Books

How Numbers Can Tell Stories (Guest Post)

tree_grows_in_brooklyn

This week I was I guest posted on Aman Mittal’s blog, Confessions of a Readaholic, which was quite exciting because his blog is awesome! If you love to read, I highly recommend checking it out!

Without further ado, here’s my post:

How Numbers Can Tell Stories

So let’s talk about math! I know, I know…as readers we tend to hate math, right?  But Francie Nolan (from Betty Smith’s novel, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”) has a passion for both words and numbers and in fact combines the two in creative ways:

“When Francie added a sum, she would fix a little story to go with the result…The figure 1 was a pretty baby girl just learning to walk, and easy to handle…Each single combination of numbers was a new set-up for the family and no two stories were ever the same.”

When I read this passage (of which I’ve only quoted a small amount here), I was blown away by the wonder and magic of it all.  In effect, Francie is like a Victor Frankenstein who imbues life into the meaningless, dead conglomeration of body parts around him.  Now those numbers that were once “dead” are living and breathing people who have unique personalities and ways of life!

Click here to read the full post!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s