friday january 18
Winter...sheer and utter cold, thoughts rising sluggishly like sap through the veins of a maple. What a great time to read a poem and let the images in it dance over the surface of your nearly hibernating brain! John Ashbery is a favorite of mine for cold days like these. His strange peekaboo glimpses of image after image make even familiar items and ideas seem strange and new. Beyond that, I've got a special kind of respect for a poet who can write a sestina about Popeye.
On the new books shelf recently, I noticed an Ashbery collection I'd not yet seen. Notes from the Air is a selection of poems from the last 20 years of Ashbery's work, mostly written during his middle-age and beyond. Perhaps that's part of what makes this collection so suitable for my winter days. Like all Ashbery poems there's a certain surreal confusion to the style, however, when one lets the images flow past, there's a sense of longing, disconnection and regret in many of the poems that speaks to the season.
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thursday january 03
I would begin this blog entry: "It's winter, and the perfect time to enjoy the warmth of a nice crackling fire." However, that's a bit in poor taste even for me, especially since I want to talk about a book called
An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England. If you're looking for a book with a title that will get you some curious and frightened stares when you read it on the bus, this is the book. It's sparked a number of conversations during which I've had to explain that
no, I'm not planning on burning anything down and
yes, it is
a novel. However, aside from brief pauses during curious interruptions this book is one that's hard to put down.
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friday november 30
At a certain point in the days of my youth, Choose-your-own-Adventure books enjoyed a surge in popularity. I must admit I was one of the many in my generation who paged frantically back and forth exploring another planet or trying to find the lost treasure. I also have to admit that more often than not I was bitten by a poisonous creature or perished in a pit trap.
I have to admit that my decision making, at least in novels of this sort, has a certain exuberance that overrides my common sense. Offered the phrase You see a dark wood door; from behind it comes the sound of uncanny howling. Do you:
- Open the Door (turn to page 58)
- Go back down the passage (turn to page 84)
I'm going to almost always turn to page 58. I've also now verified that this trait has continued into adulthood with my recent thumbing through several of the hundreds of available plots in Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes.
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friday november 16
I've had this eerie relationship with apocalyptic fiction ever since I found Nevil Shute's On the Beach as a 11 or 12 year old kid. I'm not entirely sure how to describe what this unbearably grim story did to my young mind. Needless to say I had trouble getting to sleep for a week or two and spent the next year or so worried that the Russians were going to drop the bomb on us before I even got my first kiss. Luckily, after that year the Berlin Wall fell, and soon after that the Soviet Union split up, and then I got my first kiss, so there were a few less worries to plague my young mind. However, my thirst for fiction that proposes the worst began at that point and has never quite left me.
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tuesday september 04
It's back to school time for all but a few lucky kids. What a great time for us "old people" to look back and remember our own school days. For instance, remember filmstrips?
Change Your Underwear Twice a Week brought it all back to me. Suddenly I recalled the filmstrips in their little plastic tubes, always wound backwards and requiring a quick rewind while the class waited. Then there were the old filmstrip projectors, made out of heavy metal and sitting on someone's tiny desk like a World War II battleship. I spent more than a little time sitting in a classroom with the shades drawn while the teacher, (or some
very lucky teacher's pet) waited for the "ding" that would signal them to turn the little dial and advance one frame.
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thursday august 02
Although I'm not really focused on knitting as much during the summer, I just had to blog about Fitted Knits. I like this book! One of the first things that caught my eye was that it uses yarns in a variety of price ranges. What kept me interested were several hip-looking patterns designed to be knit in one piece from the top down. Yay! No sewing seams!
Fitted Knits is a great resource for beginning and intermediate knitters interested in patterns with a little more shaping. One of the great features in the book is that not only are the patterns sized to specific measurements, they're also broken down into separate design parts. This makes adapting the patterns to one's own proportions much easier.
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friday july 06
I love a good mystery novel. Likewise, a piece of science fiction, especially one with an anthropological bent, really makes me want to curl up and read all night. Books that straddle the gap between these two genres: pure bliss.
I recently found Paloma, a new book in the Retrieval Artist series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I was so happy to see a new one is out, because I tore through the other four in the series last summer, reveling in the mystery plots centered around humanity's interaction with various species of aliens and the ensuing political and legal conflicts.
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tuesday june 19
One might think that after my last blog, I might be done with ideas dragged out of the nursery and dressed in adult clothes. Not so! In fact, I continued in the same vein this past week with The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle.
In The Bear Went Over the Mountain, a struggling Maine author loses his first manuscript to a fire, and the briefcase containing his second one to a bear. The author goes into a deep depression. The bear dresses up in clothes, reminds himself not to carry the briefcase in his mouth, and heads off to sell the manuscript in New York.
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thursday june 07
Imagine a novel where Jack comes to the big city to seek his fortune. The twist is, the city is Toy City and populated only with toys and nursery rhyme characters. On the night of Jack's arrival, he's mugged and left in an alley. From there, he teams up with a bear named Eddie to solve the serial murders of Humpty Dumpty, Little Boy Blue, and Eddie's former partner Bill (a.k.a. Wee Willie) Winkie. Along the way he meets a love interest (Jill) and develops a drinking problem (the problem being: the glasses in Toy city are all toy-sized--he solves it by ordering ten drinks at once). This is Robert Rankin's The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalpyse and it is a hilarious diversion for a summer evening.
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tuesday april 10
When I was a small girl, my brother made me angry for one reason or another and I decided to run away. I grabbed a jacket and my favorite stuffed animals, and then got together the books that I absolutely couldn't live without. When I was finally ready to leave, there was one small problem; I couldn't lift the pile of books.
It's difficult as a book lover to narrow down your collection of essentials. It took me many years and several occasions of moving house before I minimized my own collection. I love books, but having now lived in a variety of places, most with lots of stairs, my back finally overruled my brain.
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thursday march 29
If you talk to a group of young adults in Cincinnati for any length of time, someone is sure to come out with some sort of grand plan for getting out of here. Usually they talk about moving to some very cosmopolitan place like New York, San Francisco, or even Seattle. This isn't just one conversation, ever since the most recent census there have been articles in Citybeat and the Enquirer bemoaning the situation. Even I, though I'm mostly quite happy to live here, sometimes wonder "How would my life be different if I lived in New York?"
A partial answer was just provided to me by Lucky by Gabrielle Bell. Lucky is a collection of the three minicomics plus a special bonus section. Lucky Number #3, one of the included titles, won an Ignatz award in 2004. This graphic novel details the everyday life of Bell including her struggles to find a job and acceptable housing. It's made me grateful to live in Cincinnati, if only for the large cheap building that I call home.
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tuesday march 13
Lately I've been listening to Elizabeth George's What Came Before He Shot Her. This dark, dense novel explores the ghettos of London and offers another perspective on the events leading up to the ending of the last Lyley mystery, With No One as Witness.
I really enjoyed her Inspector Lynley mysteries, but that's not really a recommendation for this title, since the plot is only tangentially related to the Lynley series. In fact, many reader-reviewers have panned it based mainly on this fact. The book focuses on the rather grim life of three siblings in North Kensington, fifteen year old Ness, eleven year old Joel, and seven year old Toby.
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friday march 02
I got a new toy--an MP3 player!
I've been kind of enthralled with exploring all its little glowing menu options instead of reading books like a good library blogger should. Thus, I'm having a hard time coming up with a book to write about this time around. I can however, recommend as an alternative my current passion, which is listening to digital audiobooks every chance I get!
I do have one book recommendation that's pulled directly from my current idee fixe. Knit one, Felt too has a very cute fair isle pattern for a felted cell phone/mp3 player case. I'm adapting it to fit my player and spending some quality time on the couch with my earbuds plugged in and my knitting in my lap. What's playing while I knit? Death of a Hussy from Netlibrary, one of the Hamish Macbeth mysteries that the library doesn't have on CD. Awesome!
monday february 05
I recently picked up a new book: My Secret Life on the McJob, written by Jerry Newman, a business management professor who took a year off to work at seven fast food burger joints. The book purports to be another "management advice book" and each chapter begins with a management lesson that one might presumably glean from the following chapter. I liked the book even more as an outsider's undercover glimpse of what working fast food was like.
There's something very appealing in books about this kind of cross-cultural spying. The classic of the genre is Black like me, written by a white man with darkened skin making his way through the segregated south of the 1950's. A close second in terms of name recognition is probably Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, in which the middle-class Ehrenreich explores what it really means to take the sort of low-wage work on which the working poor rely.
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friday january 26
I occasionally enjoy the TV show Numb3rs, both for the sexy TV-geeky* guys and the not-so-subtle attempt to make math seem a little more exciting and attractive. Geek Logik is a new book that also proposes to make math useful and a little more attractive.
OK, that last sentence was a little tongue in cheek; it's actually a humor book. The subtitle of the book is "Easier Living through Mathematics", and the premise is geeky in the extreme. The book provides algebraic equations to answer such pressing questions as: "Should I call in sick?" and "Do I have a snowball's chance in hell with her?" It's a very amusing book, especially if you have a grasp of the math involved. However, even if you don't remember your high school algebra there's a refresher page in front so you too can find out if you "deserve a personal assistant".
*TV-geeky: A word I've coined with a similar meaning to TV ugly
For example: "Ryan Phillippe in Antitrust" geeky rather than young Bill Gates geeky.
monday january 22
I was reading an article some time ago in one of those magazines librarians read (Library Journal, Publishers weekly--sorry I can't remember which one!) and was somewhat interested to read about cross-pollination that was occurring between romance and other genres. I thought it was a good thing at the time, and thought it might be interesting to come across one of these titles, though I wasn't intrigued enough to seek one out.
Now I'm not so sure. I'll admit, I was frantically grabbing audiobooks in the last few minutes of my lunch break, and therefore missed the rather telling CD cover of Cover of Night by Linda Howard. So I was a little surprised by the sudden "blossoming of affections" that happened during the bloody beginnings of the siege (by criminals working for the mafia) of a small mountain town. I was also very surprised at the end when the male lead's close-quarters and semi-premeditated killing of at least one of the criminals was so blithely accepted by the heroine, despite her having young twins. Altogether, I found the premise of the plot more amusing than suspenseful, and the "happy ending" chillingly odd, which I'm pretty sure is not what the author intended. I'm sure there are other novels that blend the genres with ease. This was just the wrong one to encounter first and unawares.
friday january 12
I like new things--especially technological toys. I was one of those people who ran out and got a digital camera when 2 megapixels was top-of-the-line and cost what 10 megapixels cost today. I snagged a combination cellphone/MP3 player/internet device all of about 2 months before they were suddenly advertising them on TV everywhere. I love my Web 2.0. On the occasions when I can afford it, I'm what they call an early adopter.
What that translates to, according to Flavor of the month: why smart people fall for fads, is that I'm an enthusiastic embracer of technological fads and innovations. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in certain cases it costs me money and time. People who hold off buying that digital camera get a better deal; people who pause a bit before buying that Segway mostly never end up purchasing it at all. The secret is to know what innovation to adopt and when. One interesting point along these lines that the book mentions is that, in the 1930s, some people thought wristwatches were just a fad. Then again, who really wants a Pet Rock?
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tuesday january 09
It's now officially time for the post-holiday slump. Gazing off into space with a little case of the sniffles. Wrapped in an afghan and looking for another series of cozy mysteries to see me safely through January. Enter Aunt Dimity.
I'm a bit picky about my cozies. No matter how much the heart may lust for treacle, my Gen-X sense of irony can be overwhelmed by too much cutesy stuff. I am working my way toward the sweeter cozy mysteries only with halting, uncertain steps. (For instance, although I love cute cat pictures, it will be a little while before I'm ready to read the Cat Detective mysteries.) Aunt Dimity was one of those series that I was uncertain of, but my day off loomed and I needed a book to read.
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saturday december 23
I've got to admit that I got the recommendation for Hit by a Farm by Catherine Friend from another library blog. And I'll also admit that "lesbian examines ram testicles" is an awfully good first chapter hook. However, although this book has a lot of the standard "city slicker encounters the country life" episodes, it's so much more than that.
Hit by a Farm expertly describes what an all-consuming force a small family farm can be, and many scenes made me glad to be a generation removed from it. It also covers the author's struggle to write and maintain a sense of her own identity when confronted with endless lamb births, digging holes for miles of fencing, and the day-to-day hard work that left her tumbling exhaused into bed instead of writing (though obviously not forever since this is her book).
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friday december 08
A book with an introduction that details how the author spiked his own pint of ice cream with salt to deter a thieving roommate promises a certain amount of vicarious retribution. Life's Little Annoyances delivers on its promise. Not all of us are the sort of person that will plant embarassing items in a person's cart at the supermarket jut because they left it in the middle of the aisle. But I think many of us can appreciate the small frustrations in this book and the creativity with which they are met.
This book isn't exactly a model of the high points of mature behavior. Some of the stories border on being cruel, and some of the pranks have consequences the pranksters have not fully thought out. For instance, the person who deals with cars parked in handicapped spots with a note that says "I'm sorry I ran into your car", along with the phone number for an organization that advocates for the disabled, probably hasn't thought in terms of how annoying these calls might be to the organization. I'm also not entirely sure of the environmental consequences involved in painting dog poop with gold spray paint. However, for adults that can use it as a safety valve rather than a manual, there are enough funny but not too harmful occasions of vengence in this book that one will certainly find something one can appreciate.
friday december 01
I've been working my way through the classics of literature on CD as I find them, catching up with all those books I should have read long ago. But I feel I have to be honest and share my defeats as well as my victories here. I am now batting only .330 in my attempts to read James Joyce's Ulysses. Yes, I've only succeeded once out of three attempts, and even then I was in high school and may have skipped one or two pages. This time, determined to appreciate it as an adult, I got it on CD--that should have made it easy, right? Well, this morning I returned the unabridged CD version. Someone else had a hold on it, and I had only made it to disc ten.
Now, there's a good chance that I'm sleep deprived, so it probably wasn't the best idea to try to listen to this title right before bed. The fact is, it was a great audiobook. The narrator had a lovely voice, and of course there was the prose, the fantastic melodious prose. Well, melodious it was, and I tripped down those notes straight into dreamland, night after night.
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wednesday november 22
It's the day before Thanksgiving, which is the quintessential American family holiday, and I have the peculiar nature of the family on the brain. Families are funny. No, let's face it, most of our families are quirky, odd, downright weird.
Because of all the shared history involved, it can be hard to tell a family story correctly and succinctly. Some things translate, and some don't work at all. For instance, although I can explain to strangers why nearly every gift my aunt Dar gets has a goose on it somewhere (she had a fundamentally bad experience with a goose when all my aunts were children), I'm not nearly as capable of elucidating why another of my aunts has an entire photo album full of pig posteriers.
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thursday november 09
In my continuing search for audiobooks to play while quilting or knitting, I often end up listening to books I wouldn't be caught dead reading. This can be interesting. Two recent titles that I would have set down after twenty pages if I'd encountered them in print, were actually strangely satisfying on CD.
William Dufris narrates both Lord Vishnu's Love Handles and The Futurist. I think he had a lot to do with my sticking with these titles to the end. For the record, I found the characters in both of these novels absolutely unlikable, spoiled and self-indulgent. However this narrator has a voice that absolutely personifies the whiny upper-middle-class white guy suddenly cast out of his element, and that's what both these books are all about.
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friday october 13
Wow--that was sudden! Just the other day I was looking out the window of the car and noticed the trees starting to change. Today there's a nip in the air and it really feels like fall. According to the National Forest Service, fall color will be at its best between now and the end of October. What better time to grap a map or a few guidebooks and take to the backroads for a day or a weekend?
We have a lot of travel books for the Midwest that could be useful for planning a little leaf-watching jaunt. The title Scenic driving: Kentucky might be just the thing if you want to head south. There's a very nice route from Frankfort to Florence which takes a detour through the picturesque town of Rabbit Hash. It's probably a good idea to see the town now, after the midwest premiere of the movie, who knows what'll happen?
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Did you know that a study in the British Medical Journal found there was an increased risk of being injured in an accident on Friday the 13th? Were you aware of the superstition that if 13 people sit down to dinner one will die within the year? The full story of the above, and other facts and folklore surrounding the number 13 can be found in Jonathan Cott's Thirteen: A journey into the number.
Thirteen is Cott's 13th book, and the story of its beginning makes an interesting introduction. Spurred to write by his own trepidation about the number (despite labeling himself a generally unsuperstitious person), Cott begins with a meeting of the Philadelphia Friday the 13th club, travels through calendars and horoscopes based on the number 13, and also touches on music, art and poetry inspired by the number.
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wednesday october 04
I haven't been knitting much lately, but now that it's getting cooler out I'm starting to get the urge again. This has mostly manifested itself in looking at cool new knitting books rather than actually knitting anything, but hey, I'm working up to it! I've found two books I was very impressed with this week. The first, Big Girl Knits is the first knitting book I've found where my size was on the bottom of the sizing chart! This book fills a great need for nice looking knit patterns for larger women. The informational section at the front, as well as pattern indications for recommended body types is also very useful. Plus, the little wrap sweater on page 66 is divine!
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monday september 25
“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.” Erica Jong
I'm not very interested in current-day self-help books, but I love old ones. There is nothing like immersing yourself in the aphorisms and advice of the first half of the twentieth century to give yourself a feeling of the utter strangeness of a familiar culture.
We recently got a book that sent me down that road again. How to be Popular is a collection of short excerpts from self-help books and articles for teens on the subject of popularity. These are drawn from books and magazines, mostly from the 1960's and 70's, with art from the same time period. A classic quote from this title is "Take a good look at those who are popular. Where do they go? What do they do? Try to be like them."
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saturday september 16
Now that I've finally cleared enough work from around my computer that I can blog without laying eyes on some urgent task that needs to be done immediately, I thought I could mention that I'm back from my vacation. And what a vacation it was! I started out with the idea of just finishing off a few projects and ended knowing that I was going to have to remove most of the tin ceiling downstairs. In between that, there was the flood...
If you're looking for a book on plumbing, I can heartily recommend Plumbing: basic, intermediate, and advanced projects, with the caveat that, unless you live in a house less than 20 years old, your plumbing will never be as clean, modern, or in as convenient a place as "book plumbing". However, at this point I'm really looking for a distraction from thoughts of plumbing so I thought I'd step sideways, yet continue the general "too much water and associated disasters" theme with a quick look at Brian Keene's The Conqueror Worms.
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friday september 01
My vacation starts in six and a half hours. So what will I do? Well, having spent all my spare cash remodeling my house, I'm headed off for a fun-filled vacation-week of staying at home. Yes, for the most part I will be finishing some of those remodeling projects, but I've also found something else I want to do with my time. I just ran across a book called The Dragon Charmer by Jan Siegel. The part I've read already is very good, and I plan on picking up the other books of the trilogy and having a fine day or two exploring this fantasy-world.
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saturday august 26
I've been so busy at work lately. Flying from one thing to the next, hurry, scurry out to the reference desk and then back to the office to work on everything else I have to do. Busy is good. It's fun to be involved in all the great things the library is doing, but sometimes when I get home I need a little help winding down.
Enter Hamish MacBeth. No, I haven't found a pleasant Scotsman to greet me at the door with dinner when I arrive home; Hamish is a character in a series of books by M.C. Beaton. A cozy mystery with a pleasant main character is a great way to unwind, and though Hamish can't beat an actual man bearing dinner, he is pleasant to curl up with nonetheless.
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wednesday august 16
I noticed in the newspaper the other day, the Gee's Bend quilts are going to be on display in Indianapolis starting in October of this year. The Gee's Bend exhibition has brought a spotlight onto African American quilting in the United States like never before. These beautiful abstract quilts have been traveling the country for almost four years now, garnering critical acclaim and generating amazing public discussion. The book, The Quilts of Gee's Bend, is a gorgeous view of the quilts and their makers.
I have a particular respect for African American quilting because it was an African American quilter's work that really got me interested in quilts as art. Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold was a major inspiration to me. It's a children's book, but I was already halfway grown when it came out. Still, the idea of telling a story through a quilt snagged me. Ringgold's work is so visually rich, it's hard not to be captivated. For a more adult take on her, as well as a lot more examples of her work, try Dancing at the Louvre.
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monday august 07
Quilts for Change, an international juried quilt show will be opening on Thursday August 10th at the Cintas Center. In honor of the show, here are a few books to broaden your appreciation of traditional quilts as well as those that venture into the fine arts.
Wild by Design, a beautiful overview of American quilting, is an illustrated catalog of some of the finest quilts from the collections of the International Quilt Study Center. One of the more interesting facets of this book is the conversational format, which offers several perspectives on the same quilt. This book is a good snapshot of the progression of the American quilt through the years and ends with several modern art quilts.
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friday july 28
It's the end of July, and it seems like all the folks from the office have headed off on vacation, or are planning one. Trips to Florida, the Smoky Mountains, and all the old favorites...do they make you yawn? Looking for something different? Something to spice up the water-cooler confab? Something to make your co-workers stand up and say "huh?" Look no farther than America Bizarro: A guide to freaky festivals, groovy gatherings, kooky contests, and other strange happenings across the U.S.A.
Even if you're not ready to hop in the car in search of strange American folk culture, America Bizarro is a great read. Catch an entry here or there while you're waiting for the bus, or for an appointment and imagine a mini-vacation to International Tuba Day, the National Hobo Convention, or the World Championship Punkin' Chunkin Contest.
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monday july 24
I'm in the middle of several remodeling projects. I live in an old house, so this is pretty much standard procedure. I finish one project, and a new one claims my attention. I am beginning to have an inkling that I may be in the middle of several remodeling projects for the rest of my life.
The library has been an integral part of this remodeling odyssey. You'll often find me in the Science department, poking through the books on plumbing, or carpentry, or masonry. One of the things that was missing from all these how-to books was an idea of just how a house, especially an old house like mine, works. David Owen's book, The Walls Around Us, started me on an answer to that question.
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saturday july 15
I just finished Magic Street by Orson Scott Card. In it, Mack Street, a baby found abandoned in a shopping bag grows up and into magical abilities. His ability to see people's most wished-for dreams has a dark aspect however, as these dreams tend to be fulfilled in ways that harm the dreamer or his loved ones.
As Mack discovers more about the peculiarity of his birth, he also finds a house which is a gateway into another world. There he meets Puck and Titania (yes, this book draws heavily from A Midsummer Night's Dream) and discovers how his fate and the fate of the community he lives in depend on how he manages this interaction with Fairy.
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friday july 07
Recently I fell under the spell of an audiobook: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I found it browsing, and am still not entirely sure how I missed hearing about it when the book came out. Reviewers have compared Clarke's novel to Jane Austen and "Harry Potter for Adults" but after hearing it myself I'm not sure an easy comparison exists for this book.
The title magicians, Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, are both given unique strong personalities by narrator Simon Preble. The book explores the "sorcerer's apprentice" style relationship between Norrell and Strange while touching on English history, magical history, and the manners of the 19th century. With a plot that unfurls gradually, this title might not be paced for those who demand page-a-minute action. The characters and landscape, however, are so well drawn that it's well worth a listen anyway.
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saturday july 01
I remember a snippet of an article I read recently which wondered how many recipes in a cookbook had to appeal to someone before they would buy the book. I think the author posited that it was six. Tastes being what they are, that's probably right. I think knitting books are much the same. It always amazes me how many times I find a book of one person's designs equally divided between intriguing and appalling. That was the case with Loop-D-Loop.
I was sucked in by the sweater on the cover; a random cable tunic, it looks like tree bark in the deep grey used for the model. It's lovely. I was not so enthralled with some of the other patterns; the cowl, especially, occasioned a "huh?!" moment. More traditional knitters should beware; this book tends toward the avant-garde. On the whole though, there's much to whet one's appetite, patterns ranging from moderately easy to very difficult, including various gauges and photography that has a lot more ambience than your average knitting book. There's even a sweater in there that I think both my mother and I could agree on (the cardigan modeled on an English riding jacket), though, of course, I'd want it in black and she would insist on off white.
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wednesday june 21
Tonight at nine p.m. the first part of the documentary film A Lion in the House will air on CET. It follows five families from cancer diagnosis though treatment, with footage covering six years. The film was shot at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center with many local families. This is a great project, and I am so happy that we at the library are one of CET's outreach partners in presenting this valuable and thought-provoking work to our community.
The film is part of the PBS series Independent Lens and was created by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar. The companion book, also called A Lion in the House, includes thoughts from the parents, siblings, medical team and filmmakers in their own words. These moving stories touch on the choices and realities of cancer in each family. The book is also interesting for getting a perspective on how the film was made. Filmmakers' notes on each family, and a longer section at the back of the book emphasize the struggle not to be intrusive while filming and to portray the families with honesty and sensitivity.
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saturday june 17
After my last post, I wanted to know more about ghost towns. I found several cool things, including a series of books on Ohio ghost towns, lots of ghost town and urban exploration sites, and an online photo gallery of many ghost towns in the southwest. I also found Ghosts in the Wilderness: Abandoned America.
Ghosts in the Wilderness is a big format art photography book, so it will take some effort to carry it home. It's worth it! The photographs are a nice blend of color, black and white, sepia and hand tinted. The subject matter is evocative: vacant main streets, flaking interiors, abandoned buildings and rusted out trucks under an endlessly variable Great Plains sky. Pretty pictures of entropy and decay make for an interesting "armchair travel" experience that encapsulates the essence of so many miles of the American West.
saturday june 10
In the house where I grew up, I could sit on the weathered wooden fence and look across the valley at an apple orchard. That is, I could until about the age of five. After that, the heavy machinery moved in, cut roads, and quick as flowers sprouting, there was a new subdivision. The gnarled apple trees, the brambles, the old stone foundation of a house were all bulldozed under. It was the first time I'd ever lost a place.
In this spirit, I picked up Melissa Holbrook Pierson's The Place You Love is Gone. The book is divided into three sections: her childhood home in Akron, Ohio, her first apartment in New Jersey, and the third part of the book, a history of the towns drowned by New York City's reservoirs. Almost like a book length poem, this isn't a writing style for everyone; it can seem fragmented and hard to follow. It works, however, as meditative blank verse and as the pained whisper of those of us who feel lost, confused and irritated, staring at the subdivision where the orchard used to be.
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friday june 02
Every so often I end up with a library receipt on my desk at home with a title circled, spotted with exclamation points and the annotation "Buy This Book!" The Yarn Girls' Guide to Simple Knits by Julie Carles is the most recent of these. I am a relatively new knitter, my first attempt to knit (at age nine, on slippery metal needles with yucky acrylic yarn) having been an abject failure. Now, armed with bamboo needles and much better yarn, I'm a knitting fiend. I have been scouring the knitting books, trying to find a basic book with patterns that straddle the happy medium between "grandma made you this nice cardigan (with intarsia ducks!)" and You Knit What?!
For a beginner like me, one of the great things about this book is the simplicity of the patterns. However, in addition to easy, the projects are also nice-looking. Simple, classic sweater patterns in bulkier yarns that don't look "too bulky" on a solid frame like mine were the initial draw. The thing that sealed the deal was the warm wool cap with earflaps; the top is round not peaked, and it's so cute. I can't wait to knit one for next winter!
There are two types of people in the world: those who love the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett, and those who haven't read them yet. If you're of the latter group, I heartily recommend them all! For people who like to read a series "in order", the discworld reading guide is a great visual resource.
Recently, I picked up The Art of Discworld which features Paul Kidby's illustrations of the Discworld and its denizens. Ordinarily I have trouble with other people envisioning my favorite fictional characters, but Kidby's illustrations are very well done, if not always exactly what I pictured. I especially liked the drawing of Cohen the Barbarian which appears on the cover of The Last Hero.
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I have to admit, I'm not usually a graphic novel person. I was intrigued by the reviews of Persepolis, though, and decided to see what the fuss was all about. I would urge others, even those who scorn "comic books", to give this one a try.
The perspective of a young girl in this book is one of the things that makes it such a great read. You grow up with the character and learn things as she does, so although you receive a lot of information about the politics and history of Iran, it's integrated seamlessly into the plot. The drawings are simple yet expressive, and help convey the the limited viewpoint of a child with their black and white unshaded format.
The novel has a sequel, Persepolis 2, which has also gotten rave reviews. Satrapi has also recently added a third book to the series. Now is a perfect time to enjoy them all!
Whether you're trying to exercise your green thumb in an apartment where your windows face a dim alley, or you have a larger area like a fire escape or vacant lot, Garden Your City has advice for urban gardeners. Not a drool-inducing collection of gorgeous garden photos, this book is valuable because of its simplicity: offering practical tips on spaces to garden, dealing with problems like dogs and vandals, and how to get involved with community gardening.
Does this book include all the standard gardening book features like a zone map, planting suggestions and resources list? Yes! But there's more! It's also the first book I've seen that covers how to compost in a one-bedroom apartment and garden around street trees. Engaging style, cute line drawings, and an understanding that not every gardener has unlimited resources make this book worth plucking from the shelf.
