Really, almost to Chapter 14

[rthstewart]

Really, I'm done with Chapter 15 of TQSiT, and just trying to finish 14 and having a very difficult time of it in the general, I sux mode, why am I doing this again?

So, in the meantime, I give you a new book about the real Mary Anning

Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier (Girl With A Pearl Earring)

Tracy Chevalier's new novel depicts people who believe that God created human beings just a few thousand years ago. But instead of setting "Remarkable Creatures" during the 2008 Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., Chevalier digs back to the English town of Lyme Regis in the early 19th century. You know this quiet resort village from Jane Austen's "Persuasion." Two hundred miles north, a toddler named Charles Darwin will someday evolve into the world's most controversial scientist, but for now most everybody agrees with Bishop Ussher's conclusion that Earth was created on the night before Oct. 23, 4004 B.C.

Until a poor little girl starts finding monster skeletons embedded in Lyme's coastal cliffs. That's enough to rattle anybody's prehensile tail.
...

Once again, Chevalier has sunk into a fertile historical moment to examine the way a smart but untrained young woman interacts with overconfident, dismissive men.
In this case, the girl is Mary Anning, an unjustly forgotten, real-life figure in 19th-century paleontology. ...

With only a few years of training from her father, she developed an extraordinary ability to spot a variety of objects from what we now call the Jurassic period. Her ichthyosaur and plesiosaur are still on display in the national museums of London and Paris. Indeed, the discoveries made by this self-taught young woman proved important to the work of Georges Cuvier, Louis Agassiz and other leading geologists throughout the world. (And if you think they gave her the credit she deserved, you know nothing about how natural selection has engineered the masculine mind.)

From the Washington Post Book World