Tag: books

Man, there’s a lot of nonfiction going on this month? What’s up with that?

Read
Positive Addiction
William Glasser
This book is a bit dated it its psychological theories, but makes some good points. The author examines two groups of people: those addicted to running and those addicted to meditation. He supports such addictions, and sees great benefit to getting yourself addicted to some sort of positive activity. It also includes tips to establish your own positive addition.

Uprooting Racism
Paul Kivel
The guide (maybe even The Guide) for white people wishing to examine their own racism. Also the guide for white people who are sure they are not racist, but are concerned about other people’s racism. (Note: both of these groups most likely has some white privilege things to acknowledge.) Each chapter ends with discussion questions making this a very good book to use for a study group. Well written and recommended.

Mediterranean Women Stay Slim Too.
Melissa Kelly
I’ve successfully cut back on the reading of diet books, something of a hidden addiction for me. But I seem to have not actually divested myself from books that are about being slim and still eating good food. It isn’t such a bad thing. This book has a lot of good recipes and points. However, its tone can be slightly grating. It is clear from the text that the author grew up in a family that valued food and the communal ritual of eating food together. Today, the author runs a restaurant where she can continue this tradition. I am happy for her, and wish that we were all raised the way she was and strive to eat the way she does. That said, I think she may have laid out a bit of a tall order for most Americans.

Juliet, Naked
Nick Hornby
(first “Lucky Day” book)
I was excited, but cautious, about this book as I really love Nick Hornby’s writing, yet really did not like A Long Way Down. Happily, this book captures all the gleeful Hornby–esque dialogue and descriptions. As Hornby is aging, so are his characters. Because I am aging too, I don’t mind a bit.

The setup of the story was delightful, as were the life and musings of an aging former big deal rock star.

Math: Facing an American Phobia
Marilyn Burns
I was reading part of this book for an assignment at school and Burns was so funny, I just kept reading for pleasure. Burns analyzes why the vast majority of the country “hates” and “can’t do” math, and also points out that any efforts to teach math in a different, possibly more accessible way, are often loudly protested. It seems that people want their children to learn math in exactly the same way they did, even if the result was that they themselves hate math and describe themselves as not very good at it.

That makes me a little crazy. But Marilyn Burns, though troubled and confused about this, cheerily looks at a variety of math strands, how we use them in daily life, and how she would teach them in a classroom. This was so witty, interesting and thought provoking, I recommend it to everyone, not just “math” people.

Search for Dinosaurs
Bischoff
Another in the “Choose Your Own Adventure“-esque series from my youth. I had a very difficult time with this as my eyes tend to glaze over at words like “Mesozoic” and “Jurassic” and so I had trouble picking up the clues from each chapter.

Downtown Owl
Chuck Klosterman
I’m just going to say right now: prepare yourself for the ending. You will be breezing along enjoying the story and the writing and Klosterman’s incredibly unique way of seeing things and then BAM! The ending just hits you over the head and there is no real resolution and you will walk around in a kind of book daze for the next week feeling angry. But it is an anger tempered with some other emotions such as embarrassment–Why didn’t I see that coming?–and rationalization–Well, it is his book and he can end it anyway he wants, and indeed there were so many other memorable parts.

Ultimately, this is an awesome book, with several laugh-out-loud-read-them-to-any-one-who-is-willing parts. People who have spent any amount of time in a small town would enjoy the explanation of the change in the Town of Owl’s mascot, which I meant to read out loud to my mother, but the book went back before that could happen. His competing analysis of George Orwell’s 1984 from an adult/teenager perspective has clearly been fermenting inside of him for years, possibly since high school. The hidden rules of the single woman in a small town are hilarious, as are the twin internal monologues during a conversation between a man and a woman in a bar.

“Glee” is one word to describe how I feel when I read Chuck Klosterman. In this, his first work of fiction, I felt a sustained glee for 250 of its pages. Those last six pages? Be prepared. They are coming.

Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
Yet another book that I didn’t have to wait for 187 people to bring back from the library. I love, love, love the “Lucky Day” cart at the Kenton branch library. I also loved this book of interconnected short stories. I didn’t love Olive Kitteridge, but I came to respect and feel sympathy for her, which I think was the point.

The Pleasures of Cooking for One
Judith Jones
I liked that the focus on the cookbook is using your leftovers in two or three delicious meals. I’ve found this method in cookbooks with “normal sized” portions, but this was the first time I’ve seen it in a “cooking for one” cookbook. I enjoyed Judith Jones chatty tone and her discussion of techniques and equipment used in cooking for one. This cookbook seems to me to be very French inspired, which is fine with me, but might not be good for some. Overall, it was good enough for me to buy in hardback, which says a lot.

Started but did not finish:
Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
Mildred Armstrong Kalish
I would like to read the rest of this book as I always find depression-era tomes interesting, even if they make me feel guilty for not scraping the extra bit of egg white out of the eggshell with my finger, as the author pointed out the women in her family always did. Nothing was wasted.

My first look at the Kenton Library. I love it! It is small but beautiful.

A look at the ceiling. This is not a flattering shot–I was feeling shy with my camera–but the library’s website tells me that this is a barrel ceiling. When seen in person it looks a lot less “home remodel” than this picture implies.

My favorite part of visiting today was the fact that there were two of nearly every book in the fiction section. I’m sure that once people start checking out books it won’t look like this for long.

This cart is a new feature they are piloting at this branch and one other. It’s called “Lucky Day” and it features books with massive amounts of holds. If you come to the library, you might find a book that you have on hold. You, gleefully excited, can check it out for three weeks. There are no renewals, and you can only have two lucky day books at once. I am VERY excited about the Lucky Day cart. I did not take home the Sarah Palin book.

In fact, I was gleefully excited to find this book, which I had on hold. Based on the number in the queue I was, and the number of copies the library carries, it was going to be a long wait. Instead, I took it home with me today.

The teen (YA in library-speak) section is up front and they had many copies of all the Twilight books strategically placed in the window as bait.

The library also has laptops to check out , a huge “media” collection (DVDs, CDs, etc) a very large children’s section and a 32 capacity meeting room. I can tell already that I am going to like this library.

When I moved to Portland in late 2001, I got myself a library card before I got a driver’s license. Since that point, the Central Library has always been “my” library. At the time, I lived downtown, but even when Matt and I relocated to close-in Southwest, the Central Library was still the one for me. When we moved to North Portland, miles and miles from the Central Library, it was still the one I visited the most, due to the fact that I could stop by after church, as the library was located conveniently between church and my Max stop.

Until this month North Portland had two libraries: one located only a bit out of the way (North Portland Branch on Killingsworth) and one located fairly far away (St. John’s Branch.) But this week, North Portland gets a new library located right in my neighborhood. One could say that it was located around the corner from me, depending on how you draw your corners.

So today, during the week of the Kenton Library‘s opening, I changed “my” library from Central to Kenton. It was both a sad and happy moment.

It’s not many days until the brand new Kenton branch library near my house opens. I can’t tell you how excited I am. There are not words. The books are so tantalizingly close.

Some very good nonfiction this month that will probably appear on the end of year wrap up. Some okay fiction.

Read
Courageous Conversations about Race
Glenn E. Singleton.
Curtis Linton
Explains how to have conversations about race in a constructive and courageous way. I liked that the authors were very clear that conversations about race would be uncomfortable. They also discussed many of the ways people use to avoid talking about race. I entered this book a skeptic, but came out a convert.

Food Rules
Michael Pollen
A tiny book—I read it in the span of the bus ride beginning downtown and ending at my mother’s house 35 minutes later. I wouldn’t pay the $11.00 price for this book, but it was fun to get from the library and read.

Some of my favorite rules:

• Avoid foods you see advertised on television
• Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans
• It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car
• It’s not food if it’s called the same thing in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos or Pringles.)
• Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.
• The whiter the bread, the sooner you will be dead.
• Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.
• Be the kind of person who takes supplements—then skip the supplements.
• Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
• Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner
• Pay more, eat less.
• …Eat less
• Stop eating before you are full.
• Eat when you are hungry, not when you are board.
• If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, you are not hungry.
• Eat slowly
• Drink your food and chew your drink.
• Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it.
• Serve a proper portion and don’t go back for seconds.
• Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper
• After lunch, sleep awhile, after dinner, walk a mile.
• Eat meals
• Limit your snacks to unprocessed snack food.
• Do all your eating at a table.
• Try not to eat alone
• Treat treats as treats.
• No snacks, no seconds, no sweets, except on days that begin with S.
• Leave something on your plate
• Cook.

Julius Caesar
Wm. Shakespeare
Much like Henry the IV parts I & II are not really about Henry IV, so Julius Caesar is not really about Julius Caesar.
Can we talk about race?
Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph. D.
A short book, based on a series of lectures, Tatum discusses her experience as an “integration baby” and the re-segregation of schools today. Many good tidbits in this book such as:
The ABC approach to creating affirming classrooms: Affirm identity, building community and cultivating leadership. Verna Ford’s mantra: “Think you can—work hard—get smart.” I’m looking forward to reading the author’s other book, “Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?”, but it is currently on hold at the library.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Dito Montel
This didn’t have the most coherent narrative, but I kept reading for the sheer joy of the voice. Dito Montel’s misadventures in the 90s make for some engaging reading. It also includes pictures, and Dito isn’t too hard on the eyes. Note that the movie and the book have absolutely nothing in common.

The Time Machine: Secret of the Knights.
Gasperini
I read this because Matt brought it home from the library. We both read these Choose Your Own Adventure stories as children. Like many things, it was much easier this time to make the correct jumps in time to solve the puzzle, but I still had to look at the hints.

My Sister’s Keeper
Jodi Picoult
Alert! For those of you who saw the movie first a warning that the book does not have the same ending! It seems as though it will, because the movie story follows the book story so closely, but it does not! Do not get caught like I did.

Overall, an engaging story, but one where my eye skipped over, I would guess, 10% of the words, those words having something to do with medical procedures. Medical procedures make me queasy.

The Teaching Gap: best ideas from the world’s teachers for improving education in the classroom
James W. Stigler & James Hiebert
A book that provided a lot of food for thought. It discusses the results of a world-wide study of eighth grade math teachers and the methods they use to educate their students. It shed light on the strange gap in education in the United States: the “professional” educators are not the people in the classrooms. “Researchers” supposedly know more about teaching than the people who teach every day. I’ve always been confused by this mindset and this book suggests a way that teachers could not only incrementally improve their teaching, but also be seen as the professionals they are.

Started but did not finish
Doing Simple Math in Your Head
W. J. Howard
I didn’t finish reading this book, but I purchased it. It shows simple ways of accomplishing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Ways that were obvious once I read about them, but which never occurred to me in the past. I used some of the tricks to develop a math program to “catch up” my future math students. Great book.

Moontrap
Don Berry
I was surprised at how much the narrative drew me in. Trask, the first book in the trilogy is on Oregon’s list of 150 books for Oregon’s Sesquicentennial. At the time of reading the library didn’t have a lending copy of book one. So I kept getting distracted by the fact that I hadn’t read the first book. But Berry’s writing style is incredibly modern. I kept flipping to the front of the book to see when the book was published. 1962? Really? After I read Trask, I will return to this book.

A goodly number of books this month, helped along by the day in bed reading on 1/1/10. This was a good month for reading and I suspect many of these books will appear at the end of 2010 book awards.

Read
Heart Sick
Chelsea Cain
“Gloriously Gruesome Suspense…” said the Staff Pick bookmark inserted in this book. Boy, does that hit the nail on the head. Still, I devoured it, gruesome though it was. How could I not? It’s written by the woman I think of as my “older sister” (a theoretical relationship similar to the one I have with my “movie boyfriend” Edward Norton) and the book is set firmly in actual, recognizable Portland.

The serial killer/murder mystery is not really my genre (aside from the book couple–Kenzie/Gennaro–I want to marry) and I suspect this story might be a tiny bit predictable. I had to skip entire pages of text because I don’t do torture. Still, aside from those things, how could I not love a book set in my born-again home town, with a main character subletting a condo not far from where I work and dialogue such as this:

“Archie will explain. He’s downstairs in the car. I couldn’t find a fucking place to park. Your neighborhood is awash with ambling Yuppies.”

Can I really refer to a gruesome, disturbing book as delightful? With my soft spot for Chelsea Cain, indeed I can.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A writer’s life
Pamela Smith Hall
I undoubtedly know about this book because the author is a Portlander, but I would have found it anyway. I tend to read everything I come across that has to do with Wilder.

This was a very readable, accessible book that traces Wilder’s journey as a writer and seems specifically to have been written to discount the theories that some authors have put forth that Wilder’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane wrote the Little House Series.

I had discounted those theories already as they seemed to overlook the writing career Wilder had before she began her famous series. The book follows Wilder’s life chronologically, and, in her early years, compares and contrasts Wilder’s unpublished autobiographical manuscript Pioneer Girl with details in the Little House series. This in itself was interesting.

A teacher at my school was annoyed at her student teacher for labeling the Little House series as fiction. “They are autobiography!” she firmly stated. I kept quiet, and wondered just how they are shelved at the official library. I have read enough to know that her books are not the whole truth of her life. Hill does an excellent job of highlighting the changes Wilder made to her own story to establish the mythos of her family–her experiences, heightened by her story telling and shaped by her and her daughter’s editing, have become the pioneer experience for millions of people across the world.

The other point gleaned from this book is to have a tough hide if your own daughter is your editor. Wilder and Lane were close, but Lane rejected the life her mother chose–leaving it as soon as she could. Hill provides evidence, again and again, of a mother daughter relationship probably familiar to many. It is a relationship both close and strained, and Lane comes across as a ruthless editor, unsparing of her mother’s feelings.

Still, the two remained close throughout their lives and their work together provided a series that has probably done more than any other to shape my world view. The book provides a nice bibliography for me to plunder, and has me wondering why, aside from the unspeakable television series, the story of the Ingalls family has never been adapted for the silver screen. Also, is there a good biography of Rose Wilder Lane?

The Dawn of a To-Morrow
Francis Hodgson Burnett
I came across this book while moodily wandering the stacks and checked it out partially because I’d never read any adult fiction by Burnett, but primarily because it was incredibly short and I figured I could handle it.

Had I not started reading it at 1:23 am, I probably could have finished this in one sitting. This strikes me as something that originally was serialized in a magazine at the turn of the century. Unlike most books written before 1950 and written in dialect, this was an incredibly easy read.

People familiar with the Annotated Secret Garden will recognize Burnett’s life philosophy in this book. People familiar with Wayne Dyer’s beliefs will not find Burnett’s views much different than his.

Overall, a sweet story, and a nice way to begin the new year.

The Last Summer (of you and me)
Ann Brashares
I picked this book up at the library off a display featuring “Bildungsromans” which, a helpful sign explained to me was: “a novel about the early years of somebody’s life, exploring the development of his or her character and personality.” God, I love librarians. Who knew that my favorite type of book actually had a name? And such a fun one.

I was also interested in seeing how Brashares fared writing adult fiction. Sometimes the transition between Young Adult and Adult Fiction *ahem, Judy Blume, ahem* can be a rocky one. Her “Traveling Pants” were fabulous, could she maintain her winning streak in the harsh world of adult fiction?

I loved this book. Every once in awhile I come across a book where the author writes–so much better than I ever could–the feelings I have. This was one of those novels. I’ve been thinking of first loves now and again lately, and how heart breaking they always are. Even if they end in the best possible way, doesn’t every one look back at them with a sense of sadness? I think Curtis Sittenfeld hit the nail on the head in Amercian Wife when she wrote: “..her tone was reflective in that way that is inevitably sad, because the past is part sad.”

So this story of three people merging their past with their present was wonderful to submerge myself in. The tension, ache and slowly building tragedy were delightful. I saw what was going to happen and how it would end, and I didn’t care. It was the journey I enjoyed the most. What a beautiful way to spend a cold and rainy day. This is why I am a reader.

Started, but did not finish
Sexing the Cherry
Jeanette Winterson
A clerk at Krakow, a coffee shop, recommended this book to me. I liked the title, but that was a about it. I get what the author was doing, I just couldn’t stay focused on the story because of it.

Convictions
John Kroger
I expected to begin this book and then drift away from it early on and eventually take it back to the library. This is what happened, but not for the reasons I thought. This book is great! It is witty and interesting and easy to read, and a fascinating look at an area of law most of us non-lawyers probably barely think about. I highly recommend it. It is also a very long book and Kroger won an Oregon book award this year so people at the library requested it before I could finish it. I would like to someday, though. And you should read it too.

In 2009 these are the awards for:

The books this month seem to be more of “passing time” books than anything. Nothing groundbreaking here. Although, I did like Me & Orsen Wells. When is that movie coming out, anyway?

Read
Keeping Faith: a novel
Jodi Picoult
Engrossing story with dumb title, I quite enjoyed the twists and turns. It wasn’t high literature (even for my low standards) but it was a fun read.

Side note. In the author interview at the end of the novel Picoult mentions that she researches like crazy for books because she can’t stand to have errors. I found two, one of which was quite glaring: the grandmother character, who is in her 50s mentions that the War of the Worlds broadcast “scared her and her husband to death.” I find this to be amazing, because the novel is set in 1999. This puts the grandmother’s character as being born in the early to mid 40s. So, not only would the grandmother not have been married in 1938 when the broadcast was first aired, but she also woudn’t have even been alive. Also, there was a reference to a nail being put “in Jesus Christ’s side.” I found this to be off and three minutes of googling has indeed revealed that Jesus’ side was pierced by a spear. Geez oh Pete, for an author who is a stickler for accuracy, these should have been cleaned up early on.

The Last Blue Mile
Kim Ponders
I checked this out because this story of a female Air Force Academy Cadet does not intersect with my own life experiences in any way. The book provided a nice window into Air Force culture. Based on what I read, I’m glad for the window and will not be seeking a door into Air Force Culture any time soon.

A Model Summer
Paula Porizkova
The book that convinced me there is little actual glamor in modeling. How does a sheltered fifteen year old girl spending her summer working as a model in Paris fare? The answer is not surprising. As the quote on the back of the book says, the novel “bravely offers no easy answers.” Engrossing and disturbing.

Me & Orson Wells
Robert Kaplow
The “voice” in this novel is fun and fresh and the novel itself is a fun time capsule to 1930s Broadway and Orson Wells. I found out about halfway through that Zac Ephron will be playing the main character which didn’t match the picture in my head at all, but I look forward to seeing Orson Wells recreated for the screen and this book also inspired our next choice for the Shakespeare Project: Julius Caesar.

Sideways
Rex Pickett
I found this movie to be highly annoying–the main characters were incredibly juvenile and idiotic. Someone nicely summed up the movie as “Dumb and Dumber do Wine Country.” So why read the book? Though I hated the movie, the story and characters have stuck with me, and when I came across the novel on the library shelves I figured the book might provide a little more insight.

Indeed, I liked the book much better than the movie. The book had the advantage, as books do, of letting us into the minds of at least one of the men. This humanized him for me and softened my judgment. The story is well written, clips along, has some incredible passages and uses vocabulary that had me reaching for the dictionary several times. Don’t get me wrong, the men are still idiotic, but much more human. This would be a nice vacation read.

Unplugging Philco
Jim Knipfel
My initial reaction was enjoyment. This futuristic novel is set in New York City, where massive amounts of freedoms Americans enjoy today have voluntarily been given up due to “the Horribleness”–an incident that flattened Tupolo. This novel was clearly written to skewer the post-9/11 world we live in. However, as the story dragged on, the life Wally Philco lives left me sad. Near the middle of the book, things look like they would work out for him in some small way, but I realized I was about two chapters away from the end and this wasn’t going to end well. I put down the book for a few days, and eventually returned to find that, indeed, the ending was not what I was looking for. Not only that, I found it to be not believable. Two days later, I’m still thinking, “But wait. If the ending is true, then how did X work?” This is not a good sign for a book.

The Sinful Life of Lucy Burns
Elizabeth Leiknes
A slim novel, this initially had me tittering as I read along. But somewhere in the middle–which I guess would be about page 80–it bogged down and I lost interest. This was a clever premise, but not the best execution. I’m interested to see if Leiknes‘ next novel will be a bit better.

Started but did not finish
Braided Lives
Marge Piercy
It’s the 1950s and Marge Piercy’s main character doesn’t want a man to posses her. Hmmm. Good luck with that. Having just read her memoir, I can tell that large portions of this novel are inspired by her own life. It seemed like things were going to be grim, and so my attention waned. Also? Horrible 80’s-esque cover. So bad it is almost good.

Past Caring
Robert Goddard
I never really got to caring about the character, so I couldn’t move through to past caring. When I hit page fifty and I’m still wondering if I will start to be interested soon, it is time to put down the novel.

Our Lady of Greenwich Village
Dermot McEvoy
A manly novel, that takes the men in it too seriously. Pete Hamill writes better novels set in bars. This suffers from the book equivalent of the movie problem of “too many identical white guys in suits.” About the fifth time I asked myself, “Who is this person and why are they on the page right now?” I decided I really didn’t care and gave up.

Every year Steve Duin, columnist for the Oregonian holds a reading contest to see who can read the most pages during the year. The winner always reads some number that even I, a voracious reader, think insane. Like over 100,000. This year, I sent in my entry of 21,177 pages read which was 71 books. I sent this note along with with spreadsheet.

Dear Mr. Duin,

My page total isn’t anywhere near winning, but my goal this year was to actually get my entry to you. I’ve never been able to keep track of pages read on my own—that extra step of flipping to the back and seeing what the last pages was has always eluded me. In the back of my journals, I’ve kept track of “books read” since 1987, but in 2008, I began using Goodreads. At the end of last year I discovered I could export my list of books read and they listed page numbers. This year I just had to export, sum and save in Excel and voila! I finally enter the contest.

This was not the best fiction reading year. Around March I got annoyed at all the unsatisfying novels I was reading and just started re-reading things I liked. Hence the appearance of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. Things picked up mid-summer and I devoured some books during my August vacation. I would say the most quietly delightful “what if” sort of novel was Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life, by our own Tony Wolk. What if Abraham Lincoln showed up in 1950’s Illinois? My absolute favorite novel, if forced to choose, was Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife. Aside from being an engrossing story, the novel itself was a gentle reminder that the famous people I know (and judge) everything about, may in fact be media creations. Which reminds me, the other favorite novel I read the year—do your readers really actually stick to one? I can’t imagine—was Three Girls and their Brother by Theresa Rebeck. A commentary on the media culture in our country, the voices of each character are amazing. This book also wins the “don’t judge a book by its cover” award as its cover was hideous and not at all reflective of the novel.

Nonfiction-wise, it was a smashing year. I discovered permaculture theory and, thanks to the library, devoured many books on the topic. I have a tiny back yard, but I think I’m a farmer at heart, and due to the permaculture books I read, I am transforming my “land” into a more sustainable environment. The best non-fiction book I read was Urban Homestead, your guide to self-sufficient living in the city. Unlike 99% of the books I read, I finished my library copy, returned it and immediately bought my own copy. Reading the various tutorials on growing and foraging for food, making bread, cheese and preserves, all I could think was “these are my people.” What could be more fun than that?

Next year, I aim to not only enter my number of pages, but also write an essay. Until I retire (30 years hence) that seems to be my only hope for winning your contest.

Good reading,

Patricia

6/25/10 Note: I just looked at the contest results (published 2/1/10) and I got 34th! Not bad. But seriously, do those 100,000 plus pages people ever go outside?

Here is the list of books people chose as their favorites. (Published 2/1/10)

Here is the annual column about the reading contest. I, sadly, am not mentioned (Published 2/1/10)

For years I’ve been describing one of my favorite kind of books as listed above. Who knew that there was one word to say all that? Well, probably a lot of people. And, more importantly, librarians, who not only printed up a handy sign, but had a whole bunch of buildungsromans set out for us to check out. Thanks librarians! And also thanks to the clerks who probably fetched all the books!