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.

From Try Harder
 1. Hardcover or paperback, and why?

Paperback. It’s too hard to hold hardbacks in one hand.  Plus, they hurt if you fall asleep and drop them on your nose.

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…

Probably something cheesy with “nook” in the title. I am very bad at naming things.

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…

“If God meant this here bulldozer to live He wouldn’t of filled its tank with diesel fuel. Now would He of?”

It’s Edward Abbey, but I’ll have to guess at the book — probably the Monkey Wrench Gang.

4. The author (alive or diseased) I would love to have lunch with would be

I’m going to assume “diseased” there is actually deceased so I’ll go with Patrick O’Brian.  Lunch would be cheese toast and grog.

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…

In the past we’ve accidentally taken a Collins Ready Reference into the woods in place of the SAS survival guide… they look very similar when one is packing in a hurry.  The Ready Reference is a bit small but I’d want something along those general lines, for use in quelling arguments… a big quote book or the paper version of the CIA FactBook or the OED or somesuch.

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…

Read to me until I fell asleep and then automagically stopped.

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of…

Libraries.

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…

Hmm, I’m not sure, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be Bridget Jones.  Maybe Han Solo in one of the more dashing Star Wars novels.

…No, wait. Han doesn’t get a lightsaber.  A Jedi instead, then.

9. The most overestimated book of all time is…

The Da Vinci Code.  What a lame, lame book that was.

10. I hate it when a book…

Wraps things up in the most obvious way possible.

Tagging Kelly, Too Many Quinces, Exit Pursued by a Bear, and anyone else who wants to take it up (leave your link in the comments).

Wide-eyed children of the eighties watched in astonishment as Michael J. Fox (a.k.a. Marty McFly) shredded pavement on a hovering skateboard in Back to the Future Part II. The hoverboard was just like a skateboard, but with one crucial difference: no wheels. His pink and teal board had “magnetic” pads on the bottom and with a quick push-off could silently cruise over grass, pavement, and even water. While this highly desirable piece of movie technology seems very plausible, it crushingly remains fiction. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Thank you for breaking my heart, Michael J. Fox.”

Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived

by Daniel H. Wilson

Ah, how often I’ve shouted that exact phrase. It’s the 21st century, for heaven’s sake, now WHERE IS MY JETPACK, why does my house lack a transporter room, and when do I get my robot maid? Good grief — Firefox is even flagging “jetpack” as an unknown word. This isn’t the 21st century I signed up for!

Daniel Wilson understands this frustration. (So does my husband, who saw this book and bought it for me, and who now must put up with me reading the funny bits out loud.) The book examines, with decent science and great humour, just what’s up with all this great stuff they promised us: whether it exists; if not, why not; and if so, where and how you can get your hands on it.

Though fiery explosions brought on the demise of commercial airships, a simple fact remains: Someday, the fate of the free world may rest solely upon your ability to pilot a stolen Nazi zeppelin.

Yes, Daniel Wilson understands what this is all about.

Wherever a dangerous new technology exists, there is a guy with cool goggles and streaky blond hair waiting to shatter his fibula. Totally.

(All quotes from the book.)

I always end up reading Outside magazine on airplanes. I compulsively buy it in airports. Is it just because airport newsstands have a terrible selection, forcing me to choose between Maxim and Today’s Bride before I finally spy Outside hiding behind a pillar? Maybe.

There I am jammed tightly in a tin can with a few hundred other people, breathing recirculated air, trying to keep the seat from doing permanent damage to my tailbone, and I choose to read about Everest base camp, $9500 custom bike frames, the best rivers for whitewater, and how to remove a tick from one’s boy parts*? It’s a peculiar form of masochism, like reading Gourmet while sitting in a leaky tent in the middle of a rainstorm, eating cold corn straight from the can. One might think it would work as an escape fantasy but it doesn’t — it just serves to magnify the unpleasantness of one’s current situation.

Outside is a frustrating magazine, big on swagger and the marketing of absurdly expensive gear that nobody really needs. It’s also big on large, shiny photos of hot blond boys (very few women, despite an obvious hetero-male target audience) flinging themselves and the aforementioned gear through various bits of wilderness. But once in every few issues there’s some brilliant long piece that often later gets turned into a book. So I suppose that’s my story: I Buy It For the Articles.

The articles are mostly about people vanishing, perishing, or bashing themselves up in novel ways, such as travelling economy class on Air Canada.

…Yeah, that’s it: air travel as wilderness adventure, the kind where comfort is a distant afterthought, the food is strange, and the natives are restless. I sense an article pitch in the making.

–
* the answer involves tweezers, as one might expect. Also bourbon. Reason #4003 to have internal genitalia.

Animal, vegetable, miracle: a year of food life

by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver.

It’s a simple premise for an experiment: what does it look like to spend a year eating food you’ve either produced yourself or sourced locally? The Kingsolver/Hopp family certainly aren’t the only ones who have attempted this in the past few years; the personal eco-food-adventure is becoming a bit of a genre.

Still, if it is a genre, as long as we’re spending more calories shipping food than the food itself contains (and don’t get me started about bottled water), it’s a worthwhile topic and this book is one of its better examples. Kingsolver (and her husband and oldest child, who also contribute) can write well, and she has managed to write about their experiment without the over-earnest tone common to eco-adventurers, recognizing that fifty or sixty years ago her point would have been moot. She has a sense of humour and — critical to the books success, IMO — while she is thoughtful and articulate, she doesn’t take herself too seriously.

They’re realists: they buy coffee and spices from overseas sources and the odd box of KD for one child’s school friends. They eat out sometimes. They plant too much zucchini (well, any zucchini is too much zucchini in my books). They are not vegetarian; they produce some of their own poultry and buy meat from local farmers. They don’t gloss over the amount of pure work involved in weeding and maintaining a garden large enough to feed four people for a year. However, it is, as she writes late in the book, an experiment that turns out to be about eating well instead of being about deprivation: about enjoying the crunch of spring greens and the sweetness of fresh strawberries and eggs straight from the chicken; of appreciating what is in season and of working within those natural limits.

It is also, inevitably, a book about compromise. She recognizes that it’s easy to contemplate growing your own food when you have forty acres in South Virginia, but that we all make choices in our own contexts. The extensive sidebars, references, and links give people ways to find out more should the urge strike.

Nicely done. Not so much a book to read at breakfast while munching raspberries from California and blueberries from New Jersey, though. At least my yogurt was organic and my honey was local!

Yesterday I bought myself this book, which is 400 pages of doodly goodness:

The concept is that there’s a little something on each page and an idea (“draw the people stuck at the bottom of this pit”) to get you started. Brilliant! My sister bought this and its companion volume, Scribbles, for M for Christmas and I’ve been totally coveting it ever since. My Visa points gave me a Chapters gift card, so I indulged. It’s by the guy who authored the toddler classic Everyone Poops, so how can you lose?

It’s in my office now at work, for use during meetings and conference calls. I listen about ten times better and participate much more effectively when my eyes and hands are busy, I’ve found. I can’t just sit there. Using conference calls to embroider quilt squares for my niece’s baby quilt made me realize that. Lately I’ve been using ordinary scrap paper and flipchart markers in meetings, and my little scribbles — they do actually reflect the meeting content, although they’re not proper graphic recording (I can’t draw for shit) — have several times been taken away from me at the end of the meeting to serve as notes of a sort.

I have such an insanely tolerant workplace.

Still, I should probably save the “bottom of the pit” doodle for a special occasion, or maybe year-end.

By Mary Roach

Surgery practice.
The Body Farm.
Embalming practice.
Crash tests.
Transplants.
Food.

It’s not the most appetizing collection of eventual ends to which one’s body could be put, but then (as Roach points out) none of the alternatives are all that wonderful. This book deserves its good reviews — Roach is curious and funny but accurate and always respectful. And she footnotes, which I always enjoy, being geeky that way.

Still, probably not the best read if you’re easily grossed out.

(This seems like an appropriate book to end the whole book blogging month with, but hmm, the “Search Inside” on that one is a bit disconcerting…)

By Susan Fox Rogers, ed.

Once, on a canoe trip that turned out to be more vigorous than some of the trippers were prepared for, when we finally got to the end of a long portage I was asked something along the lines of “how can anyone keep going like this?” And without thinking I said, you put one foot in front of the other, and then do it again. I’m sure the only reason I didn’t get punched is that nobody had the energy to take a good swing.

But that is what I do on nasty portages, the ones that get so bad you can’t sing, not even Stan Rogers songs: focus on one foot. Then the other. Then again. And again. I divide the task at hand into its smallest possible components — steps — and then focus 100% on each step. It helps to have a canoe on your shoulders so you can’t actually see anything other than the ground. Letting your mind wander to the pain in your left shoulder and is it worse than the sunburn on your thighs, and have you gone 1200m now or maybe 1300 which leaves 1500 no 1400, and how much exactly would you pay for a cold beer right this second, and is that another @#$%$ mosquito or just my ears buzzing? That way lies intense misery. (My way is intensely miserable too, but the misery comes in shorter moments and then you’re on to the next bit.)

This is the sort of collection that makes you want to go out and do something like that. Even if you have good clear memories of serious portage pain. It’s not all sweetness and glory in this book; a bunch of the accounts talk about struggles. A few deal with injury and death. For the most part, though, these writers excel at making whatever they’re doing sound actually do-able by normal people.

I’m a lazy tripper these days and am happy to lie about sunning myself on chunks of Canadian Shield after a whole two hours in the boat, but I read this stuff and it reminds that the hard stuff is great fun too, in its own way.

By Brian Fawcett

Brian Fawcett co-taught some required course or other that I took in grad school. There was a lot of reading — maybe two books a week — and also weekly writing assignments. Not big stuff, just reflections on various aspects of a particular topic, two or three pages long. I wrote a number of nice polite prettily-constructed essay pieces that must have been insanely boring to read. Then one week I was in a foul mood and had run out of time to do the weekly bit of writing, so in twenty minutes I dashed off a rant full of sarcasm and bile and generally mouthy personal opinion. When I got it back, there was a big “YES! MORE LIKE THIS!” scrawled across it. Very freeing.

Fawcett is just like that, I think. He likes both the rant and the intensely personal — I don’t think he has much time for the politely superficial — and he connects both to big-picture issues. In this book he’s ruminating about logging and the decline of Prince George. He likes people and places but he doesn’t flinch at the plain portrayal of truth and flaws. It can feel a little voyeuristic at times but leads to a more even balance of the good and bad, I think. He sees the complications.

By Gregory Maguire

After some reflection, I’m not sold on Maguire’s stuff (Wicked is his biggest success). I don’t mind some darkness in my fairy tales, but do they have to be corrupt and sordid as well? The concept is great — turning fairy tales inside out — but Maguire excels at repellent characters and takes any sense of fun out of the stories. They’re leaden and rather creepy, although well told.

Quite possibly I’m missing something, but they don’t do much for me.

By Alyssa Satin Capucilli (Author), Pat Schories (Illustrator)

D fell asleep on the couch this afternoon. M wanted to make everything all perfect for him, so she went down and very sweetly covered him up with her special quilt, put some books next to him for when he woke up, turned off the light, closed the door, then came upstairs and shushed me (loudly). When D woke up a bit later and came upstairs to continue his snooze, he was also treated to a teddy bear and this bedtime story — Biscuit Finds a Friend.

A stirring tale of interspecies friendship it is, too; unrealistic in that particular kids’ book way. Spoiler: Biscuit and a small duckling become friends. In reality the story would have been something like Biscuit Enjoys Ducklings for Lunch (“Woof! Woof! said Biscuit through a mouthful of feathers”) — much like Curious George and the Bunny, which is in our house often called Curious George the Opportunistic Carnivore.

I suppose we should quit that sort of nonsense soon.

You can definitely tell it’s not wartime in the kids’ books. In the forties, Biscuit would’ve neatly dispatched the duck and turned it over to the resourceful children to cook in for lunch using some clever mess-kit contraption made of tin cans and string after they started a small neat fire with a tinderbox or somesuch. “Good dog!” the children would have said, “Now we have feathers for the quilt and soup bones for Mother!”

I’m crazy tired and not up to books with actual words and plots and characters and things, so today I think I’ll stick to pretty pictures.

This is a great little map book. Very handy when we have to venture places where there might be dragons — north of Eglinton and whatnot. It’s probably neither as detailed nor as reliable as a Perly’s, but I don’t usually need that level of detail. Plus it’s only $7 and fits in my purse… it definitely fills a niche.

By Margaret Atwood

Short stories — very short, most are only a few pages. Many touch on themes of gender. Some of the best ones showcase Atwood’s needly humour, ranging from a perfect satire of PC fairy tales (There Was Once) to a sendup of gender roles (Making a Man) to a brilliant mashup of war and beauty pageants (Epaulettes):

The competition itself is divided into several categories. Each one of these is designed to appeal to the female temperament, though there has been some difficulty in determining exactly what this is. For instance, the “aroma” category — in which the condensed essences of the competitors’ sweat-socks, cigars, used tennis shirts, and so forth — had to be discontinued, as it made too many women sick. But the name-calling, muscle-flexing and cool-dressing bouts remain. So does joke-telling, since it is well known that women prefer men with a sense of humour, or so they keep telling us. In addition, a song must be sung, a dance must be danced — though a solo on the flute or cello will suffice — a skill-testing question must be answered; and each world leader must describe his favourite hobby, and declare, in a well-modulated exhibition speech, what he intends to do in future for the good of humanity. This is a popular feature, and occasions much giggling and applause.

Not all the stories are so light (An Angel, Third Handed, Death Scenes), but these needle in a different way:

(Snow angels, you’ve seen them: the cold blank shape of yourself, the outline you once filled. They too are messengers, they come from the future. This is what you will be, they say; perhaps what you are: no more than the way light falls across a given space.)

By Thomas D. Brock, ed.

My poor sick green-faced sproglet is finally sleeping, and since she’s in my bed(*) I’m trapped at my desk doing quiet things, so I’m choosing from among the books on the shelf above my desk. This book seems apropos.

Microorganisms is a good basic introductory text. Well-organized, decently written (more narrative/anecdote than usual for a science book) and with effective illustrations, it covers the last several hundred years’ thinking on this topic very efficiently. They even touch on biological weapons. Recommended for biology geeks and anyone wanting a solid background against which to assess things like anthrax threats.

*: a moment of risk and parental sacrifice: she’s quite barfy, and not very good at making the necessary run to the bathroom. This is more an unwitting sacrifice for D, I suppose, since she’s on his side (which is closer to the bathroom), but I’m the one home doing the laundry today, so.

By Adam Gopnik

Gopnik writes about his five years living in Paris.

Somehow he managed to write about it without making me hate him.

..Mostly.

By Stephen Gould

Fascinating stuff here. Stephen Gould is more often known for his natural history books aimed at casual readers (Bully for Brontosaurus and the like) — but this is not a book aimed at the general public. Wonderful Life is an exploration of the extraordinarily old, very different forms of life discovered in British Columbia’s Burgess Shale. It’s not light reading; he ventures quite deeply into evolutionary biology in both theory and practice.

Since it was written others have come forward with alternate theories for the Burgess Shale, but that hardly matters. It’s the sense of chance and fragility inherent in evolutionary processes and theory (real evolutionary theory, not the half-assed, half-understood stuff that so often appears in print) that’s this book’s lasting message.

By Atul Gawande

Gawande succeeds at conveying the art that is medicine (that is much of science, really), the combination of knowledge, past experience and plain old gut feeling that goes into any decision. It’s worth reading just to get a better understanding of how people learn to be doctors — information which might be a little startling if you don’t already have a pretty good idea about it, or at least strong suspicions.

Complications is a combination of anecdote, self-reflection and critical commentary, and it works. Worth a read.

by Pete McCarthy

McCarthy’s Eighth Rule of Travel is that you should never pass a bar with your name on it. So for that among other more complex reasons, off he goes to Ireland.

Everyone else seems to find this book much funnier than I did. That’s not to say it isn’t funny — it has some hilarious set-pieces and observations — but it’s inconsistent. McCarthy moves between travelogue, commentary on the less savory effects of tourism, and musings on ancestry and place; the result gives a good picture of Ireland, to be sure, but it feels uneven.

Nonetheless his Rules of Travel are worth remembering, particularly No. 1, On Arrival, Buy a Local Paper and Go For a Drink, and No. 17: Never Try and Score Dope from Hasidic Jews While Under the Impression They’re Rastafarians.

By Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay’s writing gets a little purple in spots and the drama can tend to melodrama. He’s good at both character and storyline creation, though, so his books are fun despite the occasional soppy spots.

The Summer Tree is the first book in the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, which is an alternate-reality re-telling of the Camelot story. Hmm, that makes it sound dippier than it is. It’s nicely done. And anyone who went to U of T might enjoy the Toronto bits.

By Neil Stephenson

Who can resist a book starring a character named Hiro Protagonist?

I’m normally kind of meh on Neal Stephenson. Some of his other books, while they have wonderfully imagined alternate realities, are a little low on plot. Not a problem here. It moves. The characters are fun. The Mafia control pizza delivery. What else can I say?