Thank you very much!

[rachelmanija]

Thank you very much to everyone who sent me birthday wishes!

If you are so inclined, a lovely gift would be a review, long or just a few lines, of a book or some other thing (a manga! a burger!), whether wonderful or interesting or hilariously bad, on your own LJ/DW or in comments. One of my best birthday gifts ever was the year two people independently decided that the perfect gift would be a review of Crazy Beautiful. And, folks: late is okay!

Comments

[dorothean]

Oh, this is a good opportunity for me to recommend a book to you! It's Every Contact Leaves a Trace: Crime Scene Experts Talk about Their Work, From Discovery through Verdict, by Connie Fletcher.

Fletcher is not exactly the author -- she's more of an oral historian, who interviewed a whole bunch of experts and arranged their statements into this book. I can't say whether it's a good representation of crime scene investigation (although the two things I did know beforehand -- (1) put evidence like clothing with bodily fluids on it into a paper bag, not a plastic one and (2) crime labs are badly underfunded and have a horrible backlog of evidence to process -- are both present), but I was really impressed with it as oral history.

There's something really irreplaceable about the original, unedited words of people describing their own work. In this case all these experts are mostly very matter-of-fact about the gruesome things they see (which makes their emotional reactions more powerful) and also say a lot of completely hilarious things. I had to keep reading bits of it out loud to my boyfriend because he wanted to know why I kept snorting. This is not really what I was expecting from the subject matter! Anyway, I think you would like it the same way I did (if you haven't read it already, that is).

[rachelmanija]

Oh, that sounds very interesting!