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Tuesday, March 15, 2011

(mostly) nonfiction I quit (mostly)

The Evolution of the Human Head, by Daniel E. Lieberman.    I admit, I ordered this because I thought it would be fun to read.  What a drag.  In the book's defense, I have a head cold and so maybe wasn't giving this reading experience my all.  In the book's offense, it reads like an upper-undergrad-level textbook.  This was not fun or interesting.  It didn't pull me in or intrigue me like good readable nonfiction.

The Emperor of Scent: The Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Mystery of the Senses, by Chandler Burr.  I made it to page 43, but the book never went where I thought it was going.  Wouldn't you think, by the title, that this would be a book about pheremones and how the nose works and the history of perfume?  Mostly it talked about this perfumer who memorized all the classic (mostly French) (mostly stinky) perfumes.  And I don't know why that should be important to me.

The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth, by Richard Conniff.  I actually find this quite interesting, if a little slow, but someone else has a hold on it so I had to bring it back.  But hey, page 218!

Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, by Richard E. Cytowic and David M. Eagleman.  I checked this out before without finishing it, and my intentions were again for naught, as I didn't get much farther.  But it isn't fair that I monopolize huge portions of the collection as my personal library.

Dinosaur vs. The Potty, by Bob Shea.  My son thinks this is the height of children's literature.  The illustrations are bold and I actually quite like them.  We must have read this 20 times, which is great, but it didn't encourage toilet training, which was my devious mission for checking out the book.  Literacy? Pah!  I'd sacrifice my own ability to read if we could just stop buying pull-ups.

2 comments:

  1. Humm... I'm at a loss for the potty training. All I know is that when I was about 3, and that was many years ago, I don't think they had any books about potty training and the last time I looked, I'm not wearing any diapers. For that matter, I haven't worn diapers for a long, long time. Sometimes I wonder if we "over think" this stuff.

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  2. Try Joanna Cole's Your New Potty. Stephie and Ben look a little mutant, and way too old to be in diapers, but it wasn't as horrendously offensive as many books, which is good, because my youngest is almost 13 and I still can recite large chunks of the book!

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