Smilla<\/a> I’m a sucker for fantastical mysteries set in snowy locales. I’ve had it for a while but haven’t finished it yet because I had to pause when a new book I’d requested came into the library (which I assume I won’t be able to renew, unlike this book, which is older and thus less in demand).<\/p>\nHer Fearful Symmetry<\/em>, by Audrey Niffenegger
\nThis is the new book. I seem to be reading it fast (150 pages yesterday, I think), because I don’t expect that I’ll be able to renew it. Also I keep reading bad reviews of it and I guess I’m eager to get to the bad part. I’m about halfway and it’s decent so far. Not as good as Time Traveler’s Wife<\/em>, but I think that some people only get to write one great book. TTW<\/em> is definitely nothing to sneeze at — if I were Niffenegger, I’d be happy to sit on my vast piles of cash and paint (apparently she is an artist as well). Anyway, this one’s about identical twin sisters who are the daughters of an identical twin who was estranged from her identical twin who dies and leaves the daughters her flat in London. It’s also a mystery. She does write some nice, dreamy, descriptive prose, which I like.<\/p>\nJonathan:<\/strong><\/p>\nPredictably Irrational<\/em>, by Dan Ariely
\nThis book has a fetching blue and orange cover, and is an exploration of the variety of reasons that people don’t always behave rationally. Sometimes Jonathan will recount bits of it to me, like the part about the experiments in which people were given money and no money to perform tasks and they more willingly helped people out when no money was involved. Which, to me, proves that money is evil.<\/p>\nThe Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia<\/em>, by Laura Miller
\nI remember reading about this when it came out but then it dropped off my radar. I don’t think that Jonathan’s started it yet; we will probably need to renew it if we’re both going to read it. I read the Narnia books multiple times both as a kid and a (now, agnostic) adult, and lately I’ve been thinking about when Gus will read them, so this book should be interesting. <\/p>\nGus:<\/strong><\/p>\nDragon Slayers’ Academy<\/em>, by Kate McMullan
\nGus LOVES this book series, which is sort of a Harry Potter for the younger set with dragons instead of wizards. They’re pretty good, too, funny plots and reasonably complex language with a fair number of pictures interspersed throughout. Plus, they’ve taught him Pig Latin. He’s on book 14 (of 19) which for some reason the library only has ONE copy of, so we bought it and plan to donate it to the library when he’s finished.<\/p>\nCalvin & Hobbes<\/em> (various), by Bill Watterson
\nJonathan gave Gus his old C&H about a year ago, but now that Gus is older he’s really smack in the middle of the C&H demographic. So we got another 3 books from the most recent Scholastic flyer to come home from school. We did have a little bit of a splashing problem in the bath tonight when Godzilla destroyed Tokyo, but otherwise it’s been fun to watch Gus devour these, laughing all the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So I thought I’d write about TV, how disappointing it’s been recently which is making me grumpy. But then I realized that the end result of disappointing TV these days is that I’ve been reading more, so I thought I’d do a (some of) what we’re reading post. Me: The Cloud Atlas, by Liam Callanan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[24,33],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-kid","tag-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":445,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions\/445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}