Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is “Favorite Bookstores”, or “Bookstores You’d Like to Visit”. As a child of rural post big-box America, I’ve only ever known places like Bookland, Books-A-Million, etc, and until recently could only visit ‘real’ bookstores while on vacation. COAS Books in Las Cruces comes to mind, as does Second Read Books in St. Augustine. Within the last year, though, a retired academic dean and community-minded gentleman has opened up Broad Street Books in downtown Selma — and it’s one of my very favorite places in the city, with a ‘living room’ feel to it. I visit it every Saturday morning and always find good company, coffee, and the odd treat there. The proprietor also uses the space to host book talks and poetry readings. It’s a treasure! If you’re ever in Selma, do drop in.

These shots are all from my instagram ,which is all nature or ‘community life’ type shots. On the subject of Tuesday memes, I used to participant in one called “Teaser Tuesday”, in which members would share a two-line excerpt from their current read. Although the original host has long since hung up her book-blogging hat, and there’s no successor to my knowledge, I always enjoyed going back to see what funny, surprising, or interesting lines I’d shared — so I’m going to start posting teases here again!

From Ed Yong’s An Immense World:

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension.”