The Housekeeper and the Professor, this year’s Langley Summer Read, presents an interesting idea of using math in an everyday environment and the mystery of memory, but really, no one cares. For me, the book made no sense and I kept telling myself, “why am I reading this, is there some philosophical point that the people of Langley are trying to make me see?”

The book involves three characters, maybe more but they don’t really have much impact on the main plot. The three characters are Root, the Housekeeper, and the Professor. Yeah, you don’t even know the majority of their names; we know them as nouns and professions, they must be so important. The Professor has a bad memory; well basically he loses his memory every eighty minutes. The Housekeeper then has to meet him all over again, Root “cheats” on his math homework because he gets way too much help from the Professor (in my opinion at least), and the process repeats itself all over again.

This gets boring fast, we don’t want math over the summer, and the countless confusing equations in the book make you want to throw the book out the window. We never know why they choose the books we do but we read them and we pray that they seem to make sense, in this case, they don’t.