I’ve been glossing the Penguin Reader version of White Fang for my students tomorrow. It’s the story of a 3/4 breed wolf/dog who lived around the Mackenzie River. The book’s a bit harder than what my kids have been reading, but it seems pretty accessible to them since it has so many animals [...]

Tonight TC came over to my place to pick up some of his stuff that had been left at my apartment since long before I moved in there myself. He had a tripod, and some random other filming stuff to take, and I also gave returned all the books he’d lent me over the [...]

I recently received this email from a high school teacher in Florida:
I came across your textbook reviews online and they all seem to focus on college level chinese and traditional characters.
I just started teaching high school Chinese and I’m looking for a textbook that will allow me to focus on tones, simplified characters, and pinyin. [...]

The very first Dr. Seuss book I have my students read is Hop on Pop. It’s easy enough in terms of phonics and vocabulary that my students can handle it pretty easily by the time they finish the first book in the Up and Away series of textbooks. Most of my first and [...]

When I went down to Xindian last month, I picked up a copy of Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Since I was in the middle of The Diamond Age at the time, I didn’t get started until a couple of weeks ago. I read the first chapter pretty quickly, and then kind [...]

I stayed over in Táibĕi last night, so I could get some things done this morning. Since I have less than a year left on my passport, I figured it was time to head over to the sort-of-but-not-really-a-US-embassy, otherwise known as AIT. While I was filling out my paper work, I bumped into [...]

The first time I ever heard anything about lucid dreaming was when I was a teenager. My best friend, Jason, lent me a blue paperback called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. The premise of the book was simple- people can be lucid, i.e. aware, even while they are dreaming. In other [...]

Avid investor that I am, I’ve been reading quite a bit about investing. Especially over the last year, I’ve been trying to read at least one or two investing books each month. I’ve finally gotten around to one my friends have been telling me would be just my type. Not only that, [...]

This year my father gave my Grandmother an investing book. It’s called The Little Book That Beats the Market, by Joel Greenblatt. I’d already read about Greenblatt before. His investment firm has averaged a jaw-dropping %40 in annual returns for over 20 years. Needless to say, I was more than a [...]