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I recently finished Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. It was a fine book, once it got past a rather dreary (but academically required) first chapters that dealt with what he was arguing against.
Once I was done with it, I needed something a bit lighter, so I picked up Around the World in Eighty Days, which I had never read. That was fun!
I followed that up with a trilogy by Pamela Aidan that my grandmother gave me. It's Pride and Prejudice from Mr. Darcy's perspective, drawn out into three books (moo). Aidan did a reasonable job of mirroring P&P, but missed a bit in getting the social details right. It is, thankfully a romance, not porn (remember, I got it from my grandmother), but I'm sure it's much closer to what women wished men felt when falling in love than what actually goes through their minds.
We've been reading the kids books from my childhood library, which is pretty broad. Grandma, before she went batty, was a chiildren's librarian and gave me lots of great books when I was a kid. I am revisiting old friends, and the kids are having a ball, too. One thing stands out to me, though: more recent publications seem to be about TV and movie characters instead of independent stories and characters. Even older characters - Clifford, The Berenstein Bears - seem to be intent on milking the cash cow.
We just picked up The Little Engine That Could. I noticed something that interested me in the pronouns. The first engine, the one that broke down, was female. The ones who refuse to help are all male. The engine that could was a lovely feminine blue (remember that the blue=boy/pink=girl color assignment changed after WWII and this book was originally published in 1930). So, it's a bit of a girl-power book. Who knew?
Once I was done with it, I needed something a bit lighter, so I picked up Around the World in Eighty Days, which I had never read. That was fun!
I followed that up with a trilogy by Pamela Aidan that my grandmother gave me. It's Pride and Prejudice from Mr. Darcy's perspective, drawn out into three books (moo). Aidan did a reasonable job of mirroring P&P, but missed a bit in getting the social details right. It is, thankfully a romance, not porn (remember, I got it from my grandmother), but I'm sure it's much closer to what women wished men felt when falling in love than what actually goes through their minds.
We've been reading the kids books from my childhood library, which is pretty broad. Grandma, before she went batty, was a chiildren's librarian and gave me lots of great books when I was a kid. I am revisiting old friends, and the kids are having a ball, too. One thing stands out to me, though: more recent publications seem to be about TV and movie characters instead of independent stories and characters. Even older characters - Clifford, The Berenstein Bears - seem to be intent on milking the cash cow.
We just picked up The Little Engine That Could. I noticed something that interested me in the pronouns. The first engine, the one that broke down, was female. The ones who refuse to help are all male. The engine that could was a lovely feminine blue (remember that the blue=boy/pink=girl color assignment changed after WWII and this book was originally published in 1930). So, it's a bit of a girl-power book. Who knew?