Okay, I definitely need to get back to the main library. I come home with the least uninteresting book I can find in the local library, and I still can't finish it! After all, in addition to this project, there are also so many novels, and, in these trying times, reading the news seems like another full-time job. An analysis of shadows in theory and practice, translated from the Italian, can't compete, even when it has pictures and is full of "whoa, have you ever really looked at your hand" moments.
The Shadow Club, by Roberto Casati, is not a bad book. I did appreciate the summary of Piaget's studies of children's beliefs about shadows. I do agree that shadows help us correctly interpret what we are looking at, whether in real life or in art. I can see that it's interesting that a shadow is an absence, and yet is treated like a substance: Peter Pan famously lost his and had to have it sewn on again; people of some cultures do not like their shadows to be stepped on or to touch other shadows. But I'm still not going to finish it, partly because I don't feel like I owe physics anything.
I took physics in high school and didn't mind the inclined planes and what not-- after all, as they say, "Gravity isn't just a good idea; it's the law!" As an adult, I read Brian Greene, and some Richard Feynman, and, most recently, I got a good halfway through a Neil Stephenson book called Seveneves-- the whole chunk that dealt with how to build a space colony in orbit around the earth. And if you've ever read any Neal Stephenson, you know that he throws full topical lectures into the middle of the action the way George MacDonald peppered his romances with chapter-long sermons or Anthony Trollope inserted blow-by-blow accounts of foxhunts into his analysis of Victorian politics. So, thanks to Stephenson, I'm all up on how gravity works in a multicentric orbital system; that should count for something.
The next Dewey topic is Chemistry, which is the one I actually actively dislike. But I bet if I go to the big library, they will have 30 running feet of books to choose from, and I can find one I can finish. Wish me luck!
