Excerpt from What if?

Did you get your copy of June, Into the Light? Released last Friday, here is what one reviewer says:

Brilliant, awesome, compassionate and soul searchingly beautiful. Ms Workman if you ever stop writing I think I will go find you and haul you back to a computer. You are one of the very best authors in the world, and this book is only one reason.

Who could resist a review like that? Pick up June, Into the Light on Amazon today!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

I had a hard time deciding which book to do a teaser for today! I just finished another book in Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mystery series, which I’ve mentioned here before. And I have started What if? by Randall Munroe, the creator of the xkcd web comic.

After much consideration, I have decided to go with What if? I don’t do a lot of non-fiction teasers here, but I love xkcd, and after the first few entries in What if? I can say that his humor and brilliance flow through in these Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.

But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”

Randall Munroe, What if?

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe’s iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions.

The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical:

  • What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?
  • Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?
  • What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City?
  • Are fire tornadoes possible?

His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements.

The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

Tell me what you think!

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