One aspect of not having a regular reason to drop by downtown Berkeley, is that I’m less likely to just drop by Moe’s Books or any of the other bookstores and randomly browse for interesting deep-background research materials. But this past week I had to drop off some UCB library books after work, and then wanted to kill some time until the traffic died down, so I did a shelf-browse at Moe’s and picked us some fun stuff. (I am regularly grateful that I don’t have to treat my fiction as the sort of business where research purchases have to pay for themselves.)