Off the shelf...

I finished rereading The Hunger Games trilogy preparatory to maybe catching the flick at a matinee this week sometime. The middle book is a little weak, relative to the other two, but I'd forgotten what a satisfying ending Mockingjay had. Of course, given the setting of the books, I wasn't demanding "and they all lived happily ever after." I was willing to settle for "and they all lived."

Now I'm learning new things, like about the geodetic survey of India in The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named. This was, like, a moon shot undertaking in the early 19th Century, and it has malaria and tigers and monsoons and eccentric Britishers and smashing expensive surveying equipment against the domes of old temples to Shiva. Among things I did not know: It's "Eve-rest", not "Ever-est", and "Jungle" is a loan word from Sanskrit that simply means uncultivated or unimproved land. (But now I'm left wondering what the British called jungles before they took over India and stole all their words.)