Mr. Burke's Reading List

Fun With Mathematics , Jerome S. Meyer (1952) [IMAGE COMING] Two “fun” things about this Fun with Mathematics book I rescued from my old school library are that it was checked out only twice - due dates in 1966 & 1975 - and that despite it being read, some pages were bound together. Bound, as in, they weren’t properly cut. I had to use scissors to separate some pages. (Someone, at some distant point in the past, attempted to tear them, but stopped.) This actually was a "fun" book to read. It covered some of the fun things in mathematics, and it kept the conversation at about a high school level, even when it explored higher topics. It started by talking about really big numbers and really small ones, and getting close approximations of numbers that aren't quite there. How big the Romans multiply and divide using their numbers? Likely on an abacus, not in a column format. I don't know how true the explanation that a V for 5 is because your hand forms a...

If We Had Known , Mike McPhail, ed (2017) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) First book of the year. (Okay, so I started it last year.) And look at the cool cover! If We Had Known is a collection of cautionary tales of the future: what we might find out there, and what may happen to us right here. My fear going in was that it would be a collection of depressing stories, like those episodes of The Twilight Zone where that final twist just kills you. Thankfully, that isn't the case. They aren't all cheery, either, to be sure, but humanity doesn't get wiped out over and over from mistakes made because we didn't know. The book starts off with an essay on having a necessary enemy, which turns into a fictional account before it's over, that goes through the space race and the Cold War, and pondering should we lie abo...

For a year without a Challenge checklist, I had a pretty eclectic year. Granted, I didn't read as much as I would have liked, and I lost a lot of my reading time this past summer due to ... reasons. Also, at least two crossword puzzle books factored in, as I needed a diversion every now and then. There were over three dozen posts last year, almost all of them about completed books. Only two about books that I gave the old college try before abandoning them for not being good, enjoyable, or even well-written. There were fiction books and nonfiction, sci-fi and foreign translations, graphic novels and self-help, math book and game books, long and short. In the graphic novel category: I discovered the series Amulet at my last school, before discovering that each issue was published about a year or more apart -- and that the final issue had not been published yet. Indeed, at the time, it probably hadn't been written yet, as #8 was not that old. There were summer comic books, ...