Angela Ambroz
Oh goodness. I spent much of this book in tears. A coming-of-age novel about a girl named Sam, from ages 7 to 19.
This is written in the present tense, third person, and the voice - Sam's voice - feels immediate and authentic. It felt VERY true to a girl's interior; the writing matches Sam's maturity as she grows.
Ugh. This book was honestly gutting. Sam's mom is a young, single mom in Massachusetts, near Salem. Sam has a half-brother, Noah. Noah and Sam's dads are both deadbeats who make intermittent appearances. Sam really pines for her dad. Unreliable kid narrator that she is, we - the adult reader - understand pretty quickly that he has a substance abuse problem. Oh, it's just heartbreaking.
I found this all incredibly real, naturalistic - humane and compassionate. The thread which weaves through the book is that (a) Sam is introduced to rock climbing at a young age by her dad, shows a talent for it, and it becomes her guiding passion, and (b) Sam also has an inborn curiosity about geological things. But geology don't pay the bills.
Oh goodness. As soon as this ended, I wanted to restart it. Just a wonderful wonderful book, if you have a girl in your life or are a girl or are raising a girl etc etc.
Ehhh. I get what it's trying to go for. Math is expansive - a huge cultural thing that encompasses so many activities and tools and practices and problems. But this just comes across as vague. Math is eveeeryyyythiiingggg. I feel like a kid would be like, “uh okay”.
That said, we don't have books that are like “What is literacy?”/”What is reading?” Which would also be hard. I mean, maybe we do have those books. But they can't possibly be any more successful in conveying it?
The artist in me died of jealousy, since Jordi Lafebre's command over his art is EXACTLY my ideal, what I strive for, and never quite achieve. He is chef's kiss so good.
This is an almost-perfect graphic novel/bande dessinee/Euro comix about a couple, Zeno and Ana, who Love each other but live separate lives. I'm not super into traditional Romantic stories where it's (1) love at first sight and then (2) 40 years of pining. But no matter. I can forgive it, since the art is really just so fluid, so beautiful, so good.
I also appreciated the clever story structure - we move back in time - coupled with teeny tiny little progressive moments.
I have a whole essay in my head about how Euro bande dessinee/comix show so much better craftsmanship/draftsmanship - the art is just so much better, I feel like it's respected and expected more - at least compared to American comix. But, bah, I will write that essay another day.
Ehhh. Definitely decent. Definitely met me where I'm at. Or even a bit behind. 3.5 stars, maybe?
I've recently become interested in the meta of learning, and this book is a good summary of all the different, “modern” (to me, at least) techniques to, ahem, hack your brain.
Namely:
- Spaced repetition, and the value of memorizing in general
- Memory palaces (ok, this is not modern, this is apparently Medieval/Renaissance)
- Working memory slots (apparently we have average 4, not 7), and chunking
- The Pomodoro technique, and avoiding all those cognitive energy vampires/attention sucks of the modern smartphone (screw you, smartphone!!!)
- The interplay between focused and diffuse attention
So, I have been intimately familiar with - and actively using - everything in this list for the past few years, EXCEPT the focused/diffuse attention hack. That was quite charming, actually. The basic idea is that the brain has these two attention modes - focused and diffuse. Focused is when you're deep in the pomodoro, actively trying to figure something out. Diffuse is when you STOP trying to figure it out. You step away, go for a walk. Even sleep. Apparently our brains keep noodling on our last focused attention task while we're sleeping/daydreaming/whatever-ing.
I found this extremely charming and interesting because, intuitively, I had certainly been advised and advised myself to just “step away” when I was hitting a brick wall on some coding thing. And I have, like every human, had those “ah ha” moments, those r/showerthoughts moments, those esprit de l'escalier/spirit of the stairs moments, and just assumed that was some magical brain fizz - some AETHER - coming into my brain. I didn't realize it's actually super predictable/programmable. Basically, all you need to do is:
- Think hard about something (focused attention).
- Then very actively STOP and switch your brain to something more relaxing/zoning out.
I tried this with some stats stuff before bed. I ended up having vivid noodly dreams of pooled standard errors. Lots and lots and lots of dream-chewing over how a standard error is calculated, what a standard error MEANS, etc etc. I was amazed! Good job, brain! Thanks, Barbara Oakley!
So yeah. Super interesting and inspiring, in that regard. I've recommitted to my Pomodoro and Anki cards. I really need to clean up my Anki deck, it's a nightmare right now. I am not experiencing the Champagne-like brain fizz of good Anki in my life.
What I did NOT care for in this book - well, two things. One small and one larger.
The large quibble: This book is 100% geared towards undergrad students in STEM degrees. Fine. But, like, I'm not in college. Oh well. I could still apply almost everything since I am indeed a knowledge worker, I need to constantly study (and love it with a deep passion), and I am even tested periodically (those damn technical screens - curse you, CoderPaddddd!!!). So that was fine, but - oh, it's fine.
Smaller quibble but BOY THIS BOTHERED ME: Oakley uses many (many!) examples of various intellectual luminaries - her favorites being Feynman (who among us doesn't love him, especially as a paragon of how to learn - always learn irreverently!!) and this Nobel Prize winning biochemist, oh Lord I forgot his name. Anyway, one of her examples is William Kamkwamba, who she describes as being born “in Africa”, doing cool STEM stuff with windmills “for Africa”. Oh my Lord. This made me die. Africa is not a country. Can you imagine if she described Einstein as being born “in Europe”, doing STEM stuff “for Europe”. I just aaaghhh. Is it because Malawi is too exotic for the undergraduate STEM audience?! What in the. Anyway. That is a small quibble, but it did bother me so much I took a solid star away.
A fun, freaky sci-fi horror novel which was - gasp! - self-published by some guy. Well, I am here to say: that guy had some cool ideas! Bravo! Very inventive, in the vein of David Cronenberg (oh man, that body horror was gross-out wonderful), HP Lovecraft (cosmic uber-entities who are cruel and intent on fucking your shit up), and that one Dr. Who episode that was sooooo good.
The premise: there is a secret organization called the Foundation. It's their job to protect humanity from other-worldly, supernatural threats. So far so standard. The inventiveness of author Sam Hughes is in the quality of the threat: the Foundation is up against both “memetic” and “antimemetic” entities - that is, ideas that are either dangerously viral (and thus insidious and infiltrating into humanity's consciousness), or aggressively un-seeable/forgettable. The antimemetics are - mwah - chef's kiss. Since the Foundation characters often begin to realize - and the writing does a decent job of capturing - that they are having some severe short term memory loss, often on the fly and while running away from a scary antimeme manifesting as a creepy corporate man. This was like if Alzheimer's had a will of its own and that will was pure evil. These memetic and antimemetic supernatural thingies mostly exist in the inscrutable, Lovecraftian “aether” - the MIND SPACE, if you will - but sometimes they also take physical form as, amusingly, super disgusting body horror monsters.
There is quite a bit of gore - almost a bit too much for me - and the plot is circuitous, with many false starts and false ends and forgotten bits and re-done bits. I didn't really try to follow it too closely. I was mostly along for the ride. Oh yes, and it did remind me of another wonderful, fun body horror geeky sci-fi book, which was Greg Bear's Blood Music. This was a similarly pulpy - PUN SORT OF INTENDED - story that was both an enjoyable thought experiment (how to defeat an enemy that keeps rewriting your history?) and a fast-paced thriller.
A fine, workaday collection of spec fic short stories.
Cat Pictures Please definitely shined brightest - it envisions a world of a do-gooder ChatGPT, trapped in its search engines and chatbots, trying to surreptitiously improve the lives of its stubbornly-irrational human users. This was a clever, funny, and satisfying read.
The rest weren't quite as good, but they were decent. There was an uncomfortably prescient short story about a Covid-esque plague - I checked, and that was published in 2015.
What I love about this book - and I've loved it since I was a little kid - is the just GLORIOUS SELF-PITY OF THE DUCKLING. He really draaaags himself through the mud: OH WOOOOE IS MEEEEE. He's ugly. UGGGLYYYYYY. Everyone is CRUUUUEEELLL to him.
If you have, deep in your heart, a self-pitying, grandiosely dramatic theater kid - as I do - then this is catnip. And here, the catnip is gorgeously illustrated and we really luxuriate in the self-pity wallowing, while also getting that satisfying “guess what u r a swan and everyone else is a common-ass duck, HA HA”. Chef's kiss. Probably bad values, but who cares, it's great.
An inspiring, fun, pretty portrayal of Growth Mindset - as embodied in a cute little sprite called a Yet. The rhymes were good (yo, good flow), and the illustrations were gorgeous, and I found myself - the adult - inspired by the stuff that everyone was Growth Mindsetting their way through in the background of this book. Try try try again. God grant me the perseverance of a skateboarder.
Wttfff is up with the unhealthy, Calvinist shaming in this book?! Hay Pig is a TV watcher - aka he's not just an idiot for building his house out of hay, but also apparently lazy for seeking a rest in front of a - GASP! - SCREEN (insert shrieks of horror). Sticks Pig likes to eat - this is also not okay, kids, and means you're an idiot AND a glutton (and fat, btw - wolf comments on this?!). Brick Pig is just HUNGERING for chores and work to do - and so he gets to cook the wolf and eat him. Good for him?
So I hated this. I just wanted to share the fun fable to my kids. The moral of the story for me was always: invest in cement. Not that resting or eating are somehow sins we should avoid?!!? What nonsense, mamma mia. It's taken me until middle age to realize that needing to rest is a NORMAL PART OF BEING HUMAN, and I don't need to maximize my productivity all the damn time. Also, can we please not start demonizing food at the preschool ages already?
After reading this book to my kid, I had to put it down and gulp down some tears. Hold on, mommy needs to cry a little.
A very sweet, fun, moving portrayal of moving to a new country. It's fun to read - I gibberished floridly through the foreign language (probably English) - and it's so incredibly touching. Dat is a new kid. He can't speak this language. Ugh, how frustrating. Then, one curious kid befriends him. Eventually, Dat learns the language. I died. I ded now. Excuse me while I cry.
Oh man. This kinda hit all my buttons. I am a YUUUGEE fan of several things:
- Incan civilization
- Especially Incan weaving and textile geniusness
- Especially quipu, aka a possibly completely independently-developed and interesting form of writing, I AM DYING OF EXCITEMENT HERE PEOPLE
- Especially people figuring things out, related to the above
So this is about 2 twin kids - a boy and a girl - accompanying their “scientist” parents (anthropologists? I dunno) to Peru, where they're working with a local professor on deciphering some quipu, I guess. (It's actually unclear what the parents are working on. Textile geniusness, of some kind.)
The kids grab some like super ancient and probably not to be taken out of the controlled-atmosphere museum piece of textile, and decide to go on a bit of an Indiana Jones-esque adventure throughout the Peruvian highlands. They come upon a very Indiana Jones “lost city” indeed (this was less amusing to me, since we were edging close to those old school portrayals of South American “lost civilizations”). I - AN ADULT - learned about an entirely new animal to me, the guanaco (a llama relative).
Anyway. This was maybe the most light touch of my Math For Kids reading crusade; it's mostly about patterns. I do love it. I LOVED it. I might buy this one. Now if only they made something mathy and anthropologistical and light-touch about my beloved Renaissance Italy... sigh, one can only dream...
I'm desperately seeking mathy books. I am having very strong Math Thoughts these days. Math Parenting. Math Culture. MATH THOUGHTS.
I read through this to see if it would be appropriate for a pre-literate, semi-numerate preschooler. I think I saw somewhere it was more for elementary kids. Anyway, no. I think it's fine for a preschooler. The basic teaching here is PI. Pi is a thing. It's a magical number. Sort of. It's the measure of the circumference of a circle - any circle - if you multiply it by that circle's diameter. OK, now I'm never going to forget that formula.
I was amused by the names - which, obv, my kid will not at all notice as amusing. But PLEASE, you must call me Lady Di of Ameter from now on. It's a bit wordy in the middle. It feels a bit jumbled. The riddle is as opaque as the Sphinx. But the page with the various pies, wagon wheels, and other circles was clear enough.
Overall: I'm impressed. This one's a keeper. Now to see if my kid likes it.
Argh. Right up my alley, but frustratingly shallow.
This is a non-fiction overview of the current state of Fake Food. In the early pandemic, I - like many other privileged, low-risk liberals - went deep into glamour homesteading mode. I made my own yogurt. Things like that. Anyway, as I went deep into gourmet food-land, I began to realize that more and more of the food items I had taken for granted as being Real were, in fact, Fake - that is, heavily processed and often containing very little of the things that they said they were. Some examples include maple syrup, vanilla, chocolate, olive oil, most fish, yogurt (!). In addition to that, by random chance that I'm Italian and had spent some years living in Italy and had a transformative moment when I moved from Italy to the US and tried to buy canned beans (BOY WAS THAT DIFFICULT), I also have spicy thoughts and built-in anger about the fakeness of “Parmesan”, “prosciutto”, and basically every other “Italian food” that is sold in the US.
So I was like the #1 super ideal market for this book. And, in many ways, it satisfied me by reassuring me that, yes, there is a Fake Food epidemic and yes, it's mostly in the US and the US's fault. And capitalism's fault. For the moneyed gourmand, the author, Olmsted, includes a “where to buy the real thing” guide at the end of each chapter. That's how I learned about e.g. Zingerman's, which supplies pricey olive oil that they say is real and - after I did a blind taste test - certainly tasted better/realer (?).
BUT. Here's how the book left me unsatisfied. A couple things:
- First, I didn't care for the tone, which was good ol' boy dad jokes. He was trying to connect with the reader and, just for me at least, it fell flat and left me more alienated than connected. Oh well. Tomayto tomahto.
- Second, the vast majority of his examples of “faked” food are European - and the narrative is very much about the EU laws protecting “terroire” products like Champagne or parmigiano vs. US industrial food production wanting to sell you yellow fizz and Kraft saw dust, riding the coattails of well-known high-quality foods. That's all fine and well and I am, in some part, quite curious about how exactly the EU went all-in on protecting its food. (Eating real food in the EU - especially Italy - is much, MUCH MUCH easier and taken for granted and boy do I miss it.) His one non-EU example is Kobe beef from Japan (we have a chapter on this), and some mentions of stuff like Colombian coffee. But that's it. And I was like, well, that's very interesting. Where's the rest of the world? If I may flex my worldliness for a moment: there are some glorious food products from non-EU places that are, I guess, not exported to the US market in the same volumes, and not for the same per-unit price, so they don't get copied? I'm thinking things like South Indian idli, Keralan appam, Ghanaian fufu (or jollof rice, or red-red!). I guess all of these are RECIPES, not terroire products - Olmsted makes an important differentiation there, arguing that that's what should be protected: the land + process of making something like parmigiano. I dunno. Can you find good appam in the US? (If so, plz tell me.)
Oh yes, and this was another book where I recommitted to really, for real not eating fish anymore. That market is just a nightmare.
A corporate partnership attempting to right the wrongs of Lego's previous generation of gendered marketing. I mean, basically. LEGO is all-caps blasted on page 1, followed by Disney Princesses (not just any princesses). Man, get that brand loyalty early!
A strange narrative form: an unseen “girl” loves LEGO (!) and Disney Princesses, and plays make-believe with them. Relatable. In the make-believe story, Jasmine (of Aladdin) has lost her gold vase. There are many gold items. Also, what does a Lego vase look like? Eventually, it is recovered. The end.
My kid was mostly unsettled and maddened by the unseen girl. WHO is telling the story, they kept demanding me to answer. I had no answer.
The library had a big Holi spread in the children's section, and who among us doesn't love Holi? WHO??? Some mood music.
Anyway. What I took to be an introduction to Holi as a day and concept turned out to be a VERY relatable story about a girl getting mad about a perceived slight (she got the wrong color), and learning - through the power of a Holi story - how to let go of her anger and accept love and softness back into her heart. BOY OH BOY do we sometimes need that lesson over here.
Art was gorgeous. Appreciated the suburban backyard.
Lurid, florid, grotesque aesthetic, which is perfect for capturing the idea of a giant ogre in the sky whose diet consists mainly of English kids. Honestly, this seemed quite scary for a preschooler, and indeed my kid was GLUED to the pages and needed to have every light then turned on. Though they kept assuring me they were not scared, it was not too scary, no no GO ON.
A disturbing and distressing examination of the currently-happening Uyghur genocide, and how it's accelerated by modern surveillance state technologies to create “smart” labor/reeducation camps.
Just like the Nazis leveraged early 20th century industrialization to organize the Holocaust, so China is leveraging computer vision, smartphones, and machine learning to organize its own destruction of the Uyghur, Kazakh, and other ethnic minorities along its borders. A short book, but an informative and scary one! Darren Byler situates this genocide in the overall history of genocides and state surveillance; this book made me want to restart James Scott's Seeing Like a State - since this book, and this genocide, is very much the eventual, worst extension of what Scott described: the creation of last names, street names, and order so that the state may “see”.