Category: dewey decimal project
Continuing through the 500s and science, I get to chemistry. In high school, I was a chemistry wiz. I took two years of chemistry, acing both years, but somehow between the end of high school and the beginning of college, I managed to persuade myself that I wasn’t good at chemistry and I barely passed […]
When I was a college student, I read Feynman’s autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. It was a breezy fun read (and I was young and dumb enough not to notice the misogyny and other problematic aspects of Feynman’s personal life). Feynman has a reputation for presenting challenging topics in an accessible way, so with that […]
Continuing through sciences in the Dewey Decimal system, I decided that this would be a good option for something to fill the Astronomy slot since I’m a musician and for a year or so of college I was a physics-English double major. The book itself is what I would call the academic memoir, in which the […]
The title of this book overpromises a fair amount. I’d argue that Young is far from anonymous given his prominence in the history of physics for his demonstration that light must be a wave from the two-slit experiment (although I imagine “anonymous polymath” may refer to the fact that he published a number of his works […]
At this point, I’ve been through a number of language texts, enough to get a sense for what works for me and what doesn’t (I’d like to think that in a visit to a bookstore, I’d be able to flip through a text to get a sense if it’s worthwhile). This is definitely not a worthwhile […]
As an undergraduate I studied a number of languages with varying degrees of success. Spanish, Latin, Hebrew and Ancient Greek. It was this last that that completely defeated me. After just one semester, I dropped out of the Greek class. From talking with others both back in the olden days and more recently, the difficulty of […]
It’s been a long time since I studied Latin, but I figured that it’s been long enough that a refresher will be welcome, but short enough that the refresher won’t be redundant. Sharpley incorporates a bit of cultural background alongside the language lessons which provides a nice supplement. This is generally connected to the Latin readings […]
The 460s are Spanish and Portuguese. I was hoping to find something in an intermediate reader since I have at least a decent reading knowledge of Spanish. I thought Las Puertas Retoricidas would be that book, but it turns out it’s a somewhat absurdist story at the service of teaching little lessons of vocabulary and grammar. […]
As I worked my way through the 400s, the inevitable could no longer be postponed: I’m going to read a language textbook (for most of a year, it turns out), “learning” Italian. I picked Italian in 32 Lessons primarily because it was a slender volume and I figured I could work through 32 lessons in a […]