In the spirit of our earlier “happy computer memories” thread, I’ll open one for happy book memories. What’s a book you read that occupies a warm-and-fuzzy spot in your memory? What book calls you back to the first time you read it, the way the smell of a bakery brings back a conversation with a friend?
As a child, I was into mystery stories and Ancient Egypt both (not to mention dinosaurs and deep-sea animals and…). So, for a gift one year I got an omnibus set of the first three Amelia Peabody novels. Then I read the rest of the series, and then new ones kept coming out. I was off at science camp one summer when He Shall Thunder in the Sky hit the bookstores. I don’t think I knew of it in advance, but I snapped it up and read it in one long summer afternoon with a bottle of soda and a bag of cookies.
I read this and immediately typed out a lesswrong length blog post about all the books I’ve read without thinking, but that might be a bit much so I’ll only focus on “one”:
Maze books and puzzle books. I was obsessed with mazes as a kid. Hedge mazes, mazes with twisty staircases, mazes with tunnels and shortcuts, mazes with monsters, mazes with puzzles. There is (almost) no such thing as a bad maze book! My friend and I would always check out maze books from the library and solve mazes together. One of the earlier puzzle books I read had some absolutely stupid stuff in it like a guy saying “I need some HJKLMNO” with the answer being he’s thirsty and needs H2O. There were also a bunch of puzzle books I can’t remember with these really great settings like exploring another world or stuff like that. Also I know it’s not a maze book or a puzzle book but mentally Dinotopia fits in this category for me and that book was the bee’s knees.
OK I lied I need to say more
I had transferred from a private school to a public elementary school which was way behind in my math education and for some reason no one thought to put me in a better math class. During this time my dad gave me Who is Fourier? A Mathematical Adventure.
This was a textbook with a lot of illustrations and little cartoon characters discussing the fourier waves overly enthusiastically. It was put out by a weird Japanese school (“The transnational college of LEX” – I’m still not 100% convinced they’re not some math and language cult or something).
Despite being about the fourier transform it assumed no knowledge from the reader besides basic arithmetic; and so covered trigonometry and calculus concepts where needed.
So despite only vaguely understanding a lot of the concepts in the book, it really set me up well for calculus class (when I finally got to that years later), and is probably the only reason I was good at math through university. That weird little math book that no one has heard of but I was obsessed with.
you may be interested in learning about the possibility of a moonlight maize maze meander over this side of the world
Now that there is a good maze!
Did you ever read Mad Mazes by Robert Abbott? That was a book of 20 mazes that were practically lessons in graph theory. I remember one involved navigating a public transit map where you could make free transfers of the same type (bus to bus or train to train) or to the same color (e.g., a red bus line to a red train line). Another involved using a die to mark your position on a grid; you could only move to a square if tilting the die over in that direction brought the number printed on the square to the top of the die.
I don’t think so, it looks pretty darn cool though. I’ve definitely seen mazes with those sorts of ideas, but I don’t remember in what books.