Twitterature--July 2014

Some recent reads:

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente.

This reminded me a lot of The Wizard of Oz, or maybe Narnia, or The Hobbit. Omniscient narrator who addresses the reader, child on a magical adventure, that sort of thing. It was fun and sweet and I think I finished it in less than a day.

The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman

I think I'm up to Volume 7 or 8 in the comic that inspired the TV show (which we watch religiously). Frankly, I'm not really a fan of the comic book/graphic novel format. I'm sure I'm somehow missing out on the subtleties of the art form, or whatever, but I feel like I'm reading the Cliff's Notes version of the story--sort of a sketchy summary of the depth of story you get in a book or a TV show. Also, I'm terrible at facial identification, so I'm always getting characters mixed up (this happens in TV and movies, too). It's interesting to see the differences between the comics and the show, and I know it's a classic. I'm not sure how long I'll keep up with it, though. Also: even darker than the show. Also: no Darryl. Worth a try if you need a zombie fix during the show's hiatus.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, by Mary Roach.

I read Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers last year and liked it, and thoroughly enjoyed Gulp as well. I probably have a high tolerance for grossness in my reading material, but honestly Roach's exploration of her topics (in Stiff, dead bodies; in Gulp, digestion) is so fascinating that you forget it's supposed to be gross. Also, she's a great lover of puns. Perfect pick for armchair scientists and people who like to pick up random trivia tidbits to try out at cocktail parties.

The Nesting Place, by Myquillyn Smith.

I read this book and a week and a half later moved every piece of furniture in our two living rooms and painted a wall that I have hated for six years. Partially this is because her start-where-you-are, it-doesn't-have-to-be-perfect philosophy is inspiring, and partially it's because there was a picture in the book of a room with blue walls and oak trim. (The wall I hated was hunter green, hideous and dark. Unfortunately, the DDH a) likes hunter green and b) insisted he couldn't think of another color that would go well with the oak trim. And since the oak trim is a MAJOR part of the WHOLE HOUSE, I am not allowed to paint it. The picture proved to him that a blue-gray color also looks good with oak trim. He still thinks the old wall was fine. Everyone else agrees the new one is better.)

A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel.

Mantel's later novel Wolf Hall is better (and still one of the best books I've read, ever). She's still finding her groove with style and pacing in this early novel, but it still works. I had a hard time finishing it, but I think this has to do with how depressing the events are. I knew very little about the French Revolution, and though of course this is a narrowly focused, fictional account, it's pretty horrifying. This would be a great book club pick; I wish I had someone around with whom to discuss some of the ideas it brings up.

Linking up with Twitterature at Modern Mrs. Darcy, if I remember to come back and link up since I'm a day early. But if you're looking for more suggestions on what to read (or avoid reading) this summer, check it out!

What I'm Into--November 2013

More like what I've been into since April--has it really been so long since I posted one of these?

Birthday boy.

Life

T-Rex turned one last month. The DDH turned thirty. We celebrated five years of marriage. It was a milestone month for everyone.

And our one-year nursiversary!

We had a little dinosaur (of course) themed party for T-Rex, which was fun, and the next weekend he stayed with Grandma and Grandpa while the DDH and I stayed two nights in a hotel and had a spa afternoon with massages and the works. It was awesome.

T-Rex cake made by my MIL.

Read and Reading

Oh gosh. I've been working my way through Jane Lindskold's Firekeeper series, which just keeps getting better and better. Definitely a must read for fantasy fans. Lindskold is from Albuquerque and I've met her several times; she is just the nicest person, and these books prove she's a good author, as well.

Carrying things in his mouth is a trick he learned from the dogs.

On TV

As T-Rex gets older, tv viewing gets pushed more and more firmly back to after his bedtime. We are way behind on all our shows, with a queue on Hulu a mile long.

Favorite new shows this season? Agents of SHIELD and Sleepy Hollow. Of the two, Sleepy Hollow is actually my favorite--the characters are excellent, though the premise is ridiculous.  

Once Upon a Time is having a better season than last, IMHO. We're so far behind that I'm not sure I've watched enough of the spinoff, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, to evaluate it properly, but it was growing on me.

I've also been slowly working my way through a rewatch of Firefly, which leads me to two conclusions: one, why did they ever cancel this show??? so good. and two, comparing Firefly to Castle makes me realize Nathan Fillion is getting old, which is sadface. Also three: WHY DID THEY CANCEL THIS SHOW?

Ride 'em, cowboy.

In Theaters

I have been waiting for an Ender's Game movie since the eighth grade, which was more years ago than I care to admit (umm, thirteen. or fourteen. ack). It did not disappoint my tempered expectations, but it wasn't the book, either.

I know we went to the movies at least one other time in the last six months, and certainly we've rented movies to watch, but I don't remember anything particular. Except--Man of Steel was surprisingly boring, and T-Rex loved The Sound of Music.

Birthday boys.

 In the Kitchen

We did about two weeks of a semi-Whole 30 in October. It was a disaster. For one, we simply cannot afford that much meat. Our diet relies heavily on legumes and grains and streeeeetching out the meat as much as possible. We did each lose about ten pounds, which was nice, and it did break me of what was getting to be an out-of-control candy habit. I guess it wasn't a total disaster. But it was very stressful, having to plan out every single bit of food that went into out mouths. That is just not healthy for me psychologically AT ALL.

I'm looking at getting raw milk come January. If the weather isn't too disastrous, we plan to visit the farm this weekend. So looking at the weather forecast...maybe next weekend.

I made some grain-free pumpkin chocolate chip muffins that were to DIE for. Eventually I'll get around to updating the food blog. Probably in another six or seven months. ;-)

Green chile stew at his birthday party.

First time tasting yogurt.

Music

It's FINALLY Christmas music time! My Pandora list knows pretty well what I like--but what's your favorite Christmas tune?

Rex and Meg.

Pat the bunny.

Linking up with Leigh at Hopefulleigh, like I used to before I fell off the face of the blogging earth. Check out what everyone else has been into this month.

What are you up to, friends?

Goodbye, November!

What's On My Bookshelf?

Last week, Anne at Modern Mrs. Darcy asked us if we snuck peeks of other people's bookshelves when we visited their houses. Of course we did! And so this week, we're linking up pictures of our bookshelves for others to ogle.

I have a lot of books, y'all. So here we go!

The first bookshelf you see when you enter the house is this one:

Until recently, it held very few books; I had only recently consolidated the APO memorabilia to one shelf instead of two. But then T-Rex started walking and pulling books off shelves, so I had to clear the lower shelves of another bookcase, and those books got jammed in here willy nilly.

Most obviously, the stack of German textbooks on the very top of the bookcase:

Then more German books, shoved in around the original contents of the shelf: parenting and baby books. That Having a Baby book is the one my mom read when pregnant with me in the eighties. You may recognize The Chronicles of Narnia in the middle there--but auf Deutsch. I wrote my senior thesis on Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, which is why I have that one in both English and German.

Next, the rest of the German books, my Latin stuff, and a few political/sociological books joined the original Gardening and Animals/Nature shelf.

A shelf in the cabinet at the bottom of this bookcase holds the rest of the rescued books: politics/sociology/finance, mostly, though you might spy a few more linguistics/language books--including Cat in the Hat in Latin.

Since Anne mentioned her own little yellow German books, I decided to gather all mine up and take a picture just of them, all two dozen of them:

I don't know why Goethe's Faust is green and not yellow. Because it's so special, I suppose.

The family room holds the majority of our books in five different bookcases.

First up, the little bookcase I had to clear to save from the toddler:

The top shelf is nothing but Bibles. Well, and a concordance:

 

Also? Not even all the Bibles we own.

The next shelf is about a third hymnals and songbooks, one third random religion/theology books, and one third the beginning of my German collection:

 

 Recognize this little volume, Anne? Jane Austen's Stolz und Vorurteil.

 

The two built-ins hold mostly Fancy Law Books and movies:

 

 But there are some random reference books, Spanish textbooks, and modern fiction scattered in:

 

Also some board games and middle school social studies textbooks:

 

The other built-in really is just Fancy Law Books:

 

The final two bookcases hold most of my history and English books from college:

 

From which you can clearly deduce that my history concentration was Asian history:

That Mao biography is heavy stuff. Anyway. Some random war histories, the Crusades, and one of my two books on the sinking of the Titanic--not sure what happened to the first.

Then, a bit of a mix:

Various nonfiction titles, classic fiction, Bullfinch's Mythology, the one volume of Harry Potter I own (the British edition of book seven. Wait, I also own book three auf Deutsch), some other Harry Potter stuff (Looking for God in Harry Potter is a good one for literary types) and, for some reason, two-thirds of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as a combo edition. Whatevs.

Next shelf: where English books go to die:

Can you tell my advisor was a Faulkner scholar? All those gold books in the middle are Faulkner. I think this shelf is arranged novels/short stories and then plays.

More, including the much-loved Norton anthologies:

The random Grisham novel is the DDH's; because he's a lawyer, people keep giving him Grisham books. The book on top of it, To Set Before a Queen is a tell-all cookbook written by a former chief chef to Queen Elizabeth II. I found it hidden away in a used bookstore while looking for something else, which is where all the best books come from.

Next up, the kitchen:

The three books on top are usually displayed elsewhere: Die echte deutsche Kueche, a Schwabisch cookbook, and the Lindt Book of Chocolate. Yum.

I refer most often to Joy of Cooking and How to Cook Everything, which is why they're on the end where they're less likely to set off a destructive domino chain of cookery books. The binders are Kitchen Stewardship eBooks that I printed out because I use them pretty often. There's a healthy collection of church cookbooks from around the country in the middle there.

Ok! On to the less public rooms and their books.

The children's/young adult books live in the guest room:

Oh, Animorphs. I still think you're awesome, even though I'm no longer in middle school:

The white books are the Billabong series, an Australian series of novels about a girl growing up on a sheep station in the Australian bush in the 1910s (spanning WWI). My aunt sent them to me two a time for every birthday and Christmas when she lived in Australia, where I guess they're a classic akin to Little House on the Prairie here. I love them so. much.

Here's my Redwall collection; I was a little obsessed with those mice for awhile in elementary school:

 

Here you can see a bunch of the books left over from my childhood horse obsession, including a really beautiful edition of Black Beauty. Also, dinosaur books:

 

Some more random children's books, including a children's cookbook I got for my seventh birthday and a few German storybooks:

A few of the children's books live in the nursery:

Notably, our How Do Dinosaurs...? collection and some Bible storybooks, including one that is fuzzy like a lion. Also, The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter from my own childhood.

There are a few more children's books around the house. His Indestructible books (paperlike, but unrippable) and a few other board books were on the bottom of that shelf I cleared off for him in the living room. His current favorite is Die liebste Mama der Welt. He also has a German My First Dictionary that contains pictures of things very important to German children, like public transportation ticket vending machines, that do not translate well at all to the American Midwest.

Here are the books in the office:

They're mostly the DDH's law and psychology books.

Last but certainly not least, the books in our bedroom. First, the stack by my bed:

 

I haven't gotten around to putting What to Expect When You're Expecting away yet. The DDH gave me the first Game of Thrones book to read, but I haven't yet started it. I love the Then Sings My Soul devotional, which looks at the origins of hymns. The Lutheran Study Bible because Lutherans decided they needed their own Bible. Here I Stand, the excellent biography of Martin Luther that I have been two chapters away from finishing for more than a year now.

Then there's the built-in shelf, where I keep the sci-fi/fantasy novels:

Theoretically they're in alphabetical order by author. At one time they were, anyway. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy starts us off. Watership Down is one of my absolute favorite books. The Ender books and some other Orson Scott Card novels, which I've loved since we first read Ender's Game in eighth grade. I Capture the Castle is a charming little novel, written by the author of 101 Dalmations. Stephen Gould, the author of Jumper, lives in Albuquerque and those are all signed.

Let's see. Some Wizard of Oz books that need to move downstairs to the guest room. L'Engle, of course. Jane Lindskold is another Albuquerque author and her books are also signed; we're apparently both Tigers in the Chinese zodiac. I was obsessed with Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern novels for the entirety of middle school.

And I stole that The Atlas of Pern from my dad--the other place all the best books come from. Robin McKinley--love her books. Deerskin is beautiful and sad.

More Lindskold because they wouldn't fit on the top shelf. More McKinley; more McCaffrey. A penguin ice cream scoop.

And there we go! Longest post ever, but I have a lot of books!

What do you think? Do you check out other people's bookshelves when you come to visit? What do your own bookshelves say about you? Be sure to check out the linkup to snoop on more awesome reading collections.

Twitterature: August 2013

I haven't been writing much lately, but I have been doing a lot of reading! Here are some of my favorite reads from the last few months, Twitterature style:

Literature with a Capital L

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

A engrossing, clever account of Catherine's fall and Anne's rise (Henry VIII wives 1 and 2) from the POV of Thomas Cromwell. Best book I've read this year so far. The #sequel Bring Up the Bodies is almost as good.

A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri

A story about loves lost--but in this case, the loves are a sister, a mother, and pre-revolution Iran. Well-plotted and poignant.

Murder, Mayhem: Mysteries!

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

The first in the Flavia de Luce series about a precocious, chemistry-loving eleven-year-old in rural 1950 Britain. Charming unreliable narrator. Sometimes a bit cutesy but overall delightful; the mysteries improve as the series progresses. Check out the #audiobook for an excellent reading by Jayne Entwistle.

The Midwife's Tale by Samuel Thomas

Seventeenth-century midwife at the center of a web of mysteries. Written by a history teacher, it's a fascinating look at the rituals of birth and death in the 1640s and the role of the midwife. #firstnovel #waitingformore

The Truth Is Out There: Fantasy and Science Fiction

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

First book in the Lunar Chronicles, dystopian futuristic re-tellings of your favorite fairy tales. Kind of. Book two, Scarlet, introduces new characters and expands the universe, but Cinder's still my favorite. Fast, fun, #isthethirdbookoutyet?

Earth Unaware: The First Formic War by Orson Scott Card

Did you know Card was writing a trilogy of prequels to Ender's Game? Somehow I missed that. This and the second (Earth Afire) are out and must-reads for #Ender fans.

Watchmen by Alan Moore

If you've only ever seen the movie, you owe it to yourself to read the original and get the full scope of the storyline. Masterfully plotted with gritty artwork by Dave Gibbons.

Just the Facts, Ma'am: Non-Fiction

LEGO: A Love Story by Jonathan Bender

A peek behind the scenes of LEGO and its devoted adult fandom. Wanders at times but still fascinating to anyone with a fondness for those nifty little bricks.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Fascinating, but not for the weak-stomached.

Be sure to click over to Modern Mrs. Darcy to see what others have been reading.

And then put a nice long list of books on hold at the library. ;-)

An English Major Begs for Book Recommendations

I set a goal this year of reading one nonfiction and one fiction book each month.

So far, I think it's going quite well. The goal reminds me to sprinkle all my detective novels and science fiction with the occasional serious read, and I've learned something about a number of interesting topics so far.

However, I'm already looking ahead to next year, and I think I know what my next reading goal needs to be: to read some of those Classics that I've never read.

I don't mean re-reading books I like or that I maybe read not-so-closely in a rush to get them done for school, though that would be another good list. I mean ones that I really have never read before.

My reading history is pretty erratic, and there are some somewhat surprising holes that deserve filling.

So, I'm taking suggestions. What classics do you think are Must Reads?

Here's a brief survey of some of what I have and haven't read:

American

I feel like I'm fairly well-read here. I've read two or three novels and myriad short stories by both Fitzgerald and Hemingway. My college adviser was a Faulkner scholar, so I've read almost everything he's written. I've read Walden and both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (though nothing else of Twain's save some short stories). I've read a fair amount of Poe.

For being an avid science fiction and fantasy reader, I've read very little of the classic authors--Asimov, Heinlein. Any speculative fiction fans out there who suggest I catch up on any of these?

Who else am I missing on this list? Clearly it's a very short one. Who are your favorite (North) American authors?

British

Ok, the big guns: I have most of Shakespeare under my belt, with the notable exception of the histories. Should I remedy that? I've read The Canterbury Tales and The Green Knight and most of what's in the Norton Anthology.

I've got a pretty good grounding in the twentieth century playwrights: Beckett, Stoppard, Orton. I've read Joyce though not Ulysses (my alma mater has a big Joyce collection, for some unknown reason).

This may shock you: the only Jane Austen I've read is Pride and Prejudice. What of her others should I read (choosing just one for the purpose of this challenge).

I've read Defoe's Moll Flanders but not Robinson Crusoe. I've read Jane Eyre but not Wuthering Heights. I've read a number of things by Dickens, though I'll admit that when I think of A Tale of Two Cities I mostly think of the Wishbone episode, even though I  had to memorize that famous first paragraph in the ninth grade.

Who are your favorite Brits? What do I neeeeeeed to read?

German

Maybe I'll lose most of you here, and anyway, I think my German major hit most of the highlights. Though admittedly I never did finish Mann's Joseph und seinen Bruedern, and I really have no excuse because my copy is an English translation.

Would anyone be interested in a German Greatest Hits list? Most things can be found auf Englisch, especially the older stuff. I could do a list on Filme, too, if anyone wanted.

Russian

I'll admit it. I've read pretty much none of those people. Tolstoy and his kin. I got halfway through Anna Karenina and abandoned it because my holds on the Twilight novels came in. *ducks and hides from thrown stones*

What of these should I really really read? Should I go back and finish Anna (I would have to start over from the beginning as this was several years ago).

Rest of World

Kafka is Czech but wrote auf Deutsch, so I've read most of his stuff. I even saw a stageplay of Metamorphosis which was the weirdest freaking thing I ever did see. (This is partly because the Freiburg theater company was weird weird weird).

I've read Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being (and loved it). I've read Inferno but not the rest of the Divine Comedy. I've never read The Three Musketeers or Don Quixote (again, do Wishbone episodes count?).

I'd especially like it if anyone has any suggestions of classics from some of the other parts of the world: Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America. I've read a few things here and there but definitely would enjoy more.

Ok. Paring this down to just twelve could be pretty difficult. Which is why I need your help. What are  your favorites, your Must Reads? I know you're a well-read bunch out there. Help!

What I'm Into: April 2013

Is it really the end of April already? I'm not sure why I'm asking that, actually; it seems like it's been April forever. News events-wise, April really was the cruelest month, wasn't it? And it's been alternating a few days of hot and sunny with a week of cold and rainy all month: strange weather. Tired weather.

Here's what I've been up to:


Read and Reading

I've made the goal for the year to read at least one non-fiction and one fiction book each month, because it's too easy to just get sucked in to blog-hopping on my smartphone and never actually read anything of substance (not that blogs can't be substantive, but the brain reacts differently to words on a page versus a screen). I met that goal this month.


I blew through another bunch of the Temperance Brennan novels by Kathy Reichs. I wouldn't say these are stellar detective stories, but they're interesting because Reichs focuses each one on a topic so that it's almost like reading a short non-fiction book on Nascar or the Joint POW/MIA Action Command or diamond mining in Canada as well as a murder mystery. Quick reads, anyway.

I also read The Kingmaker's Daughter  by Philippa Gregory, but it was depressing, because everyone dies. Also: flashbacks to interminable college classes covering the literature of the War of the Roses.

For non-fiction, I slammed through Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber. And by slammed, I mean, I'm not sure it took me an entire twenty-four hours to finish it. I've never read a conversion memoir before, but I found this one compelling, if a bit overwritten (it's clear Weber is an academic. She can't help herself). Good stuff to chew on.

TV

It seems like most of our shows took hiatuses for most of April. Plus, I'm really not into TV these days. I spend too much time staring at screens. It continues to be the DDH's favorite activity, though, so there's that.



Movies

We saw and enjoyed Oblivion (I love weird science fiction movies) and Django Unchained, which was surprisingly funny. I know people are love 'im or hate 'im about Quentin Tarantino. Let's put it this way: both Django and Lincoln are set in roughly the same time period, and I know which one I would rather watch. I don't care if that makes me hopelessly prol; it's true.

Food

My CSA started up a couple weeks ago, and I'm having fun using up the different veggies we get. Also: does anyone know of anything interesting to do with pecans? So far I have about a pound and a half of local ones. The DDH and I don't really like them, but I hate to waste them.

May

T-Rex will be six months in May. This means I can finally go get my eyes tested and get new glasses. Also, that my baby is getting impossibly huge. Sniff.
 

What were you up to in April? What are you looking forward to in May?

What I'm Into (March 2013)

It was a busy March this year! St. Patrick's Day, Easter, and all kinds of other things going on. The month flew by. Here's some of what I was up to:


Read and Reading

I've made the goal for the year to read at least one non-fiction and one fiction book each month, because it's too easy to just get sucked in to blog-hopping on my smartphone and never actually read anything of substance (not that blogs can't be substantive, but the brain reacts differently to words on a page versus a screen). In February, I didn't finish a single non-fiction book; in March, I don't think I read a fiction one.


I did return Princess Academy by Shannon Hale on March 2, so I guess we'll count that. It was...fine. Not the best YA novel I've ever read, but not the worst. It did not inspire me to seek Hale's other works.

For non-fiction, I finished Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which I began last month. Maybe I'm naive, but I was not prepared for how devastating this book would be. It's an excellent, excellent book, and Mukherjee does a great job of tracing the history of cancer as seen through the lens of three or four particular kinds of cancer, though he focuses much more on the developments of the last century or so than of any older history of the disease.

But. While I was reading this, one of my good friends at church died of lung cancer. No matter what breakthroughs and success stories Mukherjee found in the treatment of cancer in the last century or so, I know how this story ends: without a cure and, for many, many people, without hope. It was hard to get excited or root for the small successes because I know the ultimate success is still so far out of reach.

Mukherjee is himself an oncologist, which greatly enhanced the book. He conveyed the mixed emotional bag doctors work from--the tension between caring about their patients as people and becoming inevitably, perhaps necessarily, inured to the suffering they see everyday, sometimes not even wanting anymore to fight the temptation to dehumanize their patients. It felt honest because it didn't always reflect well on him, and I appreciated that.

I also sped through In Pursuit of Garlic: An Intimate Look at the Divinely Odorous Bulb by Liz Primeau. While I'm tempted to pick up a copy to have on hand as a reference book (I grow garlic, as does the author), the book was not at all what I expected. I expected some sort of history of garlic, something more...narrative, maybe? But it's actually a garlic reference book (how to grow and cook with garlic) interwoven with a few of the author's personal stories involving garlic, including trips to two different garlic festivals. I don't recommend it as a book to read, but it would be useful if you want a basic introduction into using and growing garlic.

I've said garlic way too many times now in this blog post.

TV

Once Upon a Time, of course, continues to enthrall. Seriously.

Season Two of Game of Thrones came out on DVD, and the DDH, the MIL, and I watched it, having watched Season One together back at Christmas. It may surprise you, knowing what a big fantasy buff I am, but I've never read the books. The DDH has, and has been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to watch the show (we don't have HBO and it's not shown on Hulu or Netflix, so I bought him both seasons for Christmas). Now we have to wait until Season Three is released.

Not for children. Not entirely sure it's for most adults. But it's very, very well done.



Movies

We were so, so disappointed by Oz the Great and Powerful. Yes, I'm one of those people who has read the books, but Oz is really a prequel to the iconic movie and not based on the books, and that's fine. EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT IT WAS TERRIBLE.

Part of what bothered me about the movie is that Oz is weirdly anti-woman, even though it made no sense for the story and in complete opposition to the source material. L. Frank Baum was married to Maud Gage Baum, the daughter of the prominent suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the Oz books are strongly feminist. Almost all of the major characters are female. They are queens and witches (good and bad) and brave little girls from Kansas and sassy, outspoken hens and the adventures are about them and what they do. They rescue others; the rescue themselves--they are never (or rarely) rescued by men. They form close and powerful female friendships and platonic friendships with men (or male creatures, really; think Toto and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion), but there are no romantic storylines in the books (at least partly because they are books for young children).

I'm not really one to drone on about wanting my entertainment to conform to some feminist ideal; I don't usually think there's some vast Hollywood conspiracy to present movies that aren't feminist enough. But when the industry takes source material that is so rich with powerful women and turns it into a plot-hole-filled farce about catty females waiting around for a man to step in and rescue them--it makes me wonder. Perhaps if the storyline had been compelling enough, I wouldn't be as bothered by the rest. Unfortunately, the story is so bad and nonsensical that I had way too much time to sit and reflect on all the other problems with the movie.

So. Yeah. There's that.


Food

Speaking of garlic, my trademark Easter recipe (or my mom's trademark Easter recipe) is asparagus with lemon and garlic. It was a smash hit at the in-law's Easter dinner.

Also, the DDH bought me a ceramic cast iron Dutch oven for Valentine's Day and I cook almost everything in it now. I love that thing.

April

With Easter over so early, April should be a quiet month. I plan to get the garden going and do some other yardwork once the weather remembers that it's spring. 

What were you up to in March? What are you looking forward to in April?

Smart Phones and Dumb People

Ok, kids, change of pace.

 

A friend of mine posted this story about smart technology on Facebook a couple weeks ago. 

 

It's interesting reading, and I think the author makes a good distinction between technologies that enable you to overcome problems/be informed vs. those that try to force you to behave a certain way or share all your information with others. One size fits all, doesn't. Anything that tries to conform people to the same mold and limit individual liberty--including the liberty to make mistakes and do stupid things--worries me. We don't really have a paradigm for dealing with these types of problems yet and deciding how far is too far. 

 

However, from the headline of the piece ("Are Smart Gadgets Making Us Dumb?"), I thought the article was going to be about something somewhat different, as did my friend, so we ended up discussing what we thought the article was about rather than what it actually discussed.

My friend said, "I think there are 'smart' things that are making us dumb, or less able to think on our own, but the article doesn't cover that much. Math teachers having been arguing for years that calculators are encouraging students to never learn basic math."

 

Yes, yes they have. But that leads me to one of my pet rants. I thought I would post it here and see what you guys think. ^_^

 

Smart gadgets are not necessarily making us less smart so much as changing our intelligence. 

 

The same thing happened when we switched from being an oral culture to a literate one. Smart stopped meaning memorizing lots of things and started meaning knowing how to read well. We no longer memorize and recite The Odyssey, we read it in a book.

 

Now being smart means knowing how to use machines to help you get answers that were once found in books, and which before that had to be memorized.

So it's not necessarily less smart, but differently smart. In all cases it matters not so much what you know or know how to do, it's what you do with that knowledge. 

Lots of people can remember things in an oral culture, but only a few create that which is worth remembering. Lots of people read in a literate culture, but only a a few write what's worth reading or read what others have written about discoveries and use it to make new discoveries. Lots of people use calculators and smart phones and computers, but only some use them to expand mathematics or create art or cure diseases.

So, yes, relying on a calculator makes you less able to do basic math in your head, but that only matters if you think doing math in your head is of some intrinsic importance and that being able to do it makes you smart. Because a calculator also makes it possible for you to perform longer and more complicated equations. Remember in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, one of the characters in the nineteenth-century timeline discovered some important mathematical concept, but it couldn't be proved until computers were invented. The character filled page after page with hand calculations, but an entire lifetime was not long enough to make all the calculations necessary, calculations that a computer could do in a few minutes.

Many great mathematicians and scientists are terrible at doing basic math in their heads, but that doesn't make them stupid. In a way it's intelligent to not allocate brain space to remembering basics if it means you then have brain space available for advanced thought.

Machines are, or historically have been, tools. You still have to know how to use them. The problem is, we're starting to enter territory where we no longer have to know even that, because the tools tell you how to use them and what to do. 

This loops back to the actual topic of the article and the importance of being allowed space to make mistakes. It's one thing to ask a calculator to calculate twenty divided by five for you and learn it's four, and another for the calculator to tell you that the number you want is four because that's the number all your friends wanted you to know.

I don't necessarily disagree that technology often atrophies brain functions that I, at least, consider important. But I don't think the changes it makes to our brains are always and only a bad thing any more than they are always and only a good thing.

 

After all, you can use smart phones to say "omg c u l8r" and watch Jersey Shore, and you can use them to read The Wall Street Journal and discuss the impact of technological changes on human intelligence (I tapped out the entirety of my side of this conversation on my smart phone while nursing T-Rex). The phone you use doesn't make you more or less smart. It's a tool you can use to exercise your brain as well as one that can let your brain be lazy.

My friend then pointed out, "I just see kids learning ways to 'cheat' and not understand what division is by relying on their calculator so much, instead of just using it as a tool to not have memorized all the division tables.

"Most common example is the need for parenthesis in using the calculator where they were 'understood' when written on paper. For the students who never understood exactly what was written, they were using their machine incorrectly for the problem and getting the wrong answer. It frustrated me to explain it over and over when they just wanted a quick fix 'so just tell me when I need them, ok mrs friend's name?'"

I agree that you still need to learn those basics in your head when you're young. That's part of understanding how to use the machines for other purposes once you're older. So I'm actually in favor of forbidding calculators until maybe high school or late middle school math classes (my younger self would NOT have agreed; I'm terrible at math! Also, it's only now that I'm older that I understand why my dad (who's a physicist) would check my math homework with a calculator but wouldn't let me use one to do it in the first place).

Then, there's also the fact that a lot of technologies change and affect our brains in ways we don't yet understand. Staring at screens has been shown to make itharder for you to sleep because the artificial lights stimulate the brain, and I do think the screens have given us rather shorter attention spans, which is a problem. So I mean. I'm pretty ambivalent about a lot of it, personally. But I suppose change always comes with costs as well as benefits, and we need to learn how to manage those costs, not stop the changes.

I'm definitely addicted to my smartphone, and am making a conscious effort to distance myself from it a bit. I can tell it's shortening my attention span, and I'm trying to negate that effect by making sure to read non-fiction in book form. But I don't think I would argue it's making me or anyone else less smart. 

What do you think? Are smart gadgets making us dumber, smarter, neither, both? 

What do you think about the actual topic of the article?

More importantly, what are you supposed to do with kids in this gadget-saturated world?