Boom

finally

When I first read Quicksilver, I was terrribly curious to know what Isaac Newton thought his sins were--Daniel Waterhouse references seeing a list he made of all the sins he had committed before a particular day when Newton was a teenager. I was curious about both how long the list was, and how complete or specific it was. My wish to know finally comes true! 

I don't think making pies is ever a sin, regardless of what day of the week it is. 

no longer entirely amish

About 2 weeks ago, I purchased my first legit mobile electronic device. I'm not counting digital cameras (I have 3) or my laptop, which as a 17" widescreen thang with lousy battery life I don't find all that mobile. The new gadget is the Nook Color. I call it la tabletita, because I can use it to check email and internet things like a few blogs, twitter for work, and facebook for myself and work, but I can't actually work on it like a real tablet.

I went with the Nook because:
1. The Kindle is butt ugly, and I hate the blink-black-to-white page turning effect; for me, that happens about five times/minute and it's awful.
2. iPads are stupidly expensive (plus, the name is still awful); I could have picked up between 2 and 4 Nooks for the same price as one iPad. The pad (seriously? pad has been forgiven?) is a little bigger and a little prettier, and lord knows there are one billion more apps to purchase for now, but I didn't buy the damn thing for apps. I bought it to read on mainly, plus to stay a bit more connected to the series of tubes.

So, I love the Nook for reading. Flexible screen choices for text/background color/brightness, comfy size and weight, occasional handy uses of the connected dictionary (although it'd be nice if said dictionary was better at Olde Timey English). And I'm getting happier with it for non-book things--the mobile OS just seems kind of lame, and I had some trouble with the internet at first, and I'm still not that great at the little tap-tap touchscreen thing. The big surprise is how it's already changing my reading and purchasing habits.

I am a dedicated liberry user. Since I read a couple hundred books every year, buying them all would set me back at least $4k/year, and that's with lowballing the average cover price, knowing I'd get at least a few used, and some others would be the cheapie little paperbacks. While I buy a handful of new titles from my nearest new/used shop down the street, and pop into Elliott Bay when I'm on the hill, most of my actual book purchases have been from Amazon for years now, with Powell's a solid second place. I haven't purchased a book from Barnes & Noble since Harry Potter book 6. Now, in the last 2 weeks, I've blown the $300 or so on the Nook/cover/anti-glare screens, plus I've picked up 3 book purchases--2 new novels, and a 25-title document of public domain stuff I like--Wharton/Austen/Thackeray/Wolfe/Dumas. (The last purchase was a whopping $2).

Last week, I also spent about 4 hours figuring out how to download books from the liberry. Let me label the process unwieldy. The Seattle liberry pawns off ebooks to a company called Overdrive. Overdrive files use Adobe Digital Editions, which I had to install on my laptop. Through Overdrive, SPL offers about 30,000 fiction titles, all of which appear to have a limited number of copies, so more popular works have waiting lists even longer than paper books; I think the reason for this is that Overdrive makes a point about how you don't have to "return" the book--it'll just disappear from your file in 3 weeks! So ebook checkout is a week longer than paper books, plus I would expect that very few copies get "returned" early. I found four titles that I was at least willing to read, and checked them out--which I can't do directly from the SPL site. Then I had to click around a bit to get the files sorted out in ADE, then connect the Nook to the laptop and transfer the books. The Nook turned out to have been preloaded with ADE, which isn't noted in the instructions it came with, so I had an instant messaging session and a phone call with Nook tech support to sort that shit out--the two versions of the program wouldn't/couldn't talk to each other. The liberry system is all functional now, but it's not very compelling to pursue because of the how the catalog functions work, and the limited number of files.

The bigger problem: I am coming to very rapidly prefer reading on the Nook to reading a paper book. (No bookmarks, plus the weight of a paperback with the sturdiness of a hardcover, plus the screen/text changes keep my eyes a little happier.) But the most common way for me to pick up books is this: I browse the tables and stacks at my nearest branch. Because Columbia City is such a demographic oddity for Seattle (omg: brown people!) the new book selection slants towards writers from Africa and Asia, and towards US immigrant authors. I discover so many authors I've never heard of, and wouldn't know how to find browsing a bookstore. I love the casual judging-books-by-covers aspect, but most of these books aren't available in digital form yet, at least not through the liberry. So my new reading options become: shelling out that $4k/year to buy the books I want from Barnes & Noble, or keeping the price down by reading stuff I'm less interested in, but is available from the liberry as an ebook.

What would really solve the problem, of course, is for digital rights management to sort itself out, and for ebooks to never have waiting lists at liberries, and so on.

2010 books

For 2009, in the chaotic mess that was my home, I lost all but about 30 of my library book records, so that year was the first year in many that (thanks for original OCD inspiration to Rob L. Squirrels!) I didn't track how many books I read. Yes, that has left a couple brain synapses a little fussy and out of sorts all year.

This year, I had an actual desk, which remained in the same spot much of the time. Thus, all my little envelopes of papers also remained in the same spot much of the time. And lo, it was good. My reading seems to have slowed down; I haven't hit the 300 mark in a few years This year, the total was 211. And no, I don't count re-reads, so the fact that I re-read a few escape-y series every year (hello, Lucky Jack; hello, Mr. Potter; hello, Westeros) doesn't matter. The list did slant more heavily into non-fiction this year, and my ongoing Read the World list has steered me to a handful of rather dense and lengthy novels.

Enough about my pointless hoarding of book lists. Instead a few books I particularly enjoyed in 2010. The three with asterisks are the three I wish everyone I know would read.
Cheerful Money --a memoir about being a WASP, written after the author spent 120k on therapy.
*The Street --the best book about the experience of American Apartheid that I have ever read. By Ann Petry.
*American Buffalo --I like our giant nutty bison, and I like reading about them, and this was excellent and even more interesting that I expected. The history is tragic, of course; the present day balances it by being surprising in a mostly pleasant way.
*Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone --the book that made me fall in love with Eduardo Galeano. I am working my way through everything of his, and this one is still my favorite. I would love it to end up required reading for middle school kids.
The Fruit Hunters --Oh to be one of the idle rich, so I too could travel to interesting spots around the world and smuggle fruit home to plant and study.
Carter Beats the Devil --A lovely period costume adventure movie of a book. Best thing to come out of Harding's presidency. Can't wait for more books from Glen David Gold.
Hella Nation --a collection of magazine essays about UFC, porn conventions, white supremicists and the assorted other low lifes of our  country.
The Iron WIll of Shoeshine Cats --the new American Gangster novel. Not earth-shattering but certainly compelling, if one likes novels about American Gangsters. *You should read my friend BK's sorta-review of this book, even if you don't read the book.
Serve the People --a woman spends a lot of time in China, cooking a lot of different things. Since I like to read about food and am always curious about modern China, I like it. If you like Chinese food, this video from the author will make you hungry.
Ahab's Wife --was pretty skeptical, what with it being all Oprah-book-clubby, in addition to the premise (protagonist is the wife of our famous Cap'n Ahab). And I ended up liking it a lot. I won't read it again, and I don't much like the author's other work, but I did enjoy the variation here, which, among other things, has Ahab being a superstar in bed. Go, Ahab.

I also feel like I should note two books that I have intended to read for many years. They each sat on a shelf in my bedroom for at least six months this year. One of them I started twice, bringing the total number of times I've started this book to 11. One of them, I still haven't opened. They are Middlemarch and The Sun Also Rises. MIddlemarch is the one that I have tried so many times; there is absolutely no reason I shouldn't like this book except...I don't seem to be able to make it more than a dozen pages in. For Mr. Hemingway: I have only read his short stories, and I didn't like them at all. I feel an obligation to read this book, but essentially don't want to.

a secret code of some kind

I just finished a boring library book that is so boring I don't need to tell you who wrote it, what's it about or the title. It is a fairly recent novel, written by a woman. It is mostly about family relationships. See? Boring. But: I need your help to solve a mystery!

Some previous library user used a pencil to make a few notes.
FIrst, two words were circled, on two different pages early in the book.
p31: Tadpole
p57: Doomsday

Later in the book, all the same handwriting, these words:
p251:
Grilled chicken
napkin
tear open

p253, both words underlined:
lettuce
fortitude

p289, last page of the book, reproduced here with caps & punctuation used in the book:
Squeeze
interlace
Nip to Hip.

The combination of tadpole and doomsday is haunting. The combination of lettuce and fortitude is ridiculous. But why?
(You might need to know that nothing about grilled chicken, napkins, tearing things open, lettuce or fortitude was going on in the book on pages 251-253.

la biblioteca

Sometimes I think that my love of reading is the main reason I wasn't interested in having kids. I love not being interrupted; being able to read books I only have a casual interest in. Lately there's been a stack of not that great but OK books: The Butterfly Mosque, The Ridiculous Race, Moneyball, Food Heroes. I've also started a Read the World challenge, which thus far isn't proving that different than my typical reading habits.

The link above lays out some fairly flexible guidelines; mine are a bit different because I don't expect to complete it in a year. (that in itself is a little challenging; I do like ticking things off lists.) I went with the UN list of countries and added Palestine; debating adding Vatican City. (Also, shamefully: Some of the countries I am only familiar with because seasons of Survivor have been filmed there.) Rather than go with the "book is set there" suggestion, I'm going to try and stick with having the author born there. (More shame: I recently enjoyed a book I thought was by an Estonian, and was a little bummed to learn she's Finnish, as I've already read a handful of Finnish authors. This is a dumb way to look at the whole idea of the challenge.)

My list started with 42 countries completed. A few that stuck with me rather firmly (I link to reviews; after spending the day writing descriptions of heirloom apples, I don't have it in me to offer more):
Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, Eduardo Galeano, Uruguay
Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenya
The One-Straw Revolution, Masunoba Fukuoka
The Hummingbird's Daughter, Luis Urrea, Mexico
Mr. Potter, Jamaica Kincaid, Antigua
Purge, Sofi Oksanen, Finland (and not Estonia)
If you're going to read one of them, I suggest Mirrors, the first one. It's a cultural history of 5,000 years, in brief essays and prose poems, and it's wonderful.

I've selected a few more books from the library (Brazil, Israel, Morocco) but as I've cruised around looking for titles, I've realized I need to not overwhelm myself with stories about grandmothers. Not having much in the way of direct grandmother experience, they feel more like a tedious plot device (wisdom/love, rebellion!, reconciliation, death, newly adult understanding!) that seems to be fairly universal. Strange but true: I mostly prefer authors from warm places. Even if those warm places have lots of grandmother action.

Bright Spot

I wish every day included news about text-messaging elephants (who, "like teenagers, learn from each other"), Google Earth, and mothers who no longer have to worry about elephants when their kids are playing under banana trees.
If I had Kimani's cell phone number, I would text him to say thx, u  100% rk. dnt e@ d crops!

Lunar Madness

This here's the entry I wrote this morning on Pitas. I'm taking it down there. Which may trap Dalton forever in the Arrested Development site, if the web works the way I think it does.

  In general, I celebrate New Year's Eve but I always sort of feel like a jew on xmas: look at all the weirdos getting excited, where is my Chinese food? I blame the solar calendar on the Xians of old, who, for reasons that strike me as fairly incomprehensible, decided to keep their most holy day--easter--on the lunar calendar and the second-most holy day--xmas--on the solar version. (the more links I look at on this topic, the more confused I get, so lets just say that when I get my time machine, I'll be heading back to prevent the two councils of Nicea from happening). The sun is the loud, charming salesman, bringing in new clients all the time, but the moon is clearly the brains behind the operation. Plus, as I have a rooster in my heart (specifically an earth rooster), this will be my year.

My book list also follows the solar calendar; in 2004, I read 250 books, plus a handful of cookbooks that I don't track. You won't read them, but I still feel compelled to list the best. In no particular order:

No Logo by Naomi Klein. You will realize that moral shopping is nearly impossible, which will drive you nuts, but it's a great read.

The Master and Commander series from Patrick O'Brian. How did I live so many years without Jack and Stephen? Great laughs, great sea battles, great characters, great zoology/botany moments. Seriously, read them. All 20.

George RR Martin's Songs of Fire and Ice. Sadly, he seems to write these tomes slowly, and the series is only half done. While you're waiting for more, check out Robin Hobb's Farseer, Liveship and Tawny Man trilogies. They're all sort of linked, so read them in the order I listed them.

Beloved books often have cookbooks tied to them. Beg, borrow or steal a copy of the Narnia cookbook, which is both charming and tasty. Lobscouse and Spotted Dog is attached to Master and Commander, and is entertaining if you are as fascinated with suet puddings as I am. The women actually cooked and ate rats. Applaud their dedication.

In A Sunburned Country is possibly my favorite book from Bill Bryson. My obsession with Australia is complete, thanks to him.

Sort of a novel, sort of a series of stories, A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That rocks the house.

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion is a study of one of the weirder areas of our culture combined with a major love of shoes and clothes. It's like talking about handbags with Sartre. Or "Sarter", depending on how drunk you are.
And I find I must include a television series, which I've never seen fit to mention before. Arrested Development. I am stalker-obsessed with Buster Bluth. Yes, he's the freaking living-at-home retard. No, I can't explain. It was love at first twitch. And bringing this entry full circle, the actor who plays him is Xian to the point of starting a bible study group for actors in LA. I feel like I'm making that up, but no: according to this piece, about 200 people regularly show up.