I’m sure that you’re motivated to read Paolo Bacigalupi’s first novel, The Windup Girl, because it was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell… Read More ›
Month: April 2012
New England Math Playoffs
Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for their strong showing in the New England Math Playoffs! We finished seventh among all the medium-sized high schools in New England. Special congratulations are due to sophomore William Kretschmer, who achieved… Read More ›
The Drop
Six years ago I reviewed Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer ; I’ve read several other books by Connelly before or since, and I highly recommend them. In recent years I’ve read The Overlook, The Narrows, Lost Light, The Poet, Blood Work,… Read More ›
Food Matters
Mark Bittman is not Michael Pollan, though they have some things in common. Bittman’s book, with the deliberately ambiguous title of Food Matters, is quite different from his standard fare. Bittman is best known for his cookbooks (and his appearances as… Read More ›
Michael Robertson’s Baker Street mysteries
As you know, the authentic Sherlock Holmes stories were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. You may or may not know that there are also two different types of Sherlock Holmes stories that were not written by him. One type —… Read More ›
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
For our last movie of the vacation, Barbara and I watched How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, a British comedy from 2008. Being all about celebrities and Vanity Fair magazine, it is not really my cup of tea, though… Read More ›
Two very different IMAX films about nature
For the last weekday of vacation, I spent the entire afternoon at the Museum of Science, including watching two IMAX films. The verdict is thumbs down for Tornado Alley, thumbs up for To the Arctic. So what’s wrong with Tornado… Read More ›
Franklin Park Zoo
Spent a lovely morning walking around the Franklin Park Zoo today. I started with the zebra and the aptly named wildebeests, who were running around like…well, like wildebeests, dashing from one end of their huge enclosure all the way to… Read More ›
Children of Men
Wow! What an amazing movie! Just don’t see it if you want to be cheered up. Its tagline — “No children. No future. No hope.” — rather gives that away. This 2006 film is an impressively well-made dystopian vision of the… Read More ›
The Elfish Gene
This is a rather unusual but definitely interesting book. The full title of Mark Barrowcliffe’s book is The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange, and that pretty much captures it. Barrowcliffe grew up as a geek/nerd in England in the ’70s, and… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 