The Eyre Affair

Jasper Fforde

This is a clever book (a series actually) which takes place in the mid eighties in England. However, this is clearly an alternate universe, where England and Russia have been fighting a 100 year war in the Crimea, Wales is independent, and lots of strange things can happen. The hero is a detective named Thursday Next with a job in the Literary branch of Special Ops. The book is clever in many ways, not the least of which it is about literature and the name of the hero is such that you have to read carefully to know when you are talking about Ms. Next, or when you are talking about a subsequent thing. It turns out in the alternate England, that there is an alternate universe in every book. Next's uncle has invented a way to enter books and, in doing so, allow the visitor to actually alter the text of the book. Enter some good political commentary as a global corporation actually controls much of the government and you have nothing but fun. A nice, easy, light read.

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Going Bovine

Libba Bray

This is one of the strangest books I have read. A teen boy gets mad cow disease and embarks on a hallucinogenic journey to save the universe. He encounters norse god in the form of a garden gnome, fire giants, punk angels, reality TV, Inuit rock bands, jazz legends and a nefarious snow globe company. Since the path through this journey is to look for random connections, it all makes sense as you read. But once in a while I would just sit back and absorb the weirdness. I do believe this one of the most honest books about end of life issues as well, in terms of how the brain actually works. Great fun, a decent stab at some cosmological physics and simultaneously logical and random, if you can believe it.

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Brain Rules

John Medina

Found this book by chance on a colleagues book shelf and promptly "borrowed" it. Medina is a molecular biologist and brain scientist. His personal research and review of current leading science about the brain led to this book, which presents 12 rules for how the brain operates. What I like in particular about Medina's approach is that every rule is accompanied by practical ideas for both education and business. I also appreciate that he admits that some of his ideas are just that... untested ideas that should be investigated, tried and studied. He doesn't have the answers, but he is willing to think about them. Just a couple of teasers for education:

• Committing learning to long term memory requires repetition, both while awake and (by your brain) while sleeping. Missing the conscious and explicit repetition or the sub-conscious, repetition while sleeping will decrease the likelihood of you remembering something. How do I organize my "teaching day" to take advantage of this and help (require) students to do so.
• Activity while learning (not just adjacent to, but while) increases ability to learn. Does taking time "out of class" to do this actually make learning more efficient
• Multiple, simultaneous sensory inputs are better than single sense. Can I organize lecture/discussion away from solitary text to text+pictures, or discussion+sound, or ...

This is definitely a read and discuss for educators.

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When we Wake

Karen Healey

Another variation on the dystopian future, teen hero novel. Tegan is a young girl who finally pronounces her love to her long time crush and then gets in the way of a sniper bullet the same day. All of one chapter takes place in early 21st century Australia. The remainder of the book takes place 100 years later, when Tegan is rejuvenated from her century long cryogenic nap. She is the first subject to be woken up and "repaired" and reintroduced to life. She is (of course) a strong personality and meets some additional strong personalities at school and her little cohort sets off to change the world. I love to see how different authors envision the world of the future. Here we see a dramatically climate changed Earth and Australia as a bastion of stability (based on its isolationist policies). Journalists all have personal "bumblebee" cameras that they use get video and post continuous updates on the network. Computers are flexible (literally), powerful and ubiquitous. And power remains power - seemingly unchecked, imperial, and nefarious. Add the difficult issue of good people working for power, without knowing (or unwilling to know) that they contribute to a system in fundamental opposition to their values and you have lots of parallels to our current world. You could read this as another generic dystopian future book and check your brain at the door, or you can read and reflect on the parallels between the 22nd century world created by Healey and our world and use it as an opportunity to think.

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Chime

Franny Billingsley

Set sometime in the mid 19th century somewhere in England... is my guess. The narrator never really says as much, but we have witches, protestant preachers, and bogs. Our narrator is Briony, a teen girl and daughter of the local pastor. She is a witch, but only she knows it. And she is doing her best to deny her witchy-ness lest she be hung. She has a twin sister Rose, who is a bit of a chore to manage and Briony has to take care of her (both her mother and step-mother have died). Enter handsome guy Eldric and you have the stage set for a romantic, self-discovery, supernatural teen drama that evolves into a murder mystery. I don't generally like the first person teen narration, since most teens don't write very well and a good author makes that part of the narration. But maybe I settled in, because after the first half I stopped being annoyed by the style. Good, low budget entertainment... no real thinking involved.

Wait unless you have nothing better to read