Winter Reading

Another winter with soup on the stove while there are books to read – there is all rain right now and reading works, as long as there are chances to spend time outdoors.

Meg Cabot – Airhead (a young adult novel)

The title character wakes with a brain transplant after an accident. It becomes a less empty idea when medical professionals explain that the law defines life by the heartbeat, not by the mentality. Although all her memory is about her life as an Advanced Placement Student, her legal identity is about the stranger she sees in the mirror.

(It does enter my mind that she sees the stranger through the stranger's eyes. The eyes are a portal to the brain, eyes have cells that are linked to the brain and to thought. One can wonder why the eyes of the stranger's body perceive the self without recognition.)

However, I only skimmed the teen novel. I have also been glancing through some texts about education and wondering if any analyses studied the eventual long-term lives of people relative to the academic, vocational, or general track that education authorities physically placed them in.

The Airhead teen novel makes me realize that the law that prioritizes existence as being about the body is a challenge to education. Education can track – move the students around according to evidence about their minds - as a way to emphasize itself, Education, or to reach all the students with their message about the importance of the mind.

Dodie Smith – New Moon With The Old

This is an endearing novel that I reread recently while glancing through some texts about education and wondering about the destinies of those students. The two sisters and two brothers whose father has left them in the advisory of a live-in secretary, newly hired, in the face of a tainted financial ruin (he must leave England) – must find work. The novel becomes a study of variations on the idea of work as a paid companion in the context of England's wonderful wealth of interesting old buildings. I remember loving one or two of the buildings in this novel very much.

It seems there is a four-volume autobiography by Dodie Smith. I put it on Inter Library Loan Request.