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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…