I also read A World Out of Time by Larry Niven alone. I like a lot of the ideas in here (the cat tails are particularly cool), but the idea where without sex the world would devolve into a nation of girls and a nation of boys who never have contact with each other gave me the terrors. The very idea, living my whole life only with other girls for companionship, and me with nonfunctioning reproductive organs, so why should it matter anyway... Outside of my personal prejudices; I find it a bit unbelievable. My own childhood experience was of mixed genders that only really formed distinct gender-specific groups around the onset of puberty (and I never did the distinct group thing myself). But then I've been told I'm a bit odd.
And the first novel I bought and read entirely on my Kindle (until this point I've been using it to convert and read my critique group's work on the treadmill): Don't Judge a Girl by her Cover by Ally Carter. I read this on the way to and from Rapid City, South Dakota. By a weird coincidence, on my last anniversary that involved a trip out of town (to Duluth two years ago) I was reading Ally's last book, Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy. These are great books; a terrific premise well-executed. Hopefully book four will be out by next October. I read three nonfiction books in October as well: a memoir, a pop science, and a foreign language grammar book. Cause that's just how I roll. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali was thoroughly engrossing, a tale of her childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya and her escape from an arranged marriage into Holland, leading up to her election to parliament there, the murder of her partner in filmmaking Theo Van Gogh by an Muslim extremist, and her removal from parliament on petty bureaucratic grounds and relocation to the US. I hope we've been treating her well; she's a sharp one with plenty to say. I highly recommend this book, and hope to hear more from her.
Having seen him speak a bit in Bill Maher's Religulous, I picked up Why We Believe What We Believe by Andrew Newberg MD. Dr. Newberg performed functional MRIs of Buddhists monks, Catholic nuns, Pentecostals and even an aetheist while they prayed, meditated, or spoke in tongues. The results are intriguing, but it left me wanting more data. I'd like to see him keep on with more "normal" people. There is something to be learned from the people at the extremes, certainly, but I'm more interested in the rest of us normal folks. What's going on in our brains?
The last book for Ocober was Introduction to Hindi Grammar by Usha R. Jain. This is another textbook with no answer key (so no true friend to the self-learner) but a good resource. The grammar is broken down in an easy to understand manner, I just wish I had some way of checking if I'm on track, or if I only think I'm on track.
