Barry Eisler just got back from doing research in Istanbul. On a research jaunt for her upcoming Granny Apples series, Sue Ann Jaffarian headed to Julian, California and had a ball staying at a quaint country inn.
And where do I get to go for research? Paris? Bali? Samarkand? Nope. The Los Altos, California branch of The Santa Clara County Library, just a few miles from the Raffel homestead.
Why there? the answer can be traced back to high school where I neglected to 
take physics. I skipped it in college, too. Well, my sins of omission have caught up with me after all those years. For the sequel to Dot Dead, I need to grock the science of subatomic particles. (If I told you why, it would kinda ruin the mystery.) Anyway, while you all are enjoying the holiday, I will be doing penance for my academic shortcomings by reading the eight books I picked up at the library this afternoon: The Particle Hunters, The Elegant Universe, Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction, The God Particle, The Oxford Guide to the History of Physics and Astronomy, From Clockwork to Crapshoot: 
A History of Physics, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century, and Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.
I have a feeling I could have absorbed all this better when I was twenty. OTOH, much of what I need to learn about had not been discovered back in those dark ages. And to tell the truth, I might be looking forward to the reading after all.
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