Detail Muse

2011 Top 10: Radioactive

2012-01-14T16:40:00.000-06:00

Eighth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

Radioactive by Lauren Redniss, ©2011

In Radioactive, Lauren Redniss uses art (primarily illustrations created through a process of “cyanotype printing” that evokes negative images and glowing radiation) to present a biography of Marie Curie ... and of radiation itself, from Roentgen to Hiroshima to Spider-man.

Even the words are art, in a font (developed by the author) that looks like delicate hand printing, arranged interestingly on the pages. I enjoyed seeing the personal side of Marie Curie, loved learning that Roentgen “dubbed the invisible light an ‘X’ ray, X for unknown,” and can understand how, at the turn of the century, the piling-up of discoveries of so many invisible forces (electricity, radio, telegraph, x-ray, radioactivity) “blurred the boundary between science and magic.”

It’s a part-linear, part segue-filled slideshow. Lovely.

2011 Top 10: My Own Country

2012-01-13T19:02:00.001-06:00

Seventh in a series of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

My Own Country by Abraham Verghese, ©1994

A fascinating, moving memoir of a doctor treating (more accurately, devoting his life to) early AIDS patients in small-town Tennessee. It's a startling reminder of how much more closeted gays were in the late 1980s and how much a death sentence AIDS was then. The last hundred pages are just sad with loss, which is exactly how it was.

Jan 14 edit: Fortuitous timing -- just came upon this TED Talk by Abraham Verghese on the importance of touch; it concludes with a moment that could have been in this book.

2011 Top 10: Boys of My Youth

2012-01-12T19:51:00.001-06:00

Sixth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

My mother is sewing a button on my father’s shirt while he’s still wearing it. “I was having this terrible feeling,” she says, “that she’d be this forty-year-old woman, going around telling people that we took her d-o-l-l away from her.” She leans down to bite off the thread. My father tests his new button and it works perfectly. “In three days she won’t remember she even knew that d-o-l-l,” he predicts.

But of course Beard remembers, and tells, in this non-linear collection of linked personal essays. They’re coming-of-age essays, where growing up is as likely to occur at thirty as at thirteen or three. Each age is rendered perfectly, as are the characters and the 1970s-80s period details of small-town Midwest.

Among the boys of Beard’s youth are Hal, that beloved d-o-l-l her mother’s oldest sister bullies her mother into throwing away; teenage boys who mostly ignore her at backwoods parties; her father who drinks and disappears for weeks at a time; Eric: boyfriend, husband, …; and a school-shooter in the University of Iowa physics department on a day Beard has gone home early to care for her aging dog. There are girls, too -- aunts and cousins; her older, nemesis sister; her mother who smokes on every page; a lifelong best friend she consults while writing these essays.

I love these people and their settings, love Beard’s writing and want more. I've also read her new novel In Zanesville, the first half of which feels exactly like these essays. I'm still scouring the Internet for anything else she's written.

2011 Top 10: Blood, Bones & Butter

2012-01-11T13:35:00.000-06:00

Fifth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

Slowly the meadow filled with people and fireflies and laughter -- just as my father had imagined -- and the lambs on their spits were hoisted off the pit onto the shoulders of men, like in a funeral procession, and set down on the makeshift plywood-on-sawhorse tables to be carved. Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper bag luminaria, which burned soft glowing amber, punctuating the meadow and the night, and the lamb was crisp-skinned and sticky from slow roasting, and the root beer was frigid and caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat.

Gabrielle Hamilton looks back on her nine-year-old self in that passage -- over-the-moon infatuated with her older siblings, her mother’s way in the kitchen and her father’s way with setting a stage ... and unaware that divorce and neglect are just around the corner.

By 13, she’s drugging with an older crowd and lying about her age to get work in restaurant kitchens to support herself; before long she's participating in a felony-level employee theft racket. Yet she has a knack for stumbling onto cooking mentors and gradually learns enough to run the kitchen at a kids’ summer camp and freelance-cook at high-volume caterers for fancy Hamptons (NY) parties. She completes a fiction-writing MFA, but only because she simultaneously finds a wellspring of sanity and true creativity in a side cooking job that recalls the down-to-earth food and settings of her childhood. And it's with that "real food" perspective that she eventually opens a restaurant -- New York City’s acclaimed Prune.

There's evidence of that MFA in this memoir -- a beautiful mix of literary and culinary creativity. I marked evocative passages throughout, and especially recall Hamilton’s homage to the simplicity and humility of 75-year-old (chef extraordinaire) Andre Soltner preparing a perfect omelet. Although she does settle into a somewhat straightforward prose to tell the bulk of her story, and I don’t think she’s quite figured out her relationships with her parents or partners, these pages are fierce and vivid. And thus I also find myself over-the-moon infatuated -- with Hamilton’s writing and with her story of reclaiming family ... or at least an adult, work-centered facsimile of it.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)

2011 Top 10: Being Wrong

2012-01-09T14:59:00.000-06:00

Fourth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz, ©2010

Being Wrong turns the camera inward to our own personal experience of error. Kathryn Schulz writes that we relish being right:

“Our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient. […But of] all the things we are wrong about, […] error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. […] it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.”

In a gentle, leisurely narrative filled with curiosity and even humor, Schulz explores philosophy, psychology, history, and the personal experiences of people being wrong (lovers, explorers, crime victims and economists, among others). Over four sections, she 1) defines error; 2) investigates how we get there (e.g. our senses, memories, beliefs, the data at hand); 3) examines our reactions to being wrong; and 4) encourages us to embrace error. Extensive endnotes and an index complete the book.

She’s adamant that error isn’t an intellectual inferiority or moral flaw but rather something beneficial, a way of learning and becoming -- where, quoting the philosopher Foucault, “The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” Schulz writes, “When you were a little kid, you were fabulously wrong about things all the time”; she suggests that when we seek new experiences it is a way of plunging ourselves back into the childhood experience of not-knowing, where error leads to rapid learning.

She also suggests that there is no actual state of “being” wrong -- we believe we’re right and then we discover we were wrong and we transition to a new state of being right. And it’s those “hinge moments” of awareness that provoke the revelatory shifts that change us; it’s also our reluctance to acknowledge error and complete those transitions that keeps us stuck in painful life situations.

It's an intelligent and deeply researched book, highly readable and highly recommended.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)

2011 Top 10: Alinea

2012-01-08T16:01:00.000-06:00

Third in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

Alinea by Grant Achatz, ©2008

Achatz is a wunderkind-chef now in his late thirties, and Alinea presents his debut restaurant, opened in Chicago in 2005 and now regarded one of the world’s best.

Alinea seats 64 diners for its nightly tasting menu of “upward of 28 courses” -- some of which are a single bite and most of which are more likely to be plated using tweezers than tongs. It’s “molecular gastronomy,” which I’d associated with manufacturers’ artificially processed food-like substances, but which actually is just playing with the physical and chemical properties of food. Achatz focuses on a food’s flavor, then creates interest (and usually surprise) by manipulating its appearance, texture and temperature -- for example, reducing lettuces to an intensely flavored liquid that is frozen and served as a sort of sorbet and topped with a salad dressing that has been similarly transformed.

Like diners who enter his restaurant through a monochromatic hallway, so too readers open the black-and-white cover of this oversized, overweight coffee-table book and find themselves transported, Wizard-of-Oz style, into hundreds of stunning color photographs (see some in the restaurant’s gallery). The book opens with 50 pages of terrific get-acquainted essays about Achatz and Alinea, followed by 350 pages of recipes and detailed procedures for preparing the approximately 100 dishes from four seasonal tasting menus. It’s armchair reading, or kitchen-table reading -- but only to rest the book on the table, not because you’re going to prepare many (any) of the recipes. I would have liked Achatz to deconstruct a menu thematically, but perhaps theme, more than technique, is his trade secret.

I came to this book simultaneously impressed by Achatz’s originality and derisive of most culinary over-the-topness. I come away in awed respect and with a desire to find the $200+ per-person for an evening at Alinea the restaurant. Meanwhile, Alinea the book exceeds 5 stars.

P.S. What’s the most ironic disease for a chef who puts flavor first? Take a look at this New Yorker profile.

2011 Top 10: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

2012-01-07T12:59:00.000-06:00

Second in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace, ©1997

A collection of seven essays about the popular culture, written and previously published in the early-to-mid-‘90s in Harper’s, Esquire, and scholarly journals.

Some are entertainingly observational, some are densely erudite, all are brilliant. Most include DFW’s signature styles of verbosity, footnotes and textual shorthand. There’s analysis of rural life via people gathering at a state fair; of pampered life via guests on a luxury cruise ship; of athletic (and mathematical) excellence, specifically in tennis. And of film, television and literature, for example “Greatly Exaggerated,” which turned out to be literary criticism on authorial context, a topic on my to-pursue list. (I read the essay twice, at first nearly laughing at its over-the-top density and assuming it must be satire. But it’s not, and I’m drawn to explore it elsewhere to figure it out.)

The essays are about pop culture but the setting is clearly DFW’s mind. Maybe he manipulates the reader’s attention toward it, but honestly, it feels gravitational. I have everything else of his still to read, yet I despair because eventually there will be no more.

2011 Top 10: A Bittersweet Season

2012-01-06T13:56:00.000-06:00

First in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2011, presented in alphabetical order.

A Bittersweet Season by Jane Gross, ©2011

Excerpted [with some paraphrasing] from the book's section on a geriatrician’s presentation to healthcare policymakers:

“How many of you expect to die?”
[All members of the audience eventually raised their hands.]
“Would you prefer to be old when it happens?”
All hands flew up in unison.
Who would choose cancer as the way to go?
Just a few.
“What about chronic heart failure or emphysema?”
A few more.
“So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?”

This outstanding book -- part memoir, part instruction manual, part expose on eldercare and financing -- is a sort of documentary about that third route. Cancer deaths come relatively early (age mid-60s) and with a rapid decline for 20% of Americans, and organ failures follow a decade later, via lengthier up-and-down declines, for another 25%. But it’s frailty and dementia -- “a drawn-out and humiliating series of losses for the parent and an exhausting and potentially bankrupting ordeal for the family” -- that lead to 40% of deaths.

The topic may be heavy but the treatment is extremely readable, accessible (suspenseful and fascinating, even), and packed with useful information. New York Times writer Jane Gross uses her mother’s decline as a springboard to present statistics and discuss issues, for example:
• elder housing (“assisted living is a social, rather than a medical, model of long-term care”);
• elder care (home care, nursing homes, physicians, hospitalizations);
• private savings and public financing (“assume that whatever it is you need, Medicare won’t pay for it”);
• family relationships and responsibilities
• end of life.

Gross gathers dozens of resources into a useful appendix, and the blog she launched (The New Old Age at the NYT) remains active although with new contributors. Her mother’s 2001 decline prompted this book, but Gross incorporated up-to-date research when she wrote it in 2010. It was published when my 92-year-old mother was a couple of years into her decline into frailty, and I read it in a cycle of putting it aside and then invariably being fascinated to find recognition and comfort when I picked it up again; I finished it a month before she died.

Of the many books now about caregiving and elder care, I recommend this single volume. It’s one to read for your parents’ aging and then again for your own.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)

2011 Reading Stats

2012-01-05T13:21:00.000-06:00

Some statistics from my 2011 Reading

Total books finished: 96
Fiction: 35
Nonfiction: 58
Other (poetry, mixed): 3

Female authors: 49
Male authors: 39
Mixed: 8
Authors new-to-me: 69
Authors with more than one book in my 2011 reads:

Jo Ann Beard (2 -- moving coming-of-age material)
Carrie Fisher (2 -- ballsy yet poignant celebrity memoirs)
James Lileks (2 -- hilarious pop-culture anti-homages)
Keiji Nakazawa (3 -- horrific graphic-novel memoirs of Hiroshima)

Original publication date:
1800s: 1
1920s: 2
1930s: 1
1970s: 5
1980s: 3
1990s: 11
2000s: 25
2010s: 48

Date acquired:
1980s: 2
1990s: 3
2000s: 12
2010s: 79

Notable tags:
Audiobook: 11 (more convenient but more difficult for me than reading)
From the library: 27 (many luscious illustrated books)
History or historical fiction: 26 (a goal, see below)
Humor: 14 (yay!)
Illustrated: 33 (a pleasure)
Novella: 7 (in 2012, it’s tomes)
Translated: 10 (an unwritten goal)
Workplace: 7 (my favorite setting)

Ratings: 77% are 3- to 4-star (okay to good), which exactly describes my reading year. Next year, I want better.

From my goals last January:
“In 2011, I want to read a little more history
--success! read 26 books of history/historical fiction--
and a few more classics,
--marginal, with 4--
to pull predominately from my TBRs,
--success! read 38 of 40 I’d set as goal and decreased my TBRs from 291 to 263--
and to [get to] other (non-book) reading [e.g. backlogged stacks of New Yorkers].”
--fail, but I'm going at it again in 2012--

Beginning tomorrow: reviews (or less-formal comments) on my ten favorite reads in 2011.

2011 Reading Recap

2012-01-04T12:00:00.000-06:00

I read some good books in 2011, a few great books, and a couple I’m now an evangelist :) for. My full list follows, sorted by fiction/nonfiction/other in reverse chronology by order read, including ratings (out of 5 stars). I tried to decrease my ballooning stacks of TBRs (to-be-reads), so books acquired pre-2011 (some acquired decades ago) are designated by “#”. Click the link to read my review; click the book’s image (most are included at the end of this post) to peruse it on Amazon.

Tomorrow, I’ll post some statistics about my reading year. Then I’ll highlight my Top 10 via individual reviews, in alphabetical order by title, over the next ten posts.

Fiction
96. The Fiction Class# by Susan Breen (2)
88. Further Interpretations of Real-life Events by Kevin Moffett (3.5) (See review)
87. Secret Letters from 0 to 10 by Susie Morgenstern (3)
86. The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick, read on audio by Yelena Shmulenson (3.5)
84. Little House on the Prairie# by Laura Ingalls Wilder (4)
83. Range of Motion by Elizabeth Berg (3.5)
80. A Farewell to Arms# by Ernest Hemingway (3)
76. One Amazing Thing# by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (3.5) (See review)
70. Speak# by Laurie Halse Anderson (3.5)
68. Number the Stars# by Lois Lowry (4)
65. Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary# by Joseph Conrad (3.5)
64. The Train of Small Mercies by David Rowell (3) (See review)
62. The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh (4) (See review)
58. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (4) (See review)
55. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly, read on audio by Natalie Ross (4)
53. The Summer Book# by Tove Jansson (4) (See review)
52. American Salvage# by Bonnie Jo Campbell (3.5)
51. Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
46. The Notebook# by Nicholas Sparks (1.5)
45. Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister (3.5) (See review)
42. Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, read on audio by Samuel L. Jackson (4)
39. The Heart Specialist by Claire Holden Rothman (3) (See review)
37. Translation is a Love Affair by Jacques Poulin (4) (See review)
34. The Girls# by Lori Lansens (3)
32. Hope for the Flowers# by Trina Paulus (3)
31. Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog# by Mark Leyner (3)
26. We Need to Talk About Kevin# by Lionel Shriver (5) (See review)
18. In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard (3.5) (See review)
14. The Housekeeper and the Professor# by Yoko Ogawa (3.5)
11. Marcelo in the Real World# by Francisco X. Stork (4)
9. Room# by Emma Donoghue (4) (See review)
8. The Art of Racing in the Rain# by Garth Stein (3.5) (See review)
7. Machine# by Peter Adolphsen (3) (See review)
3. The Silent Land# by Graham Joyce (4) (See review)

Nonfiction
94. Shockaholic by Carrie Fisher, read on audio by the author (2.5)
93. The End of Overeating# by David Kessler (3) (See review)
92. Happy Accidents by Jane Lynch, read on audio by the author (3.5)
90. Blue Nights by Joan Didion (4.5)
85. The Problem of Pain# by C. S. Lewis (3)
82. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (4)
77. My Own Country# by Abraham Verghese (4.5)
74. A Bittersweet Season by Jane Gross (5) (See review)
73. Bossypants by Tina Fey, read on audio by the author (4) (See review)
71. Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher, read on audio by the author (3)
69. The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn (4) (See review)
67. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser, read on audio by Kirby Heyborne (4) (See review)
66. The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites (3.5) (See review)
61. County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital by David Ansell (4) (See review)
60. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again# by David Foster Wallace (4) (See review)
57. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, read on audio by Robin Miles (4)
50. Bomboozled by Susan Roy (4) (See review)
49. Barefoot Gen: Life After the Bomb Vol 3 by Keiji Nakazawa (4.5) (See review)
48. I Shall Not Hate by Izzeldin Abuelaish (3.5) (See review)
44. A Friend for Einstein, the Smallest Stallion by Charlie Cantrell (2)
43. Radioactive by Lauren Redniss (5) (See review)
41. Barefoot Gen: The Day After Vol 2 by Keiji Nakazawa (4)
40. The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha (3.5) (See review)
36. Barefoot Gen Volume 1 by Keiji Nakazawa (4) (See review)
35. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (3) (See review)
33. Fast Food Nation# by Eric Schlosser (4.5)
30. A Room of One's Own# by Virginia Woolf (3.5)
29. The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard (4.5) (See review)
27. The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke (3) (See review)
25. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, read on audio by Cassandra Campbell (4)
24. Thinking in Pictures# by Temple Grandin (4)
23. Women Food and God# by Geneen Roth (3.5)
21. Spark: How Creativity Works by Julie Burstein (3) (See review)
20. Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand, read on audio by Edward Herrmann (4.5)
17. Poke the Box by Seth Godin (3.5) (See review)
16. Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives by Arthur Plotnik (3.5) (See review)
15. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error# by Kathryn Schulz (4.5) (See review)
13. Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton (4.5) (See review)
12. Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker (3.5) (See review)
10. Persepolis# by Marjane Satrapi (4)
6. Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation# by Elissa Stein/Susan Kim (3.5) (See review)
5. Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master# by Alan Weintraub/Kathryn Smith (3) (See review)
4. Gracefully Insane# by Alex Beam (3.5) (See review)
2. Sugar Changed the World by Marc Aronson/Marina Budhos (3.5) (See review)
1. I Remember Nothing# by Nora Ephron (2.5) (See review)

Other
95. Fodor's The Complete African Safari Planner (4.5) (See review)
91. What I Hate from A to Z by Roz Chast (3) (See review)
89. Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s by James Lileks (4)
81. The Gallery of Regrettable Food by James Lileks (4)
79. Alinea by Grant Achatz (6!) (See review)
78. The Food52 Cookbook by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs (4) (See review)
75. The Unofficial Guide Walt Disney World 2012 (5) (See review)
72. Ruin: Photographs of a Vanishing America by Brian Vanden Brink (3.5)
63. Paul Fusco: RFK by Paul Fusco (4) (See review)
59. Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore/Philip Levine (3.5) (See review)
56. Thoughts From the Seat of the Soul# by Gary Zukav (2.5)
54. Fodor's Essential India (4) (See review)
47. Mother Said by Hal Sirowitz (3.5)
38. Bellevue Literary Review Vol 10 No 2 (Fall 2010)# (4.5)
28. Insiders' Guide: Key West in Your Pocket by Nancy Toppino (4) (See review)
22. Bellevue Literary Review Vol 9 No 1 (Spring 2009)# (4)
19. Lonely Planet Discover Europe# (3) (See review)

Marketers vs Mathematicians

2011-07-19T19:35:00.000-05:00

After a two-year hiatus while I was reading more books than magazines, I’m subscribing again to New Scientist -- a curious, playful weekly that touches on every flavor of science.

My first issue back was as clever as ever, including this letter to the editor from Tom Heydeman in Reading, Berkshire, UK:

I was impressed to see on the back cover advertisement (28May) that Mercedes-Benz is celebrating “125! years of innovation.” Factorial 125, the number of years claimed, is more than 10²⁰⁰, so the company started to innovate unimaginable aeons before the big bang.

fyi 125! campaign site here

Resolve: Less Languishing

2011-06-07T11:31:00.001-05:00

While migrating recently to a new PC, I organized my writing files and was heartened to rediscover a number of works-in-progress and completed pieces … and disheartened to see them languishing. I moved the drafted stories and essays to a “To Finish” folder, and the finished pieces to “To Query.” Some might fit traditional print magazines, but I decided to explore the breadth of online opportunities, too.

And into this mobilization came another option -- from a writer-friend who emailed that he’d just self-published a short story on Smashwords*, which describes itself:

Smashwords publishes and distributes ebooks [and shorter length pieces]. Authors and publishers retain full control over how their works are published, sampled, priced and sold. … [Readers get] multi-format, DRM-free ebooks, ready for immediate sampling and purchase, and readable on any e-reading device.

For writers, self-publishing involves some heavy lifting in terms of text formatting and product marketing. But for readers, it’s still all about the story -- for example, how my friend K. G. Deloas accomplishes the twists and reveals that pull together the threads of his supernatural short story, It’s Happened Countless Times Before.

*or see others, e.g. Scribd and Amazon’s Kindle Singles

A.I. on Jeopardy!

2011-02-14T14:41:00.004-06:00

If you enjoyed IBM’s “Deep Blue” chess challenge against Garry Kasparov back in 1997, you may be interested in watching its “Watson” challenge on Jeopardy! this week, Monday through Wednesday.

It’s part of IBM’s overall “Deep QA” artificial intelligence (AI) project, where the goal is to develop machines that can work with language to supplement the repertoire of human services in its global consulting practice. Such computers must be able to “understand” the questions humans ask; to mine data sources that are increasingly words-based (e.g. e-mail, digitized books, the Internet); and to narrow possibilities and arrive at helpful answers.

To that end, a computer named “Watson” (actually a stack of hundreds of computers with thousands of processors) will play the Q&A game Jeopardy against the show’s all-time top two champions -- highest money-winner Ken Jennings and undefeated Brad Rutter. Jeopardy hopes the com-pu-tition (ouch, their word) will be smart and entertaining to viewers; IBM hopes it will be smart and impressive to businesses.

Tune in to Jeopardy this week -- and learn more about the challenge on a PBS Nova program. I've been following the project a bit and, if anything, it has me ever more gobsmacked about the human brain.

2010 Top 10: You Know When the Men Are Gone

2011-01-10T10:42:00.000-06:00

Final in the series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

You Know When the Men Are Gone
by Siobhan Fallon

In Fort Hood housing, like all army housing, you get used to hearing through the walls. You learn your neighbors’ routines: when and if they gargle and brush their teeth; how often they go to the bathroom or shower; whether they snore or cry themselves to sleep. You learn too much. And you learn to move quietly through your own small domain.

You also know when the men are gone.

Those opening lines hooked me into this terrific collection of short stories that are linked through a shared setting of Fort Hood, Texas, its soldiers who are deployed to Iraq, and their spouses and families who stay behind. The first story sets up military domestic life and that too-closeness to neighbors and authority. The next follows a soldier serving outside Baghdad -- an investment banker who enlisted after 9/11. Others explore suspicions of adultery; wounded soldiers returning early; the difficulty of re-acclimating to home; the public honor and private grief of widowhood.

They’re personal stories, not political, and they're gentle and straightforward, to be re-read more for comfort than for a layered understanding. But they’re some of the most engaging reading I’ve encountered ... in fact their readability reminds me of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, the first book published by Penguin’s Amy Einhorn imprint which is now publishing this book.

Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher

2010 Top 10: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

2011-01-09T11:30:00.001-06:00

Ninth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte

According to Edward Tufte, the purpose of graphics is, “Not the complication of the simple; rather [...] the revelation of the complex.” And his Visual Display of Quantitative Information, first self-published nearly 30 years ago, is now a bible -- a sort of The Elements of Style applied to information graphics.

Tufte reviews how information can be presented (e.g. a minimal amount via a sentence; a moderate amount via a table; a huge amount via a graphic) and then turns his attention to those graphics -- from their beginnings in cartography (no one who reads the book will forget Charles Minard’s graph of Napoleon’s march across Russia) to how to achieve graphic excellence today.

He urges a multi-disciplinary approach, cautioning that, “Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.” He touches on psychology and cognition. He rails against using graphic design to deceive, and enlightens readers by pulling numerous examples of misrepresentation from prominent media. He devotes a large part of the book to improving the effectiveness of graphs by urging the elimination of “chart junk” (e.g. moiré-effect cross-hatching) and numerous other sources of “non-data ink.” In fact, a chapter wherein he strips away seemingly necessary text, frames, hatch marks, etc. (leaving little more than an ether vapor but in the process simplifying and clarifying the meaning) is revelatory.

So many books I've read recently have referenced Tufte, and I'm thrilled to have finally read him directly.

2010 Top 10: The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

2011-01-08T09:47:00.001-06:00

Eighth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
by Walter Mosley

He only had one chair, and that had a book, a glass of water, and three stones he’d found that day at the park on it. They were blond stones, a color he’d never seen in rock and so he picked them up and brought them home, to be with them for a while.

That’s exactly why I read Walter Mosley -- to “be awhile” with his characters, whose situations and moral complexities I always think I haven’t seen, and whose unfamiliarity always softens into a fond recognition.

Here it’s 2006 and 91-year-old Ptolemy Grey lives alone in squalor in south-central LA. He has a small pension, he has a radio and a TV tuned 24/7 to a dueling background of classical music and cable news, and he has sporadic contact with extended family two and three generations down the line. But his home and mind have declined since his wife died decades ago, and now dementia keeps him obsessed about the ages-ago deaths of a childhood friend in a house fire and the lynching of a beloved mentor. So when another loved one dies in street violence, and a new young friend awakens Ptolemy's spirit, he embarks on a mission to protect his loved ones before his own time comes.

Mosley narrates almost completely in scenes here -- from Ptolemy’s perspective, a mix of confusion and distraction co-mingled with vestiges of philosopher and keen observer. A key plot point about experimental drugs approaches magical realism and requires a suspension of disbelief ... or maybe it just required me to fully enter a world where the rules don’t resemble the ones I know, and to appreciate the point of this book: being awhile with this man in that world. I loved every page of it.

Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher

2010 Top 10: The Imperfectionists

2011-01-07T10:26:00.000-06:00

Seventh in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

Rachman's debut novel is the story of an international English-language newspaper in Rome, told through alternating threads: a series of biographical vignettes tracking the newspaper from its founding in 1953 to the economy of today’s print media; and a series of linked short stories involving the newspaper’s employees (and one reader).

The stories are terrific! Set within the workplace and outside in personal life, they involve lots of characters yet each is effectively unpacked -- background characters just enough to make them memorable, main characters enough to make the reader care; many are developed further as they appear again in later stories. They’re fast stories, with lots of dialogue and strong forward momentum. And Rachman isn’t afraid of tension -- in one, I was so engaged in the hilarious interaction between a high-energy correspondent and a passive, fledgling wannabe that I thought I was going to have a stroke!

These stories are among the most enjoyable fiction I read last year, and it’s a mere quibble that I felt Rachman prepared me for a finish slightly more “Wow!” than I got. I recommend it highly and am beyond eager to read more by him.

Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher

2010 Top 10: The Geometry of Pasta

2011-01-06T09:29:00.000-06:00

Sixth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

The Geometry of Pasta by Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy

As the full title states, "The Perfect Shape + The Perfect Sauce = The Geometry of Pasta," so the talents of book designer Caz Hildebrand + London chef Jacob Kenedy = this terrific book.

Part history-of-pasta and part cookbook, it begins with an overview of pastas (southern Italian peasants’ plain semolina to wealthy northerners’ incorporation of eggs and different starches) and tomato sauces (also varying from light to rich), and the concept of matching the delicacy/sturdiness of a pasta to that of a sauce. And then comes that geometry -- the actual pairings of those shapes and sauces via a 270-page alphabetic encyclopedia of dozens and dozens of pasta shapes, including:

• A short history of each pasta (referencing climate, culture and politics/economics), for example the intricate shapes that were made “when housewives had to fill long winter evenings,” and the delicate and haughty pastas of the Renaissance, which “specialist nuns would make in their convents”;
• An arresting b/w graphic of its shape;
• In some cases, recipes for making that pasta at home;
• In all cases, recipes for sauces/fillings suited to that shape;
• Suggestions for other sauces (an Index makes it easy to locate sauce recipes).

I'd expected this book to be glossy and slightly oversized, so was surprised to find it the size and construction of a hardcover novel. While that doesn't sound like a book to be taken into the kitchen and later wiped down, you'll want to do so -- it's filled with easy-to-follow recipes for every level of cook, from quick sauces with a few common ingredients, to sauces involving a dozen ingredients and progressive steps that are mini-tutorials in cooking technique. They include olive oil and/or butter and a wide range of fish, fowl and meat. Most serve 2-4 people as a main course; some serve 6-8 and a few feed a crowd. But even if you're an armchair foodie with little intention of preparing the recipes, this book's design and interesting (even amusing) discussion make it a delightful read.

2010 Top 10: The Elements

2011-01-05T11:56:00.000-06:00

Fifth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

The Elements
by Theodore Gray

I started collecting elements in 2002 […and] by 2009, I had assembled nearly 2,300 objects representing every element, the possession of which is not forbidden by the laws of physics or the laws of man. […] Some elements can be experienced in large quantities, like the 135-pound iron ball I keep in my office for people to trip over. Others are best enjoyed in responsible moderation -- keep too much uranium in the office, and people start asking questions (keep over 15 pounds, and the Feds start asking questions).

The Elements is a lush and visually stunning coffee-table book that showcases those samples and provides a terrific individual "biography" of each element.

Gray opens with an overview of the Periodic Table and its organization of elements into groups according to their similar characteristics. But then he explores them, element by element, in order of their atomic number rather than by group -- an effective method because the repeated returns to the various groups reinforce the group characteristics while familiarizing readers (YA and adult) with the individual elements.

Each biography is a two-page spread -- the left a full-page photo of one of those samples from Gray’s collection, and the right an array of text and images that detail the element’s history, uses, and technical specs (atomic weight; density; crystal structure; orbital electron arrangement; melting and boiling points; emission spectrum). Though it's a reference work, I read this book straight through -- often thinking, “okay, just one more” but then unable to resist that each element’s text ends with a teaser for the next one, and that Gray is liberal with trivia, personal experience, and wit. He dubs Tellurium the most melodic name and discusses the politics involved in naming new elements, finishing: “And so it is that we come to the end of our journey through the periodic table not with a bang, but with a committee.”

He’s the Bill Bryson of the Periodic Table!

P.S. The book’s enhanced e-version seems reason enough to buy an iPad :) Take a look at the book and the app with author Theodore Gray here.

2010 Top 10: The Disappearing Spoon

2011-01-04T09:45:00.000-06:00

Fourth in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

I ended up with an honors degree in physics, but [...] my real education was in my professors’ stories. [...] I realized that there’s a funny, or odd, or chilling tale attached to every element on the periodic table.

Kean came to those professors already primed for their stories -- by having been fascinated to find mercury not only in the Periodic Table of science class but also in his childhood thermometers ... in literature’s mad hatter ... and in the mercury-laxative leftovers discovered in Lewis & Clark’s trail of latrines.

Though I didn’t keep strict track, I think Kean includes a tale for every single element in this terrific book. And while he did so, he opened my eyes to things I’d forgotten (or not ever known!!), for example:

• Chemistry is based on atoms’ electrons and physics on their nuclei;
• "Alchemy" is true: every element traces back to the fusion of solar hydrogen atoms into helium;
• The familiar Periodic Table is just one of many potential configurations of the elements, some of which are 3D;
• There are more than three states of matter;
• Our bodies don’t monitor whether we’re inhaling enough oxygen, only that we’re exhaling enough carbon dioxide;
• Midas was real as well as fictional;
• Why sci-fi life forms are based on silicon;
• Why Americans call it “aluminum” but it’s “aluminium” to everybody else.

There’s chemistry here, and physics and biology. But there’s also astronomy, geology, history, politics, warfare, economics, gender studies, human ambition and inter-personal conflict. And there’s a whole lotta humor. There are also dozens of entertaining and informative endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index. The only way to make it even better is to pair it with Theodore Gray’s The Elements.

Get started by taking a look at the disappearing spoon of the title.

Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher

2010 Top 10: Pheromone

2011-01-03T10:19:00.000-06:00

Third in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

Pheromone by Christopher Marley

~~Phenomenal~~ er, I mean Pheromone, is a stunning photographic collection of Christopher Marley’s insect artwork.

I first heard of Marley on a CBS Sunday Morning segment. He grew into adulthood hating insects (their legs, especially), but when the colors, shapes and textures of particularly remote species caught his artist’s eye, his dread turned to fascination. His specimens are sustainably collected from around the world, supporting local tribes and their efforts to resist deforestation (and with it the loss of habitat that results in species endangerment).

He preserves, mounts and frames the insects, sometimes arranging mixed species (like the “mosaic” on the book’s cover, a sort of insect version of a wildflower garden), but more often composing groups of a single species (evocative of massed tulips) or even a striking lone insect. The nubby and hairy textures are practically tactile, the colors are fabulous, and every image is lively -- the circularity of a mandala of longhorn beetles; the waves of color washing across a page of massed scarabs; the page-full of 95%-identical moths that highlights their individuating differences. The book's Endnotes include the title of each work of art; the insect specimen’s common name, scientific name, geographic location and actual size; and sometimes Marley’s personal comments, which made me re-visit the images with new insight.

You can browse Marley’s gallery here, but I've given more than a passing thought to pulling out some of the book’s pages to frame.

2010 Top 10: Packing for Mars

2011-01-02T10:25:00.001-06:00

Second in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach

It seems like a previous life: the mid-1980s and NASA’s program to send the first American “civilian” into space. I was interested, then sidelined when applications were restricted to teachers, then stunned by the Challenger launch disaster. But now I’m delighted to get a sort of ride-along with the clever and uber-curious Mary Roach in Packing for Mars.

She begins: “To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with.” And then she dives in to explore that human machinery in space and how everything -- procedures, equipment and supplies -- is designed to best serve it.

Through examples from animal simulations and crash-test cadavers, the race-for-space/ shuttle/ space-station projects, and potential Mars-length missions, she examines astronaut selection; the effects of isolation, inactivity and cramped spaces; the spectrum from weightlessness to multiple g-forces; eating, eliminating, and hygiene; and … well, enough with the listmaking; it hints at dull and anyone who’s read Roach knows she doesn’t do dull. Instead, she mines excellent and surprising information about physics and biology -- and what most captures me is her practicality, for example this from a passage about religious observations aboard the space station:

Zero gravity and a ninety-minute orbital day created so many questions for Muslim astronauts that a [guideline] was drafted. Rather than require [them] to pray five times during each ninety-minute orbit of Earth, they were allowed to go by the twenty-four-hour cycle of the launch location.

How to stay oriented toward Mecca at such speed and prostrate oneself in weightlessness are also addressed.

I loved Roach's Stiff, but Spook -- not as much, so skipped Bonk (until now, maybe). She's a front-and-center kind of narrator, a participant even, and Spook seemed too much about her. Here, she’s back in terrific Stiff form -- (wo)manning the audio and video for us like a TV news crew, giving just an occasional glimpse of her metaphoric microphone to remind us she's there. Though she isn’t a slave to structure and linearity, there’s a satisfying organization of her material into chapters here. And all of her interesting-but-off-topic segues? -- they’re here too, in a hundred witty footnotes. She also references dozens of space-travel articles, histories, biographies and memoirs, and lists them in a bibliography.

2010 Top 10: American Terroir

2011-01-01T10:45:00.002-06:00

First in a series of reviews of my 10 favorite books read in 2010, presented in alphabetical order.

American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen

[Terroir is] a partnership between person, plant and environment to bring something unique into the world. The soil and climate set the conditions; the plants, animals, and fungi respond to them; and then people determine how to bring out the goodness of those foods and drinks.

American Terroir* is Jacobsen’s exploration of that “taste of place” -- why certain locales grow certain plants and animals so well, and the attentive harvesting and processing that transform them into outstanding foods. Think artisanal not industrial; imagine a reversal of the past century’s flight from the farm and from all things "earthy."

Jacobsen organizes years of research and tasting into a dozen essays, each a primer on a food and an armchair trip to a locale: Vermont maple syrup, (hard) cider and cheese; Washington apples and oysters; California wine; locavore honeys and mead wine; Alaskan salmon; Prince Edward Island mussels; Quebec mushrooms and forest greens; Mexican avocados and chocolate; Panamanian coffee.

There’s history, biology, climatology, gastronomy, agriculture, production and business, and as close to a tasting as a book can get ... all packaged in Jacobsen’s engaging narration, which has hints of Michael Pollan and Mary Roach. And each essay concludes with a recipe or two plus a list of sources that made me dizzy with possibility (first up: an orange-blossom sparkling mead wine).

*pronounced like Renoir

Review based on a copy of the book provided by the publisher

2010 Reading Recap

2010-12-30T08:06:00.000-06:00

This year had lots of good books, some great books, and some books I’m now an evangelist :) for. My full list follows, in reverse chronological order read, sorted by fiction/nonfiction and including ratings (out of 5 stars). Click the link to read my review. Click the book’s image (most are included at the end of this post) to peruse it on Amazon.

Scan the list and you’ll find very few books I didn’t like. As for favorites -- I’ll highlight my Top 10 by posting individual reviews, in alphabetical order of the title, over the first ten days of January.

Fiction
91. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (4)
90. You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon (4.5) (See review)
88. A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote (3.5) (See review)
87. An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin (3) (See review)
85. Great House by Nicole Krauss (3.5)
84. Touch by Adania Shibli (4.5) (See review)
73. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley (4.5) (See review)
72. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (4) (See review)
70. The Recipe Club by Andrea Israel/Nancy Garfinkel (2) (See review)
68. Saturday by Ian McEwan (3.5)
65. Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons (4)
63. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (4) (See review)
62. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang (3.5) (See review)
59. Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives by David Eagleman (4) (See review)
51. The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell (4.5) (See review)
48. This Must Be the Place by Kate Racculia (2.5) (See review)
45. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (3.5) (See review)
43. The Lion by Nelson DeMille (3.5) (See review)
42. Countdown by Deborah Wiles (4) (See review)
41. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender (4) (See review)
38. Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok (4) (See review)
37. Light Boxes by Shane Jones (3.5) (See review)
35. Mrs. Somebody Somebody by Tracy Winn (3) (See review)
33. Day for Night by Frederick Reiken (4.5) (See review)
32. Gents by Warwick Collins (3)
31. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (4.5) (See review)
30. Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel (3) (See review)
29. The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald (3) (See review)
28. We the Children by Andrew Clements (3) (See review)
25. Chess Story by Stefan Zweig (4)
24. Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott (3) (See review)
22. The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre (4.5) (See review)
21. The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford (3) (See review)
20. The Heights by Peter Hedges (3) (See review)
17. The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (4) (See review)
16. Refusing Heaven (poems) by Jack Gilbert (3)
13. The Incident Report by Martha Baillie (4) (See review)
11. Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian (3.5) (See review)
9. The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens (3.5) (See review)
6. A Beginning, a Muddle, and an End by Avi (2.5)
3. The Pursuit of Other Interests by Jim Kokoris (3.5) (See review)

Nonfiction
89. American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen (4.5) (See review)
86. 365 Thank Yous by John Kralik (3) (See review)
83. Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows (3.5)
82. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey (4) (See review)
81. Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People by Amy Sedaris (4) (See review)
80. Penguin 75 ed. by Paul Buckley (3)
79. The Gourmet Cookie Book (3)
78. Mad Men: The Illustrated World by Dyna Moe (3)
77. The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (4)
76. The Fashion File by Janie Bryant (3.5) (See review)
75. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (4) (See review)
74. Pheromone by Christopher Marley (5) (See review)
71. The Book of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks by Bethany Keeley (3) (See review)
69. Huck by Janet Elder (2) (See review)
67. Chip Kidd: Book One by Chip Kidd (4) (See review)
66. Turn and Jump by Howard Mansfield (3) (See review)
64. Brain Candy by Garth Sundem (3.5) (See review)
61. True Prep by Lisa Birnbach (3.5) (See review)
60. The Geometry of Pasta by Caz Hildebrand / Jacob Kenedy (4.5) (See review)
58. Passages in Caregiving by Gail Sheehy (3.5) (See review)
57. Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point by Alex MacLean (4)
56. Change by Design by Tim Brown (2.5) (See review)
55. The Playbook by Alex MacLean (4)
54. Packing for Mars by Mary Roach (4.5) (See review)
53. Extraordinary Clouds by Richard Hamblyn (4) (See review)
52. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean (4.5) (See review)
50. A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities by J.C. McKeown (3.5) (See review)
49. Kick-Ass Creativity by Mary Beth Maziarz (3.5) (See review)
47. Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by Mark Vonnegut (4.5) (See review)
46. Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us by David Freedman (3) (See review)
44. Cutting Rhythms by Karen Pearlman (4.5) (See review)
40. Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern (4.5) (See review)
39. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman (4.5)
36. Jenniemae and James by Brooke Newman (3) (See review)
34. Aspergirls by Rudy Simone (4) (See review)
27. The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion by Herman Wouk (3.5) (See review)
26. Forbes City Guide Chicago 2010 (reference) (4) (See review)
23. Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Sewing and Fabric Crafts (reference) (4) (See review)
19. The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar (4) (See review)
18. Blankets by Craig Thompson (4)
15. Words Fail Me by Teresa Monachino (3)
14. It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs (2.5) (See review)
12. Obsolete by Anna Jane Grossman (3.5) (See review)
10. Making Rounds With Oscar by David Dosa (3) (See review)
8. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte (5) (See review)
7. The Paris Review Interviews I (5) (See comments)
5. The Elements by Theodore Gray (5) (See review)
4. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel (3.5) (See review)
2. Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman (4)
1. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin (3.5) (See review)

What Does It Take...

2010-12-03T13:18:00.000-06:00

...to coax out a muse?

This:

Of course this was pre-arranged ... in the mall.
(But what’s happening ... in you, now?)

What You Want to Know

2010-08-31T09:49:00.003-05:00

From a recent segment of The Leonard Lopate Show, it’s clear that novelist Ayelet Waldman is less a proponent of “write what you know” and more of “write what you can imagine” -- that is, "what you want to know."

Because writing is an avenue to discovery, she pursues all sorts of real-life “want to knows” through her fiction. Her latest novel, Red Hook Road, was prompted by a terrible car accident that she recalls reading about in a newspaper. Also interested in classical music, she learned about it and weaved it in. And boxing. And boats.

For her next book, Waldman went totally “want to know.” She Googled keywords of topics that interested her: Hungary (she wanted to visit a friend there and liked the excuse of researching a writing project) + Holocaust (she’s Jewish and hadn’t written about it) + art (as with the music of Red Hook Road, she was interested) = a novel about the Hungarian Gold Train at the end of WWII.

I can’t wait to read it.

What Are the Odds?!

2010-08-25T20:02:00.001-05:00

Stay with this video for the first minute-and-a-half, then just laugh for the next minute:

Oh Yeah, Someone Cares

2010-08-12T19:08:00.002-05:00

The cliché years ago, when weblogs were just becoming mainstream, was that most were mind-numbingly dull diaries along the lines of “what I had for lunch.” The hard truth was: No One Cares!

Turns out that’s not true.

While reviewing a company’s business policy on travel-expense reimbursement, I was surprised to see it doesn’t allow a general per-diem nor accept the IRS threshold that only expenses above a certain level (currently $75) require documentary receipts. Rather, every dollar needs support. And when it’s meals, forget submitting the summary/signature receipt -- this company requires the server’s item-by-item listing of your lunch.

Now let your imagination loose and consider some of their other policies. Heh. You’re not even close.

Begin with a Character

2010-07-29T11:03:00.002-05:00

I sooo believe everybody has a story -- that lives seemingly ordinary on the surface turn interesting deeper in. Consider these juror/alternate juror bios* -- some are immediately novel-worthy; others have real potential; still others seem such impossibilities that I’m frankly intrigued by the challenge:

103, a quiet-spoken white woman in her 20s who works as a full-time legal assistant

105, an African-American woman who teaches math to sixth- and seventh-graders in public school; her husband is a state probation officer

106, a white, female retired director for state public health department who has served on two juries before

115, a blond woman in her 30s or 40s who has worked in retail for the past 15 years; a fan of boating and gardening, she reads news "only for the weather"

119, a mother in her late 20s or early 30s who works in investment accounting and is an avid runner

121, a white, female accounting student at Western Illinois University with an interest in law; her father is a police officer

123, a white, male human resources manager in his 30s who volunteers for a family shelter and has done volunteer work for political candidates

127, a woman in 50s or 60s who likes reading and crafts like knitting and cross-stitch

128, a white community college student and former Best Buy salesman who likes sports, videogames and hanging out with his friends

133, a former Marine of 18 years who served in various places, including Beirut, where he suffered an injury; he has had a hip replacement and was concerned about sitting for long periods of time

135, a retired man in his mid-60s who said he was born in a Japanese internment camp in California; a former Marine, he has served on a jury

137, a retired Navyman who works full-time

148, an African-American, church-going man who worked as a letter carrier for 30 years; has served on two juries in the past, one of which did not reach a verdict

151, a mechanical engineer with a graduate degree who supervises a crew of 30 at a steel company

153, a female secretary and paralegal in the real estate department of a law firm

155, a secretary at Northwestern Memorial Hospital who volunteers at her church and used to be an event planner for a dating service; said it was hard to avoid the news, but believed she could be fair

156, young women who works in direct mail marketing and likes spending time with her boyfriend and her dog

166, a female, African-American social worker for a nursing home with a college degree

* From the Chicago Sun-Times coverage of the corruption trial of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich

Fun with a Purpose

2010-07-24T10:17:00.000-05:00

I was drawn to the Tom and Lorenzo/Project Rungay blog for its infotaining posts about Lost and Mad Men*. And now there's another layer to my visits: the blog’s Mad Style category of posts -- deep dissections of fashion as characterization -- are a virtual writing workshop!

* Season 4 premieres Sunday, July 25

Happy 234th!

2010-07-04T09:31:00.001-05:00

"The Arts Are Not Extracurricular"

2010-06-28T10:32:00.001-05:00

On the importance of making art, from Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So*, a memoir

by Mark Vonnegut -- Harvard-educated practicing pediatrician, son of Kurt, and four-episode psychotic:

The arts are not extracurricular.
[...]
Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you’re stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

* To be released October 5

Yes

2010-06-04T11:02:00.004-05:00

“Yes,” I said. It would take ten minutes. How could I say no? “Send me the buccal-swab kit.”

But it wasn’t just a yes to ten minutes of swabbing some cells from the inside of my mouth and sending them to be tested for what was already a potential match as a bone-marrow donor.

I'd looked ahead and knew that if my cheek cells confirmed the preliminary match, I’d say yes to giving an hour and a vial of blood for the definitive match. If that was a go, I’d stand at the rabbit hole where someone was struggling to live. And at that point, how could I say no?

Lost on Gilligan's Island

2010-05-18T11:29:00.000-05:00

Feeling out of sync with society? Getting manuscript rejections that include, “Not for us at this time”?

Here’s testament that your day will come:

Now for the serious details:
Lost pilot episode (re-air, w/info captions): Saturday, May 22, 8-10pm ET on ABC
Lost retrospective: Sunday, May 23, 7-9pm ET on ABC
Lost series finale: Sunday, May 23, 9-11:30pm ET on ABC
Jimmy Kimmel Live, Aloha to Lost: Sunday, May 23, midnight-1am ET on ABC

Attention: Screenwriters

2010-05-05T10:20:00.000-05:00

Query: You want to pen a blockbuster Hollywood film. Maybe a mob picture. Maybe with a wedding to rival that in The Godfather.

Solution: Wrangle an invitation to these August 21 nuptials and get yourself to Chicago. Then just sit back and take dictation.

Left or Right?

2010-05-01T08:48:00.010-05:00

Which do you prefer?

In my previous corporate life, I
spent a meeting distracted by a cup
like the one on the left.

Now in my creative life,
I think I prefer it.

Fictional Billionaires

2010-04-19T11:21:00.000-05:00

Who are the richest characters in fiction?

Jed Clampett, sure. And Thurston Howell III and Jay Gatsby, although they’re declining on a list increasingly populated by newer names.

Browse the tongue-in-cheek valuation of characters from TV, film and literature -- and the sources of their wealth -- in this year’s Forbes Fictional 15.

Elgin Park

2010-03-30T08:14:00.002-05:00

Designer/photographer Michael Paul Smith believes the secret is in the details.

He gets them right -- and pulls off the “fiction.” Watch it here (2½ min):

See more photos (including a slideshow) here.

Danny Boy

2010-03-17T10:19:00.002-05:00

Guitar and vocals* by Gavin Coyle.

Beautiful.

* 7-minute audio clip; music begins 3 minutes in

Animal Vegetable Mineral

2010-03-16T08:45:00.002-05:00

I’ve had semesters of botany and pharmacognosy, but today while listening to a podcast about plants on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show, I heard Jamie Boyer (from the New York Botanical Garden) simplify things by defining plants generally as “any organism that can produce its own food.”

Aha! -- they’re food-manufacturing plants.

Second Meaning

2010-03-05T10:25:00.003-06:00

I was just ten when my big sister got married in the ‘60s, and was fascinated by her opportunity to play house for real. I listened as she and Mom discussed her household budget, and what I remember to this day is her mentioning some exorbitant amount for staples. True, both she and my new brother-in-law were teachers and would be dealing with lots of papers. But I’d seen the price of staples in the store, and seen the box at home last forever. Wow, I remember thinking, that’s a lotta staples.

So it is when you live with a term for years, then discover a whole other meaning. And so it was yesterday, when I heard about the many magazines carried by the gunman at the Pentagon Metro stop, and my first thought still flashed, Something to read on the train…

A New Season

2010-02-07T17:13:00.000-06:00

My favorite eagles are back at the Norfolk Botanical Garden -- and as of yesterday, they're again nesting three eggs!

The young usually hatch in mid-March and fledge in June. Watch it all live here (I keep a link on my blogroll) and dig deeper via the blogs by Virginia's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and Center for Conservation Biology.

On Writers II

2010-01-30T09:01:00.002-06:00

...A continuation of my favorite takeaways from The Paris Review Interviews I (begin with Part I here).

Robert Gottlieb:

In book publishing, the editor and the author have the same goal: to make the book as good as it can be and to sell as many copies as possible. In a magazine, it’s a different matter. Of course a magazine editor wants the writing to be as good as possible, but he wants it to be as good as possible for the magazine, […A] book publishing house is much less bound up with the personality of its editor in chief. […] A magazine, on the other hand, is in a sense an emanation of its chief editor […] A magazine’s subscribers and advertisers and owner have a right to get every week or month whatever it is they’ve been led to expect they’re going to get.

Ernest Hemingway:

A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

Dorothy Parker:

It’s easier to write about those you hate -- just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

Richard Price:

If you’re the first generation of your family to go to college, the pressure on graduation is to go for financial security. The whole point of going to college it to get a job. You have it drilled into your head -- job, money, security. Wanting to be an artist doesn’t jibe with any of those three.

Robert Stone:

You construct characters and set them going in their own interior landscape, and what they find to talk about and what confronts them are, of course, things that concern you most. […] In all the arts, the payoff is always the same -- recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way thing are.

Kurt Vonnegut:

When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. […] Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. Modern life is so lonely, they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. […] Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles.

Rebecca West, revelatory about how the dead influence the living:

We had lots of pleasant furniture that had belonged to my father’s family, none that had belonged to my mother’s family, because they didn’t die -- the whole family all went on to their eighties, nineties -- but we had furniture, and we had masses of books, and we had a very good piano my mother played on.

Billy Wilder, with a secret every modern writer now grows up knowing*:

I have a black book here with all sorts of entries. A little bit of dialogue I’ve overheard. An idea for a character. A bit of background. Some boy-meets-girl scenarios.

* but it’s the only passage I marked before Wilder carried me away on a tell-all tour of his writer-director experiences in the old movie-studio system; the pages flew!

On Writers

2010-01-29T09:12:00.001-06:00

I just finished The Paris Review Interviews I (there are four volumes), a collection of conversations with writers initially published between 1956 and 2006 in The Paris Review literary journal.

My stand-out favorite is with editor Robert Gottlieb, in which writers (Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, John Le Carre, Toni Morrison, Michael Crichton among others) comment on working with Gottlieb and he responds -- it’s illuminating and hilarious! But all of the interviews are terrific, and I found myself marking passages throughout. Decided to pull one takeaway from each of the renowned novelists, poets and screenwriters to post here. (I’m all about “short,” so will post half today and half tomorrow.)

Saul Bellow, about sources of inspiration:

I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. […] When E.M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” he was perhaps referring to his own prompter.

Elizabeth Bishop, about childhood:

You are fearfully observant then. You notice all kinds of things, but there’s no way of putting them all together.

Jorge Luis Borges:

When a writer is young he feels somehow that what he is going to say is rather silly or obvious or commonplace, and then he tries to hide it under baroque ornament […] Whenever I find an out-of-the-way word, […] a word that is different from the others, then I strike it out, and I use a common word. I remember that Stevenson wrote that in a well-written page all the words should look the same way. If you write an uncouth word or an astonishing or an archaic word, then the rule is broken; and what is far more important, the attention of the reader is distracted by the word.

James M. Cain, about formula writing:

You seem to think there’s some way you can transform this equation, and transform it, and transform it, until you arrive at the perfect plot. It’s not like that. The algebra has to be right, but it has to be your story. […] If it’s too easy you have to worry. If you’re not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn’t going to, either. […] There are problems to be solved. […] Suspense comes from making sure your algebra is right.

Truman Capote:

I believe in hardening yourself against opinion. […] Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.

Joan Didion:

I generally have a point of view, although I don’t usually recognize it. Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me.

T.S. Eliot, about unfinished work:

It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.

Jack Gilbert, about writers’ complaints that writing is difficult:

They should try working in the steel mills in Pittsburgh. That’s a very delicate kind of approach to the world -- to be so frail that you can’t stand having to write poetry.

Tomorrow: Part II

Keyboard Inspiration

2010-01-22T14:32:00.003-06:00

I like the FAO Schwarz keyboard-dance scene in Big and I like the old music of Johnny Mercer (link: audio alert).

Combine the two and I love this*:

*from the 1937 film Ready, Willing and Able, discovered via a recent segment of CBS Sunday Morning

2010 on the Blog

2010-01-21T09:36:00.001-06:00

Something I’ve noticed, and analyzed, and found interesting, is my volume of posting here on the blog:

2007: 156 posts
2008: 85
2009: 46

That it’s decreasing is a concern, but how it’s decreasing is interesting: in a stick-straight line. Year 2 (2008) had 54% as many posts as Year 1 … and Year 3 (2009) had 54% as many posts as Year 2. And with two posts so far in this year’s trended volume of 25, I’m exactly on track. :(

The laws of mathematics assure me I can maintain this trend into infinity and never reach zero. But the laws of blogging require posts to come as whole numbers and, on this path, I’ll eventually dip below “1.”

That’s just sad! And so my goal this year is to nurture the part of me that comes to this place of creativity and play -- and in the process turn that trend around.

2010 Reading Preview

2010-01-13T14:14:00.000-06:00

My recent reading tells me I most enjoy mainstream and literary fiction, and memoir and science-related nonfiction. I’m especially drawn to coming-of-age stories; debut novels; stories set in workplaces; and following my curiosity, especially into books with humor, original premises/styles, or twists of perspective (moments of awareness). Having focused on science rather than arts from high school on, I’m beginning to fill in some of the history and literature I’ve missed.

This year: more, please! In content, that is; not volume :) Plus, some specific areas of interest: the origins of civilization; the Middle Ages; the Holocaust; historical disease epidemics; physics and higher mathematics; classic literature; and creativity.

I already own many terrific books along these lines and have gathered the juiciest here to keep them in mind. See a fluid chart of my year’s finished books here, and follow my reading comments here.

And because I’m thrilled by sparkly new books (new releases or merely new-to-me), I welcome your recommendations!

2009 Reading Recap

2009-12-31T11:55:00.001-06:00

999 Challenge:
Read 9 books in each of 9 categories during 2009

Done! (And I’m definitely done with this volume of reading!)

My list follows, including ratings. Click the link to read my review. Click the book’s image (most are included at the end of this post) to peruse it on Amazon. Brief comments about every book can be found on my Challenge thread at LibraryThing.

Biography/Memoir
•Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman (****) (See review)
•Direct Red by Gabriel Weston (****) (See review)
•Homer's Odyssey by Gwen Cooper (****) (See review)
•Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (*****)
•Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood (***) See review)
•Spiced by Dalia Jurgensen (***) (See review)
•Stitches by David Small (*****)
•The Lives Our Mothers Leave Us by Patti Davis (****) (See review)
•The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson (***) (See review)

Fiction
•Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott (****)
•Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (****) (See review)
•Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (*****) (See review)
•Ravens by George Dawes Green (****) (See review)
•Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (****)
•The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano (****) (See review)
•The Long Fall by Walter Mosley (***) (See review)
•The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister (*****) (See review)
•The Visibles by Sara Shepard (***) (See review)

Reading Globally
•84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (****)
•A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve (****) (See review)
•Coraline by Neil Gaiman (***)
•Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery (***) (See review)
•Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea (****) (See review)
•Off the Tourist Trail ed. by Dorling Kindersley (*****) (See review)
•Small Kingdoms by Anastasia Hobbet (****) (See review)
•The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan (****) (See review)
•The Spare Room by Helen Garner (*****) (See review)

Banned/Challenged/Taboo-Topic Books
•And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell (*****) (See review)
•Cut by Patricia McCormick (****)
•Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia Judson (*****) (See review)
•Guys are Waffles, Girls are Spaghetti by Chad Eastham (***) (See review)
•My Little Red Book ed. by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (****) (See review)
•The Blue Notebook by James Levine (****) (See review)
•The Call of the Wild by Jack London (****)
•The Color Purple by Alice Walker (****)
•The Last Bridge by Teri Coyne (****) (See review)

Laughing Out Loud
•Border Songs by Jim Lynch (*****) (See review)
•I Did It His Way by Johnny Hart (****) (See review)
•Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen (***) (See review)
•New Tricks by David Rosenfelt (***) (See review)
•Notes From the Underwire by Quinn Cummings (*****) (See review)
•On the Money: The Economy in Cartoons ed. by Robert Mankoff (*****) (See review)
•Really, You've Done Enough by Sarah Walker (***) (See review)
•The Family Man by Elinor Lipman (****) (See review)
•The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes (*****) (See review)

Looooong Books
•A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff (***) (See review)
•American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld (****)
•Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (*****) (See review)
•Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (*****)
•Inkheart by Cornelia Funke (***)
•Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (*****)
•Something Happened by Joseph Heller (****) (See review)
•The Help by Kathryn Stockett (*****) (See review)
•Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann (****)

Artist Dates
•ABC3D by Marion Bataille (****)
•Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics by Ina Garten (*****)
•Bellevue Literary Review (Fall 2009) ed. by Danielle Ofri (****)
•Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal (*****) (See review)
•Fodor's Italy 2009 (*****) (See review)
•Lonely Planet Bluelist 2008 (****) (See review)
•Martha Stewart's Cupcakes ed. by Martha Stewart Living (****)
•Momofuku by David Chang (*****) (See review)
•The Other Side by Istvan Banyai (***) (See review)

Nonfiction
•Conquering Fear by Harold Kushner (****) (See review)
•Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (****) (See review)
•How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman (****)
•In Cheap We Trust by Lauren Weber (*****) (See review)
•Listening to Prozac by Peter D. Kramer (****)
•Methland by Nick Reding (****) (See review)
•Summer World by Bernd Heinrich (****) (See review)
•The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra (***)
•You Were Always Mom's Favorite! by Deborah Tannen (***) (See review)

Wild Card
•Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville (***) (See review)
•Bird in Hand by Christina Baker Kline (***) (See review)
•Change the World for Ten Bucks: Small Actions x Lots of People = Big Change (**) (See review)
•Freaky Monday by Mary Rodgers and Heather Hach (***) (See review)
•How Not to Look Old by Charla Krupp (***)
•Sink Reflections by Marla Cilley (****)
•The Miles Between by Mary Pearson (****) (See review)
•The Truth About Middle Managers by Paul Osterman (**) (See review)
•When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (****) (See review)

Notable Off-Challenge Reads
•Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne (*****) (See review)
•Drive by Daniel Pink (****) (See review)
•Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Ilene Beckerman (****)
•Thin Places by Mary DeMuth (****) (See review)

*My 2009 Top 10* (in alphabetical order)
Border Songs by Jim Lynch
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Stitches by David Small
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes ed. by McSweeney’s
The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

Next Post: 2010 Reading Preview
Soon-ish Post: What I Learned While Reading in 2009

Six-Word Resolutions

2009-12-30T10:30:00.005-06:00

From the Leonard Lopate Show and Smith Magazine (the group behind the books of six-word memoirs) came a segment about six-word resolutions. Before I was even five minutes into the 35-minute podcast (audio here), and before I’d thought about my own resolutions, I heard one that stuck:

This year, I’m only saying yes. (quin browne)

It’s like in good improvisation, where the actors always say Yes to one another. Not a literal Yes of dialogue or action, but a creative Yes -- an agreement to openness, to be in the moment; that whatever is offered from one is accepted, responded to, built upon by the other. Yes moves improvisation forward; resistance kills it.

It reminds me of a quote on my refrigerator:

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love. (Wally Lamb)

Yes, thank you.

Yes, let’s veer off our practiced scripts and improvise life a little in 2010.

Gotcha!

2009-12-23T16:53:00.003-06:00

Recently, the final step in an online form required me to type the answer to this Captcha:

What is the first word in the phrase "gadux usu lihab cutagu ofuza"?

Feeling like I’d stumbled into an anagram from NPR’s Sunday Puzzle, I searched for an English word hidden amid the letters and spaces. When I was unsuccessful after a minute, I wondered if I was over-thinking the matter. Wasn’t a “word” simply one or more letters, grouped together?

I entered “gadux” and the website was happy.

Writers: What Not To Do

2009-12-18T07:04:00.002-06:00

It began as the fifth review of a book on Amazon.

Then, O.M.G.

A Minute a Day

2009-12-16T08:33:00.001-06:00

I'd felt creatively flat and had recently returned to the wellspring -- Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and its twin practices of Morning Pages and Artist Dates. So I was interested to see that Cameron has sliced her material in a new and accessible way in The Artist's Way Every Day, a collection of daily excerpts about the creative process. Might there be magic in her tiny inspirations, ingested every day?

I opened the book to that day's entry, November 14:

So often in a creative career, the magic that is required is quite simply the courage to go on. Singers must sing their scales. Actors must learn their monologues. Writers like myself must spend time at the keys. We would like a break in the weather. We would like a break, period, but the breaks, if they come, will not come today. Today is about keeping on.

!!

I marked that page to make it easy to find later, and I’ve marked half a dozen more pages since then. Highly recommended to inspire -- and ground :) -- anyone in creative pursuit.

O! Canada

2009-12-08T07:32:00.017-06:00

Curiosities noted during a recent visit to British Columbia:

(Left) Ye olde Gastown neighborhood of Vancouver, where the lamps are powered by ... CFLs!

(Right) Sharps (needles) disposal box in the ladies' room of Victoria's luxurious Empress Hotel ... a sign that self-injected therapies have expanded 'way beyond occasional insulin.

(Left) Self-explanatory from a church in Nanaimo -- and a concept I could get behind.

(Right) Again from Nanaimo, and I think I know what they mean.

Brush With Celebrity (Accommodations)

2009-12-01T10:20:00.009-06:00

My husband's childhood home in Iowa was full-up with family over Thanksgiving, plus a cat I'm allergic to, so we checked into the tiny town's motel. At the registration desk, I noticed a framed photo of the owner and her family with Barack Obama. I knew he'd campaigned here before the 2008 primary -- last year, I'd walked past the main-street storefront that housed a fitness center and someone had pointed to the treadmill he'd worked out on -- but the overnight accommodations hadn't occurred to me.

I asked about the photo and my question launched her spiel. He'd stayed there. Room 200. His advance team had called about accommoda- tions, and after answering a few questions she'd said, "I don’t think you know how small we are, what kind of place this is." They said, "Oh, we know." In the end, they'd taken 18 rooms. The next morning, she'd made his breakfast herself. She's good with omelettes but he'd wanted three eggs, over medium. It took seven eggs before she'd managed three over medium.

My husband and I exchanged glances. “Is Room 200 available?”

I Want That Book!

2009-11-21T11:16:00.004-06:00

I'd just read about David Chang’s process of opening Ko -- which seats just 12 diners and is the third New York City restaurant featured in his terrific memoir/cookbook, Momofuku -- and had loved the following:

There are things we say in the kitchen, a codified lexicon, that explain some of the kitchen mentality at Ko. “Make it soigné” means make it right and make it perfect. [...] ... said with a slight tilt of the head or a leading tone, means take this thing and cook it right, cook it the best way you know how. Our dishes often evolve from having an amazing ingredient arrive in the kitchen and a cook “making it nice.”

I was still under the spell of it when I visited a book design blog and found echoes of making it nice on the small scale in Cecilia Sorochin’s post about her approach to book design:

As a boutique book design studio we craft each book carefully, dedicating the time that each book needs without rushing into random ideas.

And then I saw her walk the talk -- making something perfect from an amazing ingredient -- in a post about the layout and typography of an upcoming children’s poetry book.

I want that book!

30 Covers in 30 Days

2009-11-16T11:08:00.004-06:00

I’m not participating in National Novel Writing Month this year, but what a treat to click on my blogroll and discover that Chris Papasadero from Fwis Cover Design is! -- in his own way. His variation: Design 30 book covers in 30 days, each based on a novel synopsis posted by a participating wrimo.

The goal here is to challenge myself like you writers; I believe the criteria for selecting whose book gets a cover designed by yours truly consists of a very elegant-and-complicated-but-totally-fair algorithm developed by the NaNoWriMo team. [...] I am going to be as experimental as I can with them for my own selfish artistic edification...

These covers are currently grouped together as the most recent entries on his blog (from the top down through the wrestlers on the cover of The Business). Click on a cover to read his notes and professional designers’ comments. (Talk about putting hastily created work under the bright lights!)

Or you can browse the 30 Covers, 30 Days forum at nanowrimo. See a list of links to the covers in the first post of this thread; then find links to each novel's synopsis and read wrimos’ comments in the individual thread devoted to each cover.

Like most participants, Chris is behind and trying to catch up … it’s a 30-day marathon after all, not necessarily 30 separate sprints :)

Something Worth Knowing More About

2009-11-14T10:31:00.005-06:00

I know that terrific story seeds are right here, out in the open areas of daily life. And that for me the best ones -- in the premise of this blog -- are in the specifics, the fine details that resonate.

So I liked this passage from Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer's new nonfiction book about factory farming:

[Male layer chickens] serve no function.* Which is why all male layers -- half of all the layer chickens born in the United States, more than 250 million chicks a year -- are destroyed.

Destroyed? That seems like a word worth knowing more about.

I love when that happens! The world goes on ahead while a writer’s mind stays fixed on some detail. The skill is in noticing the fixation, and capturing it instead of running to catch up with the world.

* From Foer: “You probably thought that chickens were chickens. But
for the past half a century, there have actually been two kinds of chickens --
broilers and layers -- each with distinct genetics. [...] Layers make eggs. [...]
Broilers make flesh.” (Therefore: male layers serve no function.)

Another Way to Go

2009-10-27T12:40:00.003-05:00

From my pre-vacation post:

I’m dreading the packing part -- the tediousness of choosing and preparing everything, the discouragement that I tend to pack heavy.

So what was my reaction when this guy swooped in and sat next to me at the airport gate?

Envy! And astonishment. And delight.

Vacation Reading

2009-10-10T08:59:00.013-05:00

I’m planning a vacation and, as usual, I’m dreading the packing part -- the tediousness of choosing and preparing everything, the discouragement that I tend to pack heavy. Hate it...

...except in one area: vacation reading! There, I make multiple passes through the to-be-read books on my shelves and I frankly don’t care if I pack twice as many books as I’ll read.

A dozen books remain in my 999 Challenge, five of which will probably make it into my suitcase:

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Charm School by Nelson DeMille
The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

Of course, I’m still debating about a few more...

Why Me Lord?

2009-09-13T13:18:00.004-05:00

“Why are you picking me…” time after time as taxi driver to this disagreeable woman?!

Edited to add:
CHEERS to Steve Hartman for developing a terrific
narrative arc in this video!

JEERS to CBS for labeling it with a spoiler title :(

Sign (Size) of the Times

2009-09-01T09:25:00.002-05:00

September Vogue issues:

Left: 2009

Right: 2007 (note prophetic headline)

What a Ride!

2009-08-31T16:03:00.010-05:00

In my too-careful life, I’m sometimes drawn to a contrasting philosophy*:

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming, “Woohoo! what a ride!”

I don’t know when Senator Ted Kennedy embraced this philosophy -- maybe after his three brothers arrived at their graves with bodies hardly broken in much less used up -- but I liked Ted Jr.’s remarks along these lines at his father’s funeral last Saturday:

...Ted Kennedy the statesman, the master of the legislative process and bipartisan compromise, workhorse of the Senate, beacon of social justice and protector of the people [...] The storyteller, the lover of costume parties, a practical joker, the accomplished painter. He was a lover of everything French: cheese, wine, and women. He was a mountain climber, navigator, skipper, tactician, airplane pilot, rodeo rider, ski jumper, dog lover, and all around adventurer.

And I loved this line:

Our family vacations left us all injured and exhausted.

There’s so much life in a philosophy like that.

* author unknown; variously attributed on the Internet

“Just Because You’re Homeless…

2009-08-24T13:35:00.001-05:00

...doesn’t mean you don’t read.”

David Sedaris, meet Quinn Cummings

2009-08-21T15:51:00.006-05:00

I often write book reviews and link to them in a sidebar on the left here -- an individual link if the book is a new release, or bundled in the “See more reviews” if it’s been out awhile. But a new book written by someone who’s been in my Blogroll for my blog’s whole existence? -- that deserves a post!

I loved young Quinn Cummings in the '70s film, The Goodbye Girl, and now that we've grown closer in age (!) I devour her woman-next-door blog, The QC Report. So I'm thrilled with the release of her book of essays, Notes from the Underwire.

Outside, the cover’s image of a woohoo-ing woman on a runaway roller-coaster (pulled from Maidenform’s 1950-60s I Dreamed I … ad campaign*) is prophetic. Because inside, Cummings writes hilariously about her unruly roles as woman, mother, homeowner, pet rescuer … and a few essays about Hollywood. There are touching pieces, too -- when she’s 14 and her mother is diagnosed with lymphoma; when she’s 18 and the early days of AIDS have already claimed a quarter of the men in her neighborhood, prompting her to volunteer on a national support hotline.

Ah, I always want more! -- am glad I have a portion of her blog's archives still ahead of me.

* A little more about Maidenform’s campaign is available here.

Great Month for Ad-Men Fans!

2009-08-15T11:36:00.007-05:00

I admit to still catching the occasional rerun of the ‘60s TV sitcom Bewitched, and to being happy that the late-‘80s drama thirtysomething is finally being released this month on DVD.

Combine those series into AMC-TV’s retro-‘60s drama, Mad Men, and you’ll find me over the moon at tomorrow night’s Season 3 premiere. For a full immersion, I’m going to add an ad agency-based book -- either Peter Mayle’s memoir-ish Up the Agency, or Joshua Ferris’s workplace satire, Then We Came to the End.

Book-itecture

2009-07-31T21:37:00.016-05:00

Via The Elegant Variation comes a referral to Curious Expeditions’ Librophiliac Love Letter. The page is graphics-intensive and loads slowly. But then, its “Compendium of Beautiful Libraries” rewards your patience one hundredfold.

(Left) One of my favorites: Real Gabinete Portugues De Leitura Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

(Right) The most intriguing: Hereford Cathedral Chained Library, Hereford, England

Some Fun Now

2009-07-27T11:18:00.004-05:00

From the Foreword:

As she would say, "We had such fun!"

From the Introduction:

Those early years in France were among the best of my life. [...I...] had such fun that I hardly stopped moving long enough to catch my breath.

I wasn't even to the official first page of Julia Child's My Life in France yesterday before those and two more passages poured pure joy onto the page. "Joy" isn’t my dominant impression of Julia Child; "serious" fits better.

"Serious" describes me, too. So maybe it took all those references to fun to prepare me this morning for Jill and Kevin's wedding video (audio alert).

It'll either annoy you or bring you to tears. Me? Tears. (of joy!)

Making God Laugh

2009-07-18T13:48:00.002-05:00

The joke goes: “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”

Even if you’re The Pope?

Benedict XVI left on Monday for a two-week vacation in a chalet in the Italian Alps. He fell Thursday night and broke his wrist, and had surgery on Friday to repair it and apply a cast that he’ll wear for a month.

The biggest impact?

…giving up writing by hand, which he had planned to spend much of his time doing during his traditional summer vacation.

A Boss by Any Other Name

2009-06-16T09:16:00.005-05:00

Intrigued by workplaces, I tend to mine discussions and articles for nuggets that resonate, especially regarding generations or sites outside my own experience.

This, for example, from MSN/CareerBuilder's recent 10 Worst Work Habits:

Using your supervisor's first name […is] common in many industries.

Merely "common"?

The only time I've addressed a boss by anything other than a first name was as a teenage babysitter. (Now, bosses' bosses -- that's a different story and helps me to get into the mindset. Even when promoted to report to a former boss's boss, changing the reference was like growing into adulthood and trying to call my parents' friends by their first names.)

So of course, now I'm interested in finding a workplace where first names aren't allowed, or creating a character in a normal workplace who doesn't allow it...

ABC3D

2009-06-10T07:45:00.002-05:00

Marion Bataille’s ABC3D is a book of the alphabet -- done pop-up style in red, white, and black ... and one mirror.

The design is clever, though he uses only about 12 concepts and repeats several of them across different letters. But what is extraordinary is how he surprises the reader with similarities among letters (E/F, sure; but wait until you get to O/P/Q/R!) -- and within letters (there's a mini-me in G!). He makes me want to learn about typography and alphabet history.

Watch a video of the book (audio alert) below. Note: It shows the entire book (in a little over a minute) but, in my opinion, doesn't "spoil" it. I watched the video and immediately put the book on hold at my library. And I still may get my own copy!

What Goes Around...

2009-06-06T12:55:00.004-05:00

I bought peonies ($8) and a quart of strawberries ($5.50) this morning at the farmer’s market.

“Thirteen-fifty,” the purveyor said.

I handed her fifteen dollars and she gave me a dollar and fifty cents.

I hesitated. “On second thought, I’ll take another quart of strawberries.” I gave her a twenty-dollar bill and, smiling at the circularity, said, “And here’s your fifty cents back.”

She made change for my twenty and smiled right back. “And here’s your fifteen dollars!”

Welcome Summer

2009-05-31T12:29:00.004-05:00

Superbug Slapdown

2009-05-27T11:14:00.003-05:00

Headline in a newsletter I received yesterday:

[The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists] Backs Legislation To Curb Antimicrobial Resistance

Take that, bacteria! viruses! fungi!

Finally -- some fines or jail-time for microorganisms that insist on surviving via evolutionary mutation!

------------------------------
(It is a serious problem; the House bill seeks funding for a public-health plan to better monitor, treat, and prevent infections by drug-resistant bugs.)

Too Much Tension!

2009-05-25T15:41:00.004-05:00

A couple missteps early on, then a growing confidence...

...and a big finish!

Susan Boyle moves on to the May 30 (Saturday) finals of Britain's Got Talent 2009.

(And I take some time to figure out this video's narrative tensions ... and map their numerous sensory manifestations in my body!)

Reading Lessons

2009-04-30T10:37:00.006-05:00

I read more to learn than to be entertained (learning = entertainment!) and two recent novels have lessons I'm still thinking about.

One is Kathryn Stockett's phenomenal debut, The Help. Narrated from 1962 Mississippi by two black domestics (the "household help") and a young white aspiring writer -- all of whom see things differently than the people around them -- it's about race, class status, gender roles, friendship, and the definitions of family. It's full of emotion, film-quality imagery, palpable suspense ... with subplots so seamlessly woven that I only noticed when they intersected and it became apparent how perfectly they'd been set up. The novel is compelling -- and even life-changing, if the fictional editor's advice about writing is extended to a metaphor for living:

"Don't waste your time on the obvious things. Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else."

And so these three narrators -- and author Kathryn Stockett -- did.

Another is also a terrific fiction debut, Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone. It's the story of Marion Praise Stone, born in 1954 Ethiopia of Sister Mary Joseph Praise (an Indian Carmelite nun) and Thomas Stone (an exceptional British surgeon), and (temporarily conjoined) twin to brother, Shiva Praise Stone.

Set mostly in and around a mission hospital in the capital city of Addis Ababa, the first hundred pages are riveting and the next 400 are fascinating, tender, and funny explorations of family, immigration, politics, loyalty, and the practice of medicine and surgery. With something to keep in mind when struggling in difficult work:

I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. […] I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. "What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?" she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.

I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. "Why must I do what is hardest?"

"Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?"

[…] I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field -- internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.

For more (no spoilers), see my comments in LibraryThing's Reading Globally Africa Theme Read. And NPR has a nice podcast of Abraham Verghese reading one of my favorite passages -- the descriptive, touching, and very funny performance of a vasectomy. Which brings to mind another takeaway from Cutting for Stone: Verghese's entreaty that healthcare personnel return to the bedside -- and remember the presence of the actual patient there, instead of industrial medicine’s increasing emphasis on patient as data in a computer -- a la:

Q: "What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?"
A: (See the comments)

What Kind of Writer Are You?

2009-04-25T11:45:00.002-05:00

In his terrific restaurant memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Anthony Bourdain describes several types of cooks:

You’ve got your Artists: the annoying, high-maintenance minority. [...] so ethereal and perfect that delusions of grandeur are tolerated.

Then there are the Exiles: people who just can’t make it in any other business, could never survive a nine-to-five job, wear a tie or blend in with civilized society -- and their comrades, the Refugees, [...] for whom cooking is preferable [to other work].

Finally, there are the Mercenaries: people who do it for cash and do it well. Cooks who, though they have little love or natural proclivity for cuisine, do it at a high level because they are paid well to do it -- and because they are professionals.

I see, in those descriptions, several types of writers. The literary Artists whose originality and perfection stop my breath and force me to endure beats of despair until I accept that such will never be me. The Exiles (whom I don't understand) and the Refugees (whom I'm currently aligned with, although reconsidering). But overall, being a practical person at heart (with an enormous love of literature) and good at execution, I am, I suppose, a Mercenary.

Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman -- not an artist. There’s nothing wrong with that [...] Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying. And I’ll generally take a stand-up mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day. When I hear “artist,” I think of someone who doesn’t think it necessary to show up [...]. More often than not artists’ efforts [...] are geared more [to themselves...] than satisfying the great majority of dinner customers.

What kind of writer are you?

Beautiful

2009-04-14T19:32:00.003-05:00

Two years ago, it was cell-phone salesman Paul Potts.

Now last Saturday, it’s Susan Boyle, unemployed and dreaming to dream.

Cover (back)Story

2009-04-02T12:20:00.003-05:00

I like behind-the-story stories -- seeing the moment that sparks an idea, seeing an accumulation of moments that combine into new meaning … and then seeing what story evolved from the inspiration. (Hence the link to M. J. Rose’s Backstory in my blogroll.)

And from the opposite end, I like seeing how a finished story is reflected in a title and book cover. I haven’t discovered a source for titles yet, but did enjoy Barnes & Noble Studio's (caution: audio alert) short-lived video-interview series, Cover Story, and its discussion thread.

And now I’m over the moon about a blog on book covers by the graphic-design firm, Fwis. It’s admittedly focused on the visual art, but literary and publishing details do pop up in the comment threads or by following the links to designers’ websites. Go. Enjoy!

Hints of Unreliability

2009-03-31T13:03:00.004-05:00

In his New Yorker review of John Wray’s Lowboy, a novel acclaimed for its evocation of schizophrenia, James Wood examines the details that lead readers to believe in a narrator’s unreliable point of view:

In standard third-person narration, a tiny slippage often suffices to alert us to a character’s fiction-making. For instance, if I were describing the New York subway, in the third person, from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old boy, and I wrote, “The doors closed after ten seconds and the station fell away,” […it] would be unexceptionable. If, however, I wrote, “The doors closed after exactly ten seconds and the station fell resignedly away,” the two adverbs might stiffen the reader’s posture. Who is this boy, for whom exactitude is so maniacally important, yet who also sees the world so lyrically? And if I wrote, “The train fit into the tunnel perfectly,” or “He decided to get out at Columbus Circle. To his surprise it happened very simply,” the reader would sense a world of mental difficulty, in which trains may not always fit properly into tunnels and a teen-age boy may not always negotiate the exiting of a train.

Wood has engaged me into accepting this fiction, and such a character, by the time he excerpts a passage from the novel:

The train pulled into the next station and the car began to fill with halfdead people. That’s the tiredness, thought Lowboy. They want to curl up on the ground and go to sleep. He yawned at them as they came in, showing them his teeth, and some of them yawned back.

Psychologists say that empathy increases the contagiousness of yawns. I must say, I’m yawning.

Believe Nothing, Laugh Often...

2009-03-27T14:35:00.003-05:00

…when you view this overview of book publishing, created by the Digital Marketing Team at Macmillan:

Hatched!

2009-03-22T10:50:00.002-05:00

After last year’s trauma, it’s good news now: the Norfolk Botanical Garden’s (NBG) pair of American Bald Eagles have welcomed their first and second hatchlings!

Meanwhile, here’s what’s likely happening inside the third egg as that chick completes incubation and begins to emerge. One of the coolest aspects of all this is that, though the eggs were laid over a span of seven days last month, the eagles delayed incubation of any until all had been laid, which “[slowed] early embryo development, helping to compress the time between hatch dates” and eliminate any feeding advantage that the earliest hatchling gets.

View the goings-on at the nest over the spring and summer via NBG’s Eagle Nest-cam, linked in my blogroll.

What Kind of Writer Are You?

2009-03-18T14:34:00.003-05:00

Take a look at today's issue of PW Daily, an e-newsletter from Publishers Weekly ... scroll down to the final item, "Picture of the Day."

In the photo, which writer are you?

Are you holding up your work proudly or keeping it half hidden -- too modest, too cool, too afraid -- or not even showing it at all?

I'm probably the woman in the second row, third from the left. I'm not happy about that.

But I can learn from my friend, Denise -- who showed up this morning bearing her latest published piece like she was headed for that front row. Congratulations! -- D, your enthusiasm is inspiring!

For Public Consumption

2009-03-16T11:52:00.003-05:00

Illinois law now requires first-time offenders convicted of drunk driving to install a device and prove sobriety before starting the car (and then re-prove it periodically during the trip).

Warm up your writing by describing your character going through the motions of starting the car in private ... and then jump to a scene where a boss or dream-date unexpectedly demands a ride.

Books as Artist Date

2009-03-11T12:04:00.006-05:00

Take the curious and meaningful moments of a life, assign a keyword to each, then organize them alphabetically by keyword -- encyclopedia-style. The result is Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s thoroughly original memoir, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. A few of her clever and tender observations run several pages, most are a paragraph, some a mere sentence. Here’s one:

CREAM SAUCE
I love any kind of cream sauce. My mother hates cream sauce but craved it when she was pregnant with me.

Notice where your thoughts go ... to the contradiction and coincidence? To yourself and your own mother? That's Rosenthal at work, turning her ordinary life into something universal and creatively engaging. Reading the book felt to me like an Artist Date -- a little playdate that fills my mind with imagery and energy -- companion creative tool to Morning Pages, both of which Julia Cameron presents in The Artist's Way.

Maybe I’m unique with books as Artist Dates; I'm still experimenting to discover what makes one vs not one. In the process, I've tagged some possibilities from my library. I'm eager to find more.

Whatever, the Encyclopedia has engaged me, and my muse is eager to start listing and categorizing in a sheer sense of play.

Earworm

2009-03-04T13:32:00.000-06:00

I love it. I hate it. I love it.

I hate it!

Story Workshop

2009-02-26T08:50:00.003-06:00

Who'd have thought the New Yorker published horror stories?

Yet James Salter's excellent, "Last Night," from the November 18, 2002 issue, nearly qualifies. Read it here -- or listen online, where the 20-minute story is introduced by writer Thomas McGuane and Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman, and then followed by a discussion of the story's subtext and set-ups, which in my reading made the surprises well-earned.

Virtual Mentors III

2009-02-13T17:02:00.003-06:00

I wouldn't have thought today's quote was necessarily true, thus its intrigue. But the reference to readers in the final sentence, a la "If a tree falls in a forest... ," clinches it.

From Flannery O’Connor's Mystery and Manners:

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

Virtual Mentors II

2009-02-12T15:06:00.002-06:00

Today's quote comes from an online workshop I took years ago with author and writing coach Gloria Kempton. It's not a recommendation to write toward a market, but rather an insight into the psychology of reading:

The trick to creating great characters is to make the character as much like the reader as possible so that there's immediate identification -- while at the same time making the character different enough so as to make the reader curious to find out more, since unconsciously he really knows he's reading about himself.

Virtual Mentors

2009-02-11T10:45:00.005-06:00

Upcoming: a few writing-related favorites from my quotes file, posted one a day to facilitate composting.

Today's, from The Paris Review interview with the late Christopher Isherwood, speaks to turning a real person into a fictional character:

When you’re writing a book, you ask yourself: What is it that so intrigues me about this person -- be it good or bad, that’s neither here nor there, art knows nothing of such words.
Having discovered what it is you really consider to be the essence of the interest you feel in this person, you then set about heightening it. […] trying to create a fiction character that is quintessentially what you see as interesting in the individual, without all the contradictions that are inseparable from [the] human being, aspects that don't seem exciting or marvelous or beautiful. The last thing you're trying to do is get an overall picture of somebody, since then you'd end up with nothing.

Good things grow from details...

The Surf Ballroom

2009-02-03T08:50:00.002-06:00

Snapped a few years ago during a trip to Iowa, this photo shows where Buddy Holly (“That’ll Be the Day”), J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson (“Chantilly Lace”) and Ritchie Valens (“La Bamba”) performed just before boarding a tiny plane 50 years ago, the day the music died.

Forgo literal death for now, and consider something abstract or figurative that you watched die. Can you point to a physical place where it happened?

Darrel

2009-01-21T15:27:00.006-06:00

I’ve blogged previously about The Oxford Project which, through photographs and interviews with the residents of tiny Oxford, Iowa, provides confirming evidence that everybody has an interesting life story.

But further, it suggests that people are complex characters in their interesting stories.* Consider this quote from a 75-year-old man named Darrel:

We lost one of our daughters to cancer two years ago. I still talk to [her] every day. She had a great sense of humor. Always did, even as a little girl. The loss of a child is about as bad as it gets. The last thing [she] said before she died was, “I love you, Dad.”

Darrel’s comments break your heart, yes? In a novel, he’d be a 100%-sympathetic character. But in real life, a few pages earlier in the book, we saw another side of him (and that daughter) through the words of a 35-year-old woman named Robin:

I met Karen when I worked at a theatre in Amana [Iowa]. A week later, we went on our first date. When I told my mom, I think she cried, but in front of me, all she said was that she was disappointed. Mom told my brother Ben, “You need to hate the sin, not the sinner.” My grandfather Darrel and I don’t talk.

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*aha: maybe the complex part begets the interesting part?

Abundance -- Proving Itself

2009-01-09T10:02:00.003-06:00

OMG, see??

I just blogged about (re-)establishing a trust in abundance:

I'm stingy with pleasures, including books, saving them up instead of gobbling them up. But by giving myself permission (a mandate, really) to savor a bunch of books, I had opportunity after opportunity to notice that each time I finished one, another (two others? ten?) appeared in its place.

I no sooner posted that, then finished the lush Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics -- than I stumbled onto this thread about unique fictional narrators … and a dozen new books that call to me.

Sideways points of view* intrigue me; I love the twist of perspective that inspires a fresh look.

------------

*Yes, they’re easy to overdo. Witness Dan Wiencek’s satirical “Thirteen Writing Prompts” in the hilarious McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes:

Write a scene showing a man and a woman arguing over the man’s friendship with a former girlfriend. Do not mention the girlfriend, the man, the woman, or the argument.

A husband and wife are meeting in a restaurant to finalize the terms of their impending divorce. Write the scene from the point of view of a busboy snorting cocaine in the restroom.

Still … aren’t you tempted to try? :)

2009 Reading Preview

2009-01-07T19:07:00.003-06:00

How, you’ve asked, did my 2008 reading challenge change me?

A couple ways come to mind, the first being that I learned how to (duh) read a lot. Not to read fast, mind you; I’m still slow, I sub-vocalize. But yet to read a lot. Mostly, I reallocated evenings to reading instead of wishing there was something good to watch on TV. By finding minutes to read whenever I waited in a line or for an appointment. And especially by paying attention -- if I wasn’t making progress in a book, I learned to eliminate distractions and dig in deeper until the pages took hold. If they didn’t (no time for that! either in the Challenge or in life), Plan C was to ease up by alternating the book with another, more engaging read … or finally by cutting bait altogether and abandoning the book to a pile for the Friends of the Library sale.

Second, I learned to trust in abundance. I'm stingy with pleasures, including books, saving them up instead of gobbling them up. But by giving myself permission (a mandate, really) to savor a bunch of books, I had opportunity after opportunity to notice that each time I finished one, another (two others? ten?) appeared in its place. (Ah, abundance: so many lessons still there for me. It was, after all, the stimulus for beginning this blog two years ago.)

Good changes!

And yet.

All that reading diverted me from my family ... friends ... homekeeping ... this blog. And my writing. For a year, I spent no time in the energy of my favorite magazines -- New Scientist’s curiosity, Martha Stewart Living’s lush images, O Magazine’s fun. While meantime, the deep immersion in long works (especially novels) explored ideas rather than incited them. My imagination turned dusty, a rare idea blowing through like tumbleweed.

Only recently have I felt a hint of humidity returning. Part of it must be a satisfaction at finally having read some of the books that are basics in literature or popular culture (Alice in Wonderland, for God’s sake!). Part of it is probably the year’s accumulation of some very good reading that is starting to compost. Whatever, a bit of it escaped in a little creative burp while I was in the driver’s seat on a road trip over Thanksgiving … and I suddenly connected the premises of two of my (languishing) writing projects and merged them into something new. Huh!

I have no better transition into this year’s reading than to simply admit I’ve taken on the 999 Challenge. Not for the volume of reading this time, but because organizing and list-making are forms of play to me. Heck, it was fun just to gather the Challenge books that I already own onto this separate shelf.

How about you? Any readerly learnings from 2008? Any solid or semi-solid plans for 2009?

2008 Reading Recap

2008-12-31T14:58:00.005-06:00

Woohoooo, I slid in under the wire and finished my 888 Challenge yesterday:

Read 8 books in each of 8 categories during 2008

My reading list follows below and includes ratings and links to reviews I’ve written. (Edited to add: I've removed 12 review links that were problematic; will repost them when the code is repaired.) Brief comments about every book can be found on my Challenge thread.

That volume of reading is unprecedented for me; my previous annual high was 48 books. (I do confess to nearly a year’s worth of unread magazines at this point, though, heaped in three towering piles.) But what raised the difficulty factor even more was my desire to read predominately from the shelves and stacks of to-be-read (TBR) books that are overtaking my house ... and I finished with the proportion at exactly 50% (32 books) from TBRs. They’re each indicated by “#” in the list, and it’s why so many seemingly older titles are included.

Biography/Memoir
•Dewey: The Small-town Library Cat That Touched the World by Vicki Myron (****) (See review)
•Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (*****)
•I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings# by Maya Angelou (****)
•Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison (****)
•Lucky Man# by Michael J. Fox (****)
•Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-word Memoirs (****)
•The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch (****)
•The Longest Trip Home by John Grogan (****) (See review)

I’ve Started and Want to Finish...
•A Christmas Carol# by Charles Dickens (****)
•A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius# by Dave Eggers (****)
•A Thousand Splendid Suns# by Khaled Hosseini (***)
•Everything is Illuminated# by Jonathan Safran Foer (****)
•Like Water for Chocolate# by Laura Esquivel (****)
•The Song Reader# by Lisa Tucker (***)
•The Poisonwood Bible# by Barbara Kingsolver (*****)
•The Time Traveler's Wife# by Audrey Niffenegger (****)

By My Favorite Writers
•Airframe# by Michael Crichton (***)
•Testimony by Anita Shreve (*****) (See review)
•The Gate House by Nelson DeMille (***) (See review)
•The Gold Coast# by Nelson DeMille (****)
•The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley (***)
•Until the Real Thing Comes Along# by Elizabeth Berg (***)
•What Now? by Ann Patchett (****)
•When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (****)

Children's/YA
•A Tree Grows in Brooklyn# by Betty Smith (*****)
•Alice's Adventures in Wonderland# by Lewis Carroll (***)
•Confessions of a Closet Catholic by Sarah Darer Littman (***)
•Dope Sick by Walter Dean Myers (***)
•Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz (*****)
•Holes# by Louis Sachar (***)
•The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (*****)
•When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale (****) (See review)

Nonfiction
•A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink (****) (See review)
•Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe (****) (See review)
•In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (***) (See review)
•The Omnivore's Dilemma# by Michael Pollan (*****)
•The Power of Now# by Eckhart Tolle (***)
•The Tipping Point# by Malcolm Gladwell (*****)
•The Zen of Eating# by Ronna Kabatznick (***)
•This is Your Brain on Music# by Daniel J. Levitin (***)

Anthologies
•Flash Fiction# ed by James Thomas (****)
•Labor Days# ed by David Gates (***)
•Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou (***)
•Letters to a Young Doctor# by Richard Selzer (*****)
•One Minute Stories by Istvan Orkeny (***)
•The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review (*****)
•The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted by Elizabeth Berg (***)
•Where I'm Calling From# by Raymond Carver (*****)

On Writing
•78 Reasons why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might# by Pat Walsh (****)
•Fingerpainting on the Moon# by Peter Levitt (***)
•Journal of a Novel# by John Steinbeck (****)
•If You Want to Write# by Brenda Ueland (***)
•Page After Page# by Heather Sellers (***)
•The Anatomy of Story by John Truby (*****)
•The Situation and the Story# by Vivian Gornick (***) (See review)
•Writing Mysteries# edited by Sue Grafton (***)

Discovered on LibraryThing!
•Food 2.0: Secrets From the Chef Who Fed Google by Charlie Ayers (**)
•Gardens of Water by Alan Drew (****)
•My Husband's Sweethearts by Bridget Asher (****) (See review)
•Schooled by Anisha Lakhani (**) (See review)
•Simplexity by Jeffrey Kluger (***) (See review)
•The Music Teacher by Barbara Hall (****) (See review)
•The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block (***)
•The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (****) (See review)

---------------

My Overall 2008 Top 10:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz
Testimony by Anita Shreve
The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

Images of the books (including some off-challenge reads) appear below.

Next Post: 2009 Reading Preview

Meter

2008-12-30T08:16:00.002-06:00

I listened this morning while -- for some reason -- a radio station's traffic reporter spelled her name on air:

L-E-S-L-I-E
K-E-I-L-I-N-G.

I wish my name had that kind of rhythm!

Season's Greetings

2008-12-29T19:54:00.008-06:00

I wish I'd noticed this nativity scene earlier … before last weekend's warm weather erased the foot of Chicago snow beneath the palm trees.

Ah, well.
Greetings on this fifth night of Christmas!

Vacation Reading

2008-12-05T21:49:00.004-06:00

So I’m headed on vacation to gaze at the ocean. But while most girls would obsess over which clothes to pack, I’m far more interested in choosing which books to take!

Six remain to be read for my 888 Reading Challenge, and five of them made it into my suitcase (the carry-on, mind you; I can’t risk them in checked baggage):

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -- I’ve seen most film versions but haven’t read the book (nor -- gasp! -- anything by Dickens)

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith -- I read this in childhood but can’t remember a thing about it; am looking forward to seeing what comes back as I re-read

Labor Days ed by David Gates -- I love stories set in workplaces, and this is an anthology of work-related short stories and novel excerpts

Letters to a Young Doctor by Richard Selzer -- personal essays by the surgeon forerunner to today’s Atul Gawande

Fingerpainting on the Moon by Peter Levitt -- combine the ocean with this book about artistic creativity … and who knows what might happen??

Of course, I’m still debating about a couple more…

Certain Things Must Happen

2008-11-24T14:55:00.007-06:00

The plan isn’t foolproof. For it to work,
certain things must happen.

So begins Jack Handey’s bank heist piece in the Shouts and Murmurs column of this week’s New Yorker magazine.

He lists a series of highly unlikely (yet clever and hilarious!) coincidental events that must occur for a certain robbery to succeed. Improbable as the events are, a writer might be able to weave one or two of them into a story -- taking care to make them motivated and believable -- and end up with a rollicking good tale (for example, Ocean’s Eleven).

But if a writer substitutes “plot” for Handey’s opening reference to “plan,” the list becomes an effective refresher on the problems of deus ex machina and coincidence in fiction.

It's All Good

2008-11-18T17:04:00.005-06:00

I miss the easiness of warm summer mornings. I'd pull on shorts and a t-shirt, then walk for coffee, thinking about stories.

But fall is good, too.

A Life in Cards

2008-11-13T13:50:00.002-06:00

From the Chicago Tribune: The Topps Company will soon sell 90 baseball-style trading cards that document significant moments in Barack Obama’s life.

It’s a great exercise for anyone, especially a writer: What are 90 of the most significant people, places (be specific), moments, actions, and utterances of your -- or your character’s -- life? What image represents each? What stories emerge?