Last night, as I was helping to close B&N for the day, I was walking one of my usual sections (biography) when this caught my eye. It's by a 40-ish woman who loved (with a capital L) the Little House series as a child and is on a quest to recapture that love by rereading the books and seeking out the homes and lands of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read the first chapter last night and found it to ring true and also to be quite funny. CGB, this book was written for you.What are you all reading this week?
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I don't quite have the energy for the 1500s Spanish monarchy, even in historical fantasy, so I put aside Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls to read Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself, which causes me to laugh helplessly until I start drooling. This tends to make my students look at me funny.
I'm reading Here's Looking at Euclid, a recreational math book by Alex Bellos. I'm only a chapter or two in, but it's really amusing. Bellos, a journalist by trade (but with some math and philosophy background) goes all over the world looking for math "stories" that are interesting and accessible to everyone. Erin from the bookstore lent it to me and I'm very grateful to her!
Lisa, with all due respect for your wonderful math brain, your university math job, and math's importance in our world, the phrase "recreational math" just made me laugh really hard. I'm so glad I wasn't drinking milk.
Haha! I actually probably didn't use the right wording when I said, "recreational math book." It's not really a book that requires the reader to do any math. It's more about interesting stories related to math, like a tribe in the Amazon rain forest that doesn't bother with counting much and can only count up to about four or five (and they've been surviving for hundreds or thousands of years, so that might shed some light on math's importance or lack thereof--it really depends on the culture), and...I'm not very far into the book so that's all I've got so far! It's a book about math's history, ethnomathematics, and some of the biggest mathematical discoveries and breakthroughs humankind has made, but it's not really a math book per se.
About Here's Looking at Euclid:
I gotta get this one. Vinny would love it for sure! He's the kind of person for whom the term "recreational math" makes perfect sense.
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