I headed back down to the used bookshop on my day off. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but it was a beautiful day and they had a sale for anyone who voted in the primary, which I did.

I’ve always been fascinated by Leonardo daVinci and his notebooks, and while I doubt I’ll ever read this particular book from cover to cover, I’m sure I’ll dip my toes into daVinci’s genius from time to time whenever the mood strikes.

I think I mentioned earlier that I’d watched the film version of The Martian and enjoyed it. Several of my friends have read the book, too, and while the prose has been described as ‘workmanlike’, they all enjoyed it.

While I was out walking about,  I happened upon a group of stray cats on the University’s campus. The others disappeared into the bushes when I approached, but this was was brave enough for me to get within about ten feet.

Several months ago, I picked up a copy of Julian Barnes’s Letters from London. I wasn’t aware at the time that the book was a series of essays Barnes had written about then-current events from the early 1990s. So while I occasionally come across names that mean next to nothing to me, the essays are still funny and provide a wonderful insight into Britain at the end of the Cold War.

And because I apparently can’t settle on reading one book at a time, I decided to start Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience, which is another collection of essays based on a series of lectures that Sagan gave during the 1980s and 1990s. Like any of Sagan’s other works, its science is completely approachable and tackles seemingly difficult concepts by breaking them down, step by step, until they are so easy to grasp you wonder why they seemed to hard to understand to begin with.

I also bought a latte. It was tasty.