Currently reading
Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities
Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause
The Curious World of Bugs: The Bugman's Guide to the Mysterious and Remarkable Lives of Things That Crawl
It's appropriate, I think, that my response to a book about bugs is rather, uh, nitpicky. This book quite clearly began life as a website, and it shows. There were numerous times I wanted to click on text to follow the topic but instead was swept along by the choppy, non-linear format of the book from click beetles to butterflies. The editing/usage errors were annoying to me but fairly benign, 'hoard' for 'horde' throughout, 'sheik' for 'chic' and other homophones. The illustrations appear to be copyright free antiques, and they are not labeled at all.The information was mostly good (though the folklore about local honey ameliorating seasonal pollen allergies has been pretty thoroughly debunked by double-blind studies in the last few years) and fairly entertaining. The assertion that bedbugs come from seedy hotels, communal dormitories and the like is also suspect. It would be a fun book for someone just beginning to learn about insects. Had this been around when my son was a tot, it would have been bedtime reading for sure. There just wasn't enough here that was new to me and the writing was pretty pedestrian. I'd have given it 3 stars if it had fewer errors and better illustrations. The website WhatsThatBug is a much richer source of information.
The Stations of Still Creek
This was an interesting memoir set in a place I'm very familiar with. I found the authorial voice decidedly odd, and her description of a 20-odd year marriage in which neither partner ever talked about anything important, odder still. She moves out of the house and into a cabin for a year and they never actually talk about this, which I still can't wrap my head around. There's a lot of navel-gazing wrapped in pretty nature, and lots of mortality-contemplating. It all left me somewhat bewildered and bemused, but I was interested enough to finish it. 2.5
The Big Book of Beading Patterns: For Peyote Stitch, Square Stitch, Brick Stitch, and Loomwork Designs
How can I not love this book? I've got a pattern in it! Bluebirds of Happiness, page 22. Besides the obvious giddiness of seeing my own name in print this book is full of an amazing number of beautiful patterns. There's something in here for every beader, there really is. The directions are clear, the photography is beautiful. Recommended, especially... oh, you know.
Easy Beading Vol. 7
Visually rich and wonderfully photographed. The projects are simple and attractive, but nothing I would really enjoy making. I do really like looking at project books that have such gorgeous photography. The colors pop, the focus is glorious. I only wish I could figure out how to photograph my own work so well.
A Planet of Viruses
An enjoyable, if way too short, overview of viruses and the world they have helped to make. I learned some things, reviewed some others, and renewed my liking for Zimmer's clean, clear prose. It's a good introduction but will leave the virus aficionado hungry for more. Read Parasite Rex or Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life for a better idea of Zimmer's talents as a pop-sci writer.3.5 stars
The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià's elBulli
I'd never heard of elBulli before reading this book. It didn't make me want to take the next plane to Spain so I could eat there. I can kinda understand the motivation to work somewhere free for 6 months, but I couldn't get into the feeling here. It seemed too precious, too twee (the restaurant, not the book). The book had a solidly journalistic feel, and was well done, but I just couldn't get interested in the story because the food didn't sound good.
The Lord of the Rings
But maybe this is my favorite... I do love watching Merry and Pippin come into their own. I love to think about them prancing around The Shire wearing armour. It makes me giggle. But I don't know how to address the trilogy as anything other than one monumental work of fiction. I re-read it more than anything, and I listen to it every night as I fall asleep.
The Letter Home
5/2011 Memorial day is perhaps the most appropriate day to re-read this incredible book. I love it so very much that I fear I have no objectivity regarding it. You should read it too, whoever you are, wherever you are. It's the best anti-war book I've ever read, and is in my top 5 books of all times. If my house was on fire, this is the book I'd dive for.4/2006 Stunning book, one I picked up at the library for no particular reason. I'd never heard of it, I mean, and saw the cover and was intrigued. The text of the book is the text of a letter home from WWI, written by a medic to his young son. In simple prose, the letter unwinds with the accompaniment of spare black and white drawings which are both powerful and unsettling. DH was chatting with his favorite librarian, so I went and sat in a corner and opened the book and fell in. Headfirst. By the end, my face was wet and my world was different. This is a quiet book that reverberates down through the day, and I predict it will be with me for a long, long time. I made my son read it tonight at dinner. After he read it he was speechless for a minute (if you can imagine!), and then he asked if he could take it in to school for his teacher to read. DH read it and was nearly as moved as I was. I was teary-eyed just watching them read it. I even emailed the author to tell him how great this book is. Don't be fooled by finding this in the Picture Books section of your library. Unreservedly recommended, in fact, emphatically pushed.
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
I loved this book for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the thing I loved best about it is how Brand examined his convictions and compared them to the latest and best factual evidence he could find and changed his mind. And that's what science means to me, that continual re-evaluation of things we think we know. The ability to change one's belief system so profoundly at Brand's age is a thing of beauty, and I admire him for it.I found the subjects he covers in this book to be very interesting. His arguments are convincing. I was already pretty pro-gene manipulation before reading this, but I had retained my knee-jerk 1970s ere bias against nuclear power. It's one of those perception bending books. No doubt some of Brand's positions will need to be re-thought in the future, but he's up for that. I had never really thought about cities and how they work, so that part was fresh for me, too.I loved the concept that we really don't need to plan for things that last a thousand thousand years (nuclear waste storage, f'rinstance), but rather we should trust future generations a little more. We need to come up with a perfectly safe and doable hundred year plan, and let engineers engineer new and better solutions between now and then. Technology will step up to that plate. It's hubris to think that we know better than our children's children's children will. The more you know, the less you fear. Highly recommended.
Ship Breaker
I enjoyed the ride. It's a solid first novel, tautly plotted and intermittently suspensful. I liked the characters but began to suspect about halfway through that the story was longer than the book. I checked, and sure enough, there's a sequel due out in May of 2012. I found the post-petroleum world believable and well-imagined. The extrapolation from the widening gap between rich and poor was excellently done, as were the climate change and the city killer storms. I liked Nailer, the gritty protagonist, a great deal. What he learns about family in this book transcends dystopian fiction, though I enjoyed the setting mightily. Lots of gore in this one, be warned. 3.5
Atlas of Remote Islands
This is a lovely, lovely, lovely book about tiny places in the middle of the oceans. Schalansky has researched the oddest stories about each place, and I would happily read a book about each of the events she describes. In fact, I hope someone will expand on some of these stories, the snippets here were not enough. The illustrations are so wonderful- old-fashioned and detailed and interesting. Topography done in modified pointillism. And the font & typesetting! Oh, how I love the type in this book. It's just glorious. Transcendent typography, even. I brought it home on the strength of the type on the cover and the introduction. I didn't even start to read it, just fell in love and clasped it to my bosom. It's an absolutely beautiful book, from cover to cover. If you like maps at all, and most especially if you were a child who pored over atlases and dreamed, I predict you will love it.
Matilda Bone
I liked this, though I found it fairly heavy-handed. Young Matilda has been raised by a priest to be humble but learned in Latin, to be obedient and not to question, to be a priggish pain in the tush, in other words. She's suddenly sent to live with Red Peg the Bonesetter, and oh, how Matilda hates this new life where Latin isn't important, and God is about love instead of punishment, and where the unschooled and the ignorant help people in distress. Heavy-handed, but sweet and well-researched and worth reading.
A Candle in Her Room
5/2011 Oh, how I love this book. It's tightly written, suspenseful without being terribly scary, haunting and utterly infused with a gentle love. It's rooted so deeply in its place that one comes away from it loving Pembrokeshire-as-was. Full of insights into obsession, forgiveness, family and above all love, this story is one of the classics. Scary haunted doll aside, there's just so much in this book that's rewarding. We learn about war, about cruelty and madness, about art and music and dancing, about alienation and being embraced. The contrasts are telling and delicate. That's the best word for it, I think- delicate. It's a book painted on the inside of a fragile glass ball, painted with a brush two hairs wide. Highly recommended, even if you think you hate stories about evil dolls.4/2007 Welsh spookiness, this one with an evil haunted doll, and the 3 generations of women who fall under her malevolent spell. The landscapes and supplemental characters are as lovingly drawn as the protagonists. I have loved this book for what seems like a hundred years, and it rewards every re-reading with something new.
A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout
This was a fascinating read on so many fronts. One of the most interesting things for me as a huge Safina fan, was to watch him write from a state of blinding, towering rage. This book was written in real time, with a few later comments inserted here and there. I think that writing well from a place of blistering anger is incredibly difficult, and watching Safina fulminate wildly at the beginning was both a little disconcerting and a little reassuring- he's just as human as the rest of us, for all he's arguably the greatest nature writer of our times. The story itself is heartbreaking but ultimately not what I thought it would be. The conclusions drawn at the end are fairly magnanimous and even-handed- and the eventual thrust of the book is more about our need for and use of fossil fuels than the chain of tragedies which come about because of that need. The other cost of the tragedy, the loss of livelihood and culture in the Gulf, is highlighted starkly throughout. The interviews with shrimpers and fishers and the supporting community members are very moving.A couple of quotes from near the end of the book:"The best way to respond to the Gulf disaster? Not washing oil off birds, picking up turtles, spraying dispersants, or cleaning beaches. Rather, pulling the subsidies out from under Big Petroleum. Since we pay those subsidies in our income taxes and lose sight of them, it'd be better to put them right in our gasoline and oil taxes and let ourselves be shocked at the pump by the true cost we're paying - and hurry toward better options.""There was another time when people vehemently insisted that changing America's main source of energy would wreck the economy. The cheapest energy that ever powered America was slavery. Energy is always a moral issue."There's a lot to learn here, and some of it will make you furious all over again. Some of it will make you think. Highly recommended.
Beverley Nichols' Cats' X. Y. Z.
I'm a fan of Nichols' garden writing. This is less good. It's clearly a book written by a man deeply in love with all things feline, but it tips over into the precious and the twee with depressing regularity. I can't recommend it.
After Candlemas
5/2011 Stet.2/2009 Yesterday was Candlemas, so of course I had to pull this down from the shelves. I think it's one of Arthur's weaker books- not goose-bump-inducing spooky, not sweeping over generations- but it's a solid meditation on belonging. That being said, I was struck again by the decidedly intolerant feel of this piece where the witches are unrelievedly evil. I adore Margery Gill's illustrations. Arthur's sure hand with setting, as well as her precise ear for dialog, redeem the book for me.
