Reddit reviews Modern Physical Organic Chemistry

Chemistry has some expensive textbooks (each separate word is its own link)

It's hard to say without more specifics. The idea is usually that you propose a mechanism and look for evidence that will prove that way.

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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Modern-Physical-Organic-Chemistry-Anslyn/dp/1891389319

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\^ covers most of the basics

Steven Bachrach has a blog on Computational Organic Chemistry that you may find interesting. He also has a book by the same name.

Also, you might want to look into the field of Physical Organic Chemistry. The authority in the field is Modern Physical Organic Chemistry by Anslyn and Dougherty.

Them, plus Janeway's Immunobiology, Carey and Sundberg's Advanced Organic Chemistry part A and part B, Anslyn's PhysOrg, Ptashne's A Genetic Switch, Gilbert's Developmental Biology, Fersht's Structure and Mechanism in Protein Science and the NEB Catalog form a reference shelf for Biochem/Chemical Biology that I don't suspect will need updating for another decade or two.

EDIT: Except, of course, for switching out the NEB catalog every year for the new edition.

Yeah, sorry about that. I'm an idiot. I was reading on my phone and didn't scroll before I replied.

For organic, Solomons is good. I learned on that first and liked it quite a bit. I've also TAed using Carey/Giuliano which is a good book too. I liked Solomons more, but probably because I was more familiar with it.

http://www.amazon.com/Organic-Chemistry-T-Graham-Solomons/dp/0470401419/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346010987&sr=1-1&keywords=solomon+fryhle+organic

http://www.amazon.com/Organic-Chemistry-Francis-Carey/dp/007735477X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346011101&sr=1-1&keywords=carey+giuliano+organic
Prices are steep, so maybe look for an old edition, unless you're positive you can use a new one wherever you go.

If you're pretty confident in your organic stuff, you can look at Dave Evans organic class (he is a professor at Harvard and posted some great notes here http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k7863 )

It might also help to read up on some organometallic chemistry. I this book
http://www.amazon.com/Organometallic-Chemistry-Gary-O-Spessard/dp/0195330994/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346011303&sr=1-1&keywords=organometallic+chemistry
It was ok, but there might be better out there. Maybe some other people will have some input.

A good physical organic book is http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Physical-Organic-Chemistry-Anslyn/dp/1891389319/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346011407&sr=1-1&keywords=physical+organic+chemistry
It's a dense book. This book also doesn't focus a whole lot on reactivity if I remember correctly. It does a lot of explaining the underlying physics of what happens in organic reactions.

For biochem, I can't help you. I took intro bio and ran the other direction, so more power to you.

I would suggest "Modern Physical Organic Chemistry", but it isn't limited to just radical reactions. It'll go deeper into many of the reaction types in organic chemistry including radicals.

As much as I absolutely loved that book, I would not suggest it for OP if they are not familiar with relatively end-stage calculus (there are a number of partial derivatives in there) and quantum theory. It is true that the thermodynamics might help, but even people within my own class of chemistry students at my university struggled to grasp the text. Again, this depends entirely on what OP's learning style.

If, on the other hand, OP is desiring some stimulation from the world of physical chemistry, especially from the aspect of organic chemistry (which I assume to be the next step in OP's studies) would be the Anslyn text Modern Physical Organic Chemistry. It is advanced mind you and assumes some understanding in organic and physical chemistry, but it is a very stimulating approach to both and I would highly recommend both as future reading and as a book simply to keep around - it is quite good.

Again, if OP has a solid mathematical background, the McQuarrie text really is great - one of my favorite texts until my current program.

If OP is looking for something truly interesting that, again, will help to solidify everything they learn as they progress, I would recommend (against most everyone's opinion, partially including my own due to Housecraft's overabundance of fluff) the Inorganic Chemistry by Housecraft. Again, some of this is relatively advanced, but it contains information that is extremely satisfying and, personally, helped to solidify many of the concepts I had learned leading up to that point in my undergraduate career.

If you have some desires, please post more, OP! Nice to hear people in those years are interested in stimulating their own education! Best of luck!

The relaxed T1 energy is always going to be lower than the relaxed S1 energy, so T1 will lie somewhere between the S1 and S0 states. Once you cross over to the T1 state and the molecule relaxes to the T1 minimum, there will be an energy barrier that will keep it from crossing back to the S1 state. Here is a picture of what I mean.

There are lots of good books on photochemistry and photophysics. Modern Physical Organic Chemistry has some good chapters on it. Turro wrote several popular books, but I'm partial to Klessinger and Michl.