Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Old Book, New Book #35: Brain Rules -> Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

BrainRulesCover

I finished Brain Rules over the weekend.  It was a fairly quick read. Partly because the material wasn't too dense -- very pop science-y, partly because some of it was stuff I was familiar with already, some of it (ok, maybe in large part) because I took this book with me to Orlando and got plenty of good reading time in on the planes.  But it was well-written and easy to follow.  A quick summary: the author looks at researcher in 12 different areas of brain science to come up with some suggestions for how we can improve education, business, and learning in general.  As I said some of it was stuff I'd read before, particularly the part about a lot of our learning happening when we sleep, and how not getting enough sleep can seriously start to impair your brain function.  But there were also some good and interesting points about holding people's attention and interest when presenting information that I thought were particularly interesting and useful.  And a bunch of other stuff too.  Anyway, it's interesting to see both how much know, and how much we still DON'T know about how the brain works.

Given that my life has been kind of crazy lately, I haven't really gotten a good start on my next book yet, but I've decided that now would be a good time to re-read the last Harry Potter book: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It came out when I was in Europe a few summers ago, and I purchased a copy there (hence the British cover art below) and read pretty much the whole thing on the long flight home (minus 100 pages or so that I read the night before we flew home).  I think reading so much so fast, while in the process of being up for nearly 24 hours straight, resulted in my not remembering much of anything that happens in it. When I saw the Part 1 movie that came out last year, I was genuinely surprised by much of the plot. 

Anyway, seems like it might make for some nice summer reading, if I ever end up with some downtime between all the family stuff, weddings, missions, and other summer partying that's currently going on. And I've got until July 15th if I want to finish it before the 2nd movie comes out. So that seems doable, right? :)

DeathlyHallowsCover

1 comment:

Liz said...

Knowing you, you will get it read.:)