Cats causing schizophrenia (via the parasite Toxoplasma gondii) is a plot twist I didn't see coming. 😯 Sorry cat lovers, I cannot unlearn this information.

Didn't expect to find existential comfort in a chapter about cockroaches, pesticide, and evolution 💀

Evolutionary biologists know that every species eventually goes extinct. We will too. They know that in our absence, evolution will continue as it long has. It will be punctuated by the occasional disaster as it long has been, and yet it will tend inevitably towards more diversity, more kinds of life, as has happened after every major extinction or major change in the evolutionary past. ... There is horror in such a view of life, the horror of the end of our kind, but there is also a kind of solace in knowing that life will go on without us and will offer up forms of existence we have yet to imagine...

Derby spoke movingly of the American form of government, with freedom and justice and opportunities and fair play for all.

Does that line hit differently in 2026 than in 1969? It was probably satiric back then as well, but it feels more painful now. I'm wondering... Have things really changed, or only our awareness of injustices?

There was a picture painted on the door of the refrigerator... It was a picture of a Gay Nineties couple on a bicycle built for two.

I imagined two guys on a tandem bicycle from the 1990s, realized that was impossible since this book was published in 1969, so I looked up what Gay Nineties means. It's a nostalgic term for the 1890s. Realized I didn't care. In my mind, the couple remains queer.

Both cicadas and dragonflies have tiny knives on their wings that dice bacteria to bits.

Favorite fact in this book so far 🦠⚔️

So far the humor in this book has been hit-or-miss for me, but this ending from Juliet's POV made me laugh: Several years later you run into that dude you punched at the party. Turns out his name literally is Romeo (hilarious), but despite that he's one of the more charming people you've met. You date for several months and both your parents are against it but who cares? Everything's going great until someone new catches his eye and he dumps you overnight. Glad you didn't rush into that one, huh??

"Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this:

GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE, COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN, AND WISDOM ALWAYS TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future."

The Serenity Prayer has always hung in my parents' kitchen, so this reference is both sweetly nostalgic and darkly delightful to me as an agnostic adult.