detailmuse in 2014

Happy New Year! On to 2015 -- please join me here!

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Welcome! In this message, I’ll post cover images of what I’m currently reading plus maintain a list of books I’ve finished.

# = read from my TBRs (acquired pre-2014). My goal this year = 30; my actual = 34!

For more about my recent reading, see the Reading Summary post in my 2013 Club Read thread and my threads from 2012, 2011, and 2010.

Books Read:

Fiction
62. All the Answers by Kate Messner (3.5)
60. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie# by Alan Bradley (3.5)
57. Here by Richard McGuire (5) (See review)
56. Regeneration# by Pat Barker (3.5)
53. The Dinner by Herman Koch (3.5)
44. The Hours# by Michael Cunningham (4.5)
43. Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay# by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (5)
41. Mrs. Dalloway# by Virginia Woolf (4)
40. Nest by Esther Ehrlich (3.5) (See review)
38. Dream When Your'e Feeling Blue# by Elizabeth Berg (3)
37. The Patron Saint of Liars# by Ann Patchett (4) (See review)
35. The Postmistress# by Sarah Blake (2)
28. Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (4) (See review)
27. Summer House with Swimming Pool by Herman Koch (4)
22. In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen (3.5) (See review)
20. The Street of Crocodiles# by Bruno Schulz (4)
19. Where’d You Go, Bernadette# by Maria Semple (2.5)
18. Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman (3.5) (See review)
14. Wake# by Anna Hope (3.5) (See review)
13. Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die# (3.5)
8. All Quiet on the Western Front# by Erich Maria Remarque (4.5) (See review)
2. Survival Skills: Stories# by Jean Ryan (4) (See review)

Nonfiction
61. Keep out of Reach of Children: Reye's Syndrome, Aspirin, and the Politics of Public Health by Mark Largent (3.5) (See review)
59. Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan (3)
55. Columbine# by Dave Cullen (5)
54. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (5) (See review)
48. Daring Greatly# by Brene Brown (4)
42. Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink (4.5)
39. Born on a Blue Day# by Daniel Tammet (3.5)
36. Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing by Deborah Levy (4) (See review)
34. Life# by Keith Richards (4)
33. The Girls Who Went Away# by Ann Fessler (5) (See review)
31. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast (4.5)
30. The White Album# by Joan Didion (3.5)
26. You Were Never in Chicago# by Neil Steinberg (4)
21. The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration by Bernd Heinrich (4) (See review)
17. A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred by George Will (3.5) (See review)
16. Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening by Carol Wall (2.5) (See review)
15. Edison and the Rise of Innovation by Leonard DeGraaf (3.5) (See review)
11. Still Foolin' 'Em# by Billy Crystal (Audio) (3.5)
10. How About Never - Is Never Good for You? by Bob Mankoff (4) (See review)
7. The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War# by Richard Rubin (Audio) (4.5) (See review)
6. The Great Influenza# by John M. Barry (5)
4. My Age of Anxiety# by Scott Stossel (4) (See review)
3. The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism# by Naoki Higashida (3.5) (See review)

Other
58. NPR Driveway Moments Love Stories (4) (See review)
52. 50 Success Classics# by Tom Butler-Bowdon (3.5)
51. Bellevue Literary Review (Vol 13 No 1; Spring 2013)# (3)
50. You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes by Chris Hadfield (4)
49. My Therapist Said: Poems by Hal Sirowitz (3)
47. The Make Ahead Cook by America's Test Kitchen (4.5) (See review)
46. 50 Self-help Classics# by Tom Butler-Bowdon (4)
45. xkcd: volume 0# by Randall Munroe (4)
32. Granta 108: Chicago# (3.5) (See review)
29. The World's Great Wonders by Jheni Osman (4.5) (See review)
25. Human Anatomy: The Definitive Visual Guide by DK Publishing (4.5) (See review)
24. Heart of Dark Chocolate by Rowan Jacobsen
23. The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook by America’s Test Kitchen (5) (See review)
12. The Science of Good Cooking# by America’s Test Kitchen (5) (See review)
9. Veranda: The Art of Outdoor Living (3) (See review)
5. Great Estimations# by Bruce Goldstone (4) (See review)
1. Bellevue Literary Review (Vol 12 No 1; Spring 2012)# (3)

2014 Non-book Reading (Comments about these articles begin in post >161 detailmuse: )
1. “In Praise of Discomfort” by Joe Meno, from the June 2014 Chicago magazine
2. “Sixty-nine Days: The Ordeal of the Chilean Miners” by Hector Tobar, from the July 7&14 New Yorker
3. “Away From My Desk: The Office from Beginning to End” by Jill Lepore, from the May 12, 2014 New Yorker
4. “The Four Most Desired People in New York*” by Logan Hill, from the February 24, 2014 New York Magazine
5. “Mine Is Longer Than Yours: The Last Boomer Game” by Michael Kinsley, from the April 7, 2008 New Yorker
6. “Have You Lost Your Mind? More Bad News for Boomers” by Michael Kinsley, from the April 28, 2014 New Yorker
7. “Bye-bye Babies” by Alison Motluk, from the December 13, 2008 New Scientist
8. “Marvelous Middle Age” by David Bainbridge, from the March 10, 2012 New Scientist
9. “A Sudden Illness: How My Life Changed” by Laura Hillenbrand, from the July 7, 2003 New Yorker
10. “Four Eyes: Looking for Glasses” by Patricia Marx, from the March 29, 2010 New Yorker
11. “The Decision Lens” by Helen Knight, from the April 14, 2012 New Scientist
12. “Scrubbed” by Graeme Wood, from the June 24-July 1, 2013 New York magazine
13. “The Space in Between” by Ariel Levy, from the September 10, 2012 New Yorker
14. “My Abortion” by Meaghan Winter, from the November 18, 2013 New York magazine
15. “Birthright: What’s Next for Planned Parenthood?” by Jill Lepore, from the November 14, 2011 New Yorker
16. “Letting Go” by David Sedaris, from the May 5, 2008 New Yorker
17. “Letting Go” by Atul Gawande, from the August 2, 2010 New Yorker
18. “The Secret Life of Pronouns” by James W. Pennebaker, from the September 3, 2011 New Scientist
19. “Helenism: The Birth of the Cosmo Girl” by Judith Thurman, from the May 11, 2009 New Yorker
20. “Big Med” by Atul Gawande, from the August 13/20, 2012 New Yorker
21. “Final Forms: What death certificates can tell us and what they can’t” by Kathryn Schulz, from the April 7, 2014 New Yorker
22. “A Man of Taste: A chef with cancer fights to save his tongue” by D.T. Max, from the May 12, 2008 New Yorker
23. “The Operator: Is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good?” by Michael Specter, from the February 4, 2013 New Yorker

2014 Non-reading

A shortlist of planned reads for 2014, some for the WWI theme read and some that I’ve assembled as paired reads:

✔ The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War by Richard Rubin
✔ All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
✔ Regeneration by Pat Barker
One of Ours by Willa Cather
✔ Wake by Anna Hope
✔ The Great Influenza by John Barry

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✔ Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
✔ The Hours by Michael Cunningham

✔ The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
✔ Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer

✔ Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay by Annie Proulx

And I have shortened a ridiculously long list of what most appeals to me in my TBRs to a mere longlist to keep at hand:

Fiction
American Rust by Phillip Meyer
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
The Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola
The Annotated Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Poetry
The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine

Nonfiction
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History by David Christian
Power Sex Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane
Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life by Eva Jablonka/Marion Lamb
The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code by Sam Kean
The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
✔ The Science of Good Cooking by America’s Test Kitchen
The Language of Mathematics by Keith Devlin
What to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland

✔ The White Album by Joan Didion
Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro
The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World by Michelle Goldberg
✔ The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler
Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting by Kitty Burns Florey
Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York by William Grimes
The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler

What a good idea to make a list of what appeals to you most on your TBR --mine would be "ridiculously long" too!

Hi MJ--I'm looking forward to following your reading this year. You read a lot of nonfiction, and since I've joined LT I've been reading more nonfiction too. I have to say that The Emperor of All Maladies is one of the books I've read over the past few years, although I will say that my knowledge of science is limited.

Lots of interesting things on your plate. I very much enjoyed All Quiet on the Western Front, The Great Influenza, and Regeneration and the rest of the trilogy, although Regeneration is the best IMO.

The idea of a "first off the TBR" list is a great idea. I pile them next to my reading chair, but then it gets too unwieldy and I reshelve them all. Then I forget what it was I was so anxious to read! I should also make a "best of" the wishlist list too.

I too am wanting to read Emperor of all Maladies. It's currently the base for a new TBR pile next to my chair.
:-p

The Periodic Table is a wonderful book. Here's to a good reading year!

- Meant to add that I look forward to hearing your thoughts on The Last of the Doughboys.

Hi Rebecca, Deborah, Lisa and Paul! Your mentions are sifting and repositioning the priorities of those books above! I've now made the e-list physical -- have pulled those books out from the shelves and grouped them together. Funny thing, though: that didn't free up any kind of space to shelve them together! Bookpile or shelf, I'll eventually snap a picture of them to keep a visual in front of me here.

Paul, Doughboys is 20 hours on CD and I estimate about a month to listen. My first impressions are 1) it's very good and 2) with the US coming late to the war, I wish I'd gotten a little history and early-war reading under my belt before getting to this.

Great list of books in you TBR posts. Just reading those titles makes me want to get reading...something.

Hi Dan. haha for me it's wanting to get reading...everything. !

:)

Bellevue Literary Review (Vol 12 No 1; Spring 2012), ©2012, acquired 2012

My favorite literary journal -- short stories, essays and poems about illness or coping in some way, often very peripherally -- though not my favorite issue of it (I only much liked 8 of the 39 short stories, essays and poems).

So I’ll mention my noticing that, at some point while reading, it becomes important to me to know whether the piece is fiction or nonfiction. (Though I strongly suspect that in this journal many of the fictions are based in real lives.) Interestingly, the most unbelievable passage in the book was in a nonfiction piece; I do believe it happened but I think the writer didn’t have quite enough distance/talent/etc. to make it believably motivated.

And I’ll talk about the cover, which on these journals is always historical. This one captures “Student nurses at Bellevue Hospital {in New York City} circa 1890.” The “nursing school became a model for nursing training” and

The last nurse to wear the traditional {uniform} was Rita LaCouture, who worked in Bellevue until her death in 1995. Those of us who were privileged to work with her remember her as a dynamo, and a special link to nursing history. (And she didn’t mind when we affectionately referred to the coffee filter on her head...).

Survival Skills: Stories by Jean Ryan, ©2013, acquired 2013

Whatever she needs, it’s not our company.

That’s from “Greyhound,” the first in this collection of 13 short stories (their titles comprise the cover’s design). “She” is a dog I’ll never forget, one who’s adopted out after she refuses to race anymore. But “she” is also thematic of all the characters unable to meet needs in these poignant stories of human (and animal) interactions and failed relationships, mostly lesbian. There is a sameness to many of the stories but they’re beautiful and I’d eagerly read more by Ryan. I’m glad to have discovered this on wandering_star’s thread.

And she didn’t mind when we affectionately referred to the coffee filter on her head...

:-) Sorry the issue as a whole didn't pan out.

Glad you enjoyed it!

You're giving me ideas for how I could reorganise my TBR shelves... As a whole they don't much appeal at the minute, but there are certainly things there I want to read more urgently than others; now, if I had a little list AND put them physically together on the shelf... I think that might just have to be done today, right away!

Glad you reviewed Bellevue. Also, noting your nice comments on Jean Ryan.

Thanks for your BLR review, MJ. I have a stack of a dozen or more BLRs that I haven't read yet; must change that.

wandering_star -- I’ve read all my books inspired by you and will be following your reading this year for more :)

Rachel have fun! Having mine together helps against the too-many-choices inertia.

Lisa, Dan, Darryl, I love the BLR’s appreciation of healthcare history. I worked as a nurse’s aide during high school and remember the nurses’ caps -- the striping that designated an RN vs LPN and the unique shapes from some nursing schools (one was a mortarboard, very impractical). When I first moved to Chicago, I managed the pharmacy in a 100+ year old hospital and remember seeing ledgers that noted patient accounts paid via crops and livestock. I’d like to find a good volume on healthcare history.

It looks like you have some great reads coming up on your TBR list. A few are on mine too. I am retired and can't get to everything I want to read. I don't know how you all do it. :)

Oh, I just looked again at your enticing TBR lists, and noticed you have Street of Crocodiles - one that I'd like to get - looking forward to your comments - and Joan Didion's White Album was excellent.

It sounds like you had some interesting experiences with the history of local medical care. I would love to be the archivist working on that project!

I'm not sure that this would fit the bill, but my favorite book about the history of American health care is The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. I read it twice, and I wouldn't mind giving it another go in the near future.

>Colleen we’ll see how many I get to... I’m a slow reader who’s in awe of some readers here!

>Paul I find I’m turning to Didion as comfort reads -- her topics aren’t comforting but for me her writing is, very much. I was drawn to The Street of Crocodiles by a characterization of it as dreamy, imaginative fiction. I got all the more interested when I discovered that Jonathan Safran Foer later took the text and physically redacted portions of it via die cuts into something experimental and poetic in his Tree of Codes. My library consortium finally has the Foer book so it’s time to get to both.

>Lisa yes archivist, and even museum patron!

>Darryl I thought about that one, it’s in my wishlist because of you and your rereading of it says a lot. (Wish it were available on Kindle; I’m beginning to restrict tomes to ebooks.) God's Hotel is also in my wishlist due to you. I think I will use one or both as a reward after I read a couple medicine-history books from the TBRs.

The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida, translated from the Japanese by David Mitchell and KA Yoshida, orig ©2007, acquired 2013

From Mitchell’s Introduction:

Imagine a daily life in which your faculty of speech is taken away. {…} Now imagine that after you lose your ability to communicate, the editor-in-residence who orders your thoughts walks out without notice. {…} To make matters worse, another hitherto unrecognized editor has just quit without notice -- your editor of the senses. Suddenly sensory input from your environment is flooding in too, unfiltered in quality and overwhelming in quantity. {…} The functions that genetics bestows on the rest of us -- the “editors” -- as a birthright, people with autism must spend their lives learning how to simulate. It is an intellectual and emotional task of Herculean, Sisyphean and Titanic proportions

This book is a glimpse into an autistic mind via a series of questions posed to a nonverbal 13-year-old (at that time) Japanese boy and the answers he gave by typing into a sort of keyboard, those answers then transcribed by his mother and now, six years later, translated to English by novelist David Mitchell and his wife KA Yoshida (themselves parents of an autistic 3-year-old).

For example, in reply to “Why do you ask the same questions over and over?” and “Why do you echo questions back at the asker?” Higashida writes, respectively (partial excerpts here):

I imagine a normal person’s memory is arranged continuously, like a line. My memory, however, is more like a pool of dots. I’m always “picking up” these dots -- by asking {the same question over and over} -- so I can arrive back at the memory that the dots represent. {…Repeating questions} is great fun. It’s like a game of catch with a ball. {…} it’s playing with sound and rhythm.

{…Echoing questions} is a way of sifting through our memories {…I} scan my memory to find an experience closest to what’s happening now. When I’ve found a good close match, my next step is to try to recall what I said at that time. If I’m lucky, I hit upon a usable experience and all is well. If I’m not lucky, {…} I’m unable to answer the question {…and} that weird voice slips out

It’s a very quick read of ~60 Q&A, mostly about the behaviors of autistics that puzzle and frustrate their caregivers. That focus -- the author mostly on defense -- frustrated me! How about shining a light on what’s important to this young person instead of assuaging others’ frustrations? And actually, Higashida does exactly that, writing beautifully and figuratively and managing to steer topics toward his interests via some short fiction pieces interspersed throughout the book.

It’s surely enlightening and comforting to parents of autistic children, and there are passages where I cheer for Higashida’s creativity and tear-up at his pleas for caregivers to be patient and not give up on autistics. But I’m not as enamored of it as other readers are. I saw zero evidence of Japan in the book (which made me think the translation must be very sanitized), and many instances where Higashida seemed impossibly aware of self and others (autistics and neurotypicals) to the point of speaking for them (which made me wonder about the objectivity of the mother’s transcription and/or Mitchell/Yoshida’s translation).

My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel, ©2014, arc acquired 2013

{A}nxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture. {…} In computer terms, it’s both a hardware problem (I’m wired badly) and a software problem (I run faulty logic programs that make me think anxious thoughts).

This book had been catching my eye but I had been looking past it, thinking (per the title) it was a memoir of one guy’s experience with anxiety. But when I discovered that the “guy” is editor of The Atlantic magazine, I figured it might be a substantive memoir. And, not too far into it, I realized not only is it substantive but it’s broader than a memoir -- it’s a biography of anxiety.

It’s the history of anxiety (as distinguished from fear) -- both of the experience, dating from ancient times and affecting famous names (e.g. Charles Darwin), and the modern-day medicalization of it. It's an exploration of the science, psychology and sociology (particularly about the degree of choice in today’s culture) of its causes and treatments. Throughout, Stossel illuminates aspects by folding in examples from his decades-long (and, in his family, generations-long) debility from anxiety.

Though I didn’t learn much new here, I came away with a more saturated perspective. It’s an interesting, accessible exploration for the general reader.

It sounds like The Reason I Jump could have been a fascinating book, but that Naoki's story may have been appropriated for specific intentions. (I find it interesting that David Mitchell's name is larger than Naoki's on the cover.) I may still read it because there are so few published examples of people with autism that articulate their thought processes. Temple Grandin, of course. Also, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet. Have you read that one? I thought it quite extraordinary indeed.

ETA touchstone.

Very interesting review of The Reason I Jump - off to thumb it now. I appreciate the last two paragraphs especially, which would make me quite wary of reading this one. Still, it strikes me as a good idea that almost worked for you.

Wanted to add that Tree of Codes sounds like it might have to go on the wishlist - probably once I've read Bruno Schulz's though.

>Lisa I had my reservations and then found it odd that there isn't much info about this boy on the Internet. (I'd love to hear Temple Grandin's reaction.) BTW I read it on kindle and the fractal-ish images were lovely even in black-and-white, not sure if they're color in the printed book. I do have Born on a Blue Day in my TBRs, thanks for the reminder!

>Thanks Paul! Do note that Tree of Codes is a gimmick (though I use the non-pejorative, "ingenious scheme or angle" definition!) that I hope will pay off if approached with knowledge and respect for Schulz's work.

>28 detailmuse:, I read the excerpt from My Age of Anxiety in the Atlantic and it actually made me physically ill reading about Stossel's symptoms of anxiety, as I have suffered from many of the same issues - though most certainly not to the degree that he has - and it just felt a little too familiar for comfort. Given my visceral physical reaction, I probably won't seek out the book, though it does sound intriguing. I like those sort of medical/illness histories.

The Reason I Jump has been on my wishlist for a while (ever since the author was interviewed on "The Daily Show") and was glad to read your review of it. I think I'll pass. I seriously considered buying it for my nurse-friend who works with autistic patients (she loves working with them). My bookclub read Born on a Blue Day a few years ago and we all really loved it.

I'll keep my eye out for My Age of Anxiety.

I really enjoyed reading your reviews of My Age of Anxiety and The Reason I Jump. I'm highly unlikely to read either of them, but like to know what's out there - thanks!

Great reviews of The Reason I Jump and My Age of Anxiety, MJ. The first book sounds interesting, but I'll pass on it. I've added the second to my wish list, and I'll probably read it soon; my brother and mother have anxiety disorder, and I'm affected to a lesser degree, so I'm interested to read more about it.

I read another review of My Age of Anxiety and I was afraid it would just make me more anxious to read it!

Hi all, I so understand the anxiety avoidance! If you can get through the Atlantic excerpt, I think you’ve gotten most (all?) of Stossel’s memoir part. (The excerpt even contains the passage about his trying exposure therapy, which is the only part I skipped in the book ... per my discomfort and Stossel’s recommendation, which he also warns about in the article, and I skipped it again!) The rest of the book is much more about matters of history/science.

>avidmom I think your nurse friend would love The Reason I Jump. I was conflicted mostly by my reactions to the translation/authenticity. Great to hear more positives about Born on a Blue Day; I’d acquired it for the synesthesia so the autism is a bonus area of interest.

>Darryl I think you’ll be interested in Stossel’s anxiety lineage: maternal great-grandfather, mother, Stossel, his own daughter.

In retrospect, I think Stossel’s efforts at daily living are as “Herculean, Sisyphean and Titanic” as Mitchell describes autistics’.

>37 detailmuse:, That's funny - the exposure therapy part was somewhat gross, but it was definitely not the most unsettling portion for me. But I guess that's the unique nature of anxiety!

Does Stossel get into the reasons for the "medicalization" of anxiety? Sounds like it could be quite interesting. Liked your "saturated perspective"

Wow. I just read the Atlantic article by Stossel. He is incredibly honest about his anxiety, and I respect him for it. With 1 in 6 American adults experiencing clinical anxiety, why is it still stigmatized? The history of the treatment of anxiety in general is interesting, and I too think he does a good job of balancing different viewpoints. Thank you for bringing the book and article to my attention!

>40 labfs39:, Not to hijack this thread, which now makes me anxious just reading it (!!), but what I found most sad about Stossel's article was his admission that it takes him a couple of drinks (and a bevy of meds, breathing exercises, etc) for him to get up in front of a room of people and speak. I know that Stossel appears to have tried a whole range of treatments, and I know that a lot of anxiety sufferers self-medicate, but still...

And he is going to be speaking Tuesday at the Seattle Town Hall. I hate to think of him putting himself through it. I wonder why he does? I guess it is plow on or give up...

>Sassy yes lots of psychology history and then the politicking around revisions to the DSM. Stossel correlates some medicalization with pharmaceutical companies' drugs. But he doesn’t limit it to economics; he points out that pharmaceutical discoveries are often accidental -- a compound used for one thing surprises everyone with other interesting effects -- and then tracing the effect back through its mechanism of action and discovering a biological/medical basis for what was previously thought psychological or personality.

>Lisa I hate to think of him putting himself through it. I wonder why he does?
Agree; soldiering through his life seems enormously difficult but then to take on such challenges? There must be a benefit, and I think for him it builds self-confidence and resilience.

haha I wasn’t even going to tally/review the following (acquired for some kids in my life), but per Kris I offer it as a little intermezzo to create some distance from the anxiety posts :))



5. Great Estimations by Bruce Goldstone, ©2006, acquired 2013

A children’s picture book offering three methods (and lots of examples) to estimate large quantities of items:

1) eye training (becoming familiar with what groups of 10 or 100 or 1000 of something look like e.g. candies, coins, small fruits);

2) clump counting (counting a small portion and then multiplying that by an estimate of how many portions are in the group of items); and

3) box and count (dividing the group visually into a box grid e.g. 10x10, then counting the number of items in one box and multiplying by 100).

Fun and helpful.

My father taught me to estimate (mostly arithmetically, but also number of people in an auditorium, etc.). It's such a useful and, as you say, fun thing to be able to do. And not at all anxiety-provoking!

Great Estimations sounds fun! I put a hold on it at the library.

I was looking forward to your post on My Age of Anxiety. It has both inspired me to add this to my wishlist and inspired a great conversation. Thanks for the review.

Hi detail! Great reviews as always. I have to say I prefer depression over anxiety any day! Anxiety is the worst! I have to say the worst part of my mom's Parkinson's is they can no longer give her enough meds to keep the anxiety at bay due to drug interactions.

By the way, my training as a therapist was to always use the "lowest" possible diagnosis, which was usually generalized anxiety disorder, which might skew statistics.

In Buddhism the First Noble Truth is sometimes stated: life is suffering, which sounds pretty negative. I've heard a better translation is: life is anxiety-provoking. Seems more fitting.

Sure enjoying your 2014 thread as I knew I would!

Did you see Stossel's interview on the Colbert Report last night?

Interesting. I just watched it. He looks younger than I imagined. I'm glad Colbert didn't ask him what it took for Stossel to be there. I think it would be a shame if the conversation got derailed by the issue of self medicating with alcohol.

#48 I have to say I prefer depression over anxiety any day! Anxiety is the worst!

I have to say I'm with you on that, Merrikay, although I've known people who've been completely disabled by depression and I wouldn't want that. But I'd take moderate depression over moderate anxiety any day. Sorry about your mom.

>43 detailmuse: There must be a benefit, and I think for him it builds self-confidence and resilience.

I'd agree with that. When I was a research biologist over 20 years ago and had to give casual presentations to my small group about my research I would stress out for days and be a nervous wreck on the day of the talk, as I was afraid that someone would challenge me and make me look like a complete idiot. By the time I left that job to go to medical school I was more comfortable speaking in front of my group, and after giving dozens of presentations in medical school and residency I feel far more comfortable giving talks to large and small groups. Up until a couple of years ago I gave one or two 90 minute lectures to the first year physician assistant students at Emory, which is something I couldn't have imagined being able to do 20 years ago.

>48 mkboylan: Merrikay, I like your alternate translation of the First Noble Truth "life is anxiety-provoking" - how accurate! Sorry about your Mom. I'm seeing the same thing happening to my husband who has Parkinson's. All emotions are on overload, especially anxiety.

Thanks everyone!

>Merrikay and Vivienne thanks for sharing about Parkinson’s. I’m struck by the focus of both of you on the anxiety in those afflicted … I know a little about its difficulties and the anxieties, too, of the caregivers. Thinking of you.

I haven’t been debilitated by either depression or anxiety and have gone back and forth about which is worse in the mild form. I’m more comfortable with “slow” and “quiet” than with “wired,” plus I’m a worrier; so I guess anxiety is worse. I wonder if there’s a correlation with introvert/extrovert?

>Darryl your story is inspiring and I imagine you as someone who “stretches” in some way every day. I continue to marvel at how much media Scott Stossel is doing.

>45 rebeccanyc: P.S. Rebecca that’s a sweet memory. I’m curious about your father’s line of work?

Now THAT is an interesting observation about anxiety and extrovert/introverts. All the tests say I'm an extrovert but I think it may all be a front.

While mostly offline over the past ~month, I’ve been reading, reading, reading. Much to catch up on and I’ll keep the reviews short. I’m posting in order of increasing fabulousness, so today here are the okays-to-goods.



Veranda: The Art of Outdoor Living, ©2013, review copy acquired 2014

A veranda is the bridge between your private life and the public world. {…} We can’t all have the grand gardens {of} these pages, but we can all pick -- or buy -- a little posy and put it in a vase to enjoy.

That’s exactly how I came to this collection of photo spreads pulled from the pages of Veranda magazine -- looking forward to a lush visual tour and maybe some inspiration that I could pull from these magnificent properties and scale to my modest space. In the end, I did enjoy looking through it and it’s probably percolated into my subconscious, but I found little to apply to my own "veranda."

Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening by Carol Wall, Early Reviewers arc ©2014, acquired 2014

The publisher’s description of this memoir as “a white woman living in a lily-white neighborhood in Middle America” who befriends a male Kenyan gardener had me a little wary about simplifications and stereotypes. But I actually keep an eye out for books published by Amy Einhorn's imprint at Penguin … and my own yard needs work … and so I looked forward to a memoir that applied gardening metaphors to friendship and life.

Alas, I'm the outlier so far on this book. I found the writing amateurish (overwritten, with poor time and content management) and the author prickly. But worse (I hate when this happens!), I found the publisher’s description inaccurate -- this is absolutely a breast-cancer memoir and a memoir about aging parents, woven with a thread about friendship ... with Giles Owita, who I did love and welcomed every time he came to the page.

Still Foolin' 'Em by Billy Crystal, audio read by Billy Crystal, ©2013, acquired 2013

I listened to this memoir over a couple of weeks several weeks ago, and Crystal's essays on career, family, interests (including the Yankees) and aging are interesting and amusing yet sort of workmanlike. He reads the audio version well; he even performs some sections, stand-up style in front of an audience.

Wake by Anna Hope, ©2014, Early Reviewers arc acquired 2013

This debut novel weaves the stories of three grief-stricken London women (and indeed all of London; all of England) as they make their way in the aftermath of WWI -- here, over four days leading up to the second anniversary of the Armistice when the Unknown Warrior was entombed at Westminster Abbey and the Cenotaph memorial was unveiled. It's a light novel that feels more substantive afterward, in its accumulation of the countrywide, post-war weight of loss.

I appreciated the definitions of the title, “Wake,” in the epigraph --

1. Emerge or cause to emerge from sleep
2. Ritual for the dead
3. Consequence or aftermath

-- each of which is explored in the novel. And I enjoy multi-threaded narratives, but the transitions between these were very frequent, and often confusing due to characters so undifferentiated that I had trouble keeping them straight. I never grew very interested in the characters, and was bumped out of the historical period by the modern-seeming actions of women and the modern-seeming uses of profanity. Yet there were also some interesting historical aspects I’m glad to have encountered, for example “field service cards” -- postcards that were pre-printed with status updates (e.g. “I am quite well”) to make it easy for a soldier to update his family.

Edison and the Rise of Innovation by Leonard DeGraaf, ©2013, review copy acquired 2014

This is a museum-in-a-book -- the visual interest of lush exhibits (provided from several Edison nonprofits/philanthropies) and the information of a knowledgeable docent (here, the writing of archivist Leonard DeGraaf).

It’s a biography of Edison’s life and a chronicle of his work, including his invention of the electric light, phonograph, battery, motion picture, cement, rubber and ore mining. It’s also an examination of his work philosophy, and I was most interested to read about his interest in collaboration (expanding on others’ ideas; soliciting diverse employee skills and perspectives) and his all-out dedication to commercial inventions (things that people would buy):

I am not a scientific man, I am an inventor. ...A scientific man busies himself with a theory. He is absolutely impractical. An inventor is essentially practical.

While informative, the text feels a little dry and documentary (like a docent) rather than being an engaging narrative. Edison-philes won't mind that, but it did curb my enthusiasm.

Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die, ©2010, acquired 2011

An anthology of 34 short stories that share the premise of a machine that tests one’s blood and predicts the person’s eventual cause of death -- with complete accuracy, albeit often with a twist, usually ironic. The premise is science fiction but there’s substantial sociology and philosophy in the stories, along with terrific sparks of imagination -- one of my favorite stories involves a character in the throes of the death he’s been expecting, but who then recovers completely ... and realizes he’ll eventually have to go through the ordeal again.

I discovered it on auntmarge64’s thread a couple years ago, then sampled a few audio stories (listen here, or via iTunes podcasts) and liked them so well I bought the book but didn't get to it until now. The stories eventually grew somewhat similar (especially in the male-Millennial narrative voice) and tiresome and so I reverted to audio for the final bunch.

It’s hard to decide what you want to do with your life until you know how it’s going to end.

{I}n India everyone who goes to the machine gets card after card after card, thereby proving reincarnation…

Machine of Death sounds fascinating and a good premise for an anthology of shorts. Wishlisting that one. Nice reviews. Looking forward to more!

Machine of Death does sound thought-provoking. Enjoyed your thoughts on Wake, which I still need to read for Early Reviewers.

Was it a good month offline? (I have been mostly away for about a week...) Glad your back. Too bad Billy Crystal's memoir wasn't more entertaining. That would be of interest to me, as audio. And I'm glad that machine in Machine of Death isn't real.

The most I've been offline has been a week or so, and I have to say it was very relaxing. But I don't think professionally I could be offline more than that, and there was always a lot to catch up with when I came back. Sigh! I'm old enough to remember that pre-online period, when a vacation was really a vacation; it seems so far away now!

57 > Oh man. I was so HOPING the book was better than that. I kinda like gardening as life stories...or gardening memoirs.

>57 detailmuse: I found the publisher’s description inaccurate

I hate when that happens. You wonder if the cover copy editor even read the book, or if it was a marketing ploy to try and hit a wider audience.

Wake sounds intriguing. Is it a debut novel?

I didn't realize that the Machine of Death contained stories by different authors all working on the same premise. That's interesting. I wonder how the editors managed it.

I'd never heard of Machine of Death, but I think it's going straight on my wishlist now.

Welcome lesmel and valkyrdeath!

WOW re: all the interest in Machine of Death! There is a sequel anthology (This Is How You Die) with high ratings also.

Here’s some background from the book site:

Machine of Death is an anthology of short stories edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki, inspired by {an} episode of Ryan’s Dinosaur Comics. From January 15, 2007, through April 30, 2007, Ryan, Matt, and David invited everybody in the world to submit short stories for the book, without fee or prejudice. Hundreds of writers from five continents took them up on the offer.

Ryan, Matt and David chose their favorites from the nearly 700 submissions, and invested personal funds to pay each contributor. The manuscript was shopped for several years to agents and publishers who liked it, but were unable to sell a book full of material by largely-unknown writers.

Faced with this rejection, the editors self-published the book and, on October 20, 2010, announced that October 26 — six days later — would be MOD-Day, in which they encouraged everybody to buy the book from Amazon at once in an attempt to become, for one day at least, Amazon’s #1 best-selling book.

On October 26, exactly that happened. The book shot up the charts and hit #1 in all categories, staying there for approximately 30 hours.

On October 28, the editors got wind that Glenn Beck, on his radio program, called out MOD as being part of a “liberal culture of death”— for beating his own book (which had apparently been released the same day) to #1 on Amazon. We continue to find this hilarious.

On November 2, 2010, the manuscript was placed online, in PDF form, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 license. That means you can (and should!) read, copy, and distribute all the stories for free.

There is also an ongoing audiobook version, which is being released as a free podcast.

Thanks to the success of the Amazon campaign, a deal was struck to distribute MOD into bookstores all across North America.

I see they snagged a traditional publisher (Grand Central/Hachette) for the sequel.

>Fanny, I’ll be interested in your comments when you read Wake.

>Lisa, Wake is the author’s debut. It probably suffered from my reading it after some excellent WWI fiction/nonfiction.

> lesmel and Lisa, I think the Mister Owita aspect was added to pull together her cancer memoir and then emphasized for marketing. My 3 stars is sitting very lonely on the book’s page, but I got so much less of him (and gardening) and more of the author than I expected (or wanted)!

>Dan and Rebecca, some of my offline felt like hibernation. I’m friends with winter; I’m out walking in it for an hour every morning. But my body feels beaten by the unending cold and shoveling, and my spirits by so many cancellations, beginning just before Christmas with a funeral (postponed until summer!) where my whole family would have met in our childhood town. Tomorrow is a bright spot, a dressy drinks-dinner-dancing event; keeping my fingers crossed against the forecast of evening snow...

>Dan, Billy Crystal’s writing was fine, I think just a little forgettable. Yet all of the clips of him in the Oscar buzz right now remind me of those sections in his memoir, very entertaining. (If you listen -- I’m not sure how it comes across in print -- you won’t forget Sophia Loren saying, “Beeelly, kiss me twiiice.”) About audiobooks -- wow they need designing as much as printed books do -- many of the track lengths on this audio were 30-40 minutes; some devices hold your place but not my iPod nano.

>69 detailmuse: Thanks for including all the info about the creating of Machine of Death. Very interesting. I'm going to try to find the podcasts.

I really liked Machine Of Death but didn't realise there was a sequel - thanks for the tip!

Great review of the machine of Death I read it last year or the year before and thought a lot of the stories were very creative and well written. But they did become muddled in my memory, too many similarities between stories for my brain to sort out. I'm glad to hear that there is a sequel out, I'll wait to see a few reviews here before I leap on board.

>61 detailmuse: Oh man I don't want to read Machine of Death because I know I'll walk around feeling raw for a couple of days, but I can't resist. I already had it on my wish list from when stretch or bragan or someone else read it. I just got the free download. Thanks for your review.

I've tried to download two stories from the collection and keep getting an error message. I was using iTunes. How did you do it?

>75 labfs39: I googled free ebook Machine of Death and got this link:

http://machineofdeath.net/ebook

There are many sites and I don't really know the best way to find free ebooks so I end up googling. Anyone want to mention a better way?

haha isn't that the way with Club Read and LT -- one reviewer gets it onto your wishlist, with the next it's into your possession, and the next you pick it up and read it!

>75 labfs39: for the audio go to the iTunes Store, search for "Machine of Death" and you'll see the podcasts. You can listen there (or via the book's site link in msg61) or download them for later, just click on the "Free" button at the far right.

>75 labfs39: I also just remembered that iPhones now need a special podcast app to listen to podcasts. I almost always listen on my tiny nano so I don't know about the app and I think my podcasts no longer sync to my phone.

>77 detailmuse: Yes, I tried to do just that, but for some reason, the download goes into a loop and ends by telling me that it can't download, do I want to retry. I listen to a lot of podcasts on my iPhone, so I know it's not the phone or app. I'll try downloading directly from the site.

Well what do you know. I just tried it again and it worked. I'll listen tomorrow. Yea!

I finished some projects, my husband finished some projects, the planets aligned, and we escaped to the Caribbean, aaahhhh. We returned to temps still way below average but that’s actually kept the getaway in mind, rather than the usual vacation calm being gone, poof, within a day of getting home.

I popped in a couple times in March to post reviews on the book pages so I’ll start catching up with those. Then I’ll back up to catch some especially good reads I still owe comments on, and then a couple recent reads. (Really, posting about the good books should be the priority, yes?!)

How About Never--Is Never Good for You? by Bob Mankoff, arc ©2014, acquired 2014

I was excited to see this book since I’ve enjoyed several others about cartooning and/or The New Yorker magazine (see some recommendations at the end of this review*). Here, Mankoff (cartoon editor at The New Yorker) writes a little about his life; a little about the history of magazine cartoons; about work at The New Yorker; about launching The Cartoon Bank of cartoon art.

And he writes a lot about cartooning (he calls cartoons “drawn jokes”) and cartoonists, including the basics of humor and where creativity comes from. For example, there are “word firsters” vs “doodle firsters” (cartoonists whose ideas come from, respectively, words or images), and there are cartoonists who riff off those who came before (the so-called collective cartoon conscious) and those who are inspired by real life (e.g. Roz Chast).

The book’s title comes from Mankoff’s best-known cartoon, the caption of which has become a cultural aphorism. His best line in the book has also become an aphorism to memoir fans like me: “{Y}ou can’t spell memoir without the moi” (though he does veer away from himself often enough that I think the moi here is almost as much cartoonists in general as him specifically). He sprinkles hundreds of cartoons throughout the text to illustrate and entertain, and I enjoyed every page of it ... which is satisfyingly long at ~300 pages and I would have read 1000 more.

* If you liked any of the following, you'll love Mankoff's book (and vice versa):
The Naked Cartoonist -- Mankoff’s previous book on cartooning and creativity;
The Rejection Collection and Blown Covers -- about cartoons and artwork that didn’t make the cut into The New Yorker;
On the Money -- more serious: cartoons that reflect nearly a century of commentary on social economics; and
My Mistake -- Daniel Menaker’s recent memoir that includes his decades as editor at The New Yorker.

A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred by George Will, arc ©2014, acquired 2014

I’m conflicted.

On the one hand, this book is, itself, as “nice {a} little place” to spend some time as the title promises of a day at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. George Will, a Cub fan from age 7, compiles an altogether pleasant -- funny, optimistic, smart -- collection of stories and statistics about the history of baseball, its players and its playing fields.

I recommend it ... as long as you go in knowing that much of the content is about baseball in general, not the Cubs or Wrigley Field specifically. There's also a wholly frustrating lack of organization to the book’s content -- the narrative jumps all over the place in time and topic. Still, over the 200 pages, a bit of Cubs/Wrigley history does accumulate. I especially appreciated the look at the business side of baseball and attendance; the lack of standardized field specifications and how teams use their fields to their advantages; and how antiquated Wrigley has become in light of the amenities that fans (and players) expect at a ballpark (its newest owners are beginning to remedy that).

In the end, I was disappointed that this is not a satisfying history of Wrigley Field ... and I was entertained and informed by what it is.

Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman, arc ©2014, acquired 2014

Soon after I’d enjoyed Waldman’s 2009 essay collection, Bad Mother, I heard an interview where she characterized her writing philosophy as not exactly write what you know but write what you want to know. Walking the talk, she then described the genesis of her next writing project -- she’d Googled keywords of topics that interested her: Hungary (she wanted to visit a friend there and liked the excuse of researching a writing project) + the Holocaust (she’s Jewish and hadn’t written about it) + art (she was interested) = a novel about the Hungarian Gold Train at the end of WWII. I was thrilled to learn that she’s seen her idea through to publication as Love and Treasure.

{On the train were} 1,500 cases of watches, jewelry, and silver, 5,250 carpets, thousands of coats and stoles and muffs of mink, fox, and ermine, crates of microscopes and cameras, porcelain and glassware, furniture, books and manuscripts and tapestries, gold coins and bullion, the few remaining precious gems, the liturgical objects, the stamp collections and silver-backed hairbrushes, all the items, valuable and less so, that constituted the wealth of the Jews of Hungary, 437,402 of whom had been deported to Auschwitz over the course of just 56 days almost exactly a year before.

A bit like Nicole Krauss’s Great House, this novel is written as a series of novellas linked by a shared item, in this case a jeweled pendant. In the first, the pendant is discovered by an American army officer charged with securing the contents of the Gold Train in 1945 Salzburg amid displaced persons and the aftermath of war. In the second, that officer’s granddaughter works with a gray-market art dealer in 2013 Budapest to trace ownership of the pendant. And finally, that owner and her life are explored in 1913 Budapest.

I had a couple false starts with this novel; the first section felt wooden and I feared that Waldman’s Googled premise wasn’t going to work. But near the end of that section, she captured me and I felt a story begin and then get better and better. She writes well, the material is always intellectually interesting (the aftermath of war, especially regarding Hungarian Jews; art history; feminism and suffrage), and eventually it also becomes emotionally engaging. And enjoyable -- in the second section there’s a nod to a fairy tale that’s a blatant chuckle between writer and reader, and the third section, narrated by a Freudian analyst, has much amusing satire. And the story is important: in the end, it's clear that the value of the stolen contents of the Gold Train is insignificant compared with the Holocaust’s stolen human potential.

Enjoyed your reviews of How about Never - Is Never Good for You? (love the title) and the Waldman. I was a big fan of Great House but somehow this one didn't seem to intrigue me as much, but your review makes it sound more appealing than I thought it would be.

Enjoyed catching up on your latest reviews here. Love and Treasure sounds intriguing. The back-story (of the author) just makes it that much more tempting.

Hi rebecca and avidmom -- I see that I rated both Great House and Love and Treasure at 3.5 stars. But while I'd read anything by Krauss and look forward to an emotional connection, I'm less certain about reading more by Waldman and it would be with an intellectual intent.

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, ©2004, acquired 2010

An excellent book! -- a 360-degree look at the 1918 influenza pandemic and its aftermath, including the biology of viruses (“less than a fully living organism but more than an inert collection of chemicals”); the effects of WWI training and troop movements on the epidemic and vice versa; the (mostly harmful) actions of various levels of government; all amid the shockingly non-scientific state of the American practice of medicine at the time (with heavy emphasis on the handful of doctors who changed that). At times, it becomes more a documentary record than a narrative, but it’s hugely informative and interesting.

The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War by Richard Rubin, audio read by Grover Gardner, ©2013, acquired 2013

This wonderful book is comprised of (perhaps a dozen?) short biographies drawn from the author’s interviews with the last living (now all deceased) American veterans of WWI, aged 101 to 113. The bios are interspersed with some light history of the war to give context -- which, while helpful, also distracts from the veterans and makes the book feel long.

I read it (actually, listened on audio) alongside All Quiet on the Western Front and there was much similarity between the two books, which is a testament to both credible fiction and these veterans’ memories. It shocked (and discouraged) me to learn that the author had long been interested in talking with WWI vets but had been unable to locate them through US organizations (Veteran’s Administration; Veterans of Foreign Wars; American Legion); only when Jacques Chirac announced the awarding of France’s Legion d’Honneur to Americans who had served in France in WWI (and went to great lengths to locate them) did contact info for the veterans become available.

I was also shocked -- about how short US history is -- in a section on Moses Hardy, whose ancestors had been slaves:

Did I say his ancestors? I meant: his parents. Morris and Nancy Hardy had been born slaves. And not just born; {...} they had been thirty-five {...} and sixteen years old, respectively, when the Civil War ended {...} And now, in the age of cellular telephones and broadband Internet and HDTV and DVRs, I was about to interview their youngest son...

I'm glad that you enjoyed The Great Influenza, MJ. I haven't read it yet, so I'll try to get to it this year or next.

>88 detailmuse: I read another book by Barry that I thought was terrific, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, and I thought of reading the influenza book too, but I have read another book that talked about it (and lots of other diseases), The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett, and I think that was enough for me!

The New Yorker book sounds like fun. The Waldman sounds interesting. I have only read her little mom mysteries, not her serious stuff, but I love them.

>92 mkboylan: I can't imagine Waldman conjuring a cozy-mystery voice, you make me curious to sample one in her series.

>90 kidzdoc: and >91 rebeccanyc: The Social Transformation of American Medicine and Rising Tide are in my wishlist because of you, respectively, but I'd promised myself I'd read The Great Influenza before acquiring either of them. ✔ Done!

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, translated from the German by A.W. Wheen, ©1928, acquired 2013

…monotonously falls the rain. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up in the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich’s grave; it falls in our hearts.

At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood -- nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn’t get jammed, as it does in the ribs.

{About guarding Russian prisoners-of-war:} A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. {...} I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow to me and then light the cigarettes. Now red points glow in every face. They comfort me; it looks as though there were little windows in dark village cottages saying that behind them are rooms full of peace.

This classic (anti-)war novel is narrated by 19-year-old Paul Baumer, a German soldier serving in the trenches near the front during WWI. It’s brutal, thoughtful and illustrative regarding not only battle and the dead but also how the living are forever changed.

I can envision where it inspired other war novels -- that first quote above reminds me of the opening of The Things They Carried -- and while Catch-22 remains my favorite (hilarious, heartbreaking, imaginative, complex), this is excellent and so much more accessible. Recommended for everyone.

I had been considering rereading this book, last read in high school, and the quotes you have provided have convinced me to do just that. Thanks!

All Quiet on the Western front is on my reading shelf for this year and I promise you I will read it. Loved your review MJ.

Just read a lot of great reviews...wonderful excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front, really enjoyed your review of The Last of the Doughboys, given infinite time I would like to read The Great Influenza, was captured by your review of Love and Treasure, although your comment in >87 detailmuse: makes me hesitate - and those are just the ones I want to read. Looks like a lot of great reading.

Dan you might consider Doughboys for your audio wishlist. Although the formatting did frustrate me: none of the CDs were "recognized" by my computer so they loaded without any title/Disc#/etc. So I'd load 3 CDs at a time into iTunes and at least they'd organize themselves by Track 1, Track 1, Track 1, Track 2, Track 2, etc. Then I'd select all the tracks from the first CD and move them to a playlist, then all the middle tracks, etc. Then after I listened to all of them, I'd delete those tracks and do three more CDs. For 17 CDs! How can audiobooks not have solved those details yet? Or maybe I overlooked something?

Sassy and Bas, I'm eager to hear comments about your read/re-read of All Quiet. This was my first read, because until a couple years ago I inexplicably interpreted the title to be a story about the American Western Frontier !!

I've been meaning to read All Quiet on the Western Front for years; thanks for reminding me about it.

I have All quiet on the Western Front in my plans for this year. You make me want to get to it sooner.

What a mess with the cd's. Doughboys sounds like a perfect audio book, thanks for the suggestion...although I have gotten spoiled with e-audiobooks instead of CD's - because e-audiobooks have bookmarks! Anyway, I'll have to see if my library carries this in e-audio.

I may have to break down and spend money on audio books sometime.

>101 dchaikin: I too prefer downloadable audios but my library doesn't seem to have the ones I want. So I can get CDs through inter-library loan but they're more fuss. And too expensive to buy!

I'm envious of all the coming reads of All Quiet on the Western Front. I think I will deal with that by reading Regeneration, acquired thanks to NanaCC's thread last year.

The Science of Good Cooking by America’s Test Kitchen, ©2012, acquired 2012

When I subscribed to Cook’s Illustrated magazine, I read each issue cover to cover, enjoying every bit of deconstructing a recipe or technique and evaluating commercial pantry staples and cookery tools. And now I devoured every word of this big volume on the science behind 50 fundamental concepts essential to good cooking.

Each concept is presented as an 8-16 page chapter that begins with the science/theory behind a technique, followed by a cooking experiment that tests the science, and then much further exploration of the concept via at least half-a-dozen recipes (for generally familiar, delicious, foods). Note: this is not an “illustrated,” coffee-table book; there are some graphics to help describe the science, and some simple photos of experimental results, but this is a text-heavy book -- lush with information not visuals.

The topics mostly concern meat, eggs, vegetables and baking. All of it feels solid -- the reinforcement of concepts I already know about, the confidence to try techniques that are new to me, and many “aha” moments about the whys behind the science, some of which have stayed in mind:

• when to cut a food with the grain vs. against the grain (answer: onions and tough meats, respectively; cutting across cells breaks them, resulting in a too-pungent onion but a more-tender meat);

• the difference between baking soda (which reacts with an acid in the recipe to create CO2 bubbles that leaven) vs. baking powder (which contains both baking soda + a powdered acid) vs. double-acting baking powder (which also contains a second acid that works later, in the oven’s heat) -- and why you ever even need separate baking soda (it leads to flavorful browning);

• why adding eggs to a batter one at a time, and alternating the addition of wet and dry ingredients, does matter (both cause ingredients to incorporate faster/better and prevent the over-mixing that toughens the batter);

• whether to salt scrambled eggs before or after cooking (before: “Salt affects the electrical charge on the protein molecules in the eggs, reducing the tendency of the proteins to bond with each other. A weaker protein network means eggs are less likely to overcoagulate and will cook up tender, not tough.”)

If you have an opinion about Cook’s Illustrated magazine, that will be your opinion of this book -- multiplied by 50 :) Enthusiastically recommended!

>102 detailmuse: Oh, I hope you love Regeneration.

>103 detailmuse: I love Cook's Illustrated. Thanks for putting this on my radar!

And I also thought The Great Influenza was a terrific book, so adding my recommendation to those wavering.

>103 detailmuse: f you have an opinion about Cook’s Illustrated magazine, that will be your opinion of this book -- multiplied by 50 :)

The last time I looked at a Cook's Illustrated must have been more than 10 years ago and my eyes glazed over! But you make the book sound fascinating, so maybe I should revisit this!

>103 detailmuse: NEAT!

I'm not a cookbook person, but a good book on the science sounds terrific.

>102 detailmuse: fortunately there are a lot of books I want to read, but I have noticed the downloadable options are really thin.

>101 dchaikin: "I may have to break down and spend money on audio books sometime."

Dan, Many years ago, my job had me in the car a lot, and then there were all of those trips to visit grandchildren.. I was buying CD's because the library had such a pitiful selection. Chris suggested Audible.com, and I have been using them ever since. I used to have a contract that gave me two books a month, but I am no longer working, so my car hours are more limited. I switched to a one book a month contract, and even with that, I have loads of books on my iPod. They have a huge selection. Of course, you are paying, but the cost is much less than buying CD's. I also have a problem with lack of books at the library for my Kindle. Maybe someday the libraries will catch up with our needs.

>88 detailmuse:, The Great Influenza is definitely on my TBR list. It sounds like a really great read.

>89 detailmuse:, Ditto on The Last of the Doughboys.

>77 detailmuse: I'm catching up on your thread, MJ, and wanted to start with where I left off. I did eventually get Machine of Death downloaded and thoroughly enjoyed it. Some stories were better than others, of course, but the idea behind the project was intriguing and most of the stories were quite good. I liked that each author read his or her story for the audio. Some of the stories that have stuck with me since then the ones about the doctors deciding who to try and save first (reminding me of questions that arose from my reading of Five Days at Memorial, about the two soldiers on the island, about the girl and her dad going to get her reading on her birthday, about the machine technician and the blank ticket, about the young man trying to change his fate by murdering someone, well, I guess quite a few!

Wonderful reviews since then. Love and Treasure might be one I pick up, but I want to read The Monuments Men first. I've had it on my shelf since I first received an ARC of it. I'm glad you liked The Great Influenza. I thought it was eminently readable book, and I learned a lot of shocking history: nurses being kidnapped off the streets, trainloads of soldiers arriving with dead and dying, mass graves in Philadelphia. Fascinating.

I loved All Quiet on the Western Front. It brought home to me the fact that the experiences of both Germans and Allies were the same. While the leaders ran the war, the men in the trenches were indistinguishable.

I see you are currently reading In Paradise. I just picked up my ER copy to start reading. Although I'm only a few pages in, and probably shouldn't make any comments yet, I am finding the protagonist's pedantry quite irritating. There must be a better way to convey the history and set the scene than this...

Following up on the Cook’s Illustrated/Science book, I have another by America’s Test Kitchen, The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook. This one is primarily recipes with photos (and still more words/chat than any other cookbook), all scaled to serve two people. Best takeaway from the first 15 pages: that there are smaller-scale cake/pie/tart/springform pans out there, and recipes in here to use them!

>111 labfs39: I had the same impression in the opening but thought it was intentional by Matthiessen and I liked it -- reacting to a perspective viscerally vs intellectually. But I’ve lately caught myself fearing the book is becoming an essay told through puppet characters. When I started it, I thought I might read it in one sitting and I think that might have been good to do. Instead, I’ve been dipping in for ten days now and feel disconnected. My copy is an ARC but it’s a beautiful ARC -- French flaps and those rough-cut pages, neither of which I like too much but they seem like signs of respect for Matthiessen. It’s so sad he died just before publication.

>112 detailmuse: I too think it's a beautiful book/ARC. The cover is quite arresting. I have only read a few pages, but I think after dinner tonight I'm going to sit down, start over, and give it a good go. I too was saddened to hear of his passing. I've been meaning to read the obituary that I bookmarked that starts off: Peter Matthiessen... was a Zen Buddhist priest, a spy, an activist and a well-respected writer of both fiction and nonfiction. Quite a list.

So,* I read the following almost two months ago. A paragraph on the first feels generous (I’m close to hating it), and a paragraph on the second is as many words as I can put together to describe it (I’m in awe).



Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, ©2012, acquired 2013

Premise: a wife/mom disappears and her teen daughter searches for her. Narrative format: emails, journal entries, documents. My reaction: I enjoyed the first third or so -- funny, sharp satire about Seattle, the tech industry, private schools. In the rest, I was bored, disappointed by plot conveniences, and/or surprised by how young-YA it seemed.

To you resisters of popular-novel hype: keep resisting this one. (Instead, give in to the hype and go read Gone Girl -- its twisty exposures to some dark human corners make it memorable.)

----------



The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, translated from the Polish by Celina Wieniewska, ©1934, acquired 2013

A collection of (autobiographical?) short stories, mostly about the mental decline of the narrator’s father. They’re dreamy, imaginative, labyrinthine … I kept imagining them as literary versions of some of the music and animation of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Wonderful; need to be unpacked over muuullltiple re-readings.

----------

* Where did this sentence-starter ("So,") come from?! I don’t recall it existing a year ago but now every answer in every celebrity/talking-head interview begins with it. It’s a less annoying version of “like.”

I enjoyed the first third or so -- funny, sharp satire about Seattle, the tech industry, private schools. In the rest, I was bored, disappointed by plot conveniences, and/or surprised by how young-YA it seemed.

My thoughts exactly.

Have you checked out any of Bruno Schulz's art? You can see some at http://www.brunoschulzart.org/

Lisa thanks for that link. Rich in artwork and with the music kind of haunting. I’ll go back to read the writing that’s posted -- I loved his mention of a writer’s unwritten communication of meaning: “For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?”

The Street of Crocodiles is Jonathan Safran Foer’s favorite novel, and he used its text essentially as a block from which he redacted words to carve a new story, Tree of Codes. I have it from the library, it looks visually daunting to read and emerges nearly as poetry so seems mentally daunting too. I want it to work, and I’m scared to be disappointed!

The Street of Crocodiles sounds intriguing. I think I'll have to check that one out. I seem to remember seeing a very odd and slightly creepy stop-motion animation by that name, though I'm not sure how much resemblence there is between the two.

Finally catching up. The cooking science book sounds particularly interesting.

>118 Nickelini: A good match with your recipe for jam on Dan's thread!

>117 valkyrdeath: Thanks for mentioning the film -- I looked it up and it was inspired by Bruno Schulz's story. It's in DVD collections of the Quay Brothers' films and my library system has copies :)

I agree about Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, and I enjoyed Schulz's Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. I have The Street of Crocodiles in a collection, but haven't read it yet.

Hi Rebecca, I do look forward to his Sanatorium.

Hi MJ! Delightful thread! Much to ponder here.

Love and Treasure sounds like something I would really enjoy. Very enticing review!

All Quiet on the Western Front was the first war novel I read way back when I was young and uninformed. I remember being shocked by the reality it represented because it sooo vividly brought home the personal horror of combat and the Great War in general. The quotations you cite bring it all back. Agreed that it is a must read!

Ah, The Street of Crocodiles! I love your description. Why haven't I gotten hold of this yet!@#&!?? The Bruno Schultz art is fascinating, if not slightly pornographic! (Or is porn in the eye of the beholder? Yikes!)

Am I now going to have to go out and get Tree of Codes as well?

Have been wondering the same thing about the ubiquitous "So . . ." Where did that come from? It is such a nonsequitur and makes you think you must have blanked out inexplicably in the middle of the conversation! Is this a valley girl-ism? It seems to be mostly women who are doing it!

Welcome Suzanne! I've actually heard the most occasions of "So" from scientists being interviewed. You inspired me to look into it and now I'm surprised to have awakened to it so late!

* Where did this sentence-starter ("So,") come from?! I don’t recall it existing a year ago but now every answer in every celebrity/talking-head interview begins with it. It’s a less annoying version of “like.”

Hmmm .... I work with high school kids and the "new" thing is is to end everything with the somewhat softly and awkwardly spoken phrase "so yeah ...."

So yeah .......

>124 avidmom: Interesting! To me that has whiffs of indecision/lack of confidence AND a desire for consensus. Is that your take? If I were studying linguistics, I think these "tics" would be a fascinating area.

Trying to avoid overwhelm here, with a just-do-it catch-up on recent months. First, books with reviews to link to.


The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration by Bernd Heinrich, arc ©2014, acquired 2014 (4 stars)
Another gentle exploration with Heinrich, full of diversions but mostly about animals’ and insects’ abilities to locate suitable shelter, fashion it to their needs, and find their way back after an hour, a season, or a lifetime away. (See review)



In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen, arc © 2014, acquired 2014 (3.5 stars)
Matthiessen’s final novel (he died just days before its release), set on the grounds of Auschwitz where retreat participants mostly debate a series of heated topics. (See review)

For me, the most intriguing passage was this tiny one:

All the way to Heaven is Heaven.

Christ crucified is importuned by a penitent thief, in agony on his own cross on that barren hillside. “I beseech thee, Jesus, take me with you to Paradise!” In traditional gospels, Jesus responds, “Thou shalt be with me this day in Paradise,” but in an older text -- Eastern Orthodox or the Apocrypha, perhaps? -- Christ shakes his head in pity, saying, “You are in Paradise right now.”

The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook by America’s Test Kitchen, review copy ©2014, acquired 2014 (5 stars)

Another home run from America’s Test Kitchen -- recipes, culinary techniques and evaluations of cookery tools, everything (even cakes etc.) scaled to feed two. (See review)



Human Anatomy: The Definitive Visual Guide by DK Publishing, review copy ©2010, acquired 2014 (4.5 stars)

An excellent anatomical atlas of the human body for students/consumers, lushly visualized through large, full-color medical illustrations. (See review)



Lonely Planet: The World's Great Wonders by Jheni Osman, review copy ©2014, acquired 2014 (4.5 stars)

Lonely Planet “travel guides” leave me flat but their “travelogues” inspire enthusiasm and awe. This book of 50 “wonders” (20 natural, 30 man-made) is definitely of the latter type, beautifully produced with lively writing and stunning color photographs. (See review)

You Were Never in Chicago by Neil Steinberg, ©2012, acquired 2013 (4 stars)

I discovered this book through kidzdoc’s link to the University of Chicago Press’s monthly free ebooks (see the current offering here). It’s a half-memoir, half-historical homage to Chicago written by a Sun-Times newspaper columnist. Though I didn’t encounter much new in terms of memoir or civics, it was a comforting read.



Granta 108: Chicago, ©2009, acquired 2012 (3.5 stars)

Then I finally read this 2009 issue of the UK literary journal, themed on Chicago. There are many good pieces, half a dozen excellent pieces, and I’m glad to have finally sampled Stuart Dybek, Nelson Algren, George Saunders. The low-income housing projects have long fascinated me, and Camilo Jose Vergara’s photo essay of their rise in the 1950s and demolition in the 2000s was haunting. The entries focus on the cliches and downsides of Chicago, and altogether it is effective and suffocating. Still, c’mon … there is optimism and success in Chicago.

Summer House with Swimming Pool by Herman Koch, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, orig ©2011, arc translation ©2014, acquired 2014 (4 stars)

Wow what a fun read! Yes the physician narrator is a misanthrope but he fascinated me. Yes there are plot holes and conveniences but it called to me whenever I had a free minute. When I finished, I downloaded his earlier The Dinner. Also makes me want to try Stieg Larsson again, I’d put The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo aside 200 pages in.

We have coincidentally posted our impressions of Summer House with Swimming Pool at exactly the same time. It was good, wasn't it?

>129 RidgewayGirl: Well it deserves two at a time! The reading experience does, at least. Extra-coincidental timing, since I first heard of Koch through your review of The Dinner!

The White Album by Joan Didion, ©1979, acquired 2013 (3.5 stars)

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. {...} We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while.

I was hoping to recreate the Slouching Towards Bethlehem experience and perhaps Didion was, too, but other than the excellent title essay, it didn’t happen for me. Still, it’s Didion: at once gentle and piercing. It’s a second collection of her previously published articles/essays, here situated in the late-1960s/early ‘70s, largely in California and populated by people pretending that reality is different from reality.

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast, ©2014, acquired 2014 (4.5 stars)

Roz Chast’s memoir of her aged parents’ decline and death (the “what” of it, not so much the “how to”), told in her trademark cartoon style.

On the one hand, there isn’t much new here; there’s a similarity in most people’s stories of aging, the move to assisted living, the flip in parent/child roles, the purging of possessions, the end-of-life. On the other hand, Chast is searingly and unprecedentedly open -- about her (sometimes-fraught) relationship with her parents and the time, expense, shock, frustration, surrealism, and sadness associated with their decline. And she’s funny more often than you’d expect -- wryly, and usually within the details of the cartoons. This is an accessible volume to give to someone in the situation, yet it’s deep; don’t give it lightly.

Great to catch up with your reading!

Catching up on some good reviews, MJ.

Glad to see you back, MJ, I was wondering where you disappeared to!

Wow, you're on a roll with tons of reviews!

Hi all and thanks for catching up!

I’ve been in a long writing project and it’s gotten the best of my thumb to the point that I didn’t type any more than necessary. I’ve recently gotten a different desk chair that puts me at a better angle plus a thumb brace and it’s much better.

 

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer, ©2010, acquired 2014 (4 stars)

Already for some time our town had been sinking at the edges,
lowering under the fantastic domes of night.
We lived in one of those dark houses, so difficult to distinguish one from the other.
This gave endless possibilities for mistakes.
the wrong staircase, unfamiliar balconies, unexpected {…}

Yes, this is a gimmick (though a meaningful gimmick) and yes, it works.

Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles is Jonathan Safran Foer’s favorite book, and he likens its existence (amid the destruction of most of Schulz’s work) to the fourth wall at the ancient temple site that resisted destruction and became the Wailing Wall. Foer had long wanted to “sculpt” a new book by redacting words from an existing “block” of text, and Tree of Codes is that, and an homage to Schulz.

I went through phases as I read: he’s stealing Schulz’s story; then: no, he’s just using words that are freely available, including in Schulz’s work. In the end, it did seem to be Foer’s own work, yet with a feeling of the larger original, particularly that so much is a father, mother, family in decline. Most pages are a mere sentence or two, written with the brevity and imagery of poetry. Schulz’s work is surreal fantasy and Foer’s even more so. It also calls to mind Light Boxes by Shane Jones, an experimental little story of dystopian fantasy.

Life by Keith Richards with James Fox, ©2010, acquired 2010; audio version read by Keith Richards, Johnny Depp and Joe Hurley, acquired 2014 (4 stars)

It’s never a repetition, it’s always a variation.

Richards is referring to performing the same song over and over, but he might as well be referring to his decades of sex and drugs too. I started this autobiography back in 2010, loved it but put it aside for some reason and finished it now on audio. In some parts, I listened with a head cold and Johnny Depp’s monotone narration soothed like honey. Then Joe Hurley narrated so slowly that I celebrated when I discovered I could speed up the narration; at 1.25-speed he was great.

The Stones are fine; I’m not a huge fan but most of that content was still interesting. Mostly, I was curious to read the story of a person so seemingly wild. In the end he’s not sensationalistic in the telling of any of it; rather, he’s more matter-of-fact and tender than I’d have imagined.

I can’t untie the threads of how much I’ve played up to the part that was written for me. {...} Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. {...} Image is like a long shadow.

Hi MJ! Sorry to go back a ways, but I just caught up with your excellent thread and wanted to say that I enjoyed many reviews above - Love and Treasure, Last of the Doughboys, All Quiet on the Western Front, to name but three. The Science of Good Cooking - sounds like you really enjoyed that one, as did I your comments on it as well.

Regarding library audiobooks and the like: Sounds like we're spoilt rotten in the UK! I currently have about 15 titles (fiction & non-fiction) that are on my wishlist and are 'somewhere' in my local library's county-wide system. If the audiobook still exists somewhere and is not on loan, then I can request a copy whenever I like for three weeks. Renewals are allowed up to 4 times, and all of the service can be accessed online (searching for titles, book synopses, etc.). Audiobooks can be so expensive, and I don't use e-readers or tablets or so forth, so I find these audiobook CDs are a boon for my daily commute if I can't handle the usually depressing news out of Westminster, or the Middle East, or wherever...

Thank you for the Bruno Schulz thoughts as well. I've had The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass on my wishlist a while, but have so far never come across them on my used store rounds.

Your review of Tree of Codes is intriguing as well, but I think I'll definitely want to read Bruno's work before it.

Tree of Codes looks like the sort of experimental thing that I often fine intriguing. I'd also be terrified of actually trying to read it though. I'm so clumsy and with all the holes I'm sure I'd rip it to pieces.

Hi MJ! I have starred your review of Tree of Codes for future reference. I finally received in the mail a few days ago Street of Crocodiles. I am hoping to get to it very soon and I suspect I won't be able to resist getting ahold of Jonathan Foer's book. It all sounds very intriguing!

By the way, I took your name in vain the other day. Not knowing really what I was getting into, I happened to read The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban, and it fits nicely into this category that you have dubbed "quirky dreamy novellas." It's a bit different, but I think it belongs. Have you by chance read it?

Hi Paul, valkyrdeath, Suzanne -- Tree of Codes was published in 2010 and was expensive enough that I wanted to see a copy first. I kept checking my library system and finally found one lone copy acquired within the last some months (>141 valkyrdeath: true: it'd be easy to catch a finger and tear a page but it'd still be readable). Now that I want to buy, it's out of print and sellers have upped the price. With its die-cuts, another print run seems doubtful...

>140 Polaris-: I've gotten familiar enough with downloadable audiobooks to prefer them over CDs, but so many more titles are available on CD. And a larger problem is I just don't "listen" as well as I "read," especially fiction. I'm hoping practice helps.

>142 Poquette: The Medusa Frequency -- wow did you see the terrific LT review of it I was going to write, before I finished it and saw it was by you! Onto the wishlist, but I need a little myth refresher beforehand.

The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler, ©2006, acquired 2012 (5 stars)

“This never happened.”

Don Draper says that all the time on Mad Men, and in fact he says it to a character who’s in the midst of a breakdown after an unwed pregnancy. Those script writers are good: although they didn’t invent the line, it is fiction: it did happen, and the women never forget.

Subtitled, The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade, this is an excellent exploration of the social and legal intolerance of teenage unwed pregnancy and motherhood in 1950s-‘60s USA, with a compelling collection of oral histories from those birth mothers.

There wasn’t much contraception and it absolutely wasn’t much available (mostly denied to single women, or accompanied by a big dose of judgment, and condoms were behind the pharmacy counter). Even information about contraception was illegal, and sex education was nil. The 1950s was a period of extreme social conformity and violations came with catastrophic fallout. And it was all on the girl -- reliable proof of paternity wasn’t there yet -- who generally hid it with tight girdles in the early months and disappeared for the latter months to group homes (e.g. Florence Crittenton; typically under the guise of an illness or caring for a family member) and then adoption.

They said, “You can’t raise the baby alone.” But no one expects a widow to give up her baby because her husband dies, do they? No. It’s punitive.

I’ve always appreciated Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 for its mandate of equal sports opportunities for women, but until now I didn’t realize its provision was broader -- No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance -- prohibiting high schools and colleges from expelling pregnant girls and teenage mothers

And I marked dozens of passages despite my having lived at the late edge of the time. My older sister’s husband only learned in his 50s that (while he was away at college) his younger sister had been sent away and her teen pregnancy never revealed. I shudder at the lifelong burden these women bear (it reminds me of The Things They Carried and the narrator’s guilt that he conformed by serving in Vietnam rather than resisting -- following his beliefs and seeking refuge in Canada):

One of the questions that come up when you go to court and relinquish is they ask you if you have been coerced in any way, and I thought it was the height of hypocrisy. Of course you’re coerced. You’re coerced by your parents, who said, “Don’t come home again if you plan to keep that child. We’re not going to help you.” You’re coerced by everyone around you because of the shame and the lack of acceptance by society and your community. You’re not acknowledged as a fit mother because you had sex before marriage. The judge congratulated me on how courageous I was. I was furious that he would tell me it was about courage. It was about defeat. It was totally about shame and defeat.

Brilliant review MJ. Wishlisting The Girls Who Went Away - it sounds excellent. (And thanks for the Draper-Olsen reference...Powerful drama indeed!)

Excellent review of The Girls Who Went Away, MJ. That is one for my wishlist.

Great review of The Girls Who Went Away, which I've seen in bookstores. Think I'll skip Tree of Codes as Jonathan Safran Foer has always irritated me.

Paul, Colleen, Rebecca -- if any of you get to it, I hope you get a lot from it. I'm following it with Ann Patchett's The Patron Saint of Liars, set in a Catholic home for unweds in that time.

>145 Polaris-: are you caught up through Mad Men season 7a (i.e. the first half)? One TV station has reruns on Sunday mornings, and after watching hours of Don in early seasons, it felt like a gut-punch to watch him again from earlier this year.

>147 rebeccanyc: lol I know essentially nothing about Foer's brother, but he irritates me! I admit to keeping a distance from Jonathan because I like reading him (except for Eating Animals, where he did annoy me in the way that his brother does). Doesn't his marriage to Nicole Krauss speak well of him :) ?

Magazine articles have again filled an expand-o file folder, so I've triaged them into piles of high, med, and low interest and plan to do a one-a-day in August with the high-interest pile.

>148 detailmuse: Don't know Foer's brother, but I'll take it from you that he's irritating. I have to say I thought less well of Nicole Krauss when I found out she was married to him, rather than him rising in my estimation!

>149 rebeccanyc: lol and touché!

Excellent review of The Girls who went away It does us all good to read about our barbarous past, especially as some of us will remember that era.

>148 detailmuse: Yes MJ, me and the Mrs are all caught up to the end of series 7a. We had heard during that last season that there would be a 'break' mid-season. "Great" we thought - "that'll delay the awful inevitable when the show is no more..." - fully in expectation that the break would be for a few weeks, or maybe 'til the end of the summer, or something similar. But no. NEXT YEAR?!! Next year!? We can't wait around for 2015 to see this thing conclude? What were they thinking? It normally takes at least one or two episodes to re-establish all that had been happening and where everyone was in their lives already before the season can truly make much headway...

Disappointed... but on the other had, I suppose it does keep our favourite show around and still fresh for a while longer. Despite his bad (& good) behaviour in the past, we REALLY want Don to sock it to all his rivals and those who don't respect him professionally before the whole thing has played out. And then it all finsihes and we're left in our house debating what kind of people all the characters would have become through the 1970s, and on into the Reagan era...

And then, if there's one box set I'm gonna really want to have, it will be the complete Mad Men. The writing and acting, and the whole design of the show, is so superlatively good... Any time we drop in on a re-run season somewhere we're always captivated and pulled right back in to wherever the storyline was at. Such a good show. As good as good literature.

>151 baswood: Hi Barry and thanks. In part it reminded me of reading about psychiatric institutions -- how they began as places of care and refuge but became something else.

>152 Polaris-: if there's one box set I'm gonna really want to have, it will be the complete Mad Men
Yes! I've resisted buying the annual seasons, but think I will borrow seasons 1 and 2 from the library soon; seeing everyone so young will be a shock. Don Draper has seemed old since the episode backstage at the Rolling Stones. The split final season is infuriating since it's about money not story ... but here in August I'm glad to have next spring to look forward to instead of it all being done.

I've avoided most of the spinoff from Mad Men but have just started to read Mad Men on the Couch, in which a psychoanalyst explores the main cast.

I watched the first six seasons over a month last year. It was a good way to watch. I want Peggy to take it all.

>154 RidgewayGirl: Have you seen any of the 7th season?

>153 detailmuse: I've wishlisted one or two spin-off books but not as yet actually read any. The one you mention does look fun as well. I'll be interested to hear your thoughts!

>152 Polaris-: and >154 RidgewayGirl: I read a few Mad Men recap/analysis sites but the only one I recommend is Tom and Lorenzo. They run a lively and snarky fashion blog but after every new episode of Mad Men they post an analysis and then a fashion analysis ("Mad Style"). If you scroll back several years, they analyzed each character individually; then they rolled into the by-the-episode pattern. Good stuff.

>155 Polaris-: Of course! Right when they were first shown. The waiting a year for half a season irks me, too, but I'm glad I still have it to look forward to. Have you read any of the MadStyle posts over on Tom&Lorenzo? The costuming on Mad Men is amazing.

156 Thanks MJ - that looks like a very pleasurable read for the weekend. I hadn't heard of it before. I've read the odd Guardian review of specific episodes (usually season openers/closers) before, or an American page or two that my MM buddy in California might've recommended, but I've generally avoided reading too many interpretations by others. We selfishly enjoy talking it through ourselves too much perhaps. But as the show's end approaches it does appeal to me more to read a good quality blog deconstructing things a little bit. I bookmarked the site of course!

cross-posting all around! I even started rereading T&L's blog while I did the link :)

That's funny. The MadStyle posts are fantastic, though. I enjoyed them even before I watched the series.

I’ve accumulated a big folder of to-read magazine articles and am pulling one to read each day in August.



1. “In Praise of Discomfort” by Joe Meno, from the June 2014 Chicago magazine (read it online)

”We believe a trip to the emergency room is one of the harder days of your life, and there’s no reason to make it harder.”

So sayeth a rep at Chicago’s new Lurie Children’s Hospital, and it seems great. But after the writer’s son’s third happy trip to the ER within a year or so, and after the writer had read “The Overprotected Kid” in The Atlantic, he wonders whether the hospital’s Popsicles, Beanie Babies and Disney movies might be keeping his kid from learning to stay out the ER.

2. “Sixty-nine Days: The Ordeal of the Chilean Miners” by Hector Tobar, from the July 7&14 New Yorker (read it online)

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner became a single event every two days: one cookie. At the end of the meal, there was dessert: a slice of peach {…} about the thickness of a fingernail.

A long article about the August 2010 collapse at the San Jose gold/copper/iron mine, and the 33 miners’ 69 days trapped underground. It’s interesting (especially that it was a single, 45-story-tall block of stone that fell, crushing layers and layers of excavated mine) but not particularly full of new information.

3. “Away From My Desk: The Office From Beginning to End” by Jill Lepore, from the May 12, 2014 New Yorker (read it online)

The office through the ages would start with a desk, stop at a cubicle, and end with an outlet.

A review of Nikil Saval’s book, Cubed, about the history of office workspaces “from the desk of Bartleby the scrivener to the rumpus rooms at Google HQ (it’s one I’ve been interested to read). It’s almost equally about C. Wright Mills’ 1950s book, White Collar, about “the splitting of work from life -- and of meaning from existence” and the emergence of a bored new middle class (which now also interests me). Great article.

...so I just popped in to Tom&LorenzoLand. BIG mistake! That site looks fantastic. Can't wait to show my other half! Thanks for the tip... (I think... I'm probably not gonna read much else for a while!)

I think you inspired me last year to get a folder for "to read" articles (so I could get rid of all my piles of magazines) and I dutifully put a whole bunch of articles in it and not only never read them but never added new articles to the file. Sigh. Maybe you will inspire me this year to do a little better. In the meantime, I'm enjoying your article "reviews".

>Paul enjoy!

>Rebecca I remember that! I too didn't touch mine since last year, not sure why because I'm really enjoying reading them again. I do have to figure how to keep fitting in book reading though.

4. “The Four Most Desired People in New York*” by Logan Hill, from the February 24, 2014 New York Magazine (read it online)


(l-r) by gender and sexual orientation

*By algorithm, on one website, in each dating category

I’m nearing 30 years of marriage and was curious to see what’s popular with New York City users of the online-dating site OKCupid. Well. Beyond their looks: the straight woman is naïve or worse (she checked the casual-sex box then was surprised by the barrage of vulgar interest); both men are schemers (the straight guy’s a player, the gay guy uber-manages his image); the gay woman impresses with some substance and honesty.

5. “Mine Is Longer Than Yours: The Last Boomer Game” by Michael Kinsley, from the April 7, 2008 New Yorker (read it online)

{T}he last boomer game is about to start -- the game of competitive longevity.

6. “Have You Lost Your Mind? More Bad News for Boomers” by Michael Kinsley, from the April 28, 2014 New Yorker (read it online)

Baby boomers -- the seventy-nine million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 -- will be the second dementia generation, but the first to know that it’s coming.

It’s interesting that I read these together -- they were published six years apart. In the first, political journalist Kinsley realizes that the maxim, He who dies with the most toys wins has been replaced by, He who dies last wins, with bonus points for going quickly at the end. In the second article, Kinsley realizes that boomers have inserted a penultimate rivalry: competitive cognition, whoever dies with more of his or her marbles wins.

Kinsley won’t “win”: diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease at age 43, he likely won’t hit the trifecta of old-old age, a quick/painless death and lucidity. Much of both articles explores how Parkinson’s affects all of that, but there’s also much information (interesting, and worrying) about what’s ahead for the rest of us.

The "boomer" articles sound very interesting.

>167 Poquette: and now a couple about middle age:



7. “Bye-bye Babies” by Alison Motluk, from the December 13, 2008 New Scientist

Menopause is a mystery. It leaves women with 20, 30, perhaps even 50 years of life -- squandered time in evolutionary terms, because no further genes can be passed on.

Motluk says human menopause has existed a long time and not drifted much in age of occurrence. Existing theories about it don’t adequately justify it -- that childbearing stops so mothers (grandmothers) can raise (assist in raising) existing children to independence before they die. A new theory of “reproductive competition” proposes that our ancestral females of child-bearing age left their families to join new societies and, not bonded there, were insensitive to the costs their reproduction caused the larger society; by middle age, when they had become bonded, they acquiesced reproductive preference to the new, younger women.

8. “Marvelous Middle Age” by David Bainbridge, from the March 10, 2012 New Scientist

{Middle age} is an evolutionary novelty unique to humans -- a resilient, healthy, energy-efficient and productive phase of life which has laid the foundations for our species’ success. Indeed, the multiple roles of middle-aged people in human societies are so complex and intertwined, it could be argued that they are the most impressive living things yet produced by natural selection.

Those multiple roles include being “super providers” to their descendents and the larger society and being instrumental in the propagation of information (skills, knowledge, customs).

{M}iddle-aged people tend to be better at developing long-term plans, selecting relevant material from a mass of information, planning their time and coordinating the efforts of others -- a constellation of skills that we might call wisdom.

Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing by Deborah Levy, ©2013, acquired 2014

What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know? {…} A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does,

"She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters." -- A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

This is one of those vignette-ish little memoirs about life inspiring the writer within, published only for writers of a certain renown (I long for more). It’s Levy's (feminist) response to George Orwell’s Why I Write (onto the wishlist). She writes beautifully about her not-beautiful childhood in South Africa during apartheid, teen years in England, a depressed midlife. Wow I want to read more by her.

The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett, ©1992, acquired 2000s

I’ve read almost all of Patchett’s* fiction and nonfiction now, and I liked this, her debut novel from back in 1992, second only to her fabulous Bel Canto. The premise here is of a pregnant woman heading to a home for unwed mothers run by nuns. These homes were typically sources for infant adoption, and Patchett's narrative gives voice to all three parties -- the birth mother, child and adoptive parent. I pulled it from the TBRs after having read the excellent nonfiction social history of that topic, The Girls Who Went Away (msg #144 above).

*Might as well list them, from most-loved to least:
Bel Canto
The Patron Saint of Liars
This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (essay collection)
State of Wonder
The Magician’s Assistant
What Now? (essay; commencement address)

I have Taft in my TBRs; I want to read her friendship memoir Truth and Beauty; and I’ll someday restart Run, which I had on audio and didn’t finish before it was due.

>168 detailmuse: — LOL!

>168 detailmuse: Those middle age articles remind me of a book I read a few years ago, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind, which was reassuring but not very surprising.

>172 rebeccanyc: There are so many topics I'd love to read about, if they were presented as long, substantive articles instead of 300-page books.

9. “A Sudden Illness: How My Life Changed” by Laura Hillenbrand, from the July 7, 2003 New Yorker (subscribers can read it online)

{Jockey Red Pollard} came back every time, struggling through pain and fear and the limitations of his body to do the only thing he had ever wanted to do. And in the one lucky moment of his unlucky life he found Seabiscuit, a horse as damaged and persistent as he was.

Hillenbrand relates her odyssey from the sudden onset of a constellation of completely disabling symptoms, through judgmental and dismissive physicians, eventually to a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome ... and her professional (though not physical, to date) redemption via her discovery of Red Pollard and then writing Seabiscuit. Excellent. Winner of the 2004 National Magazine Award in essay.

10. “Four Eyes: Looking for Glasses” by Patricia Marx, from the March 29, 2010 New Yorker (subscribers can read it online)

Really, now, should a piece of plastic and a couple of breakable hinges cost more than the laptop I’m typing on?

I second that. I bought a new pair of glasses (frames + lenses) and a new pair of lenses for my existing frames, and after some discounts (a quasi insurance benefit) they came to $706. !!

About the article: I’ve wearied of the scattershot, too-clever-by-half articles by Marx, the New Yorker’s shopping maven. This content is all over the place, from mentions of history, corporate business, science and fashion but no depth. /cranky

11. “The Decision Lens” by Helen Knight, from the April 14, 2012 New Scientist

Your phone and web browser are making choices for you, whether you want them to or not.

Possibly revelatory when this was published two years ago -- that web algorithms tend to give you more and more information/recommendations for what you already know and less for what you don’t -- but I learned all this and more from Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble.

12. “Scrubbed” by Graeme Wood, from the June 24-July 1, 2013 New York magazine

{About investigating web developer Xander Fields:} Pondering that X, I spelled his name with Scrabble tiles and scooted the letters around my kitchen table. The first words I came up with: slander fixed.

“I watched online as a college classmate went from disgrace to redemption in months. That’s when I found myself deep in the world of black-ops reputation management” through “white noise websites, engineered to drown out an ugly signal.” These reputation-bolstering sites look good at first but become flimsy, temporary and obviously bogus beyond the first page.

Helpful article. Reminder to dig deeper than the first results of a search ... and more discouragement against trusting (much of) anything on the interwebs.

>175 detailmuse: I third your comment on the exorbitant cost of specs! (Been postponing my next pair for longer than I care to admit - I'm that bad at saving. Maybe for every used book I buy I should pop a £ in a box or something...)

"Scrubbed" by Graeme Wood sounds interesting. I also love the perfect anagram you found!

>176 Polaris-: Paul my new lenses give such crisper vision -- I looked at my TV and thought, "Now that's HD!" Plus I'm finally at the age of appreciating a good reading light; now I understand my parents' befuddlement when I ignored their suggestions to turn on a light...

Since reading "Scrubbed" I've seen even general-interest magazine articles with step-by-step how-to’s for doing the scrubbing yourself: create a new person with your name, give him an online presence like Facebook, connect him to the “trouble” you want to disconnect yourself from, etc.)

P.S. The writer found the anagram, not me. I'm terrible at anagrams!

In the feminine/feminist vein...



13. “The Space in Between” by Ariel Levy, from the September 10, 2012 New Yorker

Wolf, in her eighth book, {situates} the essence of the female being right back where it started: in the body, in one particular place.

Review of Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography, which this article makes sound philosophical (feminist theory and history), new-agey (vagina as gateway to peace and creativity), and confused/weird. I thought I’d purchased the book, but (whew) it seems I haven’t.

14. “My Abortion” by Meaghan Winter, from the November 18, 2013 New York magazine

Paragraph-length oral histories of abortion from 26 women, illustrating a range of experiences both interior and exterior (family, protestors, clinic personnel).

15. “Birthright: What’s Next for Planned Parenthood?” by Jill Lepore, from the November 14, 2011 New Yorker

If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights, women cannot have equal rights with men.

About attempts to defund Planned Parenthood during the 2012 elections, but mostly a history of the laws and politics of American contraception. Great to read after The Girls Who Went Away (msg #144). The most revelatory information: that abortion wasn’t a partisan political issue until the 1970s, when Republican strategists recommended changing their support to opposition in order to provoke divisions among Democratic candidates that would ensure Nixon would run against McGovern not Muskie. Excellent article.

Two with the same title, very different content:



16. “Letting Go” by David Sedaris, from the May 5, 2008 New Yorker

A light cigarette is like a regular one with a pinhole in it. {…It’s} like sucking on a straw.

(Interesting, I never knew that was the difference.) An essay about Sedaris going from nonsmoker to smoker to nonsmoker, not among the best work I've read by him.

17. “Letting Go” by Atul Gawande, from the August 2, 2010 New Yorker

For all but our most recent history, dying was typically a brief process {…} accompanied by a prescribed set of customs.

{O}ur every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do.

The soaring cost of health care is the greatest threat to {America’s} long-term solvency, and the terminally ill account for a lot of it.

Excellent long article that supports a change in end-of-life treatment -- replacing aggressive, death-stalling interventions with supportive interventions (like hospice) that improve the quality (and sometimes even length) of the remaining time for patients and family.

Catching up with your article reviews and enjoying your comments.

>Hi Rebecca and thanks. I'm a little behind on my reading and a lot behind on my commenting. Had a couple weekend trips plus finally got hooked on Breaking Bad, have been DVRing AMC's Sunday binges.



18. “The Secret Life of Pronouns” by James W. Pennebaker, from the September 3, 2011 New Scientist

Pennebaker suggests there are two kinds of words: 1) content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), which provide meaning (the who, what and where); and 2) function words (pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions), which determine style (e.g. formal, analytic, narrative) and are “the keys to the soul” or at least to the personality.

{Function words} are used at high rates, while also being short and hard to detect. They are processed in the brain differently than content words. And, critically, they require social skills to use properly.”

19. “Helenism: The Birth of the Cosmo Girl” by Judith Thurman, from the May 11, 2009 New Yorker

”Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere” is one of {Helen Gurley} Brown’s favorite mottoes.

A review of Jennifer Scanlon’s biography of Brown, Bad Girls Go Everywhere. I was confused throughout about what info was from the biography and what was from Brown’s own novel, Sex and the Single Girl (which would be my pick if forced to read one of these two books).

20. “Big Med” by Atul Gawande, from the August 13/20, 2012 New Yorker

”Customization should be five percent, not ninety-five per cent, of what we do {in medicine}.”

Gawande looks behind the scenes at The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant chain with an enormous, complicated menu (everything prepared onsite from scratch) and 80-million highly satisfied diners annually, to see what lessons can be applied to healthcare. A colleague of his (quote above) is well on his way to such standardization in the arena of knee-replacement surgeries, with excellent clinical and economic results. But the most likely transformation would come via corporations (“Big Medicine”), with a profit motive that would need governmental oversight.

I'm really enjoying these essay reviews. I don't often comment, so I thought I'd let you know they're interesting!

As an older person trying to expand my French vocabulary, I am finding that content words are easier to absorb than function words. In fact, I would have to include adverbs with function words, but I am not the linguist here. Thanks for sharing your notes on "The Secret Life of Pronouns." I am going to try to find the entire article.

>182 Nickelini: thanks! My reading lately has made me eager to get to a book on the history of contraception; in lieu of acquiring something new I think I’ll choose The Means of Reproduction, in my TBRs from your review some years ago.

>183 Poquette: interesting! -- the author does categorize a few adverbs (e.g. “very”) as function words. You can read the article here. In locating the link, I see he also has a book (same title as the article) and a website with some exercises.

Thanks for the link, MJ! Much appreciated!

Yes, thanks for the link, and I'm going to take a look at the book.

Well, good: In >179 detailmuse:, Gawande gives reasons why doctors don’t have the end-of-life-planning conversations with patients, and one is that there’s no payment for such appointments. (Funding was planned, but was scrapped in the hype of “death panels.”) The front page of today’s New York Times says there’s hope again.

Wow, MJ, lots to mull over here! I was too far behind to comment on everything that caught my eye. The Girls Who Went Away and Patron Saint of Liars sound like a great pairing, especially if PSoL is second only to Bel Canto, a favorite.

Thanks for taking the time to review all those articles. I stopped subscribing to magazines because the piles got so extreme and stress-inducing. Now I read haphazardly online. I need an online version of your accordion folder to give more structure to my reading. What is your favorite magazine?

One article I have read is the one about Laura Hillenbrand. To accomplish so much from bed is remarkable.

Hi Lisa, I too stopped most of my subscriptions and restarted only a few that I feel excited (rather than burdened!) to see in the mail. My current favorites are the literary journal Bellevue Literary Review and The New Yorker. I like the lush images of Martha Stewart Living and the food ideas/recipes of Cooking Light. I even like the girly-girlness (but not the Oprah aspect) of O.

I follow The Atlantic on Twitter and almost every tweet teases a fascinating-sounding article. I don't like to read long articles online and I don't like to print them out so I'm considering subscribing.

The Economist was the most difficult one for me to keep up with. I felt compelled to read it nearly cover to cover and could never keep up. When my daughter was younger I subscribed to some parenting mags, but don't anymore. Most recently I subscribed to Wired, but now follow online only. Like you, I find almost every post fascinating. We also don't get a paper newspaper anymore. It just seemed so wasteful (of paper). Podcasts (and online browsing) now fill the gap where magazine reading used to be.

>191 labfs39: hmm, digital: I'm beginning to enjoy my Kindle; reading on it is easier than a pc screen but it still feels efficient and utilitarian. Whereas paper (books, lush magazines) is filled with so much pleasure. My library offers digital magazines through Zinio but honestly I page through those almost as fast as a flip book!

21. “Final Forms: What death certificates can tell us and what they can’t” by Kathryn Schulz, from the April 7, 2014 New Yorker

A short history of the death certificate, from its origins in England’s Bill of Mortality (weekly lists of Black Death casualties, by parish, possibly to “help the healthy steer clear of the most infectious parts of town”) into an epidemiological tool where causes of death have been standardized worldwide via the International List of Causes of Death (still called the ICD but officially re-named the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), now used as much in healthcare billing as death certificates.

Also discusses how unreliable the information has become due to the form's complexity (the “one-page document {has} two hundred and fifty pages of instructions”) and people's vanity (some “socially awkward” causes of death are changed to more acceptable ones).

Schulz wrote the engaging Being Wrong; I think I’d enjoy reading whatever she writes.

22. “A Man of Taste: A chef with cancer fights to save his tongue” by D.T. Max, from the May 12, 2008 New Yorker

{Beethoven} did it, but did he enjoy it? Sure, he wrote a great symphony when he couldn’t hear. I can cook right now and I can’t taste. So I enjoy it on a mental level. But do I wish I could taste my own creation and be satisfied with it? Sure I do.

As I wrote in my 2011 review of the fabulous, uber-foodie book, Alinea (about the titular, world-class restaurant of molecular gastronomy and its chef, Grant Achatz): What’s the most ironic disease for a chef who puts flavor first?

Answer: tongue cancer. I loved the book and must have read at least parts of this article back then. So there was little new to me now but I enjoyed it. Max wrote Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, a biography of David Foster Wallace; Like Schulz above, I think I’d enjoy reading whatever he writes.

23. “The Operator: Is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good?” by Michael Specter, from the February 4, 2013 New Yorker

Much of the advice Oz offers is sensible, and is rooted solidly in scientific literature. That is why the rest of what he does is so hard to understand.

Amen.

Profile of Mehmet Oz -- Harvard undergrad, Univ. of Pennsylvania MD/MBA, Columbia/NY-Presbyterian heart-transplant surgeon -- and his descent (my word) from respected medical authority to media huckster.

I enjoyed the death certificate article too, and now that's an added reason to look for Being Wrong. I hadn't made the connection before, so thanks.

>195 labfs39: I'm almost embarrassed to say that I created a Twitter account this summer, so that I would know how to do it and what it looked like. Someone then sent me a link to a tweet by Wired about a murmuration of starlings. I've been hooked ever since. So I get my Wired articles via Twitter.

>195 labfs39: We had a book when I was a child called A Gaggle of Geese, all about collective nouns for animals, with great illustrations, and I"m pretty sure a murmuration of starlings was in that.

>196 rebeccanyc: This summer qebo and I met in Portland, ME and went to the Portland Art Museum. One of the displays was of a wooden door covered with collective names. It was unique. I wish I could find a photo of it.

My favorite collective animal noun is a murder of crows. I wonder who gets to think these up? I want that job. :-)

Btw, here is a link to the Wired article.

Wow, that was a fascinating article. And the photo -- wow too!

hooboy, gotta lay out my reading from the past several months so I can find my way to a best-of list for the year.

First, some favs:



Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

{...O}ld age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state -- something experienced largely alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions. {...} This experiment of making mortality a medical experience is just decades old. It is young. And the evidence is it is failing.

In a nursing home, the official aim of the institution is caring, but the idea of caring that {has evolved doesn’t} bear any meaningful resemblance to what {some} would call living.

An LTER snag, I’d been looking forward to this book since I read what became a chapter of it -- Gawande’s New Yorker essay, “Letting Go” (msg >179 detailmuse: above). Of several similar books I’ve now read as/since my parents aged into their nineties and died, and as I progress well into middle age, this is absolutely the best.

Best because it addresses the big picture. First, what makes life worth living? Almost always, the answer includes a desire for even fragments of independence and quality of life, not necessarily length of life. Second, in the face of a growing mortal blow to that life, which care/treatment options point toward what is desired vs. away from it? Often, that answer then obviates the need for ponderous research into life-lengthening caregiving and therapies.

Gawande begins with independent old-age and then explores decline; caregiving (family; and the creation of senior living spaces, assisted living, and nursing homes); life-improving vs. life-lengthening healthcare interventions; and hospice. Throughout, he’s philosophical, informative, poignant ... and inexplicably optimistic.

Here by Richard McGuire (cranky touchstone so here's a link via the review)

I received this the day it was released and picked it up that night, just to look at the first pages until I could properly read it later. (sigh) After a couple hours of fascinated immersion, I turned the last page. Wonderful. It’s an entirely graphic (well, maybe 1% words) exploration of what might have happened on the site of what is, in 2014, a corner in an American home’s living room. It's presented in a non-linear / non-chronological narrative from the gassy soup of 3-trillion years ago through extinct animals to a future 22,000+ years from now. Numerous cultures are touched upon -- e.g. natives and colonials, but the emphasis is on the 20th-century -- all replete with period clothing, furnishings, language, technology and activities. Little plots develop through short vignettes, but there is much to miss and much to catch on a second (or tenth) reading.

I grew up in a hundred-year-old house and now live in another one, different city, different state. I often wonder about the previous occupants and furnishings, most recently about those in the time of WWI. This book inspires me to turn my curiosity into action by looking at local historical records.

Columbine by Dave Cullen -- riveting (and respectful) account of the 1999 Columbine school shooting: the lead-up, the incident, the aftermath. I originally acquired the paperback and now downloaded the audio; I reached for one or the other in every spare moment I had.

 

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and The Hours by Michael Cunningham

I've long wanted to pair the reading of Woolf’s original stream-of-conscious narrative that weaves the emotional struggles of several people on a beautiful June day in post-WWI London, with The Hours, a literary riff on Mrs. Dalloway, where characters and events are shuffled and reimagined in storylines involving both the original characters of the novel and the participants in general to a novel: the author (Virginia Woolf, drafting the novel in 1923 in a London suburb); the main character (late-20th-century Clarissa, giving a party for her poet friend in New York City); and the reader (Laura Brown, reading the novel while struggling with societal expectations in 1949 Los Angeles). Wonderful -- both of them.

I loved the film of The Hours and now want to see it again. I’ll definitely re-read both of these novels. I’m interested in the new audio edition of Mrs. Dalloway with Annette Bening reading, though it'll admittedly lack the English accent.

Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

{I}f you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.

Another pairing: Proulx's 1997 short story and McMurtry/Ossana's 2005 adapted screenplay about closeted gays in the 1963 American West, plus essays about writing from each of the three. I loved the exercise of comparing the story and screenplay and want to watch that film again, too. Heartbreaking, though.

Nice to catch up with your varied reading!

Such an interesting variety of reading. Adding Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours to my wishlist.

BTW, good to "see" you. Been a while . . . :-)

Hi rebecca and suzanne, yes definitely a whiiiiiiiiiile. Just signed up for CR2015 and hope next year brings a better balance!

All of these were good; I’m just not an evangelist for any of them. Fiction in this post; nonfiction/poetry/misc in the next; alpha by author:

  

Regeneration by Pat Barker -- blend of WWI fact and fiction in an exploration of antiwar sentiments and various manifestations of “shell shock,” which became “battle fatigue” in WWII and is now PTSD.

Nest by Esther Ehrlich -- for middle-grade readers, a little teachy, heavy themes of child abuse and death; IMO needs to be a adult+child read.

The Dinner by Herman Koch, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett -- acquired this after enjoying Koch’s recent Summer House with Swimming Pool. Another unreliable, mostly unlikeable narrator, it fascinated me less than Summer House, yet I look forward to Koch’s next novel.

          

Daring Greatly by Brene Brown -- the emotional value of vulnerability, including the value in making mistakes. Most memorable takeaway is its inspiration: Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech at the Sorbonne, Citizenship in a Republic, about “the man in the arena”:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly...

50 Success Classics and 50 Self-help Classics, both by Tom Butler-Bowdon -- four- to six-page summaries of 50 seminal books summarizing, respectively, the lives/philosophies of people (4th-century BCE to 2003) who did succeed greatly, and the tenets of various self-improvement philosophies. I’ve been meaning to get to several of the self-helps from my TBRs (Flow, Man's Search for Meaning, Learned Optimism). I listened partly on audio, where the best takeaway was hearing the pronunciation of Flow-author Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi: “Me-high Chick-sent-me-high.” :))

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink -- fascinating and informative documentary about a hospital and its staff and patients before/during/after Hurricane Katrina.

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan -- I’ll probably listen to audio of anything Gaffigan writes, it’s amusing, but this was so forgettable I overlooked even listing it until just now.

You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes by Chris Hadfield -- I followed Reid Weisman’s photography on Twitter while he was aboard the Space Station and was happy to see this collection of Space Station photos from a previous astronaut. They’re more fascinating than beautiful, and sometimes lacking in bearings/perspective.

xkcd: volume 0 by Randall Munroe -- collection of nerd comics on math, science and romance. Much smarter and deeper than his xkcd webcomic.

My Therapist Said by Hal Sirowitz -- collection of 150 very-short poems of advice from his therapist about his mother, father, girlfriends. I previously enjoyed his Mother Said more.

Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet -- memoir by man with Asperger’s and synesthesia.

Bellevue Literary Review (Vol 13 No 1; Spring 2013) -- a Spring issue, which always has the winners of the journal’s annual prizes and which I always like less than the Fall issues. This issue also noted some Bellevue Hospital staff experiences with Superstorm Sandy in November 2012, which seemed particularly thin after having just read about Hurricane Katrina in Five Days at Memorial.

NPR Driveway Moments Love Stories -- an audio anthology of 25 essays from NPR about love in all of its forms, the fastest 2 hours you'll know unless you limit yourself to a few at a time. All were interesting, maybe half were engaging. I used to listen to NPR’s Driveway Moments podcast; this might inspire me to listen to some of NPR's other anthologies.

December 16 looks like it was a busy day for you on LT, and it was great for us to catch up with your reading.

Brokeback mountain one of my favourite films. Really ought to read Being Mortal, but have not quite got it into my head yet that I am not immortal.

Loved catching up with your brief reviews!

thanks bas and rebecca! Bas, Being Mortal does have philosophy to apply to oneself (e.g. if I can't have both, what's more important to me: quantity of life vs quality? And what does "quality" include for me?). But I'm with you: who's going to do much of that till they have to. So I think the book is most valuable for people in the role of helping others (e.g. parents) with their preferences. It would be best if healthcare providers and policymakers paid attention to it, and if the public didn't then accuse them of being "death panels."

I’m likely to finish two more books this year but they’re unlikely to make it anywhere near my Top 10 (well, 11). Wow, the fiction is light; more on that when I look at some stats.

Best of 2014
Fiction
Here by Richard McGuire
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, paired with The Hours by Michael Cunningham
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

Nonfiction
Columbine by Dave Cullen
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry
The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War by Richard Rubin
The Science of Good Cooking by America’s Test Kitchen
The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler

About my 2014 Reading

Total books read: 62
Fiction: 22 (35%)
Nonfiction: 35 (56%)
Poetry/mixed: 5
Mt. TBR: 307 (beginning of year: 306)

Female authors: 19 (31%)
Male authors: 32 (52%)
Mix of genders: 11
Author nationality: 17 (27%) were non-USA
• Authors new-to-me: 36 (plus many more in the anthologies)
• Authors with more than one book in my 2014 reads: 3 (America’s Test Kitchen, Tom Butler-Bowdon, Herman Koch)
• “Favorited” authors with books in this year’s mix: 5 (Joan Didion, Jonathan Safran Foer, Atul Gawande, Bernd Heinrich, Ann Patchett)

Original publication date:
20th century: 9 (15%)
21st century: 53 (85%)

Date acquired:
pre-2000: 0 (wow; just, wow)
2000s: 7 (11%)
2010s: 55 (89%)

• A goal was to read at least 30 books from my TBRs; I read 34, yay.
• I made a “shortlist” of 11 planned reads (msg #3 above) and read 10 of them; 6 of those ended up in my overall favorites of the year. Also made a “longlist”; read only 3 of the 23 but 2 of those were also in my overall favorites.
• I rated 33 (53%) of the books 4 stars or above (i.e. “good” to “great”).
• Read a couple dozen accumulated magazine articles, intensely interesting; some were more satisfying than book-length nonfiction.

Original publication date:
20th century: 9 (15%)
21st century: 53 (85%)

Wow!!! You read so many new books! I suppose the prevalence of nonfiction lends itself to that. Interesting.

>214 japaul22: oh thank you for commenting!! The stat has been similar for some years. I’d attributed it to advance-pub copies and an interest in contemporary fiction. But nonfiction, yes. I feel better.

>201 detailmuse: you might find this of interest. http://www.librarything.com/topic/65902

>216 dchaikin: thank you too for the comment. I followed your link and it seems I'd "ignored" that thread instead of "starring" it. Look forward to reading it through. Probably should take a look at all my ignored threads...

Happy New Year! On to 2015 -- please join me here!

Ok, l'm caught up now. Loved your end of year reviews with your favorites up front. MaGuires Here is now on my wishlist. Columbine was already there, although it's been there for a while. His posts on the author talk are what led me to add it.

>213 detailmuse: Wow! You read more nonfiction than I did. I actually read less than usual this year. Must be the literary influence of CR. ;-)

Have a Happy New Year! Look forward to "seeing" you in Club Read 2015!

>219 dchaikin: McGuire's Here might feel thin on a surface level, provoking a sense of "I don't get it." But come to it with curiosity and respect for history, and it feels imaginative and nostalgic. It reads very fast so that's a vote for getting it from the library, but I'll want to reread so that's a vote for owning it.

I'm confident you'd enjoy Columbine on audio.

>220 Poquette: Considering that I read mostly contemporary fiction, CR has influenced me toward more obscure writers and non-USA writers. My wishlist shows even larger influences but it takes so long to migrate into the shopping basket and then to the top of the TBRs!