pessl's debut novel being compared to "Everything is Illuminated", I kind of knew I wouldn't last. The constant 'book-bag dropping' (掉书袋) is cute, but it's 'I'm glad we don't have pets' cute.

• an eerily resonant newspaper ad... "CAMPING EQUIPMENT ILQUIDATION SALE"...
• but this was the Jade Vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys), a member of the Leguminosae family...
• A professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life.
• She tried... the many netting swings (the Swoop, the Shorthanded Jackknife, the Lowsell-Pit Maneuver).
• Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).
• God always took on the personality of the ceiling at which I was staring... If there was a slight tilt, He was inclined to listen.
• the odd redheaded intern (see "Bulldog Ant", Meet the Bugs, Buddle, 1985) .. a nurse (see "Wood Ant"..)
• This was Dad's deep-sea secret, never before photographed or scientifically classified:
• I'd long decided to hold in contempt all people who believed themselves to be the subject of everyone else's ESTABLISHING SHOT, BOOM SHOT, REACTION SHOT, CLOSE-UP or CHOKER.
• Stately dignity can be possessed by all, in two ways: 1. Diverting the mind with a book or play 2. Reciting Keats
• Goodnight Moons had duvet eyes, shadowy eyelids, a smile like a hammock and a silvered, sleepy countenance that most people wore only during the few minutes prior to sleep.
• the sort of washed-out Scandinavian blond person who desperately looked as if he needed to be dyed, tinted, hand dipped in something / grand ballroom of a voice