David Chart's Blog

Category: Books

  • Growing Up with Two Languages

    Since learning that Yuriko is pregnant, I have been reading books about child rearing. Obviously, it’s true that there’s a lot of stuff you can’t learn from books, or indeed from any source other than personal experience, but there is still quite a lot that you can learn from reading. So, recently I read Growing…

  • Midnight, Second Edition

    I think I might be able to catch up a bit on writing about the books I’ve been reading. The problems with my blog meant I fell behind, and then I was busy with work. However, today is a public holiday here (Spring Equinox), so I have no students, and my other work went well…

  • Word Choice

    From the book on childhood neurological development I’m reading at the moment: “Obviously, Timothy’s auditory system did not develop in a vacuum.”

  • Man in the Middle

    Well, I read all of John Amaechi’s autobiography this afternoon. See the previous article, “As Others See Us”, for my reaction to the bit about me. Since the book isn’t about me, I’ll try to keep this post about him. It was very interesting. He worked very hard to achieve something he wanted to do,…

  • Amazon Advertising

    If you scroll down a bit, you will see that I have added some Amazon advertising to the sidebar. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that these are called “Omakase” links, which is a Japanese word. It means that Amazon’s computers decide what to display. Right now, they seem to be…

  • The Collected Stories of Henry James

    I’ve just finished reading the Everyman’s Library edition of Henry James’s stories. They only published a selection, but they still run to two volumes, totalling 2400 pages or so. Henry James was quite productive. Henry James’s style is interesting. The word “lapidary” comes to mind: hard, precise, glittering, and very carefully crafted. It’s not the…

  • Power of Faerun

    I’ve just finished reading Power of Faerun, a Forgotten Realms book for D&D. I have to confess that I wasn’t over-impressed with it. It wasn’t actively bad; quality control at Wizards of the Coast is far too good for that to happen. However, it was distinctly uninspiring. It’s a background book, dealing with high-level (powerful)…

  • Watch Me Grow!

    My Mum sent us this book as a present, so that we could follow along with the baby’s development. It’s really good, because it isn’t a technical discussion of what goes on and the sorts of problems there might be. Instead, it’s basically a collection of 3D ultrasound pictures of various babies, at various stages…

  • An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

    Yesterday, I finished reading David Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. It was, naturally, interesting. Although I read his Treatise of Human Nature years ago, and taught the causation and induction sections for something like ten years at Cambridge, I’d not previously read the whole of the first Enquiry. One of the most notorious sections…