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This is a collection of short essays, taken from Chesterton's column in the Daily News.  He describes them as "a sort of sporadic diary - a diary recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy - the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep."  They range widely in topic-- from fairy tales, to art and color, to travel, and morality, and what it means to be human.  As he says in one essay, "let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or coloured cloud."  Many of them are little stories of moments in time, an interesting experience or an instant of insight; as he describes in one of these essays, the kind of moment that has "no explanation and no conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen."  Some of them are more entertaining or illuminating than others, but overall I quite enjoyed reading this book.  Because most of the pieces are fairly short, it is an easy book to read a little at a time.

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Another story of the adventures of the brilliant Master Li and his stout peasant assistant Number Ten Ox in an ancient China filled with myths and monsters, with a new mystery for them to unravel. A monk from the Valley of Sorrows comes to seek the assistance of Master Li, because one of the monks has died strangely (perhaps murdered), and the Laughing Prince has been seen-- a psychotic ruler of the valley generations ago who destroyed the beautiful land with his mines, and who experimented on peasant "volunteers" to learn anatomy. Part of this mystery is a strange fragment of a manuscript that the dead monk had found, which delights Master Li immensely and is what initially draws him in to the mystery-- a forgery so beautiful and perfect in form and calligraphy, but so obviously a forgery by the content, with words and phrases that the original author would never choose.

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Jerusha Abbott (or Judy, as she decides to call herself) is the oldest girl at the John Grier Home (an orphanage), and when the subject of her future comes up at a Trustee meeting, along with the fact that she is quite good in school (particularly in English)-- they read a humorous essay she's written for school about the Wednesdays when Trustees come to visit the orphanage, and one eccentric Trustee decides to pay for her to go to college and educate her as a writer. He prefers to remain anonymous - she doesn't even know his name, and all she sees is a tall silhouette, and a shadow from car headlights that looks like a daddy-long-legs spider, which is where Judy comes up with her nickname for him. His only requirement for putting her through college is that she write him a letter once a month. From there on, the book is told entirely through Judy's letters to her benefactor as she goes through her four years of college. The book is a quick, entertaining read, and Judy is delightfully engaging letter-writer: the letters change style depending on her mood or the things she is learning in college, and she is good company.

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This fun novelette (even shorter than a novella!) takes us into the world of Theodora Baumgarten, a student at Winfrey High School where just about everyone (except her) wants to get into the fiercely competitive IASA Space Academy. The story is told from Theodora's perspective, with her wry commentary on everything that goes on; she'd wanted to do remote learning but her mother was a "nostalgia freak", and her dad went along with the idea because he wants her to be independent, and what better place to do that than in a crowd? Shortly after the story begins, there is a mandatory assembly called, and the rumor is that one of the students has been selected to for Space Academy. No one is more surprised than Theodora that it is her name the visiting admiral announces-- particularly since she didn't apply, and really doesn't want to go into space. But things happen very quickly, no one will listen to her protests that she didn't apply and doesn't want to go (mostly because none of them understand why you wouldn't want to go or be selected for something so prestigious), and she is whisked away to Space Academy where she is sent aboard the RAH (a spaceship named for Robert A. Heinlein) and launched into space before she can clear up the mistake. Fortunately, she's got a good friend on the outside, Kimkim, who can hack into just about anything; they manage to re-establish communication and work together on figuring out just what has happened.

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