Friday, June 12, 2009

Back to Blogging!

I am almost done with my first term of online teaching and I think I am finally getting a grasp on managing my time so...I thought I would make a little blog.

Ahem.

I haven't read as much since Soapy was born. However, I have read a bit and I decided to show off the non fiction books I have read below because I used to NEVER read nonfiction books and look how many I have read! I should say that I started reading a lot more books but I got bored or traumatized before finishing them.



This is probably my least favorite of the books, despite it's interesting title and seductive muhajiba cover.


This was a great book to listen to on CD while I did dishes. I now understand my middle school years a lot better. Man. Those were terrible times. I also heard some interesting things about divorce. The author said that if a couple wants to get divorced (assuming that there is no abuse or extenuating circumstances) and they have children at home that they should probably not get divorced. She said that if you want to be good parent, a divorce will force you to be more involved with your exspouse than if they were still your spouse. She also said that even if you can't stand your spouse and fight a lot, if it is not extreme the kids will still be fooled. I don't know much about divorce but that was pretty interesting.



I no longer feel clueless about giving birth.

(Thank you, Bridget.)



This book just makes me feel smart. I loved it. And, it is why Soapy is going to be an engineer.



Freakonomics is full of fun facts like this one:
Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children—children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year's 1040 forms—vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.
(Levitt, 21)

I am currently reading this one:



It's basically a history of American trends in child rearing. This was referenced in Freakonomics and I thought it would be similar to Birth. So far it is pretty boring. The author is kind of longwinded.

As far as fiction goes, I have been reading a lot of science fiction lately. This is weird for me. I'm not anti-science fiction but usually I don't read it. Most recently I have been reading all of Orson Scott Card's books that follow Ender's Game. That was a good book. All the other ones are kind of disappointing. Even Ender's Shadow.

Anyway. Hooray for books and blogs.