Rebecca Reads

I listened to Mr. Feynman’s memoir, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, as I drove for the last few weeks. Although some aspects of the Nobel Prize winning physicist’s life were rather interesting, overall, I am surprised I stuck with his story for so long. It was not a favorite of mine.

In preparation for the upcoming (February) Harlem Renaissance Classics Circuit, I’ve been reading a lot of introductory material to prepare for the introductory information we need to write for the sign up post. As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t feel like an expert in anything, so I love having The Classics Circuit to get me [...]

I do not feel like I am a creative person, at least when it comes to creating “something” from bare materials. Although as a teenager I learned how to embroider and I even had been known to sew myself a skirt, today I find myself impatient with the slow pace of those tasks. I took [...]

When I joined the 2009 Science Book Challenge, I didn’t intend to focus on neuroscience, but it turns out that that branch of science is absolutely fascinating to me. These two books I read really have convinced me that science and art are inextricably related each other, for art is perceived and appreciated by the [...]

When I started blogging about books, I didn’t know what “graphic novel” meant. In fact, in June 2008, I wrote a post explaining my confusion. But at Dewey’s urging, I gave some of them a try. Since then, I’ve read a few graphic novels. But I admit that I still hadn’t completely understood the concepts [...]

The Chicago School of Architecture by Carl W. Condit is an academic examination and description of the architectural movement in Chicago after the Chicago fire, from about 1875 until about 1925. Because it was written in 1960s, some of the information may be dated, but it was still an informative introduction to the study of [...]

Remember how just the other day I said I give books more of the benefit of the doubt lately?
The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean is a fine example of that. A year ago, I may have dismissed it entirely because it seems so superficial to me. (Actually, I probably would have dismissed it as [...]

Poetry for Young People: William Shakespeare (edited by David Scott Kastan and Marina Kastan and illustrated by Glenn Harrington) goes beyond Shakespeare’s sonnets. In just 50 pages, the editors have also included some of the key speeches from Shakespeare’s repertoire.
As with other volumes in the series, each page has a bit of explanation about the [...]

Simms Taback has an illustration style all his own. His children’s picture book illustrations are often a blend of watercolor, gouache (an opaque watercolor painting), pencil, ink, collage, and I even observed some crayon illustrations. His colors are bright and his books have subtle jokes in the illustrations (for the parents to find). So far, [...]

I let myself browse the library a few weeks ago, and I ended up coming home with a huge coffee table book of photography, Moments: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs by Hal Buell. I thought I’d browse through the award-winning photographs and then return it.
To my delight, the short summaries on the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs were [...]