Kristen Kulinowski is executive director for policy at Rice University's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology. Her on-the-job reading is technical, so she goes for fiction in her off hours... preferably books that "leave a dent" in the lap.
Kristen Kulinowski's List:
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie. "It was that contrast between the whimsy of the writing style with the very serious content that he was writing about that I found very interesting."
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. "It's a commentary on the role that entertainment plays in our culture and how enslaved we can become by it.
Mason and Dixon, Thomas Pynchon.
The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson.
Underworld, Don DeLillo. "Underworld is a little bit about garbage, in a sense, what happens beneath the layers of our society. There's a lot more going on in the book. And I haven't read it in a while, but if I had to capture it, it would be that there is this world beneath that which we perceive directly that sometimes we don't really want to confront."
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