I read Genius to Betsy yesterday while she slept. I like reading aloud and feeling the different places in your mouth where sounds and tones and textures are produced. The book is great, it's a biography of physicist Richard Feynman, but it's really about what it is to be a genius. Who, what and how are geniuses?

"There are two kinds of geniuses, the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians.' An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark."

The book is written deliciously, colorfully and with a lovely, endearing tone. It is an ode to the eccentricities of Feynman, and all geniuses probably.

"He taught himself how to train dogs to do counterintuitive tricks-for example, to pick up a nearby sock not by the direct route but by the long way round, circling through the garden, in the porch door and back out again. (He did the training in stages, breaking the problem down until after a while it was perfectly obvious to the dog that one did not go directly to the sock.) Then he taught himself how to find people bloodhound-style, sensing the track of their body warmth and scent. He taught himself how to mimic foreign languages, mostly a matter of confidence, he found, combined with a relaxed willingness to let lips and tongue make silly sounds. He made islands of practical knowledge in the oceans of personal ignorance that remained."

I could quote the entire book, and probably would, were it not a copyright infringement. The best thing of all, Richard Feynman all his life "could never quite teach himself to feel a difference between right and left."