Short stories
Read several colletions of short stories. First, aborted Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, written in 1902. I expected colonial attitudes about e.g., seeing the animals as resource or as something to be put to work, but I didn't expect explicit racism about non-European people.
Switched to Stories for Seven Year Olds, a collection published by Harper Collins. On the whole, we enjoyed it, and discovered some interesting stories and authors. Vardiello was a highlight, as was discovering Leila Berg, an advocate of children's rights and children's literature.
For myself, read the collection The People's City, a collection of short stories centered in Edinburgh, with a rousing introduction by Irvine Welsh and contributions from Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith.
Finally, attended a wonderful seminar by Jordan Stoyanov, an academic grandson of the great Kolmogorov. The talk introduced a few intriguing problems and their connections to probability theory. The problems discused were similar to recreational maths, for example, find random variables for which $$X + Y = XY$$ with equality in distribution. These little problems are, to me, the short stories of maths. They have intrigue that captures you, but can be consumed satisfying in a single period, without multiple strands to the story line or many characters entering.
Tags: reading, short stories, maths