Citizen Reader

Back in the reading saddle.

I realized the other day that I have a different book going in every room of the house (and one in my backpack), and it feels really, really...good. It feels like I am getting back to myself again, reading-wise.

So what's going on where? Details to follow, but in the bathroom I have a novel by a British author I've always enjoyed, in the bedroom is a book on how Generation Y is getting royally screwed, economically speaking (nice light bedtime reading, dontcha know), in my bag is a memoir that I'm not quite sure about but am going to stick with anyway, in the living room is a somewhat depressing book (book info toward the bottom of that post) that I've had to take a small pause from, and in the kitchen waits a book I started a few weeks back and really must get back to, because it is fascinating. Oh, and how could I forget a book about books, which, interestingly enough, has a chapter about being in the middle of too many books (and which roves around as I carry it from room to room and outside)? Add to that some books on gardening (every year in spring I read about gardening, rather than actually gardening) and some on toilet training (although, sadly, neither CRjr nor I are too interested), and you have a full reading slate.

It's lovely.

A surprise favorite.

Northern Slave, Black Dakota: The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey
by Walt Bachman

Whenever I index books, it is always a real bonus when they turn out to be readable, fascinating books (they don't always, particularly when I'm indexing literary criticism). Particularly because when I index a book I end up reading it at least twice.

One of the titles I've most enjoyed indexing was one I did last year: Northern Slave Black Dakota: The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey, by Walt Bachman. It's a history/biography of a man named Joseph Godfrey, who was born into slavery in Minnesota in the 1830s, and his role in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

Wait a second. Did you say born into slavery...in Minnesota? That's right, I did. And that's just one of the fascinating aspects of this book. Godfrey was born to a woman who was held in slavery by a U.S. Army officer in Minnesota--which, it turns out, was pretty common in the army. It was common enough, in fact, that a healthy (well, not so healthy, if you were one of the slaves) slave trade went on at all sorts of military posts in states that have traditionally been considered free territories.

But there's much more to the story. Joseph Godfrey eventually made his way into the Native American community in the area (details are a bit fuzzy on how he escaped indentured servitude, because of course there aren't many primary sources documenting his life early on) and married a Dakota woman. When a group of Dakota Indians banded together and decided to declare war on German-American Minnesota settlers in 1862 (I need to read more about the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 in general, since I'd never heard of it before), primary accounts refer to one massacre in particular: an ambush after which it was reported that "it was, as I am informed, Wabashaw's band, a negro leading them, who committed the murders." (p. xvii.) After the war, when many Dakotas and other Native Americans were taken into captivity and put on trial, it transpired that Joseph Godfrey had taken part in the massacres, but the question became: did he take part willingly, or was he forced to by his adopted community?

Add in some strangely compelling accounts of the rushed trials of the Dakotas, and a fascinating dash of information about Abraham Lincoln*, and the end result is a really, really great book. It's put out by a small independent publisher, the Pond Dakota Press (part of the Pond Dakota Heritage Society), but it should certainly be sought out and made a part of every public library collection (as well as more academic libraries, and of course, individuals looking for a good book to add to their TBR piles).**

*That guy was incredible. In the middle of everything else he had to do as president, he personally looked through trial transcripts (and assigned others to help him) to make sure the Dakota warriors sentenced to execution were not sentenced just because they happened to be in the general area.

**And of course, I can promise you that it is as extensively indexed as I could make it.

One way out of a reading slump.

Detroit: An American Autopsy
by Charlie Leduff

As the Great Reading Slump of 2013 continues, I find the only thing that pulls me out of it, even temporarily, is to read books on subjects which are fascinating to me. And I don't mean merely "fascinating"--I find a lot of things fascinating, which is why I usually plow through a lot of nonfiction (and fiction) on a lot of different subjects. I mean fascinating in the sense that I literally cannot look away from a book's subject, much like some people cannot look away from car accidents.

This was the case with the last such really fascinating book I read, David Quammen's Spillover. Learning about viruses and pandemics and monkeys and bats was really, really fascinating. And it happened again last week when I read Charlie LeDuff's new book Detroit: An American Autopsy.

Geographically, I am not all that far from Detroit. But sociologically, I just cannot wrap my mind around Detroit. I read every book I can find on the subject, and for the most part I have found them all unputdownable. So you're telling me there's this huge American city where grass and wildlife are just taking back whole blocks? There's this huge formerly industrial powerhouse where factories have just been left to stand rot, some for fifty years or more? And 700,000 people still live in the middle of all of that? How is it possible?

There must also be something about having Detroit as a hometown that really affects you, because LeDuff is a Detroit native who, after a very successful stint working for the New York Times, returned to the city with his wife and daughter to work for the failing Detroit News. This book, in addition to being a somewhat personal investigation of the city (where much of his family still lives), is primarily a collection of stories that he first told as newspaper articles--the dead man frozen in several feet of ice in the bottom of an elevator shaft in an abandoned building; numerous run-ins with the city's corrupt politicians, including mayor Kwame Kilpatrick; city police detectives and firefighters who keep going to work in hopeless situations; and relentless crime and poverty of all types. It's a lot to take in...and yet, once you start reading, you can't stop. Mr. CR blew through it in a couple of nights, and I did the same over the following week.

LeDuff is not a particularly subtle author, but there is something forthright about him and his writing that I enjoy. I also really enjoyed his personal take on the subject, as in an early chapter when he talks about his generation's parents working in factories, and how his generation thought they could make a quicker buck somewhere else (while still thinking, in the backs of their minds, the factories would always be there for them): 

"Still, we had all gotten a taste of it, summer jobs sweeping the floor or working the press. It was horrible. The yellow lights, the stink of grease and oil and acid. The unblinking time clock. You walked in the door and the first thing you're trying to figure out is how to get out. If you don't know that about factory work, you don't know anything.

What our generation failed to learn was the nobility of work. An honest day's labor...Instead of working, we figured we could be hustlers and salesmen and gamblers and partiers. Work was for suckers. If anybody had told us such a thing existed, we probably would have tried to become New York bankers and stockbrokers. And I have no doubt we would have been good at it too." (p. 33.)

And what I love about this book is that you can see the honesty of what he's saying, particularly because he himself does seem like a hustler. At several points in the book he references particular news stories he was tracking as ones that would be good to move copies of the sluggishly selling newspaper for which he worked (which strikes me as a bit of a hustling viewpoint). He seems to move through the city like that, hustling a bit here for access and interviews, getting hustled a little bit there by his interview subjects. It's genius. You'll just have to read it to see what I mean.

I thought it was a great book. I was excited earlier this spring when I saw it was coming out, and, rarity of rarities, I was not disappointed. I'd particularly love to see people use it for reading and book groups--there wasn't a single chapter that Mr. CR and I didn't bring up when we discussed it: "Could you believe that part? What about this part?" I love it when a book does that to you.

The Great Gatsby: Not suitable for high school?

I am really, really hoping to get the chance to see Baz Luhrmann's new movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, when it comes out in May:

I am a sucker for all things Baz Luhrmann. I loved Strictly Ballroom, I saw Romeo + Juliet about seven times in the theater (ah, college, when you still have time and think someday you'll make enough money to make up for such frivolous spending), and Moulin Rouge is the only movie I ever went to by myself because I loved it and frankly, I just wanted to adore Ewan McGregor in solitude. But while casting about for something to read the other night, I saw the novel on Mr. CR's bookshelf and thought, "hey, I haven't read this book since high school. It was okay--maybe I should read it again before I see the movie."

I did, over the course of two nights, and adored it, although perhaps "adored" is the wrong word for a novel that I found just overwhelmingly sad this time around. I can summarize the story pretty briefly: Boy loves girl; girl is married to someone else; boy thinks love can conquer all; love turns out to be more complex than boy realizes. Add the backdrop of 1920s New York and a dollop of class warfare, and there you go (for more detail: Wikipedia --in case you haven't read it, spoilers abound there).

I was thoroughly engaged by this book this time around, in a way that I know I wasn't in high school. In fact, upon finishing it, I said to Mr. CR, "Why are they giving this book to high schoolers?" I know it's a classic. It's beautifully written. But it is also deceptively simple, I think. I know the money/class aspect alone would just have been way beyond me in high school, and I already knew then what a joke it was to try and keep up with the popular crowd by buying the right clothes and owning the right things (there was no way, at least not for me, to keep up, was the joke). But in high school and even college, youth is a great equalizer. You're all young and gutsy and beautiful, even when you don't think you are. To me it only seems like after school that you start to realize, insidiously, that getting ahead (or even just staying afloat, lately) seems to largely be about knowing the right people and simply being in the right place while knowing those people. Only after school, I feel, do you start to realize the genius of the heartbreak when Gatsby starts to realize Daisy is slipping away from him...

"'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly.

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the cymbals' song of it...High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl..." (p. 127).

Or this, from the narrator, later still:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together..." (p. 188).

I just don't think you can appreciate the bleakness, and the truth, of that, in high school. Do you?

Book reviews that actually make me want to read.

More Baths Less Talking: Notes from the Reading Life of a Celebrated Author Locked in Battle with Football, Family, and Time Itself
by Nick Hornby

Here's a little confession: I don't read book reviews.

Okay, I used to read them, in the good old days, when I thought I could afford a subscription to Publishers' Weekly. I was down with the PW book reviews--short, and pretty much universally chipper, although every now and then someone would rip a forthcoming book up one side and down the other. But I honestly don't think I've ever made it all the way through a New York Times book review. Why not? Well, for the most part, they never really make me want to read the books. This is why, I think, I enjoy book blogs as much as I do. The less "review-y," the better--I like to hear what someone really thought of a book, even if they didn't like it.

So it is always very refreshing to read Nick Hornby's collections of book-reading essays (collected from The Believer magazine, where they originally appear). The latest such book of his is titled More Baths Less Talking: Notes from the Reading Life of a Celebrated Author Locked in Battle with Football, Family, and Time Itself, and I devoured it over the course of a couple of nights. Hornby opens each essay with a list of the books he bought that month, and the books he actually read, which is a lovely way to admit that what we pick out to read and what we end up reading are not always directly related. And then he proceeds to discuss what he read in approachable, and often very funny, prose. And you often learn something along the way, like this, when he talks about the book Austerity Britain: 1945-51, by David Kynaston):

"While I was reading about the birth of our* National Health Service, President Obama was winning his battle to extend health care in America;** it's salutary, then, to listen to the recollections of the doctors who treated working-class Britons in those early days. 'I certainly found when the Health Service started on the 5th July '48 that for the first six months I had as many as twenty or thirty ladies come to me who had the most unbelievable gynaecological conditions--I mean, of that twenty or thirty there would be at least ten who had complete prolapse of the womb, and they had to hold it up with a towel as if they had a large nappy on.'" (p. 25.)

I don't know what it says about me that that TOTALLY makes me want to get and read the Kynaston book, but kudos to Hornby on his quote-selecting skills. I also know this about Hornby: he's the only reviewer who has ever, EVER made me want to read Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (although I know I should have read this one before now).

So: looking to get excited about a wide range of fiction and nonfiction? Try this and Hornby's other such collections, including The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, and Shakespeare Wrote for Money.

*Hornby is British, so he speaks of the British National Health Service.

**I don't know that Obama's health-care plan is actually going to make health care more accessible to anyone, but that's a small quibble with Hornby's writing.

Not his best collection, but who cares?

And of course Both Flesh and Not: Essays couldn't be David Foster Wallace's best collection---he died in 2008 and here is this collection of essays, collected from who knows where (well, the source notes tell you where, but I was too lazy to look) and published in 2012.

Last week I blogged about one particular essay in this collection, but I wanted to come back and consider the book as a whole. All in all: it may not be his best, but it's still David Foster Wallace, and there's still a lot here that's very, very readable. One interesting addition is the inclusion, between essays, of lists of words and their definitions that Wallace found interesting (from the Publisher's Note: "Readers familiar with David Foster Wallace's work know that he possessed an insatiable love for words and their meanings. On his computer he constantly updated a list of words that he wanted to learn, culling from numerous sources and writing brief definitions and usage notes...It was one of the great thrills of Wallace's life to be invited to serve on the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary. The definitions in his vocabulary list reprinted here are quoted or paraphrased from that excellent reference work").

In addition to the tennis essays (there's two here), there's a fantastic consideration of how James Cameron's Terminator 2 completely sold out everything that was great about his earlier movie, Terminator; a chapter on twenty-four words and their usage which is way more fascinating than it sounds (from the entry on "loan": "If you use loan as a verb in anything other than ultra-informal speech, you're marking yourself as ignorant or careless. As of 2004, the verb to lend never comes off as fussy or pretentious, merely as correct"), and the intro that Wallace wrote for the Best American Essays volume that he edited. I'll admit I didn't make it through some of the essays that were book reviews of more esoteric titles, or the one titled "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama." But still: even a half-book of Wallace's nonfiction is better than a lot of authors' full works.

I always particularly enjoy learning Wallace's thoughts on the processes of reading and writing (it's part of why I really enjoyed D.T. Max's literary biography of him, titled Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace). Here's a bit from the essay he wrote to introduce the Best American Essays volume:

"I'm not really even all that confident or concerned about the differences between nonfiction and fiction, with 'differences' here meaning formal or definitive, and 'I' referring to me as a reader. There are, as it happens, intergenre differences that I know and care about as a writer, though these differences are hard to talk about in a way that people who don't try to write both fiction and nonfiction will understand. I'm worried that they'll sound cheesy and melodramatic...Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder--because nonfiction's based in reality, and today's felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they're executed on tightropes, over abysses--it's the abysses that are different. Fiction's abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction's abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one's total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and way, &c." (p. 302.)

That's about as good a definition as I've read, of both fiction and nonfiction.

Finishing up Fahrenheit 451.

I finished my re-read of Fahrenheit 451 this week, and I must say I found it just as interesting as I did when I first read it in junior high school. I hope to be able to read it again in a couple of decades or so and see how it hits me then.

In the meantime, I was blown away (no pun intended) by the following paragraph, in which Bradbury describes the (nuclear? maybe) bombing of a city:

"The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turning the men over like dominos in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south. Montag crushed himself down, squeezing himself small, eyes tight. He blinked once. And in that instant, saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants, the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in grouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead." (p. 160.)

Can't you just SEE that? For my money Bradbury's the most vivid descriptive writer out there. I also enjoyed the interview questions with Bradbury that were included in the 50th anniversary edition paperback that I read--made me want to revisit Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews. For a guy who seemed to write a lot about the dark sides of human nature he sure did love life. It makes you think.

Ahhhh...that's what I've been missing.

David Foster Wallace, I miss you so.

Of course, I realize it is silly to say that about someone I didn't know at all. And even sillier considering I've never been able to make it through a work of his fiction (not even one of his short stories), which is what he's really known for. But I do think when the world lost Wallace it lost a fantastic essayist. And there just aren't enough of those around; when they go, you miss them.

Both Flesh and Not: Essays
by David Foster Wallace

As you know, I've been going through a bit of a reading hiccup. At the same time I picked up The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry from my library's "Serendipity Collection," I also got the title Both Flesh and Not: Essays, by Wallace, from the same collection. It took me a while to get started in it, but the first night I picked it up, the first essay in it that I read was (of course, because I am quite the boring linear-type person) the first essay, "Federer Both Flesh and Not." It's an article on the tennis player Roger Federer, and although I like Federer, I couldn't say I'm a huge fan.* But, there it was, and I was aware that Wallace was a skilled tennis player himself, so I was interested to hear his take on the subject.

I was not disappointed. In the essay I found this:

"Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body."*

*There's a great deal that's bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits--every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It's your body that dies, after all.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously--it's just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare peak-type sensuous epiphanies (I'm so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!, etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important--they make up for a lot." (p. 8.)

Sorry to quote at such length. But what I love here is how perfectly, how awesomely, really, Wallace captures a thought I have had so often; namely, the kinetic beauty of the body. I don't even have to watch sporting events or athletes to have this feeling--once, closing the library, I was working with a library page who was a six-foot tall, young guy. Part of closing was to make sure all the chairs were around the right tables, which was something of a pain because my library had these clunky, wooden, HEAVY chairs that I literally had to drag from place to place (slowly). So walking around I observed Scott, my co-worker, find one of these chairs way out of place, easily pick it up and carry it, literally, above his head (for fun?) until he found an empty spot at a table to gently set it down in. I'll never forget that. I stood there with my mouth open and wished, for just a moment, I could be a twenty-year-old, buff guy just so I could see what that FELT like.

But I digress.

When I read that quote, really, I heaved a sigh and something in my reading soul unclenched. It was temporary, but it felt so good. THAT is what I have been missing; I've been reading some good things, but nothing that has made me say, "yes, I know exactly what you mean!" And I think that communion, more than anything, is what I seek in reading.

This is too long already. More on the rest of this essay collection later.

*I'll admit it, my head is always turned by Rafael Nadal, who is just so, so pretty.

A disturbing juxtaposition.

This may be a bit heavy for a Monday, but if you're looking for some disturbing reading to put together (and therefore make it even more disturbing), you might try Ray Bradbury's classic novel Fahrenheit 451 and this latest article from Matt Taibbi.*

For whatever reason I decided last week it was time to re-read Fahrenheit 451, as I think I first (and last) read it in seventh or eighth grade. I'm not all the way through, but it's been interesting. I wish I'd kept a journal way back when, recording what I thought about this book, because I always remembered liking it and being struck by it, but I can't for the life of me remember WHY. And I suspect it has been a very different reading experience this time around, reading it as an adult.

This was one of the many parts that struck me, from the book:

"The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness. 'Jesus God,' said Montag, 'Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it?'"

And from the article:

"The idea that we have to beg and plead and pull Capra-esque stunts in the Senate just to find out whether or not our government has "asserted the legal authority" (this preposterous phrase is beginning to leak into news coverage with alarming regularity) to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil [using drones] without trial would be laughable, were it not for the obvious fact that such lines are in danger of really being crossed, if they haven't been crossed already."

In both: the theme of "not wanting to know" is a disturbing one. And yet, I know why we don't want to look and don't want to know. We're tired and we've got to go to work and get the kids fed and I think the brakes are going on the car and Christ, how am I going to pay that $5000 medical bill that wasn't covered? I get it. But I salute both Bradbury and Taibbi for asking: what will it take to make us LOOK?

*Stick with the article. It's long but worth it.

Nonfiction educates us, whether we want it to or not.

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
by Florence Williams

So I read Florence Williams's really fascinating book Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History almost entirely in the bathroom, and skipped around quite a bit among chapters, but I still enjoyed it. What I MOST enjoyed, however, was that Mr. CR evidently spent some time in the bathroom reading it as well. This is how his experiences with the book progressed:

The first day he came out of the bathroom and said, "Wow, breasts are really interesting."*

The second day he came out of the bathroom and said, "Thinking about what's all floating around in the environment, that's pretty weird."

The third day he came out of the bathroom and said, "I can't read that Breasts book anymore." And I think he really did stop reading it.

So what was the breaking point for Mr. CR? I think it was reading about all the chemicals and toxins in our environment, and how our bodies (womens' breasts, in particular) suck up and synthesize and deal with all those said toxins. But this book was about much more than just that.

I'd probably classify this book as popular science with a good dose of sociology thrown in: Williams discusses the anthropological and cultural history of our breasts, and also talks to a lot of scientists and researchers about their various studies, from the more sociological (male preferences for breast sizes) to the more genetic (including undertaking the chemical analysis of her own breast milk). I think that's the chapter where Mr. CR started to lose it, because you start to find information like this, on why flame retardants show up in everyone's breast milk:

"As one industry website proclaimed, 'Today, polyurethanes can be found in virtually everything we touch--our desks, chairs, cars, clothes, footwear, appliances, beds, the insulation in our walls, roof and molding on our homes.'

There's just one problem: it's highly flammable, earning nicknames like liquid gas and fatal foam. A typical home filled with polyurethane products can literally burst into flames in five minutes once the petrochemical gasses heat up enough. Much household and office foam is treated with flame-retardans designed to delay ignition. The substances, which include bromine, chlorine, and phosphorus versions, came into widespread use after 1975..." (p. 202.)

And that sort of information, coupled with the science of how breast tissue, more so than other body tissues, sucks up environmental ingredients and interacts with them, is what starts to freak a reader out.

Depressing subject matter notwithstanding, I really enjoyed this one.** I like a good science read that isn't completely dumbed down but which is still within my understanding, and Williams has a nice writing style. She reminds me a bit of Mary Roach, but I like her better--Roach seems (to me, anyway) to be becoming increasingly cutesy in her science writing.

So do give this one a try. If nothing else you'll probably be amused by the photos on the front and back covers. Very clever.

*This still makes me giggle. You think it's interesting reading about them, guys? Try walking around with the complex buggers.

*I know The Lesbrarian swears by Stacked, and I mean to read that one too, but I think I enjoyed the heavier emphasis on science topics that this book offered.

Imperfect in so many ways.

The Imperfect Mom: Candid Confessions of Mothers Living in the Real World
by Therese Jo Borchard

The slim book The Imperfect Mom: Candid Confessions of Mothers Living in the Real World has been sitting on my table for at least a month now, which indicates, I think, a lot about the imperfections going on in the house of this mom. Procrastination? Check. Poor cleaning routines? Check. (I promise you this book hasn't been moved or touched, even to dust around, in at least four weeks.) Poor time management and lack of regular blogging? Check.

I don't see that big picture turning around any time soon, but it is time to get this book out of here. I got it from the library, of course, because of the title, and it turned out to be a collection of mostly engaging essays on the practice of imperfect mothering (which I am perfecting over here). I see it's got a bunch of bookmarks in it--let's see what I thought was interesting enough, at least a month ago, to bookmark, shall we?

The entire chapter by Jenny Rosenstrach, titled "Take Back Your Stereo," about the inanity of "children's music," and how to get around it: "We'd listen to our music with two sets of ears asking ourselves, 'Would this make a good Phoebe song?' It was amazing to discover and in some cases rediscover the songs that did. Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits had probably been in the CD case for ten years without airtime when Andy decided to play track 14 in the car. It was love at first listen. For three months straight we'd barely be out of the driveway before the rapid-fire questioning would begin:

'Cecelia, Daddy?'" (p. 75.)

I enjoyed that because we just listened to that song the other day and CRjr rocked out. It's a good question: is there anyone who doesn't like the song "Cecelia"?

And this, from the opening essay:

"I should have eliminated caffeine completely from my diet during the first trimester of my pregnancy with Katherine. Maybe that was the cause of her irregular heartbeat. And why did I fly with her when she was a wee two months old? Did I really think her immune system could fight off the nasty bacterial infection she caught on the plane, which almost had her hospitalized?" (p. 4.)

Whenever I hear women saying their pregnancies made them feel stronger, I just marvel at them. Have you seen the list of what pregnant women either flat-out can't eat or "should avoid"? It's ridiculous. Being pregnant made me feel like one huge crisis waiting to happen.

And this, from an essay on a woman's pre-term labor, particularly her reactions to her husband's and doctor's reactions:

[After feeling her water break and trying to rouse her husband] "'Don't pregnant women have bladder issues? Maybe that's what it is,' he said.

'I think I would know if I had only wet my pants,' I growled, my irritation increasing exponentially.

'Yeah, but I remember reading something about...'

He noticed my hands moving to wrap around his neck.

'I'll get ready to go."

Just then the phone rang. It was my doctor. As I was explaining what happened, he interrupted me and asked to remind him how far along I was.

'Thirty-two weeks.'

'Are you sure?'

Oh, gee, now that you ask, ha, ha, silly me, I thought it was December, not February--of course I'm sure, are you kidding me?

'Yes, I'm sure,' I said with great restraint." (p. 24.)

I really got a kick out of that, because CRjr was a high-risk pregnancy, and trust me, you are not only counting weeks, you are counting days. Days to being closer to being full-term, days to being closer to bringing that baby in "safe." And how many mothers HAVEN'T had these conversations with doctors? Honestly, doctors. I know they care and try and we need them and all that jazz, but it feels like I have had to stop myself from saying, "Look, asshole," in more of my conversations than not with doctors.

So: I found a lot to relate to in this one, and I enjoyed it. I liked the variety of viewpoints, and it was refreshing to hear other mothers tell stories about how they had muffed things (and yet everything turned out fine, or at least workable). I always think this is the sort of gift, along with perhaps The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting, that someone should get for mothers-to-be at baby showers, just for a change of pace.

Where will the next big epidemic come from?

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
by David Quammen

Would you believe I spent the past week blowing through a book on diseases (primarily caused by viruses) that cross over from animals to humans?*

Well, I did, and it was a fantastic read. The book in question was David Quammen's Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, it's 520 pages long, and yes, it's about disease and human pandemics, and I could not put it down.

This came as somewhat of a surprise, since I've looked at some of Quammen's other science/natural history books, and found them somewhat dull. So either this is just a subject that I find interesting (and I do), or he took his style up a notch in this one, or I didn't give his earlier books a fair trial. All possibilities.

To be specific, Quammen reports on "zoonoses"--diseases that are communicable from animals to humans (thanks, Merriam-Webster's). Here's some introductory information from Quammen:

"Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918-1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity. All of the human influenzas are zoonoses. So are monkeypox, bovine tuberculosis, Lyme disease, West Nile fever, Marburg virus disease, rabies, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, anthrax, Lassa fever..." (p. 21).

So yes, a real upper subject. But Quammen makes it very compelling, tracing the emergence, outbreaks, study and history, and other aspects of a variety of zoonoses, from Hendra to Ebola to influenza to HIV. It's quick-paced, particularly for science writing, and there's a ton of fascinating things to learn here. Did you know, for instance, that HIV might have "spilled over" from animal to human hosts as early as 1908? I didn't.

It's a really fascinating book. I wouldn't read it right before you get on an airplane, or if you live near a lot of bats. Otherwise, do have at.

*Although, check out that freaky cover. Mr. CR is reading it now, and I've had to request that he put it down facedown, because the cover freaks me out.

Look no further for a great guide to food lit!

I am very, very excited: the first book that I helped with, as series editor for the Real Stories series of nonfiction reading guides (published by ABC-CLIO), came out yesterday!

The book in question is Melissa Brackney Stoeger's Food Lit: A Reader's Guide to Epicurean Nonfiction, and you'll excuse my parental-ish pride if I say it's nothing short of fantastic. Stoeger not only explores (and helps categorize into similar nonfiction food "genres") a TON of popular and current nonfiction titles about food, she provides gorgeous appendix materials about cooking shows, food blogs, and food book awards. If you work in a library and get questions from patrons with an interest in this subject, this is a great resource for you. (For example: Tired of combing through all the cookbooks in your stacks to find the more narrative foodie selections? Melissa has done all that work for you!)

If anyone out there is going to ALA Midwinter, I'm sure they'll have copies in the ABC-CLIO/Libraries Unlimited (#2021) booth for you to look at, although I warn you--reading it will make you hungry (for both books and food)!

I wish I could go pass out advertising flyers at my local food co-op (foodies galore!) for it--I just might, actually.*

*I'm totally biased, but I also love the cover.

Odd jobs indeed.

I am a total sucker for any variety of "save more money now!" magazine articles and books. I even eagerly pounced on the Parade magazine in last Sunday's newspaper because there was an article in it about saving more money in the new year (and Parade magazine is not usually something I pounce on with any great anticipation).

Invariably, of course, I am let down. All of the saving tips seem to be of the "don't get cable" or "find a cell phone plan that doesn't charge for individual texts" variety, and since I already don't get cable or text (I have a cell phone for emergency purposes only that I still haven't figured out how to answer, which is okay because I haven't given anyone the number, because I don't like to talk on cell phones), those don't really help me. Invariably Mr. CR points out I should skip reading that stuff, because as someone who hasn't bought new socks for at least five years*, I'm really not their target audience.

So now I have moved on to "make extra money in your spare time!" books.

Odd Jobs: How to Have Fun and Make Money in a Bad Economy
by Abigail R. Gehring

And that's how I found Abigail Gehring's Odd Jobs: How to Have Fun and Make Money in a Bad Economy. I thought I'd just look it over and see if there was anything suitably freelancey that I could try out from home, but it turned out to be not that kind of book. What it is, which actually turned out to be a lot more entertaining to read, is a compendium of, well, truly ODD jobs.

Some of the jobs explored? Escort. "Closet Exorcist." Street Furniture Sales. Lipstick Reading. Motivational Dancer. Human Scarecrow. Christmas Tree Farmer. Dog Handler in Alaska. Soap Maker. Body Part Model.

It's really quite the awesome recreational read (which I was not expecting). Each job is covered in about two to three pages, which is really all the more you want to read about these jobs. Gehring describes what you do, what you get paid, what it costs to get started, what you need to start, perks, downsides, and a few Internet sites to check out. And, bless her heart, she's a pragmatic writer, our Abigail. Here's my favorite bit from the "Escort" description:

"If you're thinking this job sounds too good to be true, it's because in most cases it is. Don't be naive. The majority of men paying $1,000 for an evening are expecting something more than arm candy." (p. 17.) Perhaps former Olympic athlete Suzy Favor Hamilton was not aware of this.

I really enjoyed this book. It didn't make me want to work any of the jobs, but let's face it, I like thinking about working and making money much more than I actually have any skills at working and making money.

*I think. The socks I'm wearing were already oldish when CRjr arrived, years ago.

Why aren't librarians allowed to love books?

When I worked in the public library I was frustrated by many things. Mainly, I'll admit, by the rudeness* of the general public, which remains the number-one reason I am still relieved not to be working a public-service desk job right now (although I'm sure I'll have to go back to one sometime, and will just be damn glad if I'm able to get one). But a slightly more esoteric annoyance I had with the system was how librarians are often told (in library school, or in training) that to be good "readers' advisors"--people who help readers find things they might enjoy reading--they must focus solely on what the reader wants. "It's not about you," we librarians are told, "Readers' Advisory is not about pushing your opinions on readers."

Read This!: Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores
by Hans Weyandt (edt)

Well, okay. I get it. When you're helping a reader find something to read it is of course vital that you focus on their interests. Likewise, if someone is, say, a Jodi Picoult or Nicholas Sparks reader, it is probably nicest if the librarian doesn't say (although they might be dying to): "So, you like hack authors, huh?"

But at the same time, I think that attitude does everyone a vast misservice. It hurts librarians, who are made to feel they can't speak about any books too enthustiastically--that they cannot "recommend," they must only ever "suggest," and strive never to allow their own opinions a part in the conversation. And I think eventually it hurts readers--who might be looking for, not only some assistance, but also a good book conversation with someone who also loves reading--not someone who is desperately trying not to have any opinions on any books whatsoever during the encounter.

Now, all of that is a very long-winded way to say I loved, absolutely loved, a little book I checked out at the end of last year titled Read This!: Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores.** God love independent booksellers. They don't dick around with any "don't bring your own opinions or loves" edicts. This book consists of twenty-five indie bestsellers' lists of their favorite 50 books--each chapter provides some information on the bookstore where the contributor works, the list, some paragraphs about a few of the titles listed more specifically, and a short q-and-a about bookstores and readers with the contributor. And they don't list their 50 best-selling titles, or 50 "sure bets" (a term which always annoys the shit out of me, since I figure my sure bet is bound to be someone else's can't stand)--they list their 50 FAVORITES. It's awesome. Straightforward and very, very pleasing. I read it a chapter at a time last month, always at bedtime, and it was a very satisfying and settling read.

The short interviews with the booksellers were almost my favorite part; and the following is my favorite response to the question "Who is your most trusted source for book recommendations?" (by bookseller Emma Straub): "There are reviewers I trust, and friends I trust, and booksellers I trust. Really, my problem is that I have too many smart people recommending books to me all the time. My backlog is so enormous that often by the time I actually read a book, I've forgotten who told me they loved it or which newspaper gave it a rave. Then it's just up to me and the book to see if we can get along." (p. 16.)

Look at those words: Trust. Recommending. Smart. Love. Now THOSE are the words you should always bring to talking with other readers. So join me in the revolution, librarians: get rid of that wishy-washy word "suggest" once and for all.

*Not to mention general scariness and sometimes flat-out violence.

**If you buy it new the royalties go to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE).

Best nonfiction 2012: my very first podcast!

Many, many thanks to Steve Thomas, who creates the podcast Circulating Ideas ("the librarian interview podcast"). He was nice enough to ask me to participate in his podcast round-up of the best books of 2012 (as well as some sneak previews of 2013 titles), and I had so much fun doing it.

You can find the podcast at his site. In the first installment, he interviewed Liz Burns, Kelly Jensen, Kristi Chadwick, Anna Mickelsen, myself, and Becky Spratford on our "best" picks.

I'll admit I listened to my part first (it starts around the 1 hour 18 minute mark)*, but I went back when I had more time later in the week and listened to the rest and thoroughly enjoyed it. (It was particularly useful for me, as a lot of great fiction and YA titles were discussed.) I particularly enjoyed the fact that many of the lists are presented in a conversational format. And: a second installment is now up as well!

*My apologies: at times I was talking too close to my headset microphone and there's some annoying noises on the hard consonants. I didn't realize that was happening--live and learn!

Authors: In Memoriam, 2012 (the personal version).

Of course, anytime an author dies it makes the baby Jesus cry. But when I was typing up yesterday's list of authors who passed on last year, I must admit there were more than a few that really hit me hard. Which ones?

Well, Ray Bradbury, of course. And Nora Ephron hit pretty hard too. But David Rakoff? Oh, losing David Rakoff broke my heart.

Several of the names surprised me; Jacques Barzun because I really didn't know he was still alive. David Oliver Relin (co-author of Three Cups of Tea, but we can't hold that against him, I think Greg Mortenson is the real problem there) was sad because he committed suicide, and Jeffrey Zaslow (although I think his book, The Last Lecture, co-authored by Randy Pausch, was a crime against the book-buying public) was kind of sad because he died on a snowy road driving around in Michigan promoting his latest book. It's a tough life, being an author.

And then, there were Earl Shorris ("who fought poverty with knowledge," what a beautiful epigraph) and Paul Fussell.* Two of my very favorites. This year please do consider reading a book by either of those authors in tribute; they wrote thoughtful, solid, intelligent nonfiction. They will be missed.

*In fact, I'm thinking I'm making this the Year of Fussell here at CR. Maybe we'll do a Menage with him, or perhaps I'll issue a reading challenge?

One of my favorite nonfiction titles of 2012.

I very much enjoyed Jeanne Marie Laskas's latest investigative book, titled Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work.

Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work
by Jeanne Marie Laskas

Evidently Laskas now has six books to her credit; I only knew about the one, a memoir titled Fifty Acres and a Poodle, which I read a million years ago and also enjoyed. Just recently a friend got me a gift subscription to Reader's Digest magazine (which struck both me and Mr. CR as kind of funny, since we'd never read it, but it turns out to be really entertaining bathroom reading), and I've noticed Laskas also does the advice column there. She usually shows good sense there, so when I saw this title, I thought I'd give it a go.

Laskas set out on an experiment that's been done a lot, especially in this age of "stunt" or "year in the life" memoirs--investigating what people do at their jobs. Her twist on the subject is that she investigates jobs we never really see anymore: coal miners, cowboys, oil drillers, truck drivers, etc. And she does it by sharing peoples' lives; she actually went down into the coal mine, and traveled to Alaska's north shore to stay with the guys doing the drilling. Her writing is very straightforward, which is great for this sort of investigative writing. For instance, when she first goes down in the coal mine and is surprised to find that everything is white:

"Everyone, I was told, gets jolted by the white. You try to make sense of it. 'They just paint this opening part white to cheer everyone up?' I said to Foot the first time I saw it. He didn't even dignify that guess with a response. 'It's, like, a joke?' I said. 'Irony? A little humor to start your day before you move into black?' I figured we'd hit the black part of a coal mine as soon as we moved farther in. Foot looked at me in that way he came to look at me, a stillness, a flatness to his gaze, an expression that said, You just keep turning into more of an idiot. He said, 'I think you'll find there are no aesthetic choices, nor is there irony, in a coal mine.'

The white is on account of 'rock dust,' powdered limestone, a fire retardant that you throw on every exposed inch of coal--which, were it not rock-dusted, would be spontaneous combustion waiting to happen. One small explosion could trigger a series of explosions, on and on, fwoom, fwoom, fwoom, through the mine, but not if you've got it rock-dusted." (pp. 20-21.)

I didn't love all the chapters equally (the chapter on the Ben-Gals, the cheerleaders for the Cincinnati Bengals, one of whom also doubled as a construction worker, left me particularly cold), but there was enough here to think about that I can still call it one of my favorite books of the last year. I even suggested it to the guy who runs the gas station down the road; I was having a problem getting one of the pumps to start, and when he came out to help me (which was very nice of him) we got talking about the price of gas, which I personally feel should be much, much higher. And then I proceeded to bore him by telling him about the oil drilling chapter in this book. That's just the long-winded way I roll.

A little bit of perspective goes a long way.

Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker
by Evelyn Birkby

Where I live got more than 18 inches of snow today.

That's right. Just today. Because one of my phobias is driving in snow (and worrying about those I love driving in snow), you can imagine this was a bit upsetting. But a book I'm reading gave me a little perspective.

The book in question is Evelyn Birkby's Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker, published by the University of Iowa Press. It's a compilation of newspaper columns written over the past sixty years by Birkby, who is lauded on the cover as "Iowa's best-known homemaker." The columns range in topic from Birkby's marriage to her husband Robert, their years in farming, the raising of their children, their vacations, involvement in boy scouts, and many other subjects. The part that gave me perspective was the chapter in which she discussed living through winters in less-than-cozy homes:

"The small white house was uninsulated, and when the temperature got down to freezing in the winter, frost formed on the inside of the windows...when chill winds blew tenaciously through the walls of the house and up from under the floor boards.

I remember using the playpen to provide a warm place for the children. I put a blanket on the bottom of the pen, which was about four inches above the floor. Then I hung another blanket on three sides. I placed the pen with the fourth side open toward the oil burning stove in the living room -- the only heat source in our house. The children would get inside the playpen to read, color, play with their toys, and stay warm." (p. 66.)

Holy crap. Our sixty-year-old house isn't the warmest thing in the world, but we don't have breezes coming up between the floor boards, for the love of pete.

It's really a pretty interesting book. Birkby is nothing if not upbeat* and the stories range from tragic to mundane to heartwarming. If you know any readers who like "cozier" nonfiction, particularly with a rural bent, they might really enjoy this.**

*For some reason this book tickled me this week--I must have been in the right mood. In real life optimistic and wholesome people who "never say die" tend to make me a bit uneasy.

**Although it's not a perfect book. It would be better if the columns included the date they were first published; sometimes the date can be figured out from the context, but it would be easier if it was just there. I also think it might benefit from an index.

Gotta love Bittman.

How To Cook Everything
by Mark Bittman

In case you're on the lookout for an exceedingly practical gift, you could do a lot worse than to pick up a copy of Mark Bittman's superlative cookbook How To Cook Everything.

Yeah, it's a big book. But it's awesome. I've looked at a lot of cookbooks, and I usually find at least one or two things I can use, but this is the first book that has been so consistently useful for so many types of recipes. Lately I've been trying to use new ingredients and do more cooking from scratch, and Bittman never fails me when I turn to his book for some inspiration (his chapter on cooking and using beans is particularly good). The best thing about many of these recipes is how simple they are--most include only a few ingredients and can be made with a minimum of fuss.

I've started to use this book so often that his name is steadily sneaking into our kitchen lexicon. His appetizer-ish meatballs are known as Bittman Balls around our house. Likewise with his yogurt biscuits: Bittman Biscuits. And, wonder of wonders, I even found an easy recipe for kale and pasta in his book a few weeks back and have moved it into steady rotation. Don't know what to call that one yet; maybe Bittman Noodles. Or Bittman Finally Found a Way to Use Kale, but that's probably too long.

In any case, if you or anyone you know needs a great basic but still very comprehensive cookbook, this is the one to try.