In the book, Ende covers the nature of the Nothing, what happens to the Fantasticans (I actually like the name Fantasians much better) when they are taken by the Nothing, and how the Nothing affects the real world. The scene with Gmork, where all of this is explained, could not be more different than it was in the movie since the brief spurt of action found in the movie is not present. Once Ende gets beyond the end of the movie, he starts to explore the idea of what happens when you allow yourself to get too wrapped up in fantasy and who you wish you can be and begin to forget who you really are.

if you loved The Neverending Story as a child, I highly recommend reading this book as an adult. Be prepared for your conception of Fantasia to be forever altered, though.

I also have a goal to get Emily off of her Disney movie obsession. We have watched about half of My Fair Lady and she likes that so far, so I am going to let her watch the original movie version starring Rex Harrison. After we finish reading Heidi, I am going to show her the Shirley Temple version of the movie. This won’t break her of the Mouse, but it will expose her to other classic films that will not drive me nuts to watch.

Driving back to the house, I decide to stop by the library to see if the book I placed on hold has come in yet. I was just there yesterday, picking up two other books that I had on hold—is this one here yet? Alas, it is not. No matter; I can do a little research while I am here. Hmm, Nolo’s book on estate planning appears to be that for which I am looking.

Satisfied with my find, I head back to the front to check out and notice the Great Courses on CD and pick up the great debate on the American Constitution. Now, I am completely distracted and wander the shelves, idly picking up books that catch my eye until, 30 minutes later, I find myself walking out of the library with a total of six books and twelve half-hour lectures on CD.

Now, I am sitting at home, happy as a clam, surrounded by a mass of books from the library and that I received for Christmas. But, as you can see, I have a small problem.

What should I read first?

Throughout the book, I found myself identifying with Sarah. Although I have never done any work on the same level as she has, I can understand the drive to understand something fully and to be able to explain it simply to other people. So, if you are interested in cryptography or you are just interested in getting a glimmer into how my mind works, check out this book. You won’t be disappointed.

To all of us the thought of heaven is dear—
Why not be sure of it and make it here?
No doubt there is a heaven yonder too,
But ’tis so far away—and you are near.

Now, from what I understand, Omar Khayyám like both women and wine a great deal and there is a good chance that the translation of this quatrain by Richard Le Gallienne is really showing his love of chasing women — specifically the “and you are near”. However, I interpret this quatrain thusly: we all like the idea of heaven, but what if it doesn’t exist? Is it not better to try and make the best of the life we have — to “make [heaven] here”? At the very least, our Earthly life is here and now while heaven “[is] so far away” So, I interpret this as an urging to live our lives to the fullest here on Earth — a very happy message.

What is your interpretation?

At one point, he discussing finding your mantra and, really, I thought that his was the best part of the book. Of course, that could be because I found one that fits me perfectly. I will reproduce it here:

To know more today than I did yesterday. This mantra focuses on knowledge and the never-ending pursuit of learning and growing.

For years, it bothered me that I have never had what others would call a hobby. I do not collect things, I am not very crafty, I only occasionally play games. However, one thing that I love to do with my free time is read books and learn lots of new things. So, I am owning learning as my hobby and going to claim this mantra as my own.

From this day forth, I want to know more today than I did yesterday.

However, Stephen Prothero made two points within the first ten pages that I thought enlightening — specifically about religious literacy but I think they are relevant to literacy in general — so I wanted to repeat them here. On page 4, he writes

In my world religions classes I told my students that before we could discuss in any detail the great religious traditions of the world, we would need to have some shared vocabulary in each, some basic religious literacy. In this way, I became, like [E. D.] Hirsch, a traditionalist about content, not because I had come to see facts as the end of education but because I had come to see them as necessary means to understanding.

This comment aligns with the books I have been reading by Susan Wise Bauer (“The Well-Trained Mind” and “The Well-Educated Mind”) about Classical Education. The classical education movement splits education into three phases called the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In each of the three stages, one studies the same types of topics, but at different levels. In the grammar level, the student is gaining basic facts — a shared vocabulary that the student can use when she learns how to reason during the logic stage and debate during the rhetoric stage. Following the trivium, you must strictly move from one stage to the next in order and, without that basic foundation, you cannot reason and debate intelligently on topics. While Prothero aimed his comment toward religious literacy, it holds for education in general.

On page 10, he writes

[Religious] ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads and effectively transferring power from the third estate (the people) to the fourth (the press).

Once again, Prothero is talking about religious ignorance but I believe that the quote holds for ignorance in general. Recently, I listened to an episode of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense called “To Dum Two Vowt”. In this episode, Carlin made explored what would happen if the United States was too require literacy tests for voting — he was not seriously suggesting it, just exploring it from a hypothetical standpoint. Carlin makes the same type of arguments as Prothero. Basically, he says that an ignorant electorate is a dangerous electorate, although he ultimately comes to the conclusion that requiring a basic literacy exam is too reminiscent of Jim Crow laws to be workable.

Of note this year, many of these books I checked out from the library or borrowed from friends, so I managed to save a significant amount of money over my usual book reading expenditures. I have marked the borrowed books with an asterisk.

1. The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time, #12; A Memory of Light, #1) – Robert Jordan
2. * The Last Colony – John Scalzi
3. * The Ghost Brigades – John Scalzi
4. * The Millionaire Next Door – Steven D. Levitt and Thomas J. Stanley
5. * Under the Dome – Stephen King
6. * King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
7. * Old Man’s War (Book 1) – John Scalzi
8. * The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time – Douglas Adams
9. * Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (P.S.) – Robert M. Pirsig
10. * The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
11. * This Immortal – Roger Zelazny
12. * Drood – Dan Simmons
13. * Batman: The Killing Joke – Alan Moore
14. * Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel – Michio Kaku
15. * The Design of Everyday Things – Donald A. Norman
16. * I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work – Julie Jansen
17. * Definitely Dead (Sookie Stackhouse, #6) – Charlaine Harris
18. * Dead as a Doornail (Sookie Stackhouse, #5) – Charlaine Harris
19. * Dead to the World (Sookie Stackhouse, #4) – Charlaine Harris
20. * Club Dead (Sookie Stackhouse, #3) – Charlaine Harris
21. * Living Dead in Dallas (Sookie Stackhouse, #2) – Charlaine Harris
22. * Dead Until Dark (Sookie Stackhouse, #1) – Charlaine Harris
23. Debugging by Thinking: A Multidisciplinary Approach (HP Technologies) – Robert Charles Metzger
24. How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie
25. * Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High – Kerry Patterson
26. How to Read a Book – Mortimer J. Adler
27. * Agent to the Stars – John Scalzi
28. Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code (Expert’s Voice) – Bill Blunden
29. The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
30. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War – Nathaniel Philbrick
31. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid – Douglas R. Hofstadter
32. Preacher Vol. 1: Gone To Texas – Garth Ennis
33. The Double Helix – James D. Watson
34. I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel – Tom Wolfe
35. The Sandman Vol. 01: Preludes and Nocturnes – Neil Gaiman
36. Of Saints and Shadows (The Shadow Saga, #1) – Christopher Golden
37. Bone Crossed (Mercedes Thompson, #4) – Patricia Briggs
38. Iron Kissed (Mercedes Thompson, #3) – Patricia Briggs
39. Blood Bound (Mercedes Thompson, #2) – Patricia Briggs
40. Moon Called (Mercedes Thompson, #1) – Patricia Briggs
41. The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins
42. * Just After Sunset – Stephen King
43. * The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers – Keith R. Mcfarland
44. Code Complete, Second Edition – Steve McConnell
45. The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain’s Untapped Potential – Tony Buzan
46. 1984 – George Orwell
47. Mean Streets – Jim Butcher
48. Storm Front (The Dresden Files, #1) – Jim Butcher
49. Batman: Year One – Frank Miller
50. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware – Andy Hunt
51. Crisis on Infinite Earths – Marv Wolfman
52. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master – Andrew Hunt
53. Turn Coat (The Dresden Files, #11) – Jim Butcher
54. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – Frank Miller
55. Upsetting the Balance (Worldwar Series, Volume 3) – Harry Turtledove
56. * The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made Carburetor Possible – and Other Journeys – James Burke
57. * The Conscience of a Liberal – Paul Krugman
58. * The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life – Twyla Tharp
59. Welcome to the Jungle (The Dresden Files, Prequel) – Jim Butcher
60. Lord of Chaos (Wheel of Time, #6) – Robert Jordan
61. Furies of Calderon (Codex Alera, #1) – Jim Butcher

This year, I hope to do more mathematics and computer science reading than I normally do, as well as doing more study on personal finance. I am sure a healthy bit of fiction will fall into my reading list as well.

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.

Adler and van Doren posit that there are four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. Elementary reading is the reading skill that children are taught in grammar school and that gives us the basics of reading for information and pleasure. To be sure, having a high percentage of the population literate in this sense is a great accomplishment. This allows a large portion of the population to gather information from reading books. However, the first level of reading can only take you so far.

Inspectional reading is meant to give you an overview of a book, of both its structure and its contents. Inspectional reading can be thought of as pre-reading a book, in preperation to reading a book analytically. Additionally, inspectional reading plays an important role in helping you determine which books are worth reading analytically; this is helpful in preparing to undertake a syntopic understanding of a subject.

Analytical reading is meant to increase you understanding through a thorough reading of the book. Adler and van Doren state that there are four questions you must ask and, through analytical reading, answer about a book:

1. What is the book about as a whole?
2. What is being said in detail, and how?
3. Is the book true, in whole or in part?
4. What of it?

If you can answer these questions about a book, you have done your job as an intelligent reader and increased your understanding by learning what the book had to teach you. Adler and van Doren provide a thorough set of rules that will enable you to learn to read analytically.

Syntopical reading goes a step further than analytical reading; syntopical reading acknowledges that any one book is not likely to contain the complete story and that a survey of several books may be needed to fully understand the subject matter. To that end, Adler and van Doren lay out a process through which you may combine the skills of inspectional and analytical reading to find and understand the relevant books to your chosen subject.

So, what of it? Does “How to Read a Book” accomplish its purpose? I believe that it does. Since reading it, I have begun to actively read the books that I am consuming so that I may come to an understanding with the authors instead of being a passive participant in the conversation.

My interests are not focused at all. While I am obsessed with computer science and engineering, I have never been able to focus. I flit from topic to topic; one day I am intensely studying the Cray-1, a super-computer from the late 70′s, with every intention of writing an emulator for the architecture (yes, just for fun). The next day, I am just as likely to be reading about Database Systems or Programming Languages. While diving in to a topic, I can come up with several interesting projects that would teach me more about my current obsession; however, I never get around to implementing any of them because the next day, my attention is diverted elsewhere.

Case in point: I spent a great deal of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas of last year reading about Ruby on Rails. I had some ideas for a web application that I wanted to write — a project and task tracking application to replace a crufty spreadsheet that I wrote and maintain at work. So, I read a lot, worked on a couple of sample applications in Rails, and have not gotten back to actually working on my project. Well, that is not entirely true. While I have not been actively writing code for the applications, I have been giving it lots of thought and trying to work out what would be the best way to approach it. For all the thought I have put in to it, though, I am still not doing it. Granted, I am doing a lot of other things. I spend a fair amount of time reading, running a Dungeons and Dragons game, watching a bit of TV, just not working on the project that I thought was important to me.

When I finished The Creative Habit a couple of weeks ago, a few keys really struck a chord with me. One, I should get over thinking that I am not creative. I always thought that being an analytical engineer really shut down that right side of my brain. To a certain extent, it does. When I am trying to solve a problem at work, I have had to train myself to ignore the leaping, scattered, right-brained thoughts and go down my checklist to figure out the cause of the problem. Usually, the solution is fairly obvious and requires no creativity. Every so often, though, I have to step perpendicular to the problem and look at it from another angle. That is the creative side coming out. So, I can do — I can be creative — whether I see it or not. Two, sometimes I just have to step off of the cliff. As an engineer, I spend a lot of time gathering data. Gathering data fits my personality well; I like to learn. Sometimes, I just need to stop gathering data, take a leap of faith, and jump into the project that I want to work on, trusting that I will figure things out as I go. My personality wants me to wait until I am sure that I will succeed before I start anything. Sometimes you just have to take a chance.