Triple Whammy I: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

This weekend I finished three books that I had been reading for vastly different amounts of time.
The quickest read was The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. It's a cute little story about a kid in the English countryside in the 50's. She lives in a manor and has a deep and abiding love of chemistry. Her name is Flavia and she is eleven. And, since this is a mystery story, she solves a murder.

Of chief note to me was the freakish little heroine's love of chemistry. Many years ago, while taking an Organic Chemistry course against my will, I realized that Organic Chemistry could be kind of interesting in a different context. It could be made into a video game, like Tetris. It would be kind of a fascinating puzzle, and kids would like it.

Instead, in actual life, it was a giant course required for bio majors like me, and also functioned as an unofficial weed-out for pre-meds. Its grading system was a steep and strict curve, so one's grade was determined relative to the performance of everyone else in the course. The worst part of all this for me was that there were somehow people in the course doing way worse than I was, but as the semester ground on, those people would start to DROP the course. And everyone would shift to the left on the curve, to fill in the bottom end. I didn't know who was more deserving of my book-toting ire, those Ivy League pre-meds crowding the top end, or the no-good dropouts creating a suction in the bottom end.

Anyway, Flavia would have been waaay beyond that course by the time she hit college. Even as a youth she would not want to play my Organic Chemistry-cum-Tetris game, because Organic Chemistry would be joy and game enough. But I don't hold that against her. She's a spunky and kind kid and I enjoyed reading about her little adventure.