as our new release of the week: The Myth of Solid Ground. By David L. Ulin (Viking Books). “Ulin’s quest for the truth about earthquakes is partly a personal journey in which he seeks to overcome post-traumatic stress and partly an introduction to the field of seismology, the study of earthquakes and seismic waves,” writes Publisher’s Weekly. “It’s also an exploration of the Californian spirit and landscape, on which subjects Ulin eagerly philosophizes. Writing in an intense, nervy style, Ulin describes being haunted by his experience of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles. Understandably fascinated by seismology and its dreams of predicting quakes, Ulin embarks on interviews with leading researchers — and speculators — in the field. Yet he quickly discovers this science to be, like its subject, all about unstable theoretical terrain: ‘the whole field operates out of some constantly shifting middle ground between research and folklore, legend and fact.’”

Excerpt: “Let me tell you about the earliest earthquake I remember. It happened in the spring of 1980, when I was eighteen years old and living in my first apartment, on Haight Street in San Francisco, with two friends from high school, a collection of Grateful Dead tapes, and a glorious sense of aimlessness, of being adrift in a magical universe, where virtually everything I confronted in my daily life could be construed to harbor a hidden message of some kind…” Read more here.