It's been called a memoir in verse, a collection of vignettes about time, place, family and race. The book Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson defies convention and can be read in any number of ways, as it will be for this year's Vermont Reads, statewide reading project presented by the Vermont Humanities Council. In Brown Girl Dreaming Jacqueline Woodson chronicles a life of stories culled from memories spent growing up as an African-American girl first in the American South, and then in New York City.

The enormity and horror of the Holocaust has been chronicled soberly in newsreels, in history books, in documentaries and Hollywood films. And yet one of the most revered depictions of the 20th century's greatest atrocity is communicated in a medium too often dismissed as a frivolous diversion: cartoons.

In 1992 the graphic novel Maus won the Pulitzer Prize for offering readers a simple but brilliant and relatable distillation of the Holocaust by rendering comic book versions of Nazis drawn as cats and the Jews they slaughtered as mice. A sequel told of survivors struggling to make a new life in the U.S.

It was a violent collision hundreds of millions of light years away, the likes of which forged the gold found in our jewelry and the uranium in our stockpile of nuclear bombs. Scientists around the globe announced Monday groundbreaking observations of two neutron stars crashing together at nearly the speed of light. A Dartmouth physicist asserts it's the beginning of a new field of scientific discovery.