Category: books

I believe I read Many Waters once previously (it’s not in my records, which go back to 1999), but I don’t think I liked it then either.

Yes, that’s Noah’s ark on the front. Sandy and Dennys, the twin younger brothers of Meg Murray, the central character of A Wrinkle in Time, accidentally travel back in time to the days before the Biblical flood, a time when people were shorter, and angels, fallen angels, and mythical creatures roamed the scorching desert.

The twins both fall for the same local girl, but apart from mild feelings of envy, their coming-of-age story mostly seems to involve recovering from sunburn while waiting for God to send the inevitable flood, hoping that a way home will eventually present itself—which it does, as you know if you’ve read A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

When and Why I Read Many Waters

First, there was just A Wrinkle in Time. Then it had a companion book, A Wind in the Door. Later, there was a follow-up book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, set a decade later, and the three were marketed as a trilogy. This fourth book actually happens between books two and three of what was marketed as a quartet. Lately a fifth book is being said to belong to the series, but I think of the series as 3+1 at the very most.

Genre: fiction (children’s fantasy)
Date started / date finished: 30-May-2018 / 03-Jun-2018
Length: 310
ISBN: 0440227704
Originally published in: 1986
Amazon link: Many Waters

A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third book in what is sometimes called L’Engle’s Time Quartet, is a bit like Cloud Atlas in how people and their actions are connected across large expanses of time.

Charles Wallace Murray, a precocious child who is saved by his older sister Meg in A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door, is a teenager in this book. Watched over telepathically by his sister, he rides the unicorn Gaudior to different eras and mentally inhabits a series of people. By influencing their decisions for good, and using an ancient Irish Christian prayer taught to him by his sister’s mother-in-law, he hopes to avert the nuclear apocalypse that is likely to be kicked off by an insane South American dictator whose Welsh ancestors migrated from the American town where the Murrays live.

I remember being confused by A Swiftly Tilting Planet when I was younger, but even as an adult I found the plot hard to follow. The bits I remembered best were about the unicorn (which is invariably shown on the cover).

See below for a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book as well as specific comments on what I liked and didn’t like about the book.

Continue reading A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle

In the first half of A Wind in the Door, the companion to the Newberry Medal–winner A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murray hones her powers of discernment with moral support from a somewhat conceited conglomeration of dragons (which is invariably shown on the cover). It’s memorably gratifying when Meg recognizes the inner goodness in her little brother’s mediocre school principal, but when she does, there’s still, alas, a whole third of the book left!

The finale takes place in a sub-microscopic realm that’s hard to picture and introduces a new character who’s hard to care about, even though he’s somehow the key to winning the climactic battle between good and evil. Good luck ever turning this one into a movie, Disney.

When and Why I Read A Wind in the Door

When I recently read A Wrinkle in Time, some scenes seemed missing. I assume they are in the sequel.

Genre: Fiction (children’s fantasy)
Date started / date finished: 29-May-2018 / 29-May-2018
Length: 203
ISBN: 044098761X
Originally published in: 1973
Amazon link: A Wind in the Door

A Wrinkle in Time is undoubtedly a strange children’s novel, but well worth reading, no less now than fifty years ago.

When and Why I Read A Wrinkle in Time

I just read this book recently, but then I read a whole lot of other things before I had the chance to read the books that follow it, so I’m just starting over.

Genre: Fiction (children’s fantasy)
Date started / date finished: 27-May-2018 / 29-May-2018
Length: 198
ISBN: 0440998050
Originally published in: 1962
Amazon link: A Wrinkle in Time

Some popular science books are dumbed-down echoes of what other popular science books have already said. At best, they’re mildly entertaining and informative, but at worst, they mislead, filling the world with oversimplified factoids. Ideas should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Benedict Carey is nobody’s fool. On page 5, after saying the brain’s modules are like a movie production crew, he takes a step back and says that actually they’re not, because metaphors are all inherently flawed.

What a relief, I thought. This was not going to be a book that would hand me an analogy in place of actual explanation. This was a book written by someone keenly conscious of the tools of writing and their limitations, an intelligent writer with respect for his readers’ intelligence.

How We Learn provides some general background in brain research, by (for example) summarizing some ground-breaking research on split-brain patients which is fascinating if you’ve never heard about it, but there’s a particular thrust to the book which is to apply brain science to the domain of education. The book relates the conclusions of several different kinds of studies designed to find out what circumstances and techniques lead to better learning.

The marketing text on the back of the book is click-baity: “What if almost everything we have been told about learning is wrong? And what if there is a way to achieve more with less effort?”

In fact, some of the conclusions are familiar: Cramming works for tests, but if you want to remember stuff longer, study a little bit, often. Sometimes, however, there’s a twist: Sleep is good, yeah, but if you have to cut some sleep, should you stay up later or wake up earlier? Well, it depends. Read the chapter on sleep to find out why.

Whether or not the advice in the book will help you put your laziness, ignorance, and distraction to work for you as the back cover seems to promise, it’s fun reading about scientific studies of memory and learning when someone has packaged them in an entertaining and articulate way, as Benedict Carey has done.

When and Why I Read How We Learn

I like books about how our brains work. Also, this one was printed with orange edges, which is pretty cool.

Genre: non-fiction (educational psychology)
Date started / date finished: 18-May-2018 / 23-May-2018
Length: 230
ISBN: 9781447286349
Originally published in: 2014
Amazon link: How We Learn