Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What are YOU reading?

The War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley - very highly recommended and very troubling.

Intuitive Biostatistics by Harvey Motulsky

Thou Shalt not Be Aware by Alice Miller

Look Me In the Eye by John Robison

How to Prove It by Daniel Velleman

A bunch of books written pre-WWII, including a nice history text, Modern European History by Charles Downer Hazen (1920).

Nicholas II: Prisoner of the Purple by Essad-Bey (1937)

Henry VIII (some pre-WWII author - don't have the book in front of me)

Blood and Roses - Helen Castor

The Decline of the West - Oswald Spengler

One Cosmos Under God - Robert Godwin

Meditations on the Tarot by an author who wished to remain unknown: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_the_Tarot

I'm re-reading the last book in The Hunger Games series with DD11 (love that series). I'm also starting What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. Need reading much these days due to the arrival of baby Owen in March.

Violets are blue (dime store vampire book)
A Confederacy of Dunces (coon arse comedy)
What to ask when you don't know what to say (remedial self help)
I used to read. Now though I mostly read blogs and forums and little golden books.

The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon- rereading it again- I like how long and complex and fun they are

Oh, I loved those books! I read them all this past spring. (One of the many reasons my husband wanted me to get a kindle instead of dropping $50 at the B&N every weekend!) I can't wait for the next one.

DW inhales DG books.

Gabaldon's CV shows she is a major giftie.

My 13 year old son and I enjoy reading together and discussing what we read. We are currently reading It Looked Good on Paper--Bizarre Inventions, Design Disasters, and Engineering Follies which always leads to more reading on Wikipedia, which is still one of my son's favorite things to read--he likes it so much that he sometimes just reads a random Wikipedia article. My son really likes reading the top 10 lists on listserve.com and he talks me into reading the ones he thinks I will find more interesting and he is usually right. Again, this leads to reading more Wikipedia articles. We also read sciencedaily.com articles almost every day. We are studying biology this year so we read a lot of biology and medical related articles. Yesterday we looked up lots of info on brown recluse spiders for my dad who had been bitten by one. The Wikipedia article had most of the info we needed. My son likes to read politifact.com and talks me into reading some of that too. Melatonin does not work well enough on him so he spends a lot more time reading than I do. Last night we read the sparknotes plot overview for Atlas Shrugged. There are references to this book in one of the video games he likes to play and his online friends mentioned this book several times so he is thinking about reading it or at least the sparknotes version. He says his online friends think he is about 18. I think he wants to make sure he knows enough about the things they like to talk about that they won't figure out that he is only 13. We were reading The Zombie Survival Guide that my son bought over a year ago last month which I didn't think was too bad if we didn't read too much of it at one time. We got half-way through it. We might read the rest next year. We just bought the New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge and are reading some of that too. My son wants me to read some of his manga, especially Death Note. I did read a little of it but I just don't like manga that much. I would rather watch online episodes with him.

I am also spending more time reading online dictionaries, yes dictionaries, with my son, who used to do spelling bees, because I notice that he has an advantage (besides being much younger) in quickly learning biology terms because he knows what the prefixes and suffixes and word roots mean. When he prepared for spelling bees, in addition to learning to spell words, he learned the meaning of the word parts and this is something I never bothered with. I just wasn't interested in etymology when I was a kid but now I am taking an interest in this.

Lori,

Has your son read The Lord of the Rings? If so he might enjoy one of my favorite quotes about Atlas Shrugged, from John Rogers:

�There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen-year-old�s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large parts of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.�

This is an interesting quote for several reasons.

Here is the source. Its a bit different than your text. Key part is bolded. The irony here is it was written by someone who does caricature and irony for a living. Either they know one when they see one or that is how they take everything.

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html


LOTR and AS are very similar in many respects and both were deeply influenced by the same historical events. I cannot read either without thinking of Fermor's "A Time of Gifts" which paints Europe prior to the War but as told through the color of nostalgia. Everything and almost everyone Fermor depicts was destroyed as was much of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

I think back to the time I first read the book below, which shows an American Professor, admirer of National Socialism, posted as Ambassador, who comes face to face with the seizure of Germany. The Nazis seem so cartoonish when reading history, but in this book they come to life, and we see the gradual turning of the American to become Hitlers' sworn enemy. The cartoonish picture Germany showed the world was very different than the ground truth. The caricaturists were able to deceived the world.

http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Beasts-Terror-American-Hitlers/dp/0307408841

If you think that there is a lot of truth that genetics determines much of what people do, and you accept the thesis in the "War Before Civilization," in which mass murder was the norm in human past, and the anthropology is quite clear on this, then you have to accept that there are genes which determine this behavior and other genes that accept this. I often wonder what the mental processes are for people that hold these propensities.

I think Robert Heinlein sums it up.


Robert Heinlein has captivated many a young man, too.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein