Several days ago on this blog Ellen Spertus suggested several subversive gifts for girls, and several commenters offered other good ideas as well.
I’d like to add a few more suggestions:
Fun, molecularly-inspired jewelry and clothing can be found at Made With Molecules. What becomes a female geek better than a pair of estrogen earrings?
I’m neither an astronomer nor a biologist, but I can’t decide whether Bathsheba Grossman’s science crystal of the large scale model of the universe or DNA polymerase is cooler. If you can’t make up your mind yet, just buy a couple of DNA keychains as stocking stuffers and get a Julia set as a birthday present.
Since I’m actually more of a nerd than a geek (I tried to be a true geek, I really did, but I had to come out of the closet and admit that I actually prefer stories to physics equations), I really enjoy books that blend science with amazing stories and captivating artwork. One wonderful book that I’ve seen is A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals, full of gorgeous illustrations and brief stories about animals that once roamed the earth but are no more. Not the cheeriest thought, of course, but are we not doomed to repeat the mistakes if we do not read the cautionary tales? On a cheerier note, though, the same author-illustrator team published another book of esoterica about the animal world that lives today: Astonishing Animals: Extraordinary Creatures and the Fascinating Worlds They Inhabit. I’ve not seen this book myself, but it sounds delightful, and even with a bit of of a challenge: they’ve made up one of the creatures, and try to guess which one!
That last topic reminds me of the monkey-picked tea that we gave as a gift once from a British purveyor of exotic foodstuffs called Edible. Gifts here would not be for the picky eater, unless she’s Wednesday Addams.
And for Christmas next July: SF Bay Area author Wendy Lichtman has written a story for children in which the female protagonist uses math to solve a mystery, Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra. I’ve not read it myself, but my writing group instructor who is a protege of Lichtman says that she totally got into the story despite being math-phobic. Maybe this can be our way of roping girls into the female geek lifestyle….
For the older geek girl (especially the one who watches CSI and yells at the screen), Sarah Andrews’ geological mystery novels have a female protagonist who’s a forensic geologist, and the science is quite solid. I wouldn’t give these to most girls younger than high school, though.
Jim Ottaviani has written a whole bunch of comic-book biographies of famous scientists. One of them, Dignifying Science, is a collection of short stories about female scientists, and all drawn by female illustrators, too, if I recall correctly. It kicks butt.
[...] I mentioned this book back in my entry about more gifts for girls with geeky inclinations back in December. (Hey, and I’d also like to add that there’s even more cool science-themed jewelry out there!) Do the Math is a young adult novel about a girl who solves a mystery by applying algebraic reasoning, so I hear. My writing teacher, Janis Cooke Newman, read drafts of Do the Math because it was written by her original writing teacher, Wendy Lichtman. Janis told me last summer that even though she is not particularly into math per se, she got really drawn into the story. [...]