#13 Measurement

Measurement by Paul Lockhart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I believe that Measurement is meant to be more or less a math text book for students around the middle-school or high-school grades. I'm not in the intended audience, and I'm not a math teacher. I'm just a professional mathematician, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.

I first encountered Paul Lockhart (as many did) through A Mathematician's Lament, an essay highly critical of the status quo in math education. Lockhart's essay was controversial, but many people loved it. I was one that did.

Maybe this excerpt will give an idea of Lockhart's approach:

So no, I can't tell you how to do it, and I'm not going to hold your hand or give you a bunch of hints or solutions in the back of the book. If you paint a picture from your heart, there is no 'answer painting' on the back of the canvas. If you are working on a problem and you are stuck or in pain, then welcome to the club. We mathematicians don't know how to solve our problems either.

With Measurement, Lockhart demonstrates how much more difficult it is to do something right than to point out the flaws in how others are doing it. That being said, Measurement is a brave and important shot at doing math education right. It is far from being a failure. I really liked Part One: Size and Shape, which deals mostly with geometry. Part Two: Time and Space, which introduces calculus, seemed much weaker.

Lockhart included lots of great hand-drawn diagrams. (I'm assuming they are hand-drawn. Maybe they were just made to look that way.) He also has included lots of exercises. Here is an example of his diagrams and exercises in one:



I didn't actually do a lot of the exercises. They just looked too darn hard.

Like I said, Part One I enjoyed. I had a lot of fun with it. Two things that really sparked my interest were projective space and parabolas. Yes I've seen both of these things many times before, but Lockhart gave me some brand new perspectives on them. In fact, I became inspired (jointly by Lockhart and my good friend Jason Lee) to compile a list of mathematical properties of parabolas. You may hear more from me on that in the future...

Part Two was interesting, but it seemed much more contrived. When calculus was first introduced to me (in high school) I was blown away by it. Maybe calculus has just become too trite to me. Any careful introduction of it seems tedious. I'm afraid I've become a poor judge of how engaging an introduction to calculus will be to fresh minds.

In Part Two I did like Lockhart's discussion of space and dimension:

What about four-dimensional space? Is there such a thing? If we're asking whether four-dimensional space is real we might as well ask about three-dimensional space: Is there such a thing? I suppose it appears that there is. We're walking around (apparently), and things certainly look and feel as though they are part of a three-dimensional universe, but when you come right down to it, three-dimensional space is really an abstract mathematical object--inspired by our perception of reality, to be sure, but imaginary nonetheless. So I don't think we should put four-dimensional space in any special mystical category. Spaces come in all sorts of dimensions, and none are any more real than any other. There are no one-dimensional or two-dimensional spaces in real life, and the only thing that gives the number 3 any special status is that our senses appear to offer us that particular illusion.

I would have eaten that kind of stuff up when I was in middle school or high school. Well, OK. I still will eat it up.

Here is something that I think Lockhart gets wrong he says:

A mathematical structure is what it is, and anything we discover about it is the truth. In particular, if we choose to model an imaginary curve or motion by a set of equations, we are not making any guesses or losing any information through oversimplification: our objects are already (for aesthetic reasons) as simple as they can be. There is no possibility of conflating reality and imagination if everything is imaginary in the first place.

I say to that: "yes and no." In pure mathematics it is true that we are not modeling real-world phenomena with mathematical structures. We are studying the mathematical structures themselves. However, (and it took me a lot of years in pure mathematics to realize this) we can and do model mathematical structures with other mathematical structures. As Lockhart says, the model may be equivalent to the original structure. On the other hand it may not be! It may be that the original structure is just too complicated for us to make any progress, and we need to model it with a simpler structure. Then learning about the simpler structure can tell us things about the original structure, but there is room for error. See my post on the Eternity Puzzle (and the links that it points to) for more on this. In other words, there is (in pure mathematics) the possibility of conflating imagination with imaginary imagination.

Measurement is thought provoking. I hope that it finds its way into some young people's hands.

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Junonia Review

Junonia by Kevin Henkes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Some have called Junonia a disappointing book about disappointment, lacking excitement, humor, or endearing characters. Indeed, when I finished the book, I had to ask myself whether anything at all actually happened in the book.



Slowly I've come to understand that this is the point. Junonia is about nihilism, or at least it is about the emptiness and loneliness of a certain modern lifestyle.



Alice is the only child of two only children (Henkes is careful to point this out early in the book). Alice's life is devoid of conflict, excitement, and ultimately meaning. Henkes depicts family life in modern America within the framework of small family size, agnosticism, lack of any real danger, and abundance of the necessities of life.



The thing is, Alice doesn't even have the drama of flawed parents. They aren't over-protective, they aren't over-indulgent. They *are* level-headed, well-meaning, adept parents. They really love Alice and she really loves them. Alice has no room for real complaints and so must make up petty ones. Then again, what kid doesn't complain about petty things, or what adult for that matter?



So why, to Alice, does everything feel so fake? And if you bought a junonia shell rather than finding one on the beach...would that be just as meaningful? Who's to say? Furthermore, if nobody really knows whether there is a God, then why not just make up your own? And how come doing so doesn't seem to add any meaning to life?



Basically that's the point of the book. At first it appears to be a shallow book with flat characters, but I think really that it is a deep book about how shallow life can feel. The flatness of the characters is--how can I say this?--more than skin deep.



All of this is not to say that Henkes is a critic of small families, agnosticism, nor being a good parent. Henkes simply writes about the reality of the modern world and its consequences.



I see this book as touching a cord for children who come from similar situations as Alice, but this is pure speculation on my part since I was raised as a Christian in a large family by (forgive me, Mom) flawed parents. (Furthermore, I've not yet been to Florida). Still, there is something familiar to the story for anyone from affluent industrialized society.



The message that I take away from Junonia is: modern middle-to-upper class liberal western society is *not* going to produce an Anne Frank. On the other hand, unnecessarily adding danger, drama, or hardship to our lives certainly isn't going to solve anything.



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Round 1: The White Stag vs. Noah's Garden

Last March I did a post (see: March Brackets) about book brackets. Well, it's been almost a year so I guess that we'd better get under way. My first line-up is between The White Stag and Noah's Garden.

The White Stag by Kate Seredy


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The White Stag is story of how the Huns came to inhabit Hungary and of Atilla, the man who led them there. It's a mythology painted with broad strokes and with illustrations depicting chiseled heroes and fair maidens.

I don't have lot to say about this book. It won the Newbery award in 1938, and I have to say that it's my least favorite of all the Newberys I've read. It's not that I have anything particular to complain about. The book just didn't do a lot for me.

Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards by Sara B. Stein


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Sara Stein documents her journey from being a conventional American gardener to a naturalist, ecologist and native-habitat restorer. Along the way there are wonders to behold and lessons to learn.

First a sample of one of the wonders: have you ever considered the life cycle of the aphid? Aphids are polymorphous, viviparous and parthenogenetic. Let's break that down.
Polymorphous: different generations have different body shapes.
Viviparous: they give birth to live young.
Parthenogenetic: they reproduce without fertilization. (They also reproduce with fertilization).
It get's stranger, but I won't go further into the aphids here.

Now for one of those lessons. Here's a quote from the book

How much water does it take to quench a butterfly's thirst? Give a dove a bath? Provide a laying place for toads? No more than a puddle.

But where are the puddles? Where are the dirt roads that you splashed in during your youth? Probably paved over with excellent drainage. The sad truth is that we've improved away our toads, doves and butterflies.

The problem with ecological restoration is that it takes education, whereas putting in grass, dousing it with water, and mowing it every week takes no thought.

Noah's Garden is a wonderful read with an important message.

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The winner is clear: Noah's Garden will be advancing to the semi-finals.

My Side of the Mountain

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I appear to be working my way backwards through the cannon on man's relationship to the natural world, having read in recent years Second Nature: A Gardener's Education. Perhaps next I will read A Sand County Almanac and then Thoreau's Walden.



The major thing that I got from My Side of the Mountain is that whenever we try to escape civilization by leaving it behind and losing ourselves in nature, we--in truth--bring civilization with us. We cannot live without both the society of other beings and at least rudimentary tools. We are social and technological beings. I don't think this was the main theme that the author was pushing with this book, but she was at least cognizant of it.



If we cannot shake off all the trappings of human society and revert to primal coexistence with nature, how then are we left to commune with the natural world? I think that instead of going to live in nature (bringing with us our roads, our Walmarts and our landfills) we must bring nature back to live with us. This is an idea that jives well with Michael Pollan's view of man as the gardeners of the earth (not a new idea, but one that seems to be largely forgot by parties on all sides of the Green Debate these days).


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A strange loop observed

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
-Epitaph of Joy Davidman, by C. S. Lewis

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter and A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis are two very different books that I want to review here.

First let me explain what brought me to reading these two books in tandem. Several years ago I read a review of I Am a Strange Loop in a math magazine. The book details Hofstadter's philosophy of mind. One thing that caught my attention is that the reviewer mentioned that the book is a soliloquy lamenting the untimely death of Hofstadter's wife and how he believes she lives on in his own mind as his memories of her. It sounded mildly interesting, but Hofstadter's world view is very atheistic and in the end he believes that each of us is really just some extraordinarily complex software running on the extraordinarily complex hardware of our brains. This contrasts sharply with my own belief in the Mormon doctrine that "Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be." (see Doctrine and Covenants 93:29). So at the time, I was not very interested in reading I Am a Strange Loop.

I've always loved C. S. Lewis since reading his Chronicles of Narnia. I've seen both versions of the movie Shadowlands, which is about Lewis's marriage late in his life to Joy Davidman. Davidman was on the brink of death at the time of their marriage and the movie ends with Lewis trying to come to grips with her death. I was interested in reading more about Lewis's marriage. I picked up his autobiography Surprised by Joy, but to my surprise, it was written before Lewis was surprised by Joy Davidman. I was afraid that Lewis had never written about this part of his life. Then, recently through a totally unrelated jaunt through the pages of Wikipedia I stumbled upon the entry for the director Richard Attenborough. I discovered that he had directed Shadowlands, and upon clicking that link I found out that A Grief Observed is Lewis's account of dealing with his wife's death.

So I went to the library and got A Grief Observed. But as I was reading it, my mind went back (completely-unanticipatedly) to that review of I Am a Strange Loop. So I looped back to the library and picked up that book also, so that I could compare and contrast them. This is the result:

A Synopsis of I Am a Strange Loop

I Am a Strange Loop addresses what the consciousness or the "I" is. I'm probably over-simplifying this, but I'm going to take a stab at explaining the main thrust of Hofstadter's view of things. Hofstadter claims that the consciousness, what we call "I" or "myself", is a strange loop. Fine, but what does Hofstadter mean by the phrase "strange loop"? I'll use an example from C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. In The Last Battle [WARNING: spoiler alert] the heroes make it to Aslan's country, which is like Narnia, only more-so. That is, Narnia is a shadow of Aslan's country. In Aslan's country (as in Narnia) there is a walled garden. Enter this garden--this tiny part of Aslan's country--and within it you find a Narnia that is even more-so than Aslan's country. Aslan's country has a copy of itself within itself, but the copy is more real (as well as bigger) than the thing it is contained in. In this copy of Aslan's country, go to the walled garden, enter it and again, you will find a bigger and more real Narnia-Aslan's country. Well, that's how Hofstedter sees consciousness. There you sit, a mass of cells. A bunch of membranes, fluids, etc., but within your brain there are representations of things in the real world. You have some picture of your computer in your mind, your shoes, stars, water, air, field, forest, and yourself. This representation of you that is inside of you, you call "I". Somehow, that "I" is the real you much more than the you sitting in front of your computer. The representation of you within you is the real you. That's what a strange loop is. In Hofstadter's words:

We are powerfully driven to create a term that summarizes the presumed unity, internal coherence, and temporal stability of all the hopes and beliefs and desires that are found inside our own cranium--and that term, as we all learn very early on, is "I". And pretty soon this high abstraction behind the scenes comes to feel like the maximally real entity in the universe.


A Synopsis of A Grief Observed

Lewis took the death of his wife very, very hard. He questioned the most basic of his beliefs and struggled to interpret the universe in the wake of his loss. A Grief Observed is his journal kept at the time of his pain as a relief valve. Aside from being a relief valve, the main theological argument that Lewis seems to be making is that we each have within ourselves an image or representation of God (the atheists too, though to their thinking it is the image of an imaginary being). The events of our lives (the lessons God leads us through) happen largely to shatter that image, so that we may rebuild it to look more like what God actually is.

Contrast

The initial reactions of these two men to each of their wives' deaths were very different, but in a surprising way. Hofstadter, who believes in no after-life, had a sense that his wife went on, as he says in these quotes:

My friends kept on saying to me (oddly enough, in a well-meaning attempt to comfort me), "You can't feel sorry for her! She's dead! There's no one to feel sorry for any more!" How utterly, totally wrong this felt to me.

I found myself ceaselessly haunted by the mystery of the vanishing of her consciousness, which made no sense at all to me, and by the undeniable fact that I kept on thinking of her in the present, which also confused me. p. 228

Lewis, the firm believer in the after-life, had only a sense that his wife had totally vanished (he refers to his wife as "H."):

After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about H. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. p. 20

One thing that both of these men still had was their memories of their wives. These memories they viewed completely differently. Here is Lewis:

Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan't). But won't the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.

And here is Hofstadter:

I keep trying, though, to figure out the extent to which I believe that because of my memories of her (in my brain or on paper), and those of other people, some of Carol's consciousness, her interiority, remains on this planet. Being a strong believer in the noncentralizedness of consciousness, in its distributedness, I tend to think that although any individual's consciousness is primarily resident in one particular brain, it is also somewhat present in other brains as well, and so, when the central brain is destroyed, tiny fragments of the living individual remain -- remain alive, that is.

Though neither Carol nor I was religious in the least, there was something that to me rang so true in this naive image of her purest essence leaving her mortal remains and soaring up, up, forever up, even if, in the end, it was not into the sky that her soul was flying, but merely into this guy...

Conclusion

The major parts of both of these books I haven't even hinted at. I just found it interesting that these two men reminded me so much of each other in these brief passages, yet were so different in their interpretations of the deaths of their wives. I originally considered doing this post as a dialogue between the two authors, but decided against it since 1) I am not half as smart as either of them and so would botch it. 2) If these men were actually brought together I don't think that they would jump into a debate, at least not a heated one. I think they would respect each other's opinions and mostly leave it there. 3) Finally, I would be be unfairly biased toward Lewis and wouldn't give Hofstadter a fair shake.

I do have several bones to pick with each of these authors, but I will leave that to another time and probably another place.

Ender's Game, a review

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Maybe it's because he's Mormon and I'm Mormon also, but anything I read by Orson Scott Card is ultimately about religion to me.

Ender's Game is no different, and so I cannot read it without comparing Card with another author who (at least in my mind) writes solely about religion: C. S. Lewis. Put briefly Lewis is the most comforting author I've ever read. Card is the most disturbing.

The thing that bothers me so much about Card is that he understands too well the darkest parts of humanity: the lust of the megalomanic, the pleasures of the sadist (and from a short story of Card's not related to Ender's Game the motives of the incestuous). In short, Card's mind is not a pleasant place to be.

Lewis on the other hand, even when walking me through the intricate workings of Hell, makes me feel as if I'm seated with him in an easy chair in a cozy English cottage. "Yes, Jack. I see exactly what you're saying. I feel the same way too."

I don't dare admit even to myself that I've thought the thoughts or felt the feelings that Card writes about.

So which of these authors is it more important for me to read? Is Card really a wolf in sheep's clothing, purportedly writing about the redemptive spirit mankind is capable of, but in truth giving us a taste only of the ugliest of our natures and leaving us hungering for more? Or is it that Card is simply more honest than any of us are brave enough to be? Does he lay bare to the world things that I won't admit about myself to myself even in the deepest recesses of my own mind?

Ender's Game is about redemption. It's about the horrible things that fear can drive us to. It's about the messy Universe we live in where good intentions can go awry. Can Ender, who has been treated only to harshness and cruelty, find deep within himself the power to not only forgive, but to lead others to do the same?

I have to admit that Card is an excellent writer. He knows how to tell a good story. As to how much Card I will be reading in the future, I don't know. Maybe it's good for me to be brought out of my comfort zone. Maybe Card has as much or more to teach me about Christianity as Lewis. I can't be sure, but I have come away from this book with something new: a deeper insight into the struggles to deal with the evils we harbor within, and the hope that we can overcome them.

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Giving Up

This is in response to a family member's blog post: six books I couldn't put down; six books that I have put down or on hold or just haven't gotten back to; six I made myself finish no matter how agonizing.

First, six books I couldn't put down:

1-Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

2-Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (I'm embarrassed to admit) by J. K. Rowling.

3-Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

4-The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

5-The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

6-Man vs. Machine: Kasparov vs. Deep Blue by Raymond Keene and Tony Buzan

7-The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata (I know I was only supposed to do six, but I had to throw this one in.)

six books that I have put down or on hold or just haven't gotten back to

1-The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (too hippy-dippy-trippy. "The air hung as shiny as candy"? Is this guy just trying to give us a taste of an acid trip or what? This may have been one book that I actually physically threw across the room. I can't remember now.)

2-To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist's History of Lunar Exploration by Don E. Wilhelms (Great book, but it is a tome. Not exactly light reading. I started to get lost in some of the technical geology. But, man! good book. I hope to get back to it someday.)

3-The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved & Why Numbers Are Like Gossip by Keith Devlin.

4-Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (picked it up in High School having heard that it is an important book. My biggest mistake was reading the *lengthy* preface by some Ph.D. discussing minutiae such as what the actual streets may have been that Dostoevsky refers to. I was so exhausted by the time I got through the preface that I put it down and haven't been back to it. Maybe someday.)

5-Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (never again will I pick up a Dan Brown book.)

6-The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis (It is my impression that everything worth saying that Lewis says in his Christian apology, he says better in his fiction. I don't plan to come back to it.)

six I made myself finish no matter how agonizing.

1-Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov (Actually it's a stretch to say I finished this. I skimmed the final chapters. Isacc Asimov in his twenties was brilliant. This book has two major flaws: 1) all of Asimov's books from this era (including this one) have the theme of beautiful female androids whose only goal in life is to bring pleasure to an aging academic and 2) this book attempts to tie together (perhaps this is slight hyperbole) *all* of Asimov's previous fictional works.)

2-Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling (did anything happen in this book? I don't remember anything happening.)

3-Bambi: A Life in the Woods by Felix Salten (very Freudian)

4-Dune by Frank Herbert (Did anything happen in this book? I must have missed the point entirely.)

5-The Wealthy Barber: The Common Sense Guide to Successful Financial Planning by David Chilton

6-The Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown (I could write children's books better than this.)

March Brackets

First of all I don't care anything about college basketball. This post has nothing to do with NCAA brackets, but I heard on the radio today about book tournaments and decided that my wife and I should have one. Here's how it will work: We each pick four books that neither of us has read. We pair them off into brackets (seeding them based on our estimation of how much we will like them). We each read our four books and declare winners in each of the matches. Then we read each other's two winners and declare winners from those matches, bringing it down to two books, and we will be left to duke it out over which one was best.

So here are the brackets. For my division we have in the first round:



The Mysterious Benedict Society (my top seed)

Versus



Dubliners

And



The White Stag

Versus



Noah's Garden.

In my wife's division we have:



Uncle Tom's Cabin (my wife's top seed)

Versus



1984

And



The Tao of Physics

Versus



The Pilgrim's Progress

Winter Book Fair

Herer are the books our family picked up.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
An amazing book about friendship and fatherhood.


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Questions

The other day my 5-year-old daughter came home from school with this book:



It is apparently from a series called "Growing Up Jewish." No we aren't Jewish, but it was fun to read and a pretty cute book. It spurred three big questions from my daughter:

1 - How do babies get into Mommy's tummy?

2 - What is circumcision?

3 - Are we Jewish?

I was able to answer these without too much difficulty to her satisfaction. But then there were more questions:

4 - If we're not Jewish, why do the boys in our family get circumcised?

5 - Do girls get circumcised too?

6 - Are babies born through the Mommy's bellybutton?

7 - Are there really knives in hospitals?

...lots of questions.

Giant Fleas and Powdered Donuts

I'm reading Bedknob and Broomstick by Mary Norton to Bailey. It is the book on which the Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks is (loosely) based. Great book. Great movie. Two completely different stories with the same premise.

To begin before the beginning, the story features one Paul, a five-year-old. At one point (before the begining of the story, as I said) Paul's older brother and sister had gone to a natural history museum and seen an enormous model of a flea. Poor Paul had missed the trip, and hence missed the flea. Of course a child of that age feels that his life will not be complete if he doesn't see that giant flea.

Jumping ahead, Paul is given a present from a witch: a magic bedknob, which enables Paul's bed to take him anywhere, anywhere in or out of this world and also back in time. Naturally he and his brother and sister are anxious to try out this new magic. But it is Paul's bedknob. Only he can use it. Given the opportunity to go anywhere, where does he want to go? To see the giant flea.

When I was about Paul's age, I always went in the summer to my grandparents' farm with my older brother. One day while visiting the farm I was tired and needed a nap. So I stayed with my grandma in the little trailer where they lived while at the farm and napped. When I woke-up my brother told me that he had gone with my grandpa to a man's house. Apparently the man's name was Martin. My grandparents and their farm-neighbors come from the old stock of rural Utahns that pronounce "cord" as "card" ("don't trip over that extension card!") and "gums" (the body part) as gooms (rhymes with "blooms"). Thus Morton, as in Morton Salt, is pronounced the same as Martin. I think, though I'm not sure, that this is why this man, Martin, was known almost exclusively by the name "Salt."

Anyway, when Cory got back from Salt's house, and I had woken up from my nap, he told me that he had sat on Salt's bed and that Salt yelled at him ("it isn't a chair!"). He also told me that they had had powdered donuts and orange juice. Oh how I wanted powdered donuts and orange juice! I cried for a long time about it. Eventually I stopped crying. But I never stopped wanting powdered donuts and orange juice.

Years later I finally visited Salt's house. I met Salt himself! I sat on Salt's bed and was yelled at! But, Salt never offered me powdered donuts and orange juice. Since then I have bought powdered donuts and orange juice for myself. I have enjoyed them. But they do not taste as sweet as Salt's powdered donuts and orange juice would. I'm sure that Salt is dead now and a fundamental piece of my life will be eternally absent: Salt's powdered donuts and orange juice.

If I had a magic bedknob, if I could travel anywhere--and back in time--I know where I would go. I would visit Salt on the day that he served powdered donuts and orange juice.

Summer Reading

Our kids' school had a Summer Reading Bookfair today. It was buy one, get one free. So we grabbed some books for summer reading:

Bailey's Picks

The Field Guide to Rain Forest Animals. A picture book with little pockets containing animals you can build.

Knut: How One Little Polar Bear Captivated the World. The true story of Germany's most famous polar bear.

Abby's Picks


True or False: Butterflies and Caterpillars. Abigail has been learning about butterflies and their life cycle in school. In fact her class released some today that they watched grow from little caterpillars.


Dora and the Rainbow Kite Festival. We told her no Barbie or Disney Princesses. I guess that Dora is the next best thing.

Lucy's Pick


Lucy on the Loose. Lucy saw this one right away, and liked the dog. When I saw the title, I was sold. It will be her first chapter book.

Arlynda's Picks


The Land of Elyon Book 2: Beyond the Valley of Thorns.


The Land of Elyon Book 3: The Tenth City. These two round out a trilogy, book 1 of whch we bought at the last book fair. Arlynda has read book one and I am currently reading it with Bailey. Originally I got book one hoping to draw Abby into some longer chapter books with it (and because it was only $3). So far she hasn't bitten. Oh well, I'll just keep reading her the books she likes. Don't want to scare her away by trying to force it. Arlynda liked Book 1. So far it seems pretty decent to me. Interesting story, even if I don't really like the writing style. In any case they are very nice looking hardback books that we got for very cheap (I guess only $13 for the whole trilogy).

My Picks


Small Steps. The follow-up to Holes. I hope it's good.


Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Comes highly recommended by kids everywhere.


Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules.

OK, I ended up with three because Lucy only picked one. I guess since I'm the Dad I can get away with that.

Book Culture

We are book people. My brother was visiting us last week with his family. We did a lot of different things and talked about lots of things, but whenever we get together there is some discussion of books. It isn't planned. It's purely spontaneous. I asked him to bring Michner's Chesapeake. I returned Michner's Texas to him. I lent my sister-in-law The Invention of Hugo Cabret. My brother showed me the most recent book that he has been reading, The Exploration of Mars, by Werner Von Braun. It has great illustrations with captions that read something like: "The spacecraft shown in Earth orbit at 330 miles. The group of islands visible on the lower left are the Galapagos." He borrowed a book, mostly of photographs, called The Planets, a Journey Through the Solar System. My niece gave me a book recommendation: Piper Reed. I tried to get my sister-in-law to read Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm, one of our favorites from childhood. My niece spent time reading to my kids. My wife spent time reading The Audacity of Hope. There was lots and lots more talk of books and stories and writing.

I'm glad that we're book people. Next time I visit with any of my family I'm sure there will be books exchanged, books talked about, books argued over, reading together; and I'm sure that our kids will carry on this tradition of sharing books.