While I love them, physical books have a few practical issues for me at the moment.

One, it’s trivially out of my way to pick them up at the library. It’s only a few blocks but it has to be either on my way to work (unlikely, since the library doesn’t open until 9, and I leave to take M to school rather before then) or on my way home (which means I can’t use a transfer and take the bus, or which means I add 2km to my bike commute) – both awkward.

Two, I have to physically carry them around. My purse is big but once it’s full of Purse Stuff, lunch, coffee thermos, keys, iPod, etc. there’s not a lot of room for a book. Plus if the subway is crammed — and it always seems to be crammed these days — there’s not a lot of room to wave around a large book.

Three, if I buy them, they don’t go away when they’re finished. I rarely re-read books so more and more I enjoy reading something and then giving it back to the library so it takes up their shelf space, not mine. I know it’s there if I ever need it so the whole library concept seems pretty ideal really.

Four, aside from subway time, I mostly have time to read late in the evening after the dinner/child-putting-to-bed fuss is over, which means I’m tired and have trouble keeping my eyes open.

I haven’t yet committed to an ebook reader / iPhone type of object, so unless I read on my computer (and I sometimes do) my commuting/bedtime salvation is found in audiobooks.

Hurray, audiobooks! An especial hurray for unabridged (abridged books are an abomination) audiobooks read by authors or readers who are good at reading. A huge, monster-size hurray for ones I can borrow from the library. (Granted, borrowing most audiobooks from the library usually means I have to have a Windows computer “read” them to my Mac in real time and re-record them before I can actually listen to them, but whatever.)

So lately, my audiobooks:

Katie MacAlister – lots of fluffy but entertaining quasi-romances about dragons and whatnot. In the first couple months of this year I was working insane hours and wanted pure fluff to distract me as I fell into bed, and this fit that niche to a T.

Neil Gaiman – I had some short stories on my iPod as well as Coraline (kids book) and The Graveyard Book (YA-ish). He reads his own books, and well. They’re very good. I’ve read all his other stuff on paper, as it came out.

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Patrick O’Brian – a wonderful, wonderful friend loaned me the entire 20-volume Aubrey-Maturin series in paper when I was pregnant with M and hopelessly sick and bed-bound. They’re fabulous books. “But I don’t care about 18th-century naval battles and spycraft,” you say. Yes you do. Trust me. Read them. Or get the audiobooks — the first one is read badly, much too slowly and ponderously and with no sense of fun, but the rest are excellent.

As actual physical books:

Ian (M.) Banks – I have a couple of these on my nighttable, waiting to be read. He never disappoints. But they are heavy, and I am tired, and once I read them they’ll be read and I won’t be able to look forward to them anymore. So they’ve sat for a while.

Jasper Fforde – recently I finished pretty much all of his oeuvre by finishing off the last two Thursday Next books (not quite as clever as the first couple in the series), the Nursery Crime books (fun but more ponderous, somehow) as well as Shades of Grey. They’re all well worth a read. I somehow came across Shades of Grey as an audiobook after I’d read it in paper, and I liked it rather more as an audiobook. Not sure why. It was very well read, anyway.

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. I wasn’t crazy about this one; I think his reach exceeded his grasp somewhat. Great universe, great concepts, but the plot and characters didn’t do much for me. The supposed cleverness overreached the actual content, IMO.

Anyway, there’s a brief overview of my recent fictional explorations.

M: I have a new book for school — Anne of Green Gables.

Me: Oh, that’s a good one. I like that book.

M: That girl talks way too much. She’s like [friend's name] when she’s tired, all talk talk talk talk talk talk blah blah blah.

Me: Well, hon, you have been known to talk rather a lot yourself, you know.

M: Well, when I’m complaining, yes.

I had the feeling I wasn’t actually reading much nonfiction lately, but looking at the piles on my floor and the history of my library borrowings that isn’t actually true. I didn’t read any nonfiction in the first few months of this year since I was working really insane hours to do 36 projects at once and in the fifteen minutes before collapsing into bed each night I needed exceedingly fluffy fiction that offered my poor brain no challenges whatsoever, but since then the nonfiction has picked up again.

At one point recently I was simultaneously reading:

1. Bill Bryson, Home
2. Keith Richards, My Life
3. Nigel Slater, Tender (Vols I & II): A Cook and His Vegetable Patch and A Cook’s Guide to the Fruit Garden.

This caused a friend to comment:

There’s probably a mash-up to be written that involves shooting up locally grown heroin in a perfectly restored English country house.

…which I have to admit I’d probably read and enjoy, if it existed.

The Bryson is a sort of rambling history of the theory of various kinds of housing and building in Britain, in Bill Bryson’s usual style. It’s a decent overview if you haven’t much knowledge of the area already; if you do it’s a non-challenging, competent review with his usual particular attention to quirk, humour and oddity. His comment that after the Romans left, the inhabitants of Britain pretty much gave up on the whole concept of comfort and haven’t ever really regained it does, I think, ring true and certainly explains British plumbing.

The Keef is his autobiography. It isn’t exactly linear but it is great fun. Plus, pictures!

And Nigel, bless him, has provided me with more fruit and vegetable recipes than I’ll ever be likely to get through, although he does have that odd British instinct to boil things and although the recipes contain mysterious — to my North American eye — ingredients such as gammon and groundnut oil (which I’m sure are things already in my kitchen, but under different names, but do I ever remember to Google them?). His fruits and veggies have effusive personalities. His quinces simper, they’re both exotic and erotic, and don’t get him started on plums.

Other things in the “recent” pile:

Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point. A nicely written rumination on various environmental issues. Lots of anecdote that helps bring abstract points somewhere we can touch.

Peter H. Gleick, Bottled & Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water. I can never understand why people spend money buying — and oil packaging and transporting — water, so I didn’t learn much from this book but had my biases reconfirmed and added a few good anecdotes to my repertoire. Worth a read.

Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks and Big Pharma Flacks – Covers bad science of several different stripes. This book got good reviews, but I think it was short on necessary detail and explanation. It assumed the reader knew a lot of what it was purporting to explain, to my eye. Preaching to the converted, as it were. An entertaining rant if your science is already good; possibly a bit frustrating otherwise. As it was aimed at the general reader I don’t think it quite hit the mark. Perhaps I am wrong.

James Howard Kunstler, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition. If you were just starting out reading about cities/urban development/etc. — AFTER you read Jane Jacobs’ excellent and very readable The Death and Life of Great American Cities (do not groan, it really is a good book) — this wouldn’t be a bad book to start with, so long as you don’t mind a certain amount of profanity. I love Kunstler; he’s extremely low-bullshit and his hyperbole is very expressive. Here’s a bit from his chapter on Atlanta (which, it may be obvious, he does not like):

There was, however, at the same time, a gathering recognition among the prospering classes that the development explosion of the past thirty-odd years around Atlanta had begun to produce diminishing returns, as the geeks in econ might say, tending toward a decrease in the quality of life–to use the kind of euphemistic, understated, neutral language that was commonly employed to describe the fucking mess that even hardcore suburban growth cheerleaders, in their narcotic raptures of consumerism and gourmet coffee, had begun to dimly apprehend. … Routine midday trips to the supermarket now required the kind of strategic planning used in military resupply campaigns under wartime conditions. Mothers with children were spending so many hours on chauffeuring duty that they qualified for livery licenses. Motorists were going mad, literally, behind the wheel–one berserker tired of waiting at an intersection shot out the signal light with a handgun.

Look up his TED talks if you’d like to get a sense of his style before committing to a whole book.

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. This one is an audiobook that’s been lurking on my iPod for longer than I’d like to admit. I keep making it about four chapters in, and it’s interesting, but it needs more concentration than I can manage in audiobook circumstances. Not that it’s not good – it is! (Well, up to Chapter 4 anyway.) It’s just that I tend to listen to audiobooks when I need half my attention to be elsewhere and this book asks for more than that. I have a few long plane trips coming up; perhaps that will finally get me to Chapter 5.

Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Vintage Lewis; he uses a half-dozen stories to help illustrate and explain the causes behind the recession. A bit sensationalistic but very readable, full of well-done explanation and not at all dull.

On my library hold list:

Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. The anti-vaccination thing drives me mad; it’s such a result of first-world complacency and scientific illiteracy. This book has good reviews and I’m hoping to be able to recommend it to people.

Ken Greenberg, Walking Home: the Life and Lessons of a City Builder. Apparently city issues are big with me lately. Or maybe there are lots of good books coming out (FINALLY) on this. Either way.

A while ago I was chatting with someone about books and bookstores and all that sort of thing and the question was asked: so, what do I read? I answered rather stupidly — “um, not bestsellers” or somesuch — but it did remind me that I’ve fallen out of the habit of posting about books, so I’ll start to correct that now.

What do I read? The honest answer is, anything that holds still long enough for my eyes to focus on it. But I don’t have a lot of time (and even less money) for physical books, so — while I’m being honest here — I’ll admit that most of my “reading” lately has been either children’s books or audiobooks. (Although I was recently given some excellent books for my birthday, which I’m very much enjoying and which I will talk about later.)

I read a lot of kids’ books because my daughter brings them home and she has pretty fun taste in books. I like to get a sense of what she likes so I can buy her books she’ll enjoy. Given the amount of travelling she does each summer, I like to send her and/or whoever’s flying with her with lots of new books. Also, she’s a Talker so it helps to have read what she’s read if I would like to understand much of what she’s telling me.

So on that front, I can recommend Patricia C. Wrede’s four Enchanted Forest books, which have dragons and princesses and things but which are far more clever than that brief summary implies. The protagonist in the first book is a princess who flees to the dragons in search of a less vapid life and then has to explain to dozens of would-be rescuers that no, she does NOT wish to be rescued and would prefer to remain Chief Cook and Librarian to the dragons, thankyouverymuch. They’re quite fun. Fast reads in book form, and well done as full-cast audiobooks as well.

I’ve also dipped into the Dear Canada books. D calls them Canadian History Propaganda books, which is fair. M has been bringing them home from the library of her own accord. It’s a whole serious of deeply wholesome books purporting to be diaries of girls at various points in Canadian history. These I find a bit tedious but M loves them and they’re not horrible. Faint praise, but there you go. Harmless stuff.

Collectively we’ve also been enjoying the How to Train Your Dragon series, which are full of goofiness and farting and so on. The sample sentences in Dragonese are worth the price of admission.

The child has also enjoyed Kenneth Oppel’s bat books. I’ve only read the first one, and I admit I bought it for M on the basis of 1 degree of separation from Ken Oppel plus good reviews, but they are indeed good books. M’s read all of them and they led to much swooping about and pretending to be a bat, which I enjoyed much more than the princess phase, so there you go.

Drive: A road trip through our complicated affair with the automobile
by Tim Falconer

Falconer talks about the history of automobiles, Detroit then and now, car culture, the quirks of traffic, urban sprawl, and much more, all structured around a long road trip of his own. Somehow he manages to treat all the various viewpoints with great sympathy and doesn’t shy away from that word complicated in the title.

His topics range from the expected:

Most people equate automobiles with freedom, and the more they have, the greater the independence, but the executive director of DU’s Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute doesn’t see it that way. “Owning three cars is enslavement,” he told me, citing all the time and money needed to maintain vehicles. “If we walk or bike, we can be free. That, in fact, is more freedom than being forced to buy three cars.” (p.211)

to thought-provoking side-effects of urban sprawl:

it dawned on me that sprawl encourages impaired driving. People heading out for a night on the town, or even a dinner that includes a bottle of wine, don’t want to take a cab because they can’t flag one at the end of the night — and they have to travel so far they couldn’t afford the fare anyway. So they drink and drive. (p. 141)

In an appendix it contains an amusing playlist of car tunes, which is really an indispensable part of any road trip. Nicely done.

These are great words! It would be a shame to lose them, even if they are obscure.

Abstergent: Cleansing
Agrestic: Rural
Apodeictic: Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration
Caducity: Perishableness
Caliginosity: Dimness
Compossible: Possible in coexistence with something else
Embrangle: To confuse
Exuviate: To shed
Fatidical: Prophetic
Fubsy: Squat
Griseous: Somewhat grey
Malison: A curse
Mansuetude: Gentleness
Muliebrity: The condition of being a woman
Niddering: Cowardly
Nitid: Bright
Olid: Foul-smelling
Oppugnant: Combative
Periapt: An amulet
Recrement: Refuse
Roborant: Tending to fortify
Skirr: A whirring sound, as of the wings of birds in flight
Vaticinate: Prophesy
Vilipend: To treat with contempt

I particuarly like compossible, fubsy, niddering and the especially onomatopoeic skirr.

7: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – Marcel Proust

Yes, yes, he tasted a biscuit that made him think of childhood, we’ve all done that. If I want to remember my childhood I look at some photographs.

– from Richard Wilson’s 10 books not to read before you die, a list extracted from his book Can’t Be Arsed: 101 Things Not to Do Before You Die.

Very refreshing — I’m unspeakably happy to find someone else who was bored spitless by Hemingway. I disagree about Lord of the Rings, not that I ever made it past the interminable trudging through forest in the middle of the second book — but I would cheerfully go to Peter Gabriel concerts and did read Dune (which mostly sucked). And I did like Pride and Prejudice.

Mighty Girl’s blog post Eight Books That Changed Things For Me got me thinking. Thinking, really, less about what books have changed things for me than whether it was far too embarrassing to publish such a list. So many of them are shallow and rather silly. But what the hey.

In rough chronological order:

1. James Clavell, Shogun

I bought this at a garage sale (for $0.50) when I was eight and devoured it. Goofy as it sounds it was the first epic I encountered, and wow! It totally opened my mind to the possibilities of stories based more in human relationships and grand circumstances than in the simpler plots of children’s lit. I followed it up (as I recall) with The Thorn Birds, that huge novel with a one-word title where small children are fed to Baal via a stone statue, the Old Testament, and the full North and South series. Whoo.

2. Sigmund Freud, a book the title of which I cannot remember

When I was nine or so it was a particularly hot summer. There were three rooms in our house that were air-condiditioned: my parents’ bedroom, my dad’s office, and the sun porch. There were no bookshelves on the sun porch and I could hardly hang around my parents’ bedroom, so I spent a bunch of time reading all the books on my dad’s office shelves (Dad’s a psychiatrist). I eventually read this book either by or about Freud, which had much detail about penis envy and whatnot. I think — and this is a wonderful credit to both my parents — that it was the first time I truly absorbed that some people thought rather little of women.

I confronted my dad: “you don’t believe all this penis envy stuff, do you?” He said something mollifying about it being a classic upon which more modern theories of psychiatry and the brain were based, and he added in a tone of true bewilderment that things might be otherwise, “I can’t imagine not wanting everything in the world for my daughters”. Go, Dad! xxxooo.

I read the Odyssey that summer too (in translation, obviously) but it didn’t make half so strong an impression.

3. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This was on a summer reading list for my new school the year I moved to Vancouver and I chose it purely based on the title. I was fifteen, which was about perfect in retrospect. My first foray into the land of abstraction, into books with ideas beyond plot, and where they could take you.

It’s good for bit-by-bit reading on canoe trips — I dragged my copy around a fair amount when I worked as a canoe tripper. I still like to read it in the woods from time to time although I now realize it’s badly dated. Cities aren’t good for it.

4. John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

In the middle of university I sort of kind of accidentally ended up on the literary review, although I was very much a science student (long story, but the previous year the review failed to cut the pages of the thing and urged us to “do violence to the text”. We did.). Frustrated by my inability to express why exactly I liked some poems that were submitted to the review and not others, I expressed this to boyfriend-of-the-time, who happened to be an Classics and English major, and he loaned me his copy of this book.

This is the only English textbook I’ve encountered that actually added to my appreciation of any form of writing instead of diminishing it. Totally changed my approach to not only poetry but prose as well. If we dispensed with the vast majority of high school English classes and replaced them with this book, the world would be a better place. And students would be much happier. To borrow Melle‘s current tagline:

“Storytelling reveals meaning without the error of defining it.”

– Hannah Arendt

It’s out of print, of course.

5. Lynn Crosbie (ed.), The Girl Wants To: Women’s Representations of Sex and the Body

Well hey. A collection of erotica that is actually varied and interesting. Who knew that existed? Not me when I found this book late in undergrad, that’s for sure.

6. Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

Here, Griffin provides a psychology of war and violence, examining in particular how the denial and secrecy surrounding these events affects personal lives. As examples, she explores the lives of the families of workers on the Los Alamos project and at Oak Ridge, the background and psyche of Heinrich Himmler, the life of a British soldier in the Boer War and World War I, and Gandhi’s resistance to violence and oppression. These are interwoven with autobiographical narrative that illustrate the effects of family denial and secrecy.

This was a required text for one of my grad school classes. We all read it and absolutely failed to discuss it afterward in any coherent way.

“It was –”
“I know! and then it was like….”
“Me too.”
“Yeah, totally.”
(long pause)
“Yeah.”

A book that is felt more than it is read, I think. Every time I’ve loaned this book to someone they’ve stolen it.

7. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance

This book made it obvious to me that I was essentially pagan at heart, although without the benefit of Californian beaches and redwood groves in which to conduct complex rituals and with rather more Buddhist tendencies and a seriously non-foofy approach.

I was doing research for my Master’s at the time. Taking things back to first principles, I ended up researching religions (because you need to base how you handle the Earth’s resources in a system that people will understand and accept). In one class I bemoaned the fact that libraries didn’t seem to carry pagan books at all, and a very generous colleague lent me a number of books including (IIRC) this one. Thanks again, Lynna!

For the record, many pagans and most Native American cultures have it right, Earth-wise.

8. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

I’ve posted about this book before, I know, but it really is a good one. I can’t remember whether I read it before or after Jacobs’ (and my) involvement with Citizens for Local Democracy, but it doesn’t much matter. Read it and you’ll not look at cities, or your neighbourhood, in the same way ever again. And it is such a wonderful read.

–

So there’s eight, but I’m sure there are a bunch of runners-up — off the top of my head, Margaret Atwood’s Edible Woman, Catcher in the Rye, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade…

I just listened to the unabridged audiobook of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The story of London’s most terrifying epidemic, and how it changed cities, science and the modern world.

It is the summer of 1854. Cholera has seized London with unprecedented intensity. A metropolis of more than 2 million people, London is just emerging as a one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure necessary to support its dense population – garbage removal, clean water, sewers – the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure.

As their neighbors begin dying, two men are spurred to action: the Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose faith in a benevolent God is shaken by the seemingly random nature of the victims, and Dr. John Snow, whose ideas about contagion have been dismissed by the scientific community, but who is convinced that he knows how the disease is being transmitted. In a riveting day-by-day account, The Ghost Map chronicles the outbreak’s spread and the desperate efforts to put an end to the epidemic – and solve the most pressing medical riddle of the age.

It’s the kind of history I particularly enjoy, with lots of discussion of customs, beliefs, and real people’s lives and activities. Johnson combines that with a good mystery and well-articulated explanations of science both current and historical — it’s a very well-put-together and gripping book.

Plus, read this book and you get to have fun dinner-table exchanges like this:

Me: Did you know that in 1850s London it was so expensive to get someone to empty your cesspool that one in twenty houses didn’t bother and just let their basements fill up with poop? One in twenty!
D: Don’t ever tell me anything else from that book.
Me: What? I waited until you were done eating!

Yes, with its extensive discussions of sewers, cesspools, smells, miasmas, anaesthetic-free surgeries, and the hideous sufferings of cholera victims, this is definitely not a book to listen to while doing anything involving food or while experiencing a bout of hypochondria. Might be good for inducing urges to clean things, though.

In the last few chapters Johnson expounds at great length about modern disasters, the uses of modern technology, and how we might proceed to avoid these. It’s competently done but since the mystery mentioned in the book’s title has by this point in the book been solved, there’s no plot to hold one’s interest. This extra material — although tangentially related — feels out of place. The book would be stronger if this material were omitted, although it might make for an interesting series of shorter essays. This weaker last section certainly doesn’t ruin the very strong majority of the book, however.

Don’t you want to know all kinds of sordid details about what it’s like to live in a city of 2 million before the advent of proper sewers, public health, or anaesthesia? Of course you do. It’ll make you feel eversomuch better about your own circumstances and give you a whole new appreciation for your toilet.

LIT 101 CLASS IN THREE LINES OR LESS.

1984

WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats.

They’re all pretty good — I’ll only quote the one, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Paradise Lost are also excellent.

(http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/challenge-5-mother)

I cheerfully tossed Andrea Buchanan’s Mother shock : loving every (other) minute of it and (perhaps less cheerfully) Susan Wicklund’s This common secret : my journey as an abortion doctor on my library hold list, intending to review one or the other. Neither of them has yet turned up, but coincidentally the library coughed up Identical Strangers: A memoir of twins separated and reunited instead and it is certainly a book that approaches the concept of “mother” from many angles.

Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein were given up at birth and were adopted into separate families, possibly because the adoption clinic’s consulting psychiatrist believed it was better for twins to be separated and possibly for the much less altruistic reason that she wanted to study certain aspects of heritability. The families were never told the children were twins, and it isn’t discovered until Elyse — in her 30s — embarks on a search for her birth mother.

You can imagine the issues of identity of self, of the family in which you were raised, of the family you’re now raising, of how to negotiate the new relationship with your twin, that would arise if out of the blue in your 30s it arose that not only did you have an identical twin, but the two of you may have been part of a bizarrely unethical scientific experiment.

Both twins write with amazing honesty (they alternate passages, so their individual voices remain distinct) about their experiences — I’m impressed that they were willing to put so much openness into their writing. It makes the book one part ruminations about self, family, and motherhood and one part mystery — why were they separated? Who was their mother anyway? It would be hard to say more without tossing in spoilers, so I’ll leave it at that. Recommended.

(http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/challenge-4-beauty/)

Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery
by Alex Kuczynski

The initial tone of this book is wildly uncritical — she skims quickly past the notions that half the American population isn’t comfortable with their looks and are subjected to a constant barrage of images of surgically-sculpted perfection and gets right into the how-to without a backward glance at the deeper issues. Kuczynski is a journalist, not a scientist or an investigator, and she clearly goes for sensationalism over depth or meaning. For example, she leaves uncommented this interview with Dr. Suzanne Lepine, a Manhattan specialist in cosmetic surgery for, of all things, feet:

We live in a fifteen-second culture,” she said. “That’s how long it takes, I believe, for a man to look at you and decide if he will be in love with you. That is it. And if you’re wearing stiletto sandals and your feet look like hell, he’s not even going to give you the time of day.”

A man won’t love you, Levine reasons, or even give himself the chance of falling in love with you, if you have a bunion peeping out of your $500 evening sandal. Tough town, I said.

“Tough town, that’s for sure,” she said. “It sets its own standards. People overreact. I had one woman come in who wanted me to do liposuction of the toe. I mean, that’s even over the top for me.”

What happened to the patient?

“I told her to go see a shrink instead,” Levine said.

When I left, Levine asked me if I knew any good single men.

Yikes. Talk about the need for a psychiatrist and a smack upside the head with a book on feminist theory. To be clear: if a man rejects you on the basis of fifteen seconds’ worth of gazing at your unpedicured, unsculpted toes, your foot should be applied swiftly to his ass as you boot him out the door, not taken to a surgeon. (But I digress.)

In later chapters Kuczynski does a reasonable job at covering the risks of surgery and gives a fairly impassioned schpeel on the need for potential clients to check the qualifications of their putative surgeons; she doesn’t skip discussion of the risks at all. Still, she doesn’t ever really address anything beyond the who, what, how, and how much money of plastic surgery — the background societal issues remain unexamined. Which, to be fair, is probably beyond what might reasonably be expected from this book: Kuczynski set out to explore the world of plastic surgery, and given that parameter she’s done a fine job. It’s a very decent factual piece which would make a respectable accompaniment to some deeper analysis.

From an introduction to a biography:

After he died, I was interviewed a lot, asked about Douglas. I said that I didn’t think that he had ever been a novelist, not really, despite having been an internationally best-selling novelist who had written several books which are, a quarter of a century later, becoming seen as classics. Writing novels was a profession he had backed into, or stumbled over, or sat down on very suddenly and broken.

I think that perhaps what Douglas was was probably something we don’t even have a word for yet. A Futurologist, or an Explainer, or something. That one day they’ll realise that the most important job out there is for someone who can explain the world to itself in ways that the world won’t forget. Who can dramatise the plight of endangered species as easily (or at least, as astonishingly well, for nothing Douglas did was ever exactly easy) as he can explain to an analog race what it means to find yourself going digital. Someone whose dreams and ideas, practical or impractical, are always the size of a planet, and who is going to keep going forward, and taking the rest of us with him.

I thought I’d read about the craft of writing for this month’s challenge.

Quotation of the Day for March 19, 2008

“I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”

- William Gibson, writer

I don’t think William Gibson’s quite nailed it. If I sat and wrote for as long as the average person watches television I still doubt there’d be much in there that would be publishable — and if there were, it would be nonfiction almost certainly.

The art and craft of fiction writing is mysterious. All the authors in the book I read — Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times — pretty much agree. Nobody could, or would admit to, the faintest inkling of where their ideas come from. Some sit each day and study others’ writing, some meditate, some follow their dog around — it’s all very entertaining to contemplate — but the headwaters of the stream of fiction remain a pleasing mystery.

From the book’s essays, I think Kent Haruf (p.89) comes closest to a cogent explanation of the craft of writing:

Still, I have to say, writing is all messier and more a matter of dead ends and fits and starts than a recitation like this one makes it out to be. And perhaps because writing fiction — this weird practice of telling artful lies, this peculiar habit of inventing imaginary people who talk and move and sleep and dream and wake up and kick and kiss one another — is so bizarre in itself is the reason why writers have to find bizarre ways to make it possible even to consider doing it.

So of course they have to write in their underwear and face the backs of dressers. Of course they have to pull stocking caps down over their faces. Otherwise they might as well do something practical and ordinary, become doctors and lawyers and ditch diggers like everyone else.

Thursday evening I excavate M’s backpack and pull out two Magic Tree House books which she has chosen to bring home from the school library.

Stories!

We’ve had week after week after week after week of educational nonfiction books about sea creatures. It’s entirely karmically appropriate given my own childhood reading preferences that I am now forced to spend hours reading aloud to my child about the digestive habits of sea cucumbers (in my professional zoological opinion, sea cucumbers are gross) and the locomotion methods used by brittle stars. But after months of contemplating the many uses and flavours of plankton I’m all OK, OK, I REPENT! PLEASE BRING ME SOMETHING WITH A PLOT!

I check out the Magic Tree House books. Nice — they look good, mostly fairly simple words with the odd challenging word (“sympathetically” for example) tossed in for interest and — oh thank you thank you — an actual plot.

Me: “Hey, these look great. Tell you what. I’ll read one to you and you’ll read one to me.” We have two weeks before they’re due and they’re pretty short books so I figure even if we crawl through them we stand a decent chance of finishing.

M: “I CAN’T READ CHAPTER BOOKS. THEY’RE TOO HARD.”

Me: “Nonsense. They have the very same words in them as all your other books and you read those just fine. We’ll give it a try. I’ll help you if you get stuck and if it gets too frustrating we’ll stop. The rule in your class is ‘try your best,’ right?”

After much fussing and resistance — TOO HARD! CAN’T! WON’T! SHAN’T! TOO HARD! — she picks the one about pirates. She climbs into the Reading Seat (a special recliner-cushion with armrests that lives on the foot of her bed and is only sat in by The Reader) and off we go. I mentally hold my breath.

But not for long. Four effortless pages and lots of positive reinforcement later I stop her only because it’s getting late and I don’t want her to get so tired she starts to fade. Plus it only seems fair that I do some reading too after she’s done all that great work. So I read a bit of the other book, one about an earthquake, and tuck her in for the night.

7am Friday, my alarm goes off. I curse at it as usual and then there’s this little voice from the other room:

“Mommy, are you talking in your sleep?”

“No, sweetie, I’m awake. Sort of. Not very. I was just shouting at the mean alarm clock for waking me up.”

…”Can I come do some more reading for you?”

The February challenge was to read and review a book about “heart”.

I intended to flake out with a fluffy and enjoyable romance but Telling Tales: Living the Effects of Public Policy (Sheila Neysmith, Kate Bezanson, Anne O’Connell, 2005) came up in my library hold queue and having read it I can’t think of a better book about heart.

The book is the final product of a three-year study which followed forty very diverse (in geography, income, ethnicity, generational makeup, etc.) Ontario households through the late 90s, interviewing them repeatedly and hearing in the participants’ own words the effects of the Mike Harris government’s policies on the participants’ lives. I read one of the early reports (c.1998) so I was very interested in the final results.

It’s about the lack of heart, really, and (although they don’t say so in so many words) the bloody-minded pointless punitiveness of the government of the day. They were elected on a platform of supposed fiscal conservatism and tax cuts, but let’s take one example from the book to see how that plays out for taxpayers. (Edited to add: this math and conjecture is mine; it isn’t from the book, although the book does include the descriptive bits I’ve mentioned below about Teresa’s situation.)

Teresa was a disabled young woman who had trained as a vet tech, but could no longer do that work because of her disability. Before the Harris government came in she was on welfare and was being retrained through the Vocational Rehabilitation Service as a medical secretary — IMO a good, suitable job for her. It would have built on her existing intelligence and skills and it is a job which allows part-time / temporary / intermittent work (because her disability might not permit her to work full-time).

Let us assume Teresa is 30 and let us assume that, because of her disability, she dies fairly young, say at 60. Let us also assume that for fifteen of her remaining years she is on welfare or doing her retraining, unable to work, so we only get fifteen years’ work out of her. Are we making a good investment in her retraining?

First, let’s give her welfare at $12,000 per year for two years for her living expenses while she finishes her college course. $24,000. But since she’ll stay on disability benefits forever unless she is retrained, she would’ve cost us this $12,000 per year even if she were not going to school so it comes out even with a permanent-welfare scenario.

Next, let’s give her tuition and books at $5,000/year. Another $10,000.

But then let’s assume that when she’s working she’s either covered or able to pay for her drugs and assistive devices herself. So we don’t have to pay for drug coverage in those years. Our total investment so far is still $10,000 additional dollars of public money.

However, during the fifteen years she does work, let’s assume she makes about $18,000 a year, and that she then pays, conservatively, 10% of that — $1,800/year — in taxes. We’ve now recouped $27,000 on an investment of $10,000 for a total profit of $17,000. Not a bad deal.

Not all of those dollars will go to the province but never mind; they’re tax dollars and I the taxpayer am happy they’re being received by whatever level of government receives them. During her working years Teresa will also be spending an additional $4,200 per year ($18,000 minus $1,800 in taxes minus the $12,000 we would’ve given her in welfare) in the community and that has further positive knock-on effects for the economy.

The Tories, naturally, cancelled the Vocational Rehabilitation Service when they came into office, so this fairly pleasant scenario never happened. Instead, they changed the rules so that you could no longer receive social assistance while also receiving OSAP. And if you took OSAP (which is not enough to pay for living expenses even for an able-bodied person) you lost not only your welfare but your drug card and your access to the assistive devices fund and all other supports. Teresa had to drop out of her course and apply for permanent disability benefits in order to retain her drug- and assistive-device benefits and thus remain alive.

Now since we’re kicking Teresa to the curb to save money, what kind of costs are we looking at?

First let’s assume that for fifteen years we come out even with the retraining scenario because Teresa would have been on welfare or doing her retraining during those years anyway.

Second, let’s be cruel and assume Teresa now saves us some money and dies at 55 instead of 60, because welfare is very bad for people’s health.

So she’s on welfare for 10 years beyond the 15 in the retraining scenario.

At $1,000 per month, which is roughly the disability benefit amount, we’re in for $120,000. Add in a conservative $100/month for drugs, and add in 5 instances of assistive-device replacement at a conservative $500 each time. Total: $134,500.

Let’s compare: $17,000 in public profit and a happy and productive client vs. a cost of $134,500 and a whole lot of misery. It makes no fiscal or logical sense.

Multiply this scenario by the thousands of people who were affected by these “cost-cutting” policy changes.

As one fairly well-off study participant noted on pp.97-98,

I have come to realize that we are living in an historical context where decision-makers are saying through their actions that we — as a society — are no longer responsible for vulnerable people. I find that very disturbing. There is something wrong with that kind of society.

Oh, and about those famous, precious tax cuts? p.166:

Not a single household spoke about the benefit of tax cuts as a buffer or replacement for needed services and employment opportunities.

You see what I mean about heart?

By David Rakoff

Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a series of Rakoff’s essays on the simultaneous pleasantness and embarrassing excess of modern American life — as it says on the cover, “the indignities of coach class, the torments of low thread count, the never-ending quest for artisanal olive oil, and other First World problems”. It’s presented as satire, but while he freely skewers trends and American society as a whole, he’s often surprisingly gentle to individuals (with the notable exceptions of himself and Karl Lagerfeld) — more “awwww” than “ooh, that must hurt”. On a man who has the peculiar and thankless job of working for an advocacy group of gay Republicans:

It is Guerriero who has used the word “bearable” numerous times over the course of our lunch, always to justify his remaining in the job. My delusions are of a different, somewhat patronizing variety. Looking across the table, I keep thinking that Guerriero will take off the mask at any moment. Here we are, after all, away from the dreary office, both gay, enjoying a sprightly conversation about politics without rancor or name-calling. At some point, he will see the futility of trying to fight for gay rights within the Republican Party and off we’ll go to the nearest independent bookstore (with a brief stop at the Phillips Collection to see its wonderful Edward Hoppers) to buy Al Franken’s latest tome, all the while laughingly shaking our heads at Guerriero’s misguided, delusional episode working for Satan. What I am feeling about Guerriero has been felt about intelligent, handsome, confirmed bachelors such as him from time immemorial. I am thinking: I can change him.

If it’s biting satire you’re looking for, this isn’t it. But he writes well and it’s a very pleasant read.

If Mark Morford can come up with 29 things to be happy about, I imagine I can too.

1. Central heating and a non-leaky roof. I’ve spent enough time living in tents that I really grok the utter luxury that is the concept of Inside. Get wet? No problem; you can go inside where it’s warm and dry off. If you’re living in a tent it may be days before you stop experiencing pervasive shivery damp.
2. On a related note — dry feet. There are many lovely benefits to outdoors work, but the all-day-every-day wearing of sodden hiking boots and sodden wool socks is not one of them. Pull the socks off at the end of the day and casual observers seeing only your feet might place bets on how long your corpse had been underwater. Dry feet are a great, great thing.
3. xkcd
   
4. RSS. O how very much time this saves.
5. Cleo the MacBook. This is far and away the most pleasant computer I’ve ever used. Pretty, too.
6. Zappos Canada. As of this moment they have 1233 women’s shoes in a 6.5WW. As opposed to any local stores which have, in round numbers, zero such shoes.
7. The wonderful women of WNET, who tell me about things like the existence of Zappos. And who give great advice about absolutely anything. And who tell really dirty jokes.
8. Webkinz World. Totally cute and harmless little games and Sims-like rooms to decorate for the online versions of Webkinz stuffed animals. Uh, I only do it to help out my kid (hrmph).
9. Catbeasts. I mean, check out the wildly goofy expression on Elwood here as he (very inconveniently) bites through the window blind’s cord:
10. The library. The lovely library robot phones me when my holds are in, I pick them up, then when I’ve read something I can give it back instead of having to wedge it into my overstuffed bookshelves. All for free! This is very happy-making.
11. Borax. Can’t beat it for getting the euphemistic “pet odors” out of stuff.
12. Friends who blog for an entire year without once requiring the invocation of Godwin’s Law or any of its corollaries.
13. Seven years ago at work we had a videoconference link to one single other location. It cost upwards of $5k. If the video worked, the sound didn’t and vice versa. Today I can download Skype and get a great audio+video connection for absolutely free. Now we’re getting something close to acceptable 21st-century technology.
14. iPods are pretty nice bits of technology too. Thousands of songs, several dozen audiobooks, half a dozen movies, a few hundred podcasts and some random photos and mine is now barely half-full. Subway delay? OK, I’ll watch another podcast. Overseas flight? Hah, no problem. Feeling evil? Put on the Feeling Evil playlist. An iPod and a library (see above) mean you can pack a whole lot of entertainment into remarkably little physical space.
15. My local bra shop. If you are neither shy nor modest, they make bra shopping supremely efficient. Take off your top, let the woman eye and measure your goods, and hey presto she brings you a small selection of bras which magically fit and are not ruinously expensive. Next time, pull the bedraggled remnants of last year’s purchase from your purse and she is a) unfazed and b) able to both recognize it and produce a new version for your immediate purchase. Contrast: go to The Bay, wander about randomly, end up in the change room under fluorescent lights with 15 bras in various sizes, one of which fits but is ugly. Ugh.
16. Dread Zeppelin. Led Zep done in reggae style by an Elvis impersonator. Too silly.
17. CBC Radio 3 (warning: sound). No better place to hear good Canadian indie music.
18. Strindberg + helium
19. Scrabulous. If the Scrabble people have any brains whatsoever they’ll cut them a sweet licensing deal and call it good, because they’ve absolutely nailed the online Scrabble concept.
20. Common Craft’s Explanations in Plain English videos. They use markers, bits of paper, and Lee Lefever’s hands and they are brilliant.
    
    
    Click To Play
21. Butterflies
22. The Shape of a Mother
23. The heated floor in our bathroom, and the programmable thermostat that makes sure it is warm by the time I get up in the morning. Worth.Every.Penny.
24. Champagne
25. Large Canadian Roadside Attractions
26. All those pocket knives and oh-so-dangerous tiny embroidery scissors confiscated by the airplane police? You can buy them in big lots on eBay. Need 40 pairs of cuticle scissors, a batch lot of corkscrews or 20 pounds of multitools? The NTSA will auction them to you for cheap, so you’ll have extras next time they nick the one you’d forgotten at the bottom your purse.
27. Online versions of old Infocom games.
28. Married to the Sea:
    
29. Chocolate. Chocolate is definitely a happy thing.

And there it is. 29 things to be happy about. Much easier to compose than 88 lines about 44 women, too.

–

*: approximately. HTML makes an exact count tricky while I’m writing, so I expect I’ll end up with a couple of quick edits to add or remove items. Or I could be less of a write-in-code person and turn on the graphic interface, I suppose.

Naaah.

(I’m a bit late with this review, but I plead work-related travel.)

The January challenge was to read & review a book on the theme of time. I rather randomly chose Madeleine L’Engle’s An Acceptable Time off a shelf of kids’ fiction at the library. I remember enjoying A Wrinkle in Time when I was a child and I am always looking for books to read to M, so this seemed it might be a good candidate. A time gate to 3000 years ago opens and a teen girl gets pulled into various dramas at both ends — could be a good story!

But no, I think not. “Ponderous” sums it up. The characters are one-dimensional. The good guys are indefatigably good, the bad guys are, you know, bad, the religious guy never loses or even questions his faith, the plot is obvious and everyone speaks in the most tortured expository dialogue.

“We need more than an encyclopedia to explain Nase’s opening a time threshold.” Mr. Murry blew through a long, thin pipe and the flames flared up brightly. “And Polly’s involvement in it. It’s incomprehensible.”

“It’s not the first incomprehensible thing that’s happened in our lifetime,” his wife reminded him.

“Have things ever been as weird as this?”

Her grandmother laughed. “Yes, Polly, they have, but that doesn’t make this any less weird.”

Mr. Murry stood up creakily. “Polly’s friend Zachary strikes me as adding a new and unexpected component. Why is this comparative stranger seeing people from three thousand years ago that you and I have never seen?”

“Nobody told him about her,” Mrs. Murry said, “so he didn’t have time to put up a wall of disbelief.”

“Is that what we’ve done?”

“Isn’t it? And isn’t it what Louise has done?”

“So it would seem.”

They get dramatically upset about minor incidents and accept major oddities in passing (a dog appears through the time gate and basically the response is “[shrug] well, we needed a new dog”. Hello?). There’s some interesting science and physics mentioned but it isn’t used to advance the plot at all; everyone’s just carried along helplessly by the plot, expounding ponderously all the while.

It’s aimed at preteens, I imagine. I’m not sure how well that would work. Perhaps it’s about right. The language is reasonably high-level and so are some of the concepts mentioned, but since they have no real bearing on the plot it doesn’t much matter if they’re fully understood by the reader. Perhaps a ten-year-old would find it Deep.

by Mark Frauenfelder

At TPL
At Amazon.ca

Mark Frauenfelder (of BoingBoing fame) has done a good thing: written a book about web stuff that’s both comprehensible to those who are less experienced while still being useful to those who are more expert. It’s clearly written and well edited, with great sidebars with more information, tips, and ideas. Frauenfelder’s voice comes through clearly — the tone is “one friend to another,” not “textbook”. I didn’t learn anything new from it, really, but I enjoyed reading it. I did pick up some extraordinarily useful tips and a large number of ideas for teaching this stuff efficiently.

I’d recommend it highly — both to those who feel they’re pretty web-native and those who aren’t. The Toronto library has a few copies and not too many holds.