Last Day of Summer School

Tomorrow is final exam day! Yeah!! Made it through another "semester." My class this summer started out good and slowly digressed to high school antics, but oh well, it is practically over now and I can be done with it. I have been making a dent into all the reading of freshman papers I had volunteered for, hopefully after tomorrow I will be through 45 of the 60 I have to read so I will only have 15 left.

I have taken a hiatus on the reading schedule, this happens when you are teaching summer school in the month that the Tour de France is going on. There is just no time to read when your evenings are spent watching the best cyclists in the world race up the steepest climbs possible. It has been an exciting tour all around, so it has been fun to watch. I am in the middle of reading this "math" book called Prime Obsession about the life of a mathematician Riemann. Then I just started The Code Book (another dorky math book) about the history of cryptography. It actually has started with Julius Ceasar and his famous code called the Ceasar shift and then Mary Queen of Scotts secret language. Quite interesting. Although I am reading this because I am creating a course at HPU that will use this book so I have to read it eventually.

My friend took me to this enormously large used book store and I walked out with maybe 8 new (used) books at a few dollars a piece. I have more books that I haven't read then I know what do to with. On top of the two mathy books I am reading I started a third mathy book called Flatland by Edwin Abbott. It is extremely short (less than 100 pages) and actually was not written by a mathematician but by a literary man. It was written in the late 1800's and it has all sorts of undertones about society and classes and religion but in the form of geometry. I am also reading this book because I will be assigning it in my class this fall. I have read 1/3 of it before but just never finished.

Hopefully I can finish some of these books so I can start something a little more for my pleasure than just for knowledge. I picked up a few classics that I have been wanting to read (or reread actually): The Catcher and the Rye, East of Eden, and The Jungle.