Mama Byrd

I love the public library.  I don’t have a lot of money to spend on books (and I hate that I spend $10-15 on something that takes me less than a week to finish).  Between my 3 kids and myself, I often have up to 10 books checked out at the same time.

Now reading…Queen of Babble by Meg Cabot

I love Meg Cabot, and not just because she wrote The Princess Diaries.  I haven’t read all of her YA books, but I have read most of the books that she’s written for adults.  I think Queen of Babble is the last set that I have yet to finish, and I’ll be sad when these are over.

Recently read…Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I read Outliers per Lannie’s suggestion.  I later read Gladwell’s other books, Blink and The Tipping Point, but this one is by far my favorite.  Outliers is a little different from my usual reads, but I enjoyed it.  As in his other books, Gladwell explores sociological reasons for why people behave the way they do.  In the case of Outliers, he explores why successful people are successful.

I learned several fascinating things from reading Outliers, including the following:  it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice for anyone to master anything (from hockey to computer programming); the Beatles picked up their 10,000 hours by playing strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany, eight hours a night for seven nights a week; Bill Gates had the extreme fortune of gaining access to a time-share computer when he was in the sixth grade at a private school in Seattle– he spent every free second on a computer from that time forward (sometimes by sneaking out of his house after his parents had put him to bed).