In England (and I mean that, as the system in Scotland was and probably still is different and I couldn’t tell you about Wales or Northern Ireland) you do most every subject for the first three years of secondary school (the school you start at 11 and where you go through puberty in the company of hundreds of other kids of both the male and female variety. Joy.)

At roughly the age of fourteen you choose what subjects you will continue to study for the next two years, and those at the time formed the basis of your “O” or “Ordinary” levels. Each subject has its own exam and is graded separately. They replaced all that with something called the GCSE around the time I left school, so don’t ask me to explain. Ask a teacher.

The point is, I picked arts. I chose French, German (an extra subject that had the added benefit of replacing one hour of hated P.E.), English Lit, Art, and History. Do we detect a theme here?

I also had to take English, Mathematics, Social Studies, and a science, so I took General Science which was pretty much science at the level of “water boils at 100 degrees C and freezes at zero.” And English doesn’t count because I would have picked it even if I hadn’t been required to.

So, did you get that comment about Science? That’s why, today, I have a book about Quantum Physics.

I lean heavily towards the arts. (Duh.) Reading about it may be challenging, but it’s a natural kind of challenging because my mind just works that way. But recently I’ve been wanting to stretch, and I’m mildly obsessed with the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series.

Man, I love those books. I love them for their design, their content, and for what they represent to me. They are small enough to fit in a pocket, have tiny print, and introduce a variety of topics in a way that you don’t need any actual knowledge of the subject beforehand, but you do need a working brain.

Aside from the fact that they’re aesthetically pleasing, typically written with a dry sense of humor and–oh, my giddy aunt–numbered so that they’re collectible…they have become my standard morning-coffee reading. I can’t read more than a short section at a time because they are crammed so deeply with things I have to think about as opposed to just read for entertainment. The length of time it takes to drink one cup of coffee is just about perfect.

So today I was in Borders looking for a copy of Nevada Magazine because I wanted to see if I’d been published yet. On a whim I did a search for VSI books and they had exactly four: this one, the Koran, Buddhism, and Islam. I went to visit all the books on their shelves hello little bookses but I took the Quantum one home. I took it because I’m not a scientist and I’ll read all the ones about history and religion quite happily but that would continue to keep my education one-sided. The science one might actually make my mind explode.

I’ll let you know how that goes, once I’ve cleaned up the mess. But for now, there’s a preciousss book I want to caress.

P.S. I stopped doing P.E. altogether in my fifth year by signing up on an “environmental” project to a) dig a pond and b) have mud fights.