Booksnobbery

I can be a bit of a book snob.

I'm not proud of it, but I judge non-readers pretty harshly. There are people out there who say things like "I don't read", and they don't seem to think that it's a serious hole in their lives, which is very difficult for me to understand.

Books are, for me, a necessity. Since the day I was able to read Grover At The Farm all by myself, I have been reading. I have a quick link to my library's website on my Firefox toolbar, and I choose new purses based primarily on their size, because they must have enough space for an average hardcover. I have read hundreds of books, from classics to to sci-fi to non-fiction on almost any topic, and I've got a "to-read" shelf (currently growing online at Goodreads.com) that never seems to get any shorter. I deeply regret that I only have one lifetime during which to read, because I'll never be able to read everything I want to.

I think more people should be regular readers. The digital world is slowly chipping away at our attention spans and encouraging us to absorb written words in small, manageable paragraphs, instead of pages and chapters, so I smile when I see people at bus stops or in coffee shops, holding an open book. So why, then, do I feel such hostility towards adult readers of tween-and-teen-targeted "literature"? See, right there, I used sarcastiquotes without even thinking about it. I get all sorts of annoyed when I see a grown person paging through Twilight. They're reading something, so I should be happy about it - they made a decision to acquire and read a book, which is what I want more people to do.

But why would anyone other than a 12-year-old girl voluntarily read about angsty sparkling vampires (unless they're parents of teens and tweens who want to be familiar with what their kids are reading)? My parents weren't standing in line at the store, waiting excitedly for the next Babysitters Club book to be released so they could discuss it with their friends at work, so what changed over the past 20 years? Did young adult (YA) literature get more complex and adult along the way, blurring the lines?

It sounds sort of rhetorical, but it's a question I'm honestly asking of my readers: has there been a shift in the complexity of YA books over the years, making them closer to adult books?

I've done a lot of thinking about my hostility towards the YA stuff, and I posted my thoughts to one of my message boards to start a discussion there, learning more about myself in the process. A big part of my problem is that I assume that someone reading "kids' books" isn't going to want to read Asimov, or John Irving, or a history of the life of Henrietta Lacks. But how do I know what else is on their shelves? Just like someone at Taco Bell might cook fancy gourmet dinners 95% of the time, some people who read lots of good stuff sometimes like to read "fluffy" books because they're easy.

I think I tend to lump all YA into the "bullshit fluff" literature category, because of what I remember from the books of my childhood. The problem with that, if I think about it, is that I enjoyed the Harry Potter series, and if I'm being honest, I have to say they were better written than Sophie Kinsella's "Shopaholic" stuff, which was aimed at adult readers. So where's the line? What's a YA novel and what's a crappy grownup novel? I count Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Anne of Green Gables among my favorite books and I've read them dozens of times, despite the fact that they're intended for younger readers. But they're good. Conclusion: maybe I'm putting more overlap in my Venn diagram of "YA" and "crappy writing" than is warranted.

Why should it even matter that people are reading badly-written junk? It's not my business what people read, and on a conscious level I know that, but I see someone in a waiting room reading Fifty Shades of Grey and I die a little inside. I'm sure there are folks who will look down on my collection of science fiction and medical memoirs and declare that I'm not a real reader if I don't know Tolstoy and Dumas by heart, and I'm sitting here in my glass house, tossing stones around. 

Full disclosure: I haven't read Twilight or 50 Shades, mostly because I've heard enough about them and read enough reviews and quotes from them to know that they won't be to my taste. Hunger Games, on the other hand, is being recommended to me from all sides, by people I know and whose opinions I usually trust, and that's a big reason why I started this thread. I really don't want to read the books, and I'm not entirely sure what my resistance is about. I don't think I'm the hipster type who avoids things when they get popular, so what is it? I thought maybe it was the YA label that was doing it, but I'm not sure, given that I do count some children's classics among my favorite books.

Maybe I'm guilty of lumping the Hunger Games books into the same category as the Twilight series, when it belongs elsewhere? Is it more Little Women than Sweet Valley High?

I'd like this to open up into a discussion, if anyone's game. I need help pinning down what it is that bugs me so much about the popularity of fluff, because otherwise I'm not sure how I will ever change that prejudice.

New acquisitions

Last week, I did not have these two things. I think that my life is more complete this week.

The little green guy is a crocheted version of a Brain Slug from Futurama. When I learned that my new coworker is a very adept knitter and crocheter, I showed her this pattern and asked if maybe she could teach me how to crochet sometime, maybe over some lunch breaks, so I could make one. I've had the page bookmarked for months, and if I could ever learn how, I was thinking of using a crocheted brain slug as a Halloween costume, or sporting one in lieu of a fez on formal night on the next nerd cruise. My coworker printed out the pattern, mumbled something about likely trouble finding the right green, then left for the weekend.

I arrived at the lab on Monday and my boss warned me that my office had "an infestation", and I should be careful going in there. His tone suggested that it wasn't anything that required a can of Raid, but I couldn't think what in the world he was getting at... until I saw my new green friend sitting beside my computer monitor! I wasn't expecting her to make me one! Now, more than ever, I need to learn to crochet. Just imagine the possibilities!

And now, the book. The massive tome (8 pounds!!) comes with a long and convoluted story involving Barnes and Noble, their horrible computer system, and a delay of over a month in getting to me, but I'll spare you most of it. Essentially, they put it on a sale so good that it wiped out their inventory much more quickly than they expected, but their computer let people keep buying it anyway. I got emails telling me it was delayed, and then I called for more information and the computer had cancelled my order for me and not told me about it! It was worth fighting for, though, because I got this baby for $15, thanks to a friend on one of my message boards who gave us a heads-up about the sale. It's currently on sale at Amazon.com for $94.50, with its original price set at $150. I wanted it the second it was released two years ago, but couldn't justify the cost, so I am giddy about finally having my hands on it!

It's 1200 pages worth of Simpsons episodes broken down into trivia, quotes, pictures, summaries, and character profiles. I'm a huge Simpsons fan, to an almost-embarrassing degree. I don't have the seasons on DVD yet, but someday I'll splurge and buy a huge boxed set. This book will tide me over until then, I suspect, because it's going to take a while to explore. I remember getting Bart Simpson's Guide to Life* when I was a teenager, and finding more funny bits in it each time I paged through it, and I hope this book brings me the same giggles. 

*I just read the whole Wikipedia article, and that book came out in 1993, almost twenty years ago. Oh. my. GOD. I am old. And the Simpsons is awesome to have lasted so long!

Audiobooks

A while back, I challenged myself to read 50 books in 2012. I'm keeping track of my progress with the help of a great website called Goodreads, and you can see my little counting widget on the right margin of my blog if you scroll down. The widget will bring you to the website, which I recommend checking out if you're a big reader. I've read 18 books as of this post, only, I'm not entirely sure if they all count.

Some of these books, I admit to you, I did not read. Instead, I listened to a narrator as he or she read them aloud to me. Does that still count?

My commute to work is a solid hour in each direction, leaving me a lot of free listening time, and I've been thinking about audiobooks for a while, if not for their own merits, then at least as a way to avoid being subjected to the newest Coldplay song three times a day. I kept dismissing the idea because because I don't generally enjoy being read to, and I don't like radio morning shows where the hosts chatter and argue over things.

Well, after JoCo Cruise Crazy 2, I was on a nerdy-famous-people high, and I started listening to some podcasts. I listened to a bunch from Wil Wheaton, and a bunch from Paul and Storm, and I enjoyed them more than I expected. It was just these guys, talking about some stuff for a while, making me laugh and think a little while I'm stuck in traffic. But they don't record them often enough to fill my whole week's commute. I was seeking out more podcasts, different podcasts, longer podcasts, to fill the emptiness. Beware, friends - half hour Paul and Storm podcasts are a gateway drug. Now I'm mainlining library audiobooks.

They have their issues, of course. I have to be in my car to listen to them, so if I have downtime during my lunch break, I either have to go sit in my car or keep a second, paper, book with me as a backup plan. You never know what you're getting in terms of the narrator, and I've encountered the very good and the very bad. Sometimes the CD will start up with track #1 again and if I didn't note what track I was on before I got rebooted, I have to skip ahead and listen to the beginning of each track to see when it stops sounding familiar, and then back it up a little. Also, with real books, I have a bad habit of skipping ahead a few pages to see if I'm right about where the story is going, and I can't easily do that with a CD. For me, the biggest downside is with my beloved nonfiction books - part of what I love about them is that they refer to other great books and authors, and when I'm reading a paper version, I can write the titles down for future reference. It's dangerous to try that on the road.

But I'm finding a way to absorb more books than I otherwise could, and I'm delighted about it. I started with The Pun Also Rises, by John Pollack, which is about the history of puns and wordplay. It was good. Then I bought Fuzzy Nation, by John Scalzi, because Paul and Storm told me to. Now, Fuzzy Nation is fiction. There are characters and dialogue in fiction - would the reader use different voices for them all, like the famous Gollum voice Dad used when he read The Lord of the Rings out loud to me when I was a kid? Well, Wil Wheaton read this one, and he did such an excellent job that I wish everyone would hire him to read their audiobooks.

Not all of them have been great. I tried listening to Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz, and the narrator kept taking sharp breaths mid-sentence, distracting me from the material. I had to switch it off after five minutes, and I'll look for the paper version of that one instead.

I want to list the audiobooks in my total, but I'm not sure if that meets the spirit of the reading challenge. Initially, I thought I'd find a little time each day to dedicate to a book, but it's been very hard to accomplish. Do I need to cross the audiobooks out and push myself to carve out more reading time? Or can I count  my commute "reading", since I'm getting the same education through a different sensory input?

Book sale loot

I'm a sucker for a used book sale. Something about picking through tables and tables of books to find old favorites and new possibilities makes me giddy, not to mention the smell of hundreds of books, which is so comforting.

Every year since I moved to Maryland, I've been making an event of the Stone Ridge Used Book Sale, in Bethesda. My aunt lives near the Stone Ridge school, and she's the one who first introduced me to their annual fundraising book sale. The school collects used books throughout the year, and an army of volunteers work at sorting, categorizing, and pricing them before the sale weekend rolls around again in April and they need to line them up neatly on tables in the three gymnasiums. How big is the sale? You're handed a map when you enter the front door. There's a history section and an American history section, each one occupying its own large table. There's psychology, medicine, science, humor, fiction and biography. How-tos, cookbooks, classics and foreign languages in every format: hardcover, paperback, trade paperback, audiobook... 

The sale runs for four days.

We make an outing of it, marking the date on our calendars months in advance so we don't miss it. It seemed to be a little on the sparser side this year, which means that only three gyms worth of tables were filled with books. In previous years, there were boxes of books under the tables, waiting to be brought up by volunteers filling the empty table spaces as books were nabbed. Still, I left after giving the school $48 in exchange for two canvas shopping bags full of books. Want to see what I got?

So many books!

Let's see... a handful of board books for when my nephew comes to visit, a deck of cards with Weber grill recipes on them, and a two-for-one H.G. Wells with The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, both of which I've read but neither of which I owned.

A couple of these are novels I previously read and enjoyed enough to want a copy handy for re-reading: Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding) and The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein). I highly recommend the latter - it's written from the point of view of a dog, and it's excellent.

I picked up Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce (Douglas Starr). Given my profession and current employer, I couldn't leave a book like that on the table. I also got One Hundred Days, My Unexpected Journey From Doctor to Patient (David Biro), because I love reading about medicine and illness from people on the inside.

I'm very excited about To Seek Out New Life - The Biology of Star Trek (Athena Andreadis), which explores the weird life-forms and environments of Star Trek from the perspective of today's biological knowledge. How possible is a methane life-form, anyway? Why am I not getting my drugs by hypospray yet?

I've got Driving Mr Albert (Michael Paterniti), about a road trip taken to transport Einstein's brain across the country, and Uncle Tungsten, a memoir by Oliver Sacks, the neurologist. I also bought Legacy, A Step-by-step Guide to Writing Personal History (Linda Spence), in hopes that it will help me to become a better writer.

I finally put A Complicated Kindness, an award-winning novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews, into my canvas bag after stopping to re-read the back a half dozen times. Obviously, I want to read it. And last, my husband found me If I Die Before I Wake, the Flu Epidemic diary of Fiona Macgregor, by Jean Little. It's got "Dear Canada" written in a banner across the top, and a little research tells me that it's fiction, one of a series of fictional "historical diaries" written around the time of big events in Canadian history, but I still think it will be interesting to read.

Once I'm finished all these, I will box up any that I don't need to keep, and bring them back to Stone Ridge so that someone else can pick them up next year and enjoy them. Unless a friend wants to read them first, of course!

Jen's Library: The Lost Art of Reading

The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time
David L. Ulin

This is a short book. Which is good, because it's so easy to be distracted when you're reading. More and more, we're reading online, skimming novels on our little phones, clicking links and losing that sense of being totally immersed in a book.

The author, a former book review editor for a big newspaper, found that concentrating on reading was becoming more difficult, as was tuning out the buzz of the wired world and getting deeply into a book, and this book is an expansion of an essay he wrote on that subject.

He's not anti-technology at all - he has an e-reader and uses it - but he feels like the connection between the writer and the reader is fraying because we're drifting away from good writing and good reading as we shift to a way of life with shorter attention spans. Some authors are using new digital media as a way of enhancing their work, and he gives them praise, but they're in the minority. It's his personal opinion throughout this book - he doesn't pull up citations and tables to show you how the world is changing, and while he's clearly lamenting the loss of connection with literature, he's not yelling at those damn neighborhood Kindles to get off his lawn.

As a person who has always loved books, I can relate to his sentiment. I nearly always have a book with me. I bring books on vacation. I won't buy a purse until I've tried stuffing a normal hardcover book inside, to see whether it'll fit. The damp scent of old yellowing paperbacks makes me happy. My home is filled with books and it physically pains me to throw any away. I find it strange to see someone reading Pride and Prejudice on an iPhone, although I can understand the convenience factor.

Like Ulin, I have noticed my shortening attention span and it bothers me. I've been avoiding reading fiction because I find myself bored, flipping ahead to get to the point. But the point isn't the point - reading is about the trip, and that's getting harder for me to remember. So I've been eating up nonfiction, reading too quickly and not retaining nearly as much as I'd like, because I don't have the time and attention and energy to absorb a good novel and all it has to offer. And that's what Ulin is getting at with his book.

Maybe I'll ease back into fiction by rereading a favorite or two.

Jen's Library: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot

If you've ever learned anything about cell biology, cloning, or vaccines, you should know Henrietta Lacks.

She died young - only 31 years old - of invasive cervical cancer. She left behind a husband, five young children, and a small slice of cancer cells that would end up living longer than she ever had a chance to.

When she was treated at Johns Hopkins, in 1951, her doctors took a biopsy of her tumor. Researchers soon found out that her cells would multiply indefinitely, defying the normal rules of cell division. Usually, a cell divides a finite number of times before dying, which is why we age. Cancer cells tend to ignore this rule, dividing as they please and becoming mutated and unrecognizable versions of their former selves. For years, cell biologists had been trying to create cell cultures - vials of identical cells that they could keep alive and use for research, because standardization is so important. To be sure the results are reproducible, everyone needs to be able to start with the same materials. Henrietta's cells, which became known as the HeLa line, finally gave the scientists what they needed.

Sadly, the Lacks family was completely unaware of the cell line and its contributions to biology. A poor black family living in Baltimore, they didn't have money to go to doctors themselves. Their mother's cells are patented and being sold from lab to lab, all without the family's knowledge or prior consent.

Rebecca Skloot is a reporter who decided to explore the HeLa story and get to know the Lacks family. This book is a fascinating look at HeLa's contribution to modern medicine and genetics research, along with the evolution of medical ethics since the 1950s. I'm embarrassed to say that I knew nothing about this woman. I'm glad this book came out and brought her out into the light so everyone can read about her.

If you're in a scientific or a medical field, you need to read this. And if you're not, you should anyway.

Jen's Library: The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels

The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels -- A Love Story
by Ree Drummond

I am a big fan of Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman. I forget who was the very first to clue me into her existence, so I'll fling out a blanket of thanks towards all my friends in hopes that I catch the right person with it.

I started poking around her website to try out her recipes, which she writes out in hilarious detail, with step-by-step pictures so newbies like me can figure out what we're doing. So far, the few recipes I've tried have worked out great, and I intend to tackle her famous cinnamon rolls one of these days, but I think I'll need an entire team in my kitchen to pull it off. She's also got sections on her blog about photography, home-schooling her kids, and my favorite: her life on the ranch. If you ever have a wedge of free time, pop over to her website and start reading through her "Confessions" section. She's a very engaging and entertaining writer and you'll probably get hooked like I did.

On top of her profuse blogging, she's managed to write a book. Well, three, actually, if you're including her cookbook and her children's book, but I haven't gotten to those. And I think she's got a show on the Food Network now. Which I can't watch because I don't have cable, but maybe it's on their website?

Her "memoir" is a lot of fun. Black Heels is her story about her transformation from ditzy LA party girl to a ditzy ranch wife after she meets and falls in love with a very stereotypical cowboy. Well, ok, not ditzy, but she's got no problem making fun of herself and she comes across as a real person, whose fluffy love story is really fun to read. Falling in love and leaving the old you behind to try on a new version of yourself is something I can connect with, even if my move and transformation wasn't as dramatic, and my telling of the story wouldn't be nearly as engaging as Ree. I'm not saying this book is great literature, but if you've got a rainy weekend to kill, give this a shot. It made me smile and I kept flipping pages to see how it ended, even though I already knew they finished off happily ever after.

Jen's Library: What I've been reading lately

I've had a lot of chaos hovering over me lately, what with the hurricane cleanup, kitchen ants, a sick Mojo, long days at work, and new job prospects, so I've been slacking on my book reviews. I've still been reading plenty of stuff, just haven't found the time to write about any of it. I tried to keep a list going so I wouldn't forget everything, and I'd like to come back and talk about at least a few of these later, when I find more time. What say you, readers? Are there any of these you'd like me to tell you more about? I think I missed a few, too... I wish the library's website kept a list of all the books I've checked out, so I could keep track.

Straight Dope by Cecil Adams

The Lost Art of Reading by David L. Ullin

Homer's Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned about Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat by Gwen Cooper

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton

Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton

Mother of My Mother: The Intricate Bond Between Generations by Hope Edelman

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Jen's Library: In The Devil's Garden

In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food
by Stewart Lee Allen

Oh, how I love these "history of this or that" books. If there is a book on display at the library, and the cover declares it to be a history of some random object, process, or concept, I will pick it up. I've rarely been disappointed.

In The Devil's Garden covers the history of foods that have been forbidden at one time or another to certain people. Let them eat cake! The author has playfully split the book up into seven parts, for the seven deadly sins, because, after all, if something is forbidden it's generally because someone has decided it's bad for you. The distinctions don't always hold up, because there's a lot of overlap between the sins. Depending who you are, eating a "Trojan Pig", a whole roast pig stuffed with other meats and sausages, can be both gluttony and blasphemy. Incidentally, I am adding "successfully constructing a turducken" to my list of things to do before I die.

The book covers everything from the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden (which, by the way, was not likely an apple - the Christians threw an apple into the story to discredit the sacred fruit of the Celts), to the cultural and religious taboos against eating pork, cows, and dogs. Roman feasts, Aztec human sacrifice, and absinthe - the book is a little disjointed because there's no clear beginning or end, and he jumps from one food to another, sometimes bringing up the same food twice in different places, making it hard to keep track of everything, but it's definitely entertaining and I'd recommend it if you're looking for a lighter non-fiction book. Splitting it up into sections like he did makes it easy to put down and pick up again later. My only major complaint is the lack of references. There's a bibliography but no foot- or end-notes, so you can't easily track down where he got all his information. I'm a stickler for knowing where the facts are coming from.

Jen's Library - The Book Of Awesome

The Book of Awesome
by Neil Pasricha

I read a lot of odd blogs. Some of them are nerdy and full of graphs, some of them are about disastrous cakes, cats with poor English skills, or people questionably dressed at WalMart.

I'm not sure when or how I stumbled onto 1000awesomethings.com, but I did, and my life is better for it. This guy uses his online existence to celebrate all the little things that make life awseome. It's so easy to pick out all the irritating things in your day, and so easy to overlook the small moments of awesome, so I'm glad this guy has decided to remind us about just how many things out there can make you smile if you take the time to notice them.

This book is pretty much the blog in print form - dozens of one-or-two-page mini-essays about individual awesome things.

Like being home sick from school (or work) and watching The Price is Right. Peeling an orange in one long strip. Hitting all the green lights in a row. Finding there's just enough milk left for your cereal. All little, silly things, but they're like little presents and they can really make you feel awesome.

I was reading it at work, and as usual, my nosy coworkers asked what I was reading. Usually my answer leaves them shaking their heads and thinking I'm a dork, but this book got them all interested. "What kind of awesome things?" they asked. And so we talked about our own little moments of awesome, which in itself made for a moment of awesome. Very meta.

Jen's Library - Big Green Purse

Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World
by Diane MacEachern

Oh, book sale finds, how do I love thee.

I have several awesome friends who are, to varying degrees, into the green, organic, and local food movements. I found this at the big Bethesda book sale in the spring and thought it would make a great gift for one of them, but then I ended up reading it first because I couldn't help myself. The best part is, none of these friends would be offended about receiving a used book as a gift, so I'm still in the clear. :)

I'm no economics pro, but I can grasp the concept that demand will drive supply to a certain extent. If everyone stops buying products with purple dye #230 in them, manufacturers will respond by taking it out of their product so they can continue making money. Consumers influence the market - look at the availability of gluten-free products at the average grocery store today, when only five years ago someone with celiac disease had to go to specialty stores to find a candy bar they were allowed to eat.

Big Green Purse looks at our spending power and how we can try to use it for good, shifting slowly towards having more choices in organic, fair trade, and local products, and having those products more accessible and visible where we shop. It's split into chapters about different products, like produce, clothing, and cosmetics, along with explanations about what all the different labels and certifications really mean. There are a lot of tips to help you avoid being "greenwashed" (the author's term) by manufacturers and marketers who put "natural" and "environmentally friendly" labels all over their products, hoping to suck people in. These days, more people are interested in making better choices for the environment, and lots of companies are trying to make themselves seem as "green" as possible so they can ride that trend and get people buying their products. A lot of that labeling is meaningless, though, so you've got to do your research before you shop. She gives lists of examples of products and companies she recommends as being legitimately green, along with some which are not, because she encourages her readers to contact those guys and urge them to take some steps towards green-ness.

My problem with organic stuff is that it's expensive. I'm terrible, I know, but if I have to spend twice as much for an apple with no pesticides on it, forget it. I'll wash the stupid thing and get on with it, ecosystem be damned. And I know that's not very nice of me, because I should be caring more about the planet I'm living on, but if I went totally organic granola with my grocery shopping, I'd go broke quickly. Buying more of it would be good because it would be sending a message, however tiny, that people want organic stuff, so slowly and surely, prices would start creeping downwards... but it's hard for me to do that when the price of food keeps going up and the "greener" options are inevitably more expensive.

I decided to start with coffee. After reading the chapter on coffee growing, I figured that I could make the sacrifice and spend a little more on coffee in order to try and help save some rainforest. I'm only doing it for the tree frogs. The book says to look for "shade grown" coffee, because that farming method does the least damage to the ecosystem, but I haven't had any luck finding that at the big grocery stores, so I went with organic and fair-trade-certified coffees as a compromise. I have tried two so far, and I liked one of them a lot, so switching to that brand wouldn't be a terrible sacrifice for me. I can post coffee reviews if anyone's interested!

I don't see myself shopping for organic hemp t-shirts, or boycotting Hershey bars because the cocoa beans they use weren't grown in an environmentally friendly way. But maybe I'll try using fewer household cleaners, buying recycled aluminum foil, and growing more of my own veggies. Baby steps.

Jen's Library - Songs of Distant Earth

Songs of Distant Earth
by Arthur C. Clarke

Ah, another dip into classic, comfortable sci-fi.

In this world, Earth has been handed a death sentence, so "seedships" are developed to bring humanity to habitable planets and keep us from extinction. The thing is, technology is always advancing, so some of the last ships to leave are faster than the old ones, and so we get a situation where a ship whose crew has witnessed the actual destruction of the planet arrives at a colony that was established with one of the first ships ever to leave Earth - so early that people didn't travel, only their DNA did, and they were built from nothing when the ship landed, in a sort of "Genesis Project".

You've got one population on an eden-like planet, who have never seen Earth and only have a few bits of literature and art to show them where they came from, and one population from the difficult last years of Earth's existence. Drama ensues! The actual story is a little weak, in my opinion, and my favorite part has always been the interesting ideas on what our future might hold and what we might do once our planet's demise was inevitable and predictable. What will our "end days" bring? Chaos? A scientific surge and a desperate attempt to get Man out of the solar system? A rush to religion or a retreat from it? Clarke covers this well despite being a little heavy-handed in moral judgements on humanity.

Jen's Library The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In my many years of indiscriminate binge reading, I have come across a number of non-fiction books that I think everyone should read. This book is getting added to that list. In pen. Underlined.

Cancer is terrifying. It's our own bodies, out of control. Nobody is immune to cancer - given enough time alive, pretty much everyone will develop a tumor of some sort, and that's a very unnerving thought. You will get cancer. If you can avoid heart disease and diabetes and keep yourself away from car crashes and shark attacks, you will be rewarded, someday, if you live long enough, with cancer. While we've come a tremendously long way in diagnosing and treating cancer, we haven't come that much closer to winning our war against it, and that's what this book is about.

The author is a doctor and a cancer researcher, and he has set out to describe Cancer's life story, from the first descriptions of cancerous growths in old Egyptian texts to the latest interferon treatments, and he does so in a way that the layperson can wrap his mind around. It's fascinating, horrifying, and inspiring, to read about the rise and fall of radical treatments, the leaps forward in fundamental research, and the strength and struggle of the millions of patients dealing with their cancers over the span of medical history. It's a good balance between the science and the humanity of the disease: molecular and genetic breakthroughs and the early rise of breast cancer awareness campaigns and patient advocacy groups.

Like I said, it's on the must-read list. Cancer has touched someone in your life, or it will, and this is its story. Know the enemy.

Jen's Library: Dilemma

Dilemma: A Priest's Struggle with Faith and Love
by Albert Cutié

I remember hearing about this guy a couple of years ago. A charismatic, popular Roman Catholic priest, called "Father Oprah" by some of his fans because of his talk shows and his desire to help the average Joe with his problems, was "outed" by tabloids a couple of years ago when it was discovered he was seeing a woman. Now he's written a book about his life with the Church and his gradual disillusionment with the establishment, and that last bit struck a chord with me, so I picked it up.

He is extremely clear, through the whole book, that his faith in God has not wavered since his childhood aspirations to serve Him as a priest. He entered into the Church, wanting to bring the message of God's love to everyone who needed it, and as he spent more and more time "in the system" he realized the hypocrisy and coldness and exclusionary nature of the Catholic church was not something he was comfortable living with. To a certain degree, yes, it had to do with his falling in love with a woman and feeling that it was not right that the gift of marital love, which he considered a gift from God, was considered by the Church to be incompatible with preaching the word of God.

He left the Roman Catholic Church and is now an Episcopal priest, married and raising a family while continuing his ministry, and he's much happier for it, despite the pain and difficulty of leaving the institution he grew up loving and believing in.

I'm not going to go into a huge religious debate here, because I don't claim to have all the answers or even educated opinions on everything. I don't consider myself religious - I joke that I'm a "catholic" in a superstitious way more than anything else. It's a very touchy and emotional subject for many, on which I have vague and disjointed thoughts, and I've had some serious issues with the Catholic Church myself, which is why I haven't really been involved with it since my childhood. There's a dire need to adapt to reality, and I think that until that happens, the Church will keep losing members. Contraception, homosexuality, women, and celibacy are hot-button issues within the Church, and having the wrong opinion will keep you down, so you can't corrupt anyone with your ideas and make the Church look bad. It's not about faith, not about God, but about the rules Man has made about who's allowed to be close to Him. And a lot of those rules piss me off. Father Cutié feels the same way about the need to adapt - I can't express any of it nearly as well as he did, and I know I'm not doing him justice with this sad little review, so if you want to get his point of view, get reading.

Jen's Library - Spousonomics

Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes
by Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson

Every now and then I browse Amazon.com, trying to find new books I may enjoy reading. I check out the "people who bought this also bought" section, because it usually leads me to similar books, or authors with similar styles, so I can start with a book I enjoyed and use it as a stepping stone to new books.

I read Freakonomics quite a while ago, and loved how they took economic principles and used them to explain all sorts of things that really don't seem to have anything to do with economics, like sumo wrestlers, prostitutes, and crime rates. So using that as a jumping-off point, Amazon suggested "Spousonomics", and I thought it may be worth a try. From the little blurb, it seemed like they'd be applying economic principles to relationships, which is an interesting idea. And when I got the book at the library, all of the reviews on the book jacket are by authors of other works I've liked! Promising!

Sadly, it didn't live up to the hype. It's a marriage-advice book, peppered with economics terms. If you don't like fighting, you're risk-averse. Chores and sex are on a supply and demand curve. We all need incentives, like wall street executives, to get things done.

I wasn't looking for marital advice! I was hoping for some sociology and psychology mixed up with economics, an insight into how economic principles may affect interpersonal relationships. and I didn't get that. I got a sort of Dr. Phil advice book with all sorts of examples of real life couples who could totally fix their marriages if they only applied these principles!

Skip it. Unless you're an economist and your marriage is in trouble, in which case this book might be a godsend.

Jen's Library - The Fly in the Ointment

The Fly in the Ointment: 70 Fascinating Commentaries on the Science of Everyday Life
by Dr. Joe Schwarcz

Dr. Schwarcz was one of my professors at McGill University. He's the director of the Office for Science and Society, which is dedicated to spreading information and debunking bad science about all sorts of health and food topics. They do a wonderful job using radio, the internet, and public lectures to make science accessible to the average person. I took one of his "World of Chemistry" courses at school, and it was a ton of fun.

He's written several books, all very easy for the layperson to understand and enjoy, so go ahead and read whichever of them you can get your hands on. Pesticides, bezoars, bottled water, fake blood, broccoli, lithium: he tackles each topic with a short essay, examining and explaining their history and chemistry in a way that's easy to understand and enjoy.

I love that he's writing these books and doing his radio show, and hosting lectures for the public, because there is so much misinformation out there, and someone's got to fight it. The more educated people are, the less they're likely to be confused by all the new nutrition information coming out of scientific studies (coffee is good for you! but it's not! yes it is!), and the more critical they will be of TV stories about the newest greatest miracle cream. A little more critical thinking never hurt anyone (except maybe the quacks selling the new miracle cream), and I think Dr. Schwarcz is doing a good job pushing people in that direction.

A lot of the lectures from the World of Chemistry courses are available online for you to listen to, and I highly recommend them as a productive and educational waste of time.

Jen's Library: The Hedgehog's Dilemma

The Hedgehog's Dilemma: A Tale of Obsession, Nostalgia, and the World's Most Charming Mammal
by Hugh Warwick

I know nothing about hedgehogs besides that they are small, spiky, and a friend of mine has one as a pet. His name is Hitch (the hog, not the friend) and while I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him, I’ve seen him on his webcam and he’s definitely cute.

This book is by a biologist who has researched hedgehogs for quite some time and has developed an affection for them. Apparently hedgehogs are huge in the UK. Well, they themselves are still small critters, of course, but they’re quite popular and common. They’re not often pets, though – they’re wild animals who wander around in gardens and eat slugs and get squished by cars if they venture out onto the roads.

Across the Atlantic, there’s a whole Hedgehog Preservation Society, and some people are so dedicated that they've converted their homes into rehabilitation hospitals for the little guys when they’re found sick or injured. If you go by this book, most folks in the UK are in love with these animals, and frankly, I can’t see the appeal. Sure, they’re cute, but why love them and not squirrels or field mice? The author claims that hedgehogs have more distinct personalities than mice, and they’re a lot more like cats or dogs, but I don’t know how true that is. I guess maybe I could see myself putting out a hedgehog feeder if they were native to the area, the same way I put out a bird feeder for the cardinals (which ended up being a squirrel feeder for the squirrels), so I could see them more often. But they’re not native to Maryland, so their charm will remain a mystery to me. Maybe if I finally meet Hitch in person, I’ll become a convert.

Jen's Library - How to Be an American Housewife

How to Be an American Housewife
by Margaret Dilloway

Sometimes, I get a book recommendation from one of the trashy magazines left in the lab break room. This was one of those times. I can't remember if it was People magazine or US magazine, but I think it had "insider's secrets about the upcoming royal wedding" all over the front cover.

I tried very hard, while reading this novel, not to compare it to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, one of my all-time favorite novels. To a degree, they're similar. They focus on mother-daughter relationships between Asian women (in this book they were Japanese, and Amy Tan's characters are Chinese) and their American-born daughters, and the cross-cultural conflicts as experienced by both sides. They're both good. But while the plot is interesting enough, Margaret Dilloway's characters feel flat and lifeless and predictable. It's hard to see them as anything but characters in this book, because they don't feel real enough. I'm not sure if that's because I'm comparing them to the women in Joy Luck Club, but either way, I had a hard time really enjoying the book. I finished it, and it kept my interest through the story, but it was predictable and didn't leave me with that sense of satisfaction as I shut the book at the end.

I can see why it got a good review in the magazine, because it's not a bad book., and I did enjoy it. But I feel like it's not the book it could have been. There was a lot more potential there and I wish it had gone a little deeper and given me more. Woman falls for the wrong man, repents her sins by marrying someone her family approves of, tries to adjust to a new country as an immigrant and struggles to raise her kids in America with her Japanese values. And the daughter of course doesn't understand her mother's weird old-fashioned ways and struggles with being neither Japanese enough or American enough to make anyone happy. So much to work with, but I wish it had lived up to my expectations.

My favorite part of the book was the little quotations at the start of each chapter, from a handbook issued to Japanese war brides, entitled "How to be an American Housewife". But sadly, this is also fiction. How awesome would it be to read that handbook, if it were real?

Jen's Library - Little Princes

Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal
By Conor Grennan

This falls squarely into the "couldn't put it down" category.

This guy volunteered at an orphanage in Nepal and learned that most of the children there weren't orphans at all. Apparently, there was a lot of child trafficking happening in Nepal during the civil war of the late 90s and early 2000s - fearing that their children would be recruited into the insurgents' army, poor rural parents paid people huge amounts of money to take their children out of danger and into the city, where they would be safe. Sadly, many of these children were dumped off and left homeless in Kathmandu, or sold as servants. Some were told their parents were dead, killed in the war.

When Conor Grennan discovered this sad truth, he made it his mission to find the parents of the "orphans" and give the families a chance to reunite. His story is fascinating and terrifying - hiking through the Himalayas to remote villages where nobody speaks his language and the answer to "where is the toilet" is "no", finding himself waylaid by armed insurgents demanding to know why he's there, and fighting against a powerful ring of child-traffickers in a country where the government has little power to help him.

As sad as parts of this book are, it's an inspirational and uplifting story about a man who finds his purpose in life and dozens of amazing kids who are getting their families back. He writes well, and his book is a smooth, funny, exciting story that reads almost like a blog. You're a friend and he's telling you about these awesome things he's done.

If you're interested in his story and his cause and want to learn more, his website and nonprofit organization is Next Generation Nepal. Check it out.

Jen's Library - The Complete Tightwad Gazette

The Complete Tightwad Gazette - Promoting Thrift as a Viable Alternative Lifestyle
By Amy Dacyczyn

A good friend lent me this book when I mentioned that I was trying to grow my own tomatoes, learning how to do home improvement stuff on my own, and cutting back on unnecessary expenses to save money for the aforementioned home improvement projects. She said "Have I got a book for you!" and she brought it along the next time we met for coffee, which, incidentally, is a necessary expense since Panera Bread dates with my friend are good for my mental health and cheaper than therapy.

The author, who is apparently known as the "Frugal Zealot", published a series of Tightwad newsletters in the 1990s, helping people save money with a series of tips and advice. This huge book is a compilation of all of her articles and it's taken me forever to read, but that's mostly because I'm taking notes on the good parts. Some of it is incredibly outdated and makes me smile - like when she suggests a place to buy a certain product, and gives you a mail-order address so you can write to the store with your order. I wonder what a store would do with such a letter now? I bet they'd be a little confused.

There's a lot of sensible advice in here, both about basic rules for not living beyond your means, and about ways to cut corners where it doesn't matter, and to make the most of what you have. the beauty of this book is that you can just take away from it whatever will work for you and ignore the rest. I won't be making tomato soup from tomato paste and evaporated milk, but I plan on putting up a clothesline in my yard or sunroom, and I love the ideas for simplifying Christmas and other holidays with homemade and/or edible gifts, because most people don't need a ton more stuff to deal with.

Her emphasis is on preventing expenses by taking very good care of what you already have, and keeping an organized inventory so you don't go out buying duplicates when you can't find something. She's also incredibly anti-waste, and has ideas for making old clothes into potholders or shopping bags - after they've been worn to death and handed down to everyone possible, of course. She advocates shopping at yard sales instead of buying new things, and using every last crumb of food in the house so you aren't throwing anything away. I think her best suggestion is making a price book to compare staples at the stores you usually shop at, so you can figure out when and where you should stock up on butter. I think I should do that, because I recently noticed that the pasta sauce we like is much cheaper at Target, but cake mixes are cheaper at Giant (when they're on sale) and it's hard to keep track of what's cheaper where, which leads to me just getting everything in one spot because it's convenient, even if it costs more. I wish I had a fancy smart phone and an app for that, but I'm thinking the 15c savings on pudding won't really justify the expense of a fancy 4G phone contract.

It's hit-or-miss, for me, because some of the ideas are beyond cheap. I won't be shredding used mylar balloons to make streamers, and I don't plan on buying my whole wardrobe at yard sales. And because I'm a shy type, the best tip of all is very difficult for me to put into practice - the "just ask" technique. You see someone throwing out shoeboxes and you need some for storage? Ask for them. The worst they can say is no, right? Or if you need a new printer, put the word out amongst your friends, so if anyone hears about one on a huge sale, or one someone's getting rid of, the information can make it back to you.

I don't think I'll be rolling in dough after reading this, but it's full of great ideas and some of it is actually very useful. The hard part is getting past the "cheap" stigma and deciding there's nothing wrong with sticking soap slivers together to get some more use out of them, or buying your dining room table used on Craigslist.