“Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.”—James Russell Lowell My granddaughter calls me Poppy. She is two years old. She loves books and wants to be read to all the time. I have read a lot of children's books over the last two years. Some of them are beautifully written and illustrated, and they can teach important, early lessons about family and friends, sharing and caring, laughing and exploring.

Dear Granddaughter, What's so great about F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby that almost everyone I know had to read it in high school? Would it still be considered "great" if it were first published today, instead of 100 years ago? That may not be a fair question. Certainly, the book would lose points for being both racist and anti-Semitic in its depiction of several characters recently arrived to New York City, including the Jewish gangster, Meyer Wolfsheim, who claims to have fixed the 1919 World Series and to have "made" Jay Gatsby.

March 28, 2025 Dear Granddaughter, Science or, more accurately, the search for scientific knowledge, isn't inherently good or evil, although it sometimes seems that way. In this fascinating and relatively short (180 pages) book, the author demonstrates how scientific inquiries can lead to good or evil consequences, especially if the researchers ignore the potential, moral consequences of their discoveries. "When We Cease to Understand the World," by Benjamin Labatut, is a partly fictionalized account of the lives of some of the most prominent physicists and mathematicians of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and it examines the moral and ethical consequences of their greatest discoveries.

Dear Granddaughter, I'm sure you know the story of Sleeping Beauty. In Thornhedge, the author, who uses the pen name T. Kingfisher, takes that fairy tale and turns it completely inside out and upside down. This is not simply the taking of a well-known story and telling it from the perspective of a different character in that story. Rather, …

If you can accept your mortality, you will feel more alive.