From Mindspillage
Musings about reading. For a list of stuff I've read, go to the reading log and I'll even try to keep up with it.
I do the majority of my reading in transit; it's a forced time without too many distractions and being engrossed in a book discourages strangers from talking to me.
I keep wanting to treat a book as an indivisible unit. Being more willing to stop reading a book, or to skip around, has helped me get what I can from books that have some good parts and ditch the ones that aren't any good; that psychological barrier of having failed at reading the book if you don't consume every word cover to cover is a hard one.
It occurred to me, upon reading a college-level book on mathematical logic, that my first introduction to most of these concepts was Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School. It's a children's book, aimed at elementary schoolers, in the same setting as the Sideways Stories from Wayside School.
And it's actually pretty sophisticated math. About half the book is "alphametics": arithmetic problems written out so that each number is replaced by a specific letter, usually in such a way so that the inputs and outputs spell words (for example, "elf+elf=fool"); the challenge is to determine which numbers the letters must represent. (For example, the "f" must be 1 here.)
The other half is logic problems and puzzles, and not easy ones; at least, ones that even a mathematically-inclined adult would have to take a little time to solve, and a non-mathematically-inclined adult would have to take time to figure out how to solve. I read it when I was 9 or 10 and found it a great challenge. It probably did more to open up the idea of logical problem-solving outside of math textbooks, and the ability to figure out how to approach those problems, than any other book I read. And the word problems were funny. Every bright kid should get a copy. Because by the time I saw those concepts again, they had been a part of my thinking for such a long time that they weren't foreign when I saw them.
I usually take a book to the gym with me (because half an hour not going anywhere is otherwise tedious); this last time, Micromotives and Macrobehavior, by Thomas Schelling. Which turns out, with its library-reinforced binding, not to lay open very well on the elliptical machine's magazine rack, so I grabbed something else from the primarily-ornamental shelves in the apartment clubhouse -- The Genius Factory, by David Plotz, about the ill-fated Nobel Prize sperm bank -- and read that instead.
I picked up the Schelling again, and after reading a few pages past where I'd left off get to a chapter entitled "Choosing Our Children's Genes".
Looks like I wasn't traveling very far from my starting point either way...