#32 - Committed

Dear Elizabeth Gilbert,

Should you have ever come to one of my book club meetings, you will have discovered that I am not a fan of the epistolary format. It makes me a bit crazy unless it's Mary Shelley, actually. Yet, I feel the need to speak to you directly. Perhaps it's the personal nature of your book or perhaps it's my own selfish need to write a bit differently today -- regardless, here we go, an open letter to you.

An apology to start: I really and truly hated Eat, Pray, Love. I didn't give it a proper chance, however, and threw the book across the room halfway through India. The voice, the whining, the lack of appreciation for your life's gifts, it all annoyed me to no end. And then I watched the movie (why oh why does Hollywood insist upon making movies about writers where they never, ever write? Aside from an email or two -- to break up with a boyfriend none the less -- the Liz Gilbert in the film never picks up a book or a pencil. Annoying. Didn't that bother you?) and it affirmed my every action in terms of not finishing that book.

Cultural zeitgeist aside, I was weary to read Committed. In fact, I'm not sure why I did -- and it took some effort, an extra trip to the library, a hold, actual dedication to read your book while caring for an ever-increasingly needy infant. But am I ever glad that I did. I'm going to say it loud and clear: I'm so very sorry. I was Judgy McJudgerson when it came to EPL, I couldn't abide by the stories I was hearing of groups of women having themed parties and giving up their own lives for a year of self-journeyment. Maybe I was jealous. Maybe I wanted to be out there too -- travelling for year and then writing about it. I mean, it sounds delicious. Yet, something in Committed, maybe it was the word "skeptic" in the book's subtitle that caught me, or maybe it was the subject matter (being a happily married lady myself but ever-curious about the social and political implications of the institution itself), but I was hooked by the first chapter.

In fact, despite the odd pairing of the more anthropological aspects of the memoir with your own personal experiences, I was somewhat taken in by your obsessive/compulsive need to research just about everything you could possibly about marriage before wearily entering into your own second union. I know Curtis Sittenfeld pointed out that some of the connections between your own research and experiences in limbo while waiting for Felipe's immigration situation to be sorted stretched thin across your narrative, but I didn't mind. I enjoyed learning about the people that you met, the marriages you came across, the kind of social history that seems to only be discussed between women but not necessarily written down. Women need to talk more about their differences. Or, rather, women need to be better aware of the social and political implications of marriage around the world -- if only to appreciate and understand our own particular wants, needs, and biases.

But what I adored about your book, and what made me feel like a heel for being so judgmental about your first book, was the story about your grandmother. I, too, grew up with a strong natured, extremely intelligent, ridiculously amazing grandmother -- a war bride who bravely left her family behind in England to start a new life in Canada with a difficult man, who held her family together tragedy after tragedy, and whom I loved so much that I still think about her every single day. Your grandmother, with her sassy fur coat and her determination, her happiness in that tiny farmhouse with her small kids and everything that she gave up -- there's a richness to her story that I felt was missing from the bits of EPL that I read. Maybe I should have been more patient. Maybe more Maud-like stories would have shown up in the "Love" section of your book. Alas, I didn't wait around to find out.

I did, however, rip through to the end of this book and was pleased to see that the legalities of your situation worked itself out. That your skepticism still allowed you to take a brave step down the aisle and I could absolutely relate to the idea of wanting to be married but not necessarily needing a "wedding" (we called ours a "non-wedding" for a long time and got married at city hall; it took less than 15 minutes. In fact, the actual "wedding" means so little to either of us that we a) forget our anniversary just about every year and b) neither can remember exactly how long we've been married. Some people might think this strange -- but for me, and for us, it's about the relationship, not the piece of paper, about building a life together, not about the institution. In a way, why did we get married at all, one might wonder. But it was important to me to be married and I'm sure it's exactly as you explore throughout your book -- the way I was raised, the example of my parents' marriage, my grandparents and aunts and uncles.

Also, you have such a grand sense of humour throughout this book that perhaps I missed completely while being so annoyed with EPL? The tone of this book was whip-smart yet still with a questioning when it came to having to do something you were both so against from the beginning of your relationship. Lastly, I can absolutely relate to the obsessive/compulsive way you went about coming to terms with having to get hitched -- the research, the restlessness, the ideas of how to still be the "you" that you had discovered after your first failed marriage. And as one who obsesses and has their own compulsive tendencies when it comes to many aspects of my life -- it made me feel better to see someone else put it down in writing so eloquently.

So, in short, here's my apology for being so flippant and, well, cruel. I'm sorry.

Notes From A House Frau XVIII

At this very moment, my RRBB, after an exhausting few minutes of rolling over, fussing because he can't get himself back again (like a turtle on its back only in reverse; it's quite funny), has spent the last fifteen or so minutes looking at himself in the mirror on his activity mat. His concentration skills are hilarious. I'm not sure at all what he sees in the mirror but he's absolutely enamoured with whatever it is...

Here is our wee boy at five months (five months!) [And this picture is already three weeks old because he's 26 weeks tomorrow]. He's starting to have quite the little personality. My temper, my RRHB's response to anything traumatic (to go to sleep), and a lovely happy smile that belongs to him alone. Everyone keeps telling us that this is the best of the baby stage -- when they get to this age, five or six months, but I'm enjoying every baby stage these days, if only because it's all so new to me, and just so damn fun. That's not to say that I'm not exhausted, because I am, beyond words, and that I'm not frustrated by how the disease still refuses to calm down, because I am, but I'm trying to be calm and collected, find a quiet routine we can settle into, and make the most of the time that I have before heading up to the cottage for the summer (without plumbing!).

We gave the RRBB some sweet potatoes this afternoon. His very first non-cereal food. He decided about four bites in that enough was enough and he'd really just prefer to breast feed. It's a slow, patient process, this real-food business. Like anything, I am excited for him and want to record every little thing that happens -- but I can't be sure that when he's older, he'll actually want to know.

Over the last few days, I've seen many doctors: SFDD, kidney doctor, gastro doc, and had some blood work done today. I'm not going to lie -- I've been panicking inside a whole lot about the state of my poor kidneys. I have tried to be positive, tried to look at the bright side of it all (that my condition is essentially unchanged since two weeks before having the baby), and yet regardless of all the drugs, of all the "resting," of all the not working, my creatinine is still sky high as is my blood pressure. In all the years I've had the disease, I've never had high blood pressure -- and I hate taking medicine for things that my body should just do right -- and it scares me when I put the cuff on and get a reading like 146/98. We can't afford any more restorative yoga at the moment, and the money I thought would last us a year barely made it through six months. Such is life, right?

Last time, I promised I would stop complaining about being sick. Or tired. Sick and tired. A lot of residual shock and awe about how everything turned out led me to try and read other birth stories. Helen left a comment letting me know about a collection called Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories About Childbirth edited by Lisa Moore and Dede Crane (#31). And it's excellent (thank you Toronto Public Library for loaning me a copy). I whipped through it in just a couple of hours (over a few days) and came to the conclusion that not a single birth plan goes according to, well, plan. For something that women have been doing since women were, well, invented, childbirth is as complex and ever-changing as people are themselves. I needed to read this -- I needed to know that despite all the best laid plans (birthing tubs, doulas, midwifes, home births, drugs, no drugs) that a women might set out before her due date, chances are something dramatic will change in the minutes when she shouts "it's time" at her husband and/or significant other. It's a bright, fascinating collection -- not a single one of the writers fall back into cliche to describe their experiences, which I felt was a revelation considering most pop culture birth stories coming to us via television and the movies aren't remotely realistic. Like firefighters heading into a blaze without their masks, they're all panting and fake screaming, with babies popping out looking six months old already. But this collection is painstakingly honest, achingly real and just what I needed to read.

Anyway, I don't have much else to say. I've been trying to write this blog post for over a week now and the RRBB hasn't let me get much done. I've got two book reviews to get to and a to-do list that is as long as my arm. So, I will stop rambling, for now.

Notes From A House Frau XVI

RRBB has been hitting some very fun milestones lately. He had his first taste of solid food (if you can call it that) as the picture here depicts. He slept through the night: twice (even though in the few hours preceding the long sleep he was over-tired and ridiculously manic, but not upset). He visited a sugar bush and an antique mall (or, rather, his bored parents dragged him to said sugar bush and said antique mall). And he was babysat for the second time while my RRHB and I went to see the Elephant 6 collective at Lee's Palace on Friday night. Shockingly, he's still the happy, well adjusted, easy baby we've brought into this world.

Of course, I'm still not sleeping from the drugs. But the odd night isn't so bad here and there, I can handle it. It's funny, I get poetic about it in a way: the sun rises and it sets, the moon comes out, but without that deep hours-long pause -- time passing in an instant because you are, well, unconscious, everything blurs into one, breakfast feels like a late night snack, lunch disappears, and dinner is always rushed, trying to cram the day in before the bedtime routine starts. As always, I am at a loss for spoken words. Friends came over for dinner yesterday and I just couldn't finish my sentences, kept forgetting words, used the wrong words, filled up the space with malapropisms -- when does the 'baby brain' end? Perhaps when I get more consistent, consecutive rest, or perhaps when the RRBB turns 18 and heads off to university. Who knows. For now, I'm struggling with simple sentences while complex thoughts careen around my brain like snowflakes -- always melting before they necessarily land.

We went to the Bloor/Gladstone library last week, and it was glorious. It really is a beautiful building and I'd forgotten how much I enjoy libraries. I haven't truly visited one on a regular basis since being in grad school, and now that we're pinching every penny, I simply can't afford to buy books. I've been wondering a lot about other birth stories, wanting to compare experiences, wanting to maybe experience a little catharsis too in terms of my own trials and tribulations. So, one of the books I picked up was Rebecca Eckler's Knocked Up (#27). I didn't read anything other then What to Expect When You're Expecting while I was pregnant, and now that I'm no longer pregnant (although still with-pooch), I am curious to know about other mothers-to-be. I mean, not everyone ends up on the special pregnancy ward of Mt. Sinai hospital with their lungs bleeding before giving birth, right?

In short, I wanted to know what normal was like, in a way. Granted, there was a little too much: "is my ass fat????" throughout Knocked Up, and I don't know that I would have chosen a c-section had one not been chosen for me (I was oddly looking forward to the experience of giving birth). But I did laugh in various places, and while I know Eckler takes a lot of flack for her self-involved, me-first, examination of both pregnancy and parenthood, I actually enjoyed the lighthearted nature of the book. More chicklit than the nauseating "motherhood makes me a saint" stance of so much that I find online relating to this situation we're in (yes, motherhood), Knocked Up gave me a bit of a mental break in terms of contemplating all that happened to me, and that's all I'd ask of it. It was an easy-breezy read and I'm jealous of her ability to stay so completely focussed on not changing in the midst of such a huge change.

That's not something I've been able to do -- none of my clothes fit, in fact, I can't even seem to find three-quarters of my wardrobe, having packed things away to who knows where in the house. My body is so very different and I barely recognize myself in the mirror. The shock of the naked self in the shower is enough to give up food forever, and were it not for the prednisone encouraging my stomach to crave every baked good on the face of this earth, I just might. I need to get more exercise, and I was actually jealous when the Rebecca in Knocked Up went out on a girl date barely two weeks into her daughter's existence. There's a level of guilt that I feel the moment I am away from the baby -- that I am being a bad mother in a way by not constantly being in his company. I know that's crazy, and ridiculous, and that doesn't mean that I don't hand him off to his father for hours at a time, but it doesn't seem to be getting any easier leaving him. But to get back to my point, the physical changes -- shorter hair, chubbier me, bloating from the meds -- feel so much more permanent these days than the mental ones.

The mental part of being a mother seems easy these days. There's love. You give it out, a lot of it. There's patience, which sometimes gets tested. There's joy. There's boredom, and there's bliss -- but it all comes together in a pretty awesome package. So, I don't blame someone for obsessing about the size of their ass -- it's overwhelming to contemplate all of the physical and mental changes at the same time, something's got to give. I was remembering way back in the way back this week. An old boss I had at an evil corporation that I used to work for (which no longer exists) took us out for lunch within the first few months of her assuming a position she later proved she was utterly unqualified for. She had just finished mat leave for her second child and we were talking about babies. At some point, and I can't remember what preceded the moment, she crinkled up her face and said that she really didn't like babies, not even her own. Perhaps she likes her kids when they get out of the difficult infant stage, who knows, but all I've been thinking this week is how awesome babies are. I know I shouldn't be so judgmental but as if I didn't need another reason to post-actively hate the woman, now I even think she's kind of inhumane. I've already forgotten the witching hour, the exhaustion, the frustration of the first little while, and moved on to complete and utter adoration.

I know it won't always be like this -- and we're so lucky that we have an extremely easy going baby -- but, for right now, I'm wallowing in the fun of it all. Charging ahead with crazy vampire kisses and holding that baby high up in the air to hear him squeal. Suffering through the whining when he's in the car seat to enjoy a beautiful spring day where it neither rains nor snows -- where the sun actually feels warm. Staying up far past my bedtime to enjoy a moment of non-couch (baby STILL only sleeps on me for long periods of time) freedom to watch reruns of Law and Order. Listening to him giggle uncontrollably downstairs as my RRHB plays with him. Even sobbing uncontrollably because of the hormones and whatever else is coarsing through my system because of the meds. It's all awesome in a traditional sense of the word -- it inspires awe in me that this is my life now, that my life contains another's so completely at the moment, all things that I didn't know when I was just pregnant and hoping to live. I am thankful that I did. I wouldn't want to miss any of this.

Other library finds for this week: Blink, A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters, West Toronto Junction, Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems, as well as Knocked Up. I've been reading a poem a night before I go to bed, just dipping into them, and found this delicious line that somewhat sums up my last couple weeks: "O clamorous heart, lie still."

As if it could. As if.

#65 - Payback

Margaret Atwood is one of the few authors, Canadian authors, where I've read almost every single thing she's ever written. It's not even a love-hate relationship: I count a few of her books among my absolute favourites (Surfacing), and when I saw her at the IFOA a couple of years ago, it was one of the most entertaining readings I had ever been too. So, I bought Payback, years ago, I think, and it sat on the shelves. Atwood's Massey lecture looks at the philosophical and literary implications of debt -- what it means from a balanced perspective. This isn't a book about the recession or about the failure of our monetary system but it's about what it means to be in debt from a moral perspective.

I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed reading Payback. I actually learned a great deal about the idea of balance. Atwood takes a very thorough look at what defined debt throughout the ages -- starting with early philosophical positions (there's lots of talk of mythology) and ending with a modern-day take on Dickens' character Scrooge (with all of the implications of how we are living today), Atwood's point is simple: we can't keep taking so much without giving something back... and if we don't give it back, the universe will just take it.

Anyway, I don't have much more to say about it -- this is probably my shortest review ever. Balance is good. Taking advantage of our resources isn't. Money is so much more than dollars and cents, and there's a surprising amount of debt in literature. If I ever go back to grad school, what a fascinating thesis that would make.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf, naturally.

#41 - No Way Down

Perhaps I should follow up my furious Franzen rant with another post about the state of publishing or some other issue floating around (and, believe me, if I was still remotely anonymous, I would). But, instead, I'm going to go back to basics: a book review. This week I took a break from guilty pleasure reading and read, well, more guilty pleasure stuff. Most people imagine armchair travel to be lovely, pretty memoirs like Eat, Pray, Yawn or the like. Instead, what I love is a truly good horror story incurred by a natural disaster happening at the top of a mountain. Yes, I love climbing disasters -- I don't know what it is about it, maybe the time I spent in Banff during my formative years scrambling up mountains, maybe it's the sheer Titanic-ness of it all -- the knowledge that the weather's about to turn, something's about to crack, someone's about to fall, and no one will ever be the same again.

In 2008, eleven climbers died on K2, the world's second-highest mountain. NY Times reporter Graham Bowley first saw the story flash across his screen as an assignment (I think) for the paper. He wrote so convincingly about it that it appeared on the front page and then he went on to realize that the story was so much larger than the paper could accommodate. The resulting effort, his book No Way Down, couples a little bit of the climbing history of K2 (it's deathly grip!) alongside a detailed, poignant and utterly captivating look at what went wrong.

The weather was seemingly perfect on the assent. A record number of climbers advanced to the summit despite some epic problems getting up through a bottleneck of people who were having trouble at one particular point on the mountain. But as the aptly titled book suggests, the descent was problematic for many. Between glaciers breaking, avalanches, snapped ropes and leaving the summit simply too late, many of the climbers were trapped at high altitudes, which had disastrous consequences -- deaths, frostbitten limbs, climbers getting lost coming down, bad weather, accidents -- all contributed to the high toll the mountain took on that day.

It's hard to explain what I find so fascinating about these kinds of stories. I'm hugely attracted to the idea of climbing to the top of a mountain even if health- and lifestyle-wise I'd never be able to do it. I'm also consistently amazed at the propensity for things to go wrong and that, still, hundreds of athletes still push themselves to the limits and then put their lives at risk in a very classic human versus nature scenario. Bowley's careful to explain, both in his preface and his epilogue, how much research went into constructing the narrative. In his words, he tells the story as well as he could, but there's always room for conjecture. It's a sad, captivating story and even though it's a terrible tragedy, it makes for one hell of a good read.

No Way Down coverage on NPR
Bowley's original NY Times piece

Summer Reading: A Catch Up Edition

I have a huge list of books to get caught up on in terms of keeping track of my reading here in the blog. As I doubt I'll find the time to create individual posts for every book I've read since the beginning of July, I'm going to do one big post here, and then try very hard for the rest of the summer to update here more than once a month.

#24 - Shadow Tag
This was the very first book I read for my new book club. I'd read Louise Erdrich back in university and remembered enjoying Love Medicine very much. Shadow Tag, with its semi-autobiographic overtones and extremely dark subject matter, was an unsettling novel. It's not even that you can't trust the protagonist, or that she's an unreliable narrator; it's more that both Irene and her husband Gil are truly, completely unlikeable. They lie to one another, feed off each other's insecurities, have a terrible, damaging relationship, and ultimately aren't the best parents to their three children. The writing is terrific but I consistently go back and forth on the age-old debate in my head -- can I really enjoy a book when I hate the characters? We had an amazing discussion about the novel, about their motivation to stay together, about the destructive nature of art in the book, and about both of their selfish, selfish behavior. It's an intense novel, be prepared for that should you decide to delve in.

#25 - Freedom
I'm not sure how much to say about Franzen's latest novel because I read a work galley (well, I begged to borrow a work galley and it's my ONLY copy) and the book isn't being published for another few weeks. However, I will say this -- it's a terrifically engaging chunk of a book that follows the lives of the Berglund family. Like The Corrections, Franzen writes so convincingly about American life that it's impossible not to get emotionally involved in the lives of these characters. It's an excellent novel.

#26 - I'd Know You Anywhere
The same goes for the new Laura Lippman. She's one of my favourite commercial fiction writers -- her stories are always page-turners and her characters always have issues to overcome that develop into rich, realistic plot lines -- you never feel like she sacrifices anything for the story, it's relentless. Her latest novel is no exception. Eliza Benedict has worked hard to create a very particular kind of life for herself -- until the man who abducted her when she was a teenager tracks her down and asks something of her she isn't necessarily prepared to give. The novel reminded me in a way of Barbara Gowdy's Helpless in the way it gives a bird's eye view of not only the victim, but the criminal as well. It's a captivating novel -- perfect for summer reading.

#27 - We Have Always Lived In The Castle
Oh my goodness I adored Shirley Jackson's macabre, Gothic novel. This was another book club book and what an awesome choice it was. Merricat (Mary Katherine) Blackwood and her sister Constance live in a run-down old manor house with their Uncle Julian. Years ago her entire family was killed by a fatal dose of arsenic-laced strawberries during dinner. Constance, the elder sister, was accused of the crime, and then tried, but found innocent. However, the townspeople have never quite forgiven her, and so Merricat (an 18 year-old who acts far more like a 12 year-old) and Constance have somewhat shut themselves up against the world. That is, until their cousin Charles arrives and throws their world in chaos. It's a delicious, deceptively simple novel, and we all raved about it at book club. I comped it to the best of Flannery O'Connor with even more edge, if that's possible.

#28 - Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard
Richard B. Wright remains one of those Canadian authors, like Jane Urquhart or Michael Ondaatje, that I'll read anything they write. If they wrote a grocery list, I'd probably read and enjoy it. His latest novel, Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard, feels like a departure, and that's not a bad thing. While I loved October, I felt like it had a definite place in the Canadian canon -- it was almost as if he was actively trying to write back to Hugh MacLennan. With this new novel, I feel like he's moved into decidedly new territory. It's a hybrid kind of novel -- one part historical fiction (the book's protagonist is the bastard daughter of Wm Shakespeare), one part typical literary fiction, and one part juicy page turner. Aerlene Ward has lived her entire life with a secret: William Shakespeare was her father. As she gets on in age, she feels the need to tell her story and enlists the help of Charlotte, the youngest daughter in the manor house where she's been the housekeeper for all of her adult life. It's a rich tale -- both as its told and as it was lived -- and Wright has a keen ear for Elizabethan London. The biggest issue that I have with so much historical fiction is the romance-novel-ness of them all. This book isn't that, while I can see how it would appeal to the biggest fans of Philippa Gregory, it's so much richer in how the historical details are integrated into the fabric of the story. These are strong, interesting women, and there's an apt feminist critique to be explored upon a more educational reading of the novel. Anyway, I've got high hopes for this book for the fall -- I really want many, many people to love it as much as I did. We're doing a Savvy Reader read-along post for it that should be live in the next couple weeks.

#29 - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Like the rest of the universe, I finally went back and read the first of Steig Larsson's ridiculously addictive series. I'm glad I did, if only to fully understand how all three books fit together, and to see how Lisbeth and Blomkvist actually meet for the first time. We watched the film the other night, and I found it almost better than the book -- while definitely not as detailed, it was far more streamlined, which I appreciated. As much as I find these great books, great social experiments in how a book can "tip," sometimes the writing is clunky, the dialogue terrible, and there's just too much detail. And I enjoyed seeing the Swedish landscape if only to give myself a visual picture to accompany the reading experience in my head. I read this book on my iPad with the Kobo application and found that there were some layout issues with the text that made transitions a little awkward but overall I think it's the perfect way of reading commercial fiction. It's not a book that I'm dying to keep -- it's an impulse, something I want to read right now and steam through, and knowing I don't have to pawn off a physical copy on a friend was a relief.

#30 - The Help
Now, this novel truly surprised me. From the cover, it screams "Oprah" and "Nicholas Sparks," but because it's my job to know what kinds of books sell like stink, I figured it would be another good one to try on my iPad. This time, I used the Kindle application, and I found it just that teeny bit superior to the Kobo (mainly in the fact that it gives an accurate idea of where you are in a book), but there's really little difference between the two as a reading application for the basic stuff that I need (good bookmarks, easy navigation, etc). Annywaaay, The Help. I bawled like a baby by the end of it, found myself reading until 4 AM one night at the cottage when I couldn't sleep and realizing it's just a really good novel. Set in Jackson, Mississippi smack-dab in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, The Help entwines the stories of the young white women who form the "society" of the area with the black women who they consider their "help." From debate over why separate bathrooms IN ONE HOUSE for the women who feed, clothe, bathe, and raise their children to Miss Skeeter's desperate 'Peggy in Mad Men-esque' quest to get out of her Southern life entirely, the novel keeps you emotionally invested from beginning to end. Stockett writes convincingly from both perspectives and the payoff at the end was impeccable.

#31 - Locavore
When the iBookstore launched at the beginning of July, I bought a few of our books so I could make sure they worked. Sarah Elton's look at the local food movement from a Canadian perspective had been on my TBR pile forever. I did a lot of work with her when the book first came out and she's just such a lovely author (but that's an aside). She has a very easy-going writing style and her way into the topic (from a pink sugar cookie made in China in her daughter's loot bag) was both personal and intriguing. There were so many things that I didn't know and so many interesting, new perspectives about the local food issues that Elton puts forth that I learned a lot. How wrong was my assumption that once I'd read Pollan and Kingsolver that there was nothing left to know about the locavore movement. This is a book for anyone remotely interested in the issues surrounding the food we eat -- and even if you aren't, it's a great primer to get you started. But my favourite part of Elton's perspective isn't a holier than thou approach, it's more "do the best you can; it all helps in the end." And I feel like this suits my life -- we buy local where possible, support farmer's markets, grow our own veggies, and balance out the more exotic aspects of your eating with better choices. I LOVED this book.

#32 - The Lovers
I have so much respect and admiration for Vendela Vida. Not just because she leads an obviously envious life and is bloody gorgeous, but because she's an exquisite writer whose craft I covet every time I read a sentence of hers. Yet, this novel disappointed me. It lacked the emotional resonance that reverberated so nicely through Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, and the tragic event posited by the jacket copy to "rock" the protagonist, Yvonne, to her core, felt contrived and even stereotypical when looked at in context. It felt very Hollywood, this novel, and maybe I was just expecting too much from Vida because I pushed her earlier book on every single person I know. So, in short, Yvonne, a middle-aged widow, visits Turkey, the site of her honeymoon, to try and figure out how to move on with her life. She's had a good life, but one with issues, and she starts to unravel the more time she spends trying to 'find' herself in relation to who she once was: mother, teacher, wife. The setting, at once meant to invoke her past and perhaps spurn Yvonne into a sense of self-discovery, becomes exotic and strange to her. And then, things start to go very awry when she befriends a young Turkish boy visiting his grandmother. There could have been such a rich palette to explore so much in the book but Vida doesn't drift beyond the superficial in a way. You never truly feel like you know Yvonne, and maybe that's on purpose, but the whole novel felt incomplete to me, especially the ending.

#33 - Secrets of Eden
And, again, here's another of my favourite novelists with new books that fell short of my expectations. I adore Chris Bohjalian's books -- even his critical misfires work for me, unlike many, many reviewers, I really liked the trippy nature of The Double Bind and didn't even mind his last book, Skeletons at the Feast despite its truly awful cover. But Secrets of Eden, well, it failed to impress either with the moral premise underneath the story or by its storytelling. Like in Vida's novel, the "twist" at the end felt very much like an M. Night Shyamalan film -- far, far too apparent from too early on and really quite stereotypical for my tastes. The whole book felt like a Law and Order episode but without any convincing or interesting characters. I find the complex nature of religious characters in novels interesting -- but I'll turn to Marilynne Robinson when I want to explore it in more depth -- Bohjalian used it to very obviously pit "good" against apparent "evil" and in this case it didn't work. Oh, the plot, right: a reverend loses a member of his flock, a woman who had been abused by her husband, and becomes accused of the murder when she and said partner are found dead the morning after her baptism. Enter a very famous writer who has made plenty of money writing about angels. They become involved, which, of course, casts even more suspicion on the poor Reverend Stephen Drew. Yawn. Yes, I know, I'm being sarcastic, but the book was truly tedious in places. Anyway, nothing will stop me from reading Bohjalian, because I adore his fiction, but this just wasn't the book for me.

#34 - The Big Short
Wow, was this a dynamo of a nonfiction book. Michael Lewis examines the financial crisis in such a detailed and fascinating way that it's impossible NOT to think of the yahoos on Wall Street as crooks by the end of it. While the book has a LOT of technical jargon as it relates to the financial markets, it's not remotely dry. In fact, it's just the opposite -- it's utterly riveting and totally fascinating. He breaks down the few characters who managed to short the crisis even before it began, including a hedge fund owner whose driving characteristic is his Asperger's, along with a few "outsider" funds who actually took the time to investigate the market and pull it apart at the seams -- primarily to find the ways of making huge amounts of money from what they could see coming: a total collapse of the system. It's incredible that the US government propped up the big investment houses, essentially rewarded them for their stupidity, and then they turned around and rewarded themselves with huge bonuses, and, well, got to all keep their jobs. Billions upon billions of dollars with hidden paper trails and bad trades are lost, unknown or hidden from the general public, just so we can keep the illusion that the big investment banks actually had any idea of what was happening. I'd highly recommend this to anyone remotely interested in why the US is such a mess these days -- it's just utterly captivating and you will shake your head in amazement that not a single person stopped the madness before it all collapsed. Anyway, it's a great, great read.

Whew. That's about it -- I'm sure there are a couple of books that I've probably forgotten but that's about the extent of my summer reading so far. I'm so behind in my reading in general this year that it's nice to just have a big stack of books out of the way before the insanity of the fall creeps up on us.

#9 - The Value of Happiness

The subtitle of Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing questions 'why everything costs so much more than we think.' It's an intelligent, dense book that explores our modern society, its economic context, and the very real implications of our lifestyles. Patel sustains his main thesis, that the true value of goods and services are completely at odds with their prices as set out by the market, while people never give it a second thought. Patel wrote an amazing piece of added-value content for our Book Guide here that explains, in short, the kinds of material things we pay heavily for but that are relatively cheap.

I'm not going to lie, this isn't an easy book to read -- Patel looks at everything under a microscope, he digs deep into economic theory and pushes the reader to think hard about what he's saying. The very idea that, as a society, we are blind to the terrible impact our consumerist ways are having on the world around us despite seeing it, literally, every day, is compelling. In ways, it's easy for me to support Patel's work. I believe in his politics, sit slightly to the left, and have already been convinced that we need to change as a society before we ruin everything. Like Patel, I believe the first step to change is concerted dialogue about the issues, exactly the kind of thinking that is represented here.

However, what really struck me about the book concern post-colonialism. It's not surprising to me that issues with modern economics are so essentially tied up in old colonial models. We don't think about it everyday. We don't turn on our work blackberries and think, "hey, I'm exploiting the Congolese today." Has anyone else out there read King Leopold's Ghost? Hasn't the Congo been through enough? But I can't stop it -- I don't have a personal cellphone but I do have my BB and I use it all the time, every waking moment, and I don't think twice about what went into building it or sourcing it or the power that it takes to use it. I send money every month to David Suzuki and the WWF to try and balance out my consumption. Somehow, I feel ashamed that I'm not doing enough.

You can't be faint of heart when you read this book. You can't expect to be unchanged. And you can't imagine you'll keep living your life as you had been living it. Once you know the true value of what we consume, the cost to human life, the cost to the planet, you'll think hard and then you'll think twice.

READING CHALLENGES: The Better You Read The Better You Get. Oddly, I'm, um, not actually finishing the books from my shelves. However, I do feel like reading more nonfiction has reminded me that it's important to challenge yourself with smarty-smart material every once in a while. School's good.

Read an excerpt of The Value of Nothing here.

#5 - In Defense of Food

Carrying forth with my "I should read more nonfiction. I'll do it in January" mentality, I finished Michael Pollan's excellent In Defense of Food this week. I know Foer's critical of Pollan's approach in Eating Animals, but I still find him to be the most logical, engaging food/environmental writer (and I don't read widely, sorry!) that I've read in years.

The book has a simple edict: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Throughout its 200-odd pages, Pollan explains what he means by these simple statements. He defines what "food" is (it should be recognized by your ancestors, live in the outer edges of a grocery store, and grown) for people who may have been confused (or living under a rock), sets out simple ways to find it, and then encourages them to eat it (at a table, preferably).

The idea of becoming a selective omnivore never would have entered my mind five years ago. When our neighbour planted tomatoes and some herbs in our backyard I was so grossed out at the thought of eating something pulled right from the dirt that I poo-pooed the vegetables before even picking them. And then I tasted them. Now I can't eat a pale, lifeless grocery store cucumber without longingly thinking about the ones that I've grown.

Your muscles have memory, and so do your taste buds, and Pollan's so correct when he says that finding connection to your food by something as simple and inexpensive as a vegetable garden remains a resoundingly rewarding activity. My beans taste nothing like the waxy, protected grocery store bags of veggies I had to buy for Christmas. It might be a silly thing to say, but my crazy, intrusively kind neighbour changed my outlook on food completely. Then Pollan came along and gave me cause to shout.

While the book might linger just a little bit too long on the science and evolution bits, the idea that we're getting it so fundamentally wrong on such a massive scale still catches my breath in my throat. Maybe we can change the world one seed at a time. Maybe we can't. But I won't stop digging in the dirt and doing what I can regardless.

#4 - The Happiness Project

Many, many years ago, after what felt like a lifetime of taking prednisone for the disease and suffering through the awful "induced psychosis" and resulting debilitating depression side effects, I began to explore the idea of happiness. My doctor recommended reading Mark Kingwell's In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac, which I did, until I got about halfway through. It just wasn't practical. I didn't need an empirical exploration of what "happiness" was -- I needed some magic lessons to lift the pressures of my troubled life and float me away on a magical river of self-understanding, satisfaction and, yes, intense happiness.

Like so many aspects of my (naive?) twenties, you have to grow up a little and realize that happiness isn't something that magically appears. It takes hard work, it's incremental, and it's perhaps not even the point. Gretchen Rubin's year-long experiment, her aptly titled The Happiness Project, comes to some of the same conclusions. Rubin doesn't set out to radically renovate her life.

Instead, she took incremental steps to increase her happiness on a daily basis. She tried everything, from smiling yoga to starting a YA book club, and created a theme for each month in the year to centre and ground her expectations. Not everything worked. Which, I imagine, was to be expected, but I'm going to summarize, perhaps incorrectly, that the point of Rubin's book wasn't to just find new things in life that equated a happy pill -- it was to try and experience organic growth around the goal of leading a happier life.

Yet, like Kingwell's book, I found Rubin's to be also somewhat unsatisfying. She's got a sweet, chatty tone to her writing, did massive amounts of research, and put herself out there (warts and all as they say) in an intensely personal way. Yet, the book, on the whole, felt a little superficial. And perhaps that's just me as a reader; I did want some broader, philosophical implications from studying happiness for a year. But, in Rubin's defense, that's not at all what she set out to do. There's a lot of hows in Rubin's book, and not a lot of whys. She's a goal-orientated person (and loves her gold stars) and therefore her quest for happiness consists of plenty of goal-orientated activities.

When it comes right down to it, maybe I'm looking for a balance between both books in my own search for understanding -- a book that takes happiness outside of the person, looks at it from a different perspective, what does it mean and why it's important, and then provides some guidance about how to get there. There's an undercurrent to The Happiness Project that equates, in my mind anyway, that the end result is somehow deserved -- but I know I'm reading my own thoughts into her project. The idea that by being happier herself Rubin can then infect others with these lightened feelings seems simple enough. But, like I said before, the book feels a bit too much like a happiness "to do" list to me. Maybe I wanted Rubin to dig a little deeper (why did she have so much clutter to begin with, what's the emotional resonance behind any of the projects she embarked upon over the year) -- the book felt rushed to me: did this, check, tried that, check, improved this, check, now on to the next thing.

However, I'm not even going to remotely suggest that it's not a good idea to spend a year trying to a) improve yourself, b) improve the lives of your family or c) try to make it through life with a lighter, happier load. For this, I tip my hat to Gretchen and her year-long quest to be herself, sing in the mornings, and do what she loves. And also, I say a hearty hallelujah to the author for setting out from the beginning the differences between suffering from a depression (Rubin's not at all depressed) and that all encompassing sadness, and the meaningful way she wants to set out to improve her life on a daily basis. Not once does she mix up "sadness" and call it "depression." The slippage of the word depression into the lexicon whereby it becomes interchangeable to 'sadness' enrages me.

Annywaaay, Rubin's clear, honest and forthright; she's intelligent, a keen reader, and doing good in the world by helping the many readers of her successful blog -- those are also things wherein I cannot find fault. But maybe for her next year, she might explore a little self-help Beth Lisick-style, because Helping Me Help Myself still remains my favourite of the happiness-seeking memoir genre.

#2 - Eating Animals

In preparation for our Vegan Smackdown 2010 (here's our very first video podcast), I read Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals this past weekend. I've been a "selective omnivore" and a "passive vegetarian" for the majority of my life. Despite turning vegetarian when I was about twelve (in a shocking moment of tween tempestuous in response to my mother serving me a piece of almost-rare roast beef), I've always eaten fish (albeit with no regularity), and started eating chicken (from Rowe Farms or the Healthy Butcher) about a year ago.

At first, it was about the animals -- we grew up listening to "Meat is Murder" and were very into Morrisey. Then, when I was diagnosed with the disease and learned that too much protein was terribly hard on your kidneys, that sort of clenched it for me. The environmental concerns came last -- for, like Safran Foer, I still had idyllic images of farmers in mind when I thought of chickens, cows and pigs. Fast Food Nation opened my eyes a little. The Omnivore's Dilemma was also good. But Safran Foer's book has had me thinking and mulling over my eating choices for days.

Sure, he's making a point. Sure, he wants people to become vegetarians, that much is obvious. But even though I realize I'm being pursuaded by an incredibly convincing narrative, there are truths about this book that are unavoidable. We, as a society, do not think, properly debate with ourselves, about where things come from. We consume. We package. We shop. We eat. We sleep. We get up and do it all over again. And as so much of our lives has been managed for us by giant companies whose only responsibility seems to be to their shareholders, it seems impossible to try to step outside and make a difference.

Factory farming, as its described in the book, is abhorrent. The socio-economic, environmental and philosophical implications of being so separate from that which sustains us can't but have an irrevocable impact on human society. That's not to mention the impossible suffering that the animals who give their lives to ensure we get up, walk around, go to work, entertain ourselves and keep us healthy endure. Yes, I like to think I buy responsible meat (from a local butcher who sources from local farms when at the cottage; from The Heathy Butcher or Rowe's in the city), I still can't get my head around the fact that industry is ruining the sheer sustainability of our lives, of my nephew's life.

The fact that we are destroying the ocean at record-breaking pace to keep shrimp on the table and frozen in aisles of the grocery store makes me furious. The fact that hundreds of thousands of species are decimated by fishing techniques makes me want to row entire populations out to the middle of the ocean so they can see what soon won't be there. Imagine not seeing the whales in Tofino? Imagine sea horses being a thing of encyclopedias? I can't. I don't want to. Words matter. Calling senseless killing "by-product" doesn't erase the fact that for every piece of fish on the table, hundreds needlessly litter the oceans because of impatient and irresponsible companies looking to make a profit. Is there sustainable fish to eat? I think I'm going to turn to Taras Grescoe's Bottomfeeder for the answer. But, until then, I will not eat another piece of fish.

After our two-week Vegan Smackdown comes to a close, I'll probably still continue to selectively eat what little chicken I do eat -- but I'll never buy it in a grocery store. I'll never not take the time to make a separate trip to Rowe's or the Healthy Butcher. And, it's not like I do this anyway, but I certainly won't be eating any chicken I absolutely don't know the providence of.

I thought I was doing well by gardening. After all, growing my own food has given me a solid understanding of how much hard work goes in to keeping a garden that will actually feed me and my husband for most of the summer. It's not easy. It's worth celebrating every time a pull fresh green beans and steam them up for dinner. But knowing that the butter my RRHB smothers them with was made using factory farmed milk would turn their taste sour in my mouth. How can I avoid butter for the rest of my life? Is buying organic butter enough? Is it enough to do that small thing?

I don't have any answers to the numerous questions the book brought to the forefront. It a persuasive, thoughtful, artful (if repetative in places) work that had me hunkered down when I should have been cleaning the house in preparation for my brother's birthday. Here's the thing -- I'm an easy one to convince. I was already headed in the right direction. Here's hoping that Jonathan Safran Foer finds an audience for his book outside of people like me, and his book can make a difference.

READING CHALLENGES: I'm continuing all of my 2009 challenges because I didn't finish a single one. Here's a book for The Better You Read, The Better You Get theme I set up last year.

#60 - Long Past Stopping

When the US presented this book at conference a world and a half ago, I was totally taken with the cover. The idea that the son of Jack Canfield, the author of those (ridiculous?) Chicken Soup for the Soul books, became a heroin addict and lived to tell the tale was intriguing. I did two things I never do: 1) judged a book by its cover and 2) picked up the book solely based on the fact that its blurb intrigued me. And trust me when I say I've got some issues with a book blurb. So much so that I rarely read them and almost never pick up the book because of them.

Annnywaaay. Oran Canfield's roughly my age but we've had two very different lives. First of all, he grew up with a fiercely intelligent mother (that's not so different from me) who pretty much kept him outside of your typical societal norms. He was raised by libertarians, went to an anarchist boarding school, joined the circus for a while (and competed as a juggler), and was often left with individuals who had questionable parenting skills yet nonetheless took part in forming him as he grew older. Secondly, his father left the family when he was very young and before his brother, Kyle, was born. Lastly, there's that whole heroin addict situation. Oh, and then there's the whole his dad became a multi-millionaire thingy too.

His memoir, Long Past Stopping, not unlike Dry by Augusten Burroughs, presents addiction in a harrowing yet utterly matter-of-fact way which makes it impossible not to get pulled into his story. There's irony in how addictive these kinds of memoirs are -- how easy it is to just keep reading as the hero (or heroine) moves from fix to fix. Gets themselves deeper and deeper into the black hole when they'd much rather be with that great girl that's finally showing them the time of day. Also, it might just be me, but it's so much easier to read addiction stories than it is to watch them (like say Intervention). There's a level of separateness once you know the author's gone through it and come out the other side. Also, Canfield's a survivor. He doesn't set out to get hooked on heroin. In fact, his introduction to the drug seems innocent rather than ominous, and the practical nature of how he starts shooting (he's simply wasting too much of the drug by smoking it) seems almost blase when you read it.

The tone of this book is consistently infused with his infectious, intelligent sense of humour. And while the writing might not be Nobel-prize worthy (I have to admit I felt the dialogue was particularly weak), it's impossible not to be interested in this book from start to finish. I'm willing to forgive things that I don't normally (like weak dialogue) when it comes to this book (because, let's face it, I'm a snob) primarily because the story itself, his life, is just so damn fascinating. And I'm willing to bet anyone else who picks up this book will end up with a Totally Inappropriate Crush on its author too. Just try it and see if you can put it down after browsing a few chapters. The structure of the book is smart too -- it vacillates between his childhood and his adulthood in a way that breaks up the more dramatic, traumatic moments, and it's certainly a relief when he finally finds his way off the junk.

Never say I don't use my power for good. Here's a quirky and fun road trip guest blog post he wrote for us over on The Savvy Reader. And to get a sense of his sense of humour, watch this video.

#56 - #57 Crush It & The Tipping Point

There's nothing new that I can possibly blog about Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. It's a book that's back in the Amazon.ca top 100 today, I'm guessing because of all the Nook news, and it's simply one of those titles that you imagine everyone to have already reviewed, if not read. So when I was browsing around the Vancouver Public Library sale last Thursday trying to ward off the persistent stomach butterflies (there because of the whole public speaking element to happen the next day; bleech), I was pleased to find a battered copy of The Tipping Point from the Kitsilano Branch for a whopping $0.55.

The central thesis of Gladwell's book, that little "things" can lead to sweeping change, seemed particularly relevant reading for the days leading up to and passing by Book Camp. The iconic work looks at all of the social conditions that surround a product, event or action "tipping" into an epidemic. From smoking to book sales, the book comes to some pretty cool conclusions about the power of word of mouth. Words that we toss around all the time, like connectors and mavens, this theory of something "tipping" has become part of the everyday business lexicon. And it's easy to see why.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Crush It! isn't as intellectual nor as everlasting as The Tipping Point, but it's a really good example of putting Malcolm Gladwell's theories into action. Vaynerchuk grew his business exponentially by investing in his own personal brand, used the "free" tools of the internet to grow it, and then tipped over into the uber-successful range by simply working hard and "crushing it." It's a veritable how-to manual for his kind of success and a good handbook for anyone somewhat curious about social media.

I like how both books focus on finding/offering solutions instead of lamenting the demise of the "old" ways of doing business. Vaynerchuk's work isn't necessarily innovative; it's stuff people have been doing on the internet for as long as the web's been around. But what he managed to achieve goes above and beyond how everyday people use the tools, which is impressive. Also, he's driven to succeed in ways that, yes I'm going to say it, regular people may not be -- he's a born Salesman, a picture perfect Connector, and proof positive that word of mouth absolutely works to drive community, which in turn drives sales, which in turn allowed his endeavours to tip into an epidemic.

The stickiness of Gladwell's book versus Vaynerchuk's can't really be compared. I dogeared piles of pages of the former and returned my copy to work the morning after I read the latter. One's a book that would benefit from repeated reads and the other I'd recommend as a handbook to anyone looking to build their brand through social media. All the way through The Tipping Point, I tried to define myself in terms of the different personalities Gladwell presented. All the way through Crush It!, I wondered how much coffee Vaynerchuk must drink in a day to get himself out there to the extent that he does -- two very different intellectual exercises on my part.

Regardless, there were lessons from both books that I'd apply to my everyday and my work life.

1. That you need to pull the best, most relevant ideas from everything you read, fiction to non, and everything in between, and apply this learning to your life. Maybe it's just in the sense that you enjoyed something and want to pass it on, but that your passion, about anything, can be contagious. And that's not a bad thing.

2. Pay close attention to what goes on around you. You might not think you have anything in common with how "cool" becomes relevant, but within that, you'll discover what's authentic and what's rubbish -- especially in areas of your own expertise.

3. Don't be afraid of people. Or situations. Or of doing things that might make you uncomfortable (read: running a seminar in front a large group of people). Ahem. YES, I realize how ironic this is coming from shy, scaredy-cat me.

4. Read more nonfiction.

5. Getting people excited about reading isn't just about selling books. For me, it's about the survival of our culture, whether it's pop or otherwise, it's a record of who we are as a people at the time. It's necessary. It's important. It's valuable and it's a part of our survival. Art matters. Fighting about it won't get us to our goals any quicker.

The Money Books (#s 46, 47)

For those of you who know the real me, the non-virtual Deanna, you know that I'm a worrier. I fret a lot. I spend a lot of sleepless nights pondering things as random as why I'm so obsessed with True Blood this season and how on earth I'm ever going to finish the book I've been writing the last few years. A recurring theme in my sleepless nights is listmaking. I find that if I get up and write down a list of all the things I can actually do to assuage whatever is bothering me at that moment, I can actually get some sleep. One of the main things I consistently write down has to do with money: paying bills, managing accounts, moving things around, and debt.

Debt and I have quite a history together. For years I thought of debt as free money. I thought of credit cards as a means of filling in the gaps. Maybe it's because I wasn't really taught proper money management as a kid (and that's not the fault of my parents; it just wasn't something we discussed and then there was a lot of tragedy that sort of took over...). I was in my early 20s when I truly started to understand how money works. And with that understanding came a glimpse of a day when I wouldn't have to worry about it all the time. I learned that it's not just important to be in control of your financial situation but it's also necessary to understand the true cost of things.

So, over the years I've read a number of money-related books: Suze Orman, David Bach, and many, many more. These books all pretty much say the same thing: buy a house, keep up with extra mortgage payments, invest wisely, blah de freaking blah. It's the same advice packaged in fancier ways: Women and money. Going green and your money. Getting married and your money. Yawn.

I didn't need any more "whys." What I needed were "hows." Enter Kerry K. Taylor's excellent 397 Ways to Save Money. When I read this book in manuscript form before we published it, I honestly sat at my desk, skipped lunch, and then wrote an exuberant note to her editor about how smart and savvy I thought it was. It's a little bit of the "whys" but it's mainly pages upon pages of good tips about how to save money. How and when to reduce, reuse and recycle. How to shop smarter. How to make your resources stretch further and longer so that you aren't looking down the barrel of double and triple-digit credit card debt month after month.

Then I learned we were publishing a book called Debt-Free Forever by Gail Vaz-Oxlade. I'd never heard of her nor had I watched 'Til Debt Do Us Part (both situations I have now rectified). I read it, too, in manuscript form and am only going to say that it's changed my outlook entirely on budgeting (always thought it was more trouble than it's worth) and living within your means (what's the difference if all the bills get paid anyway).

I've also been doing a lot of thinking about money in general and what it means to my life. Truly, it's a means to an end; it's a way for us to finish the house but, it, inherently, doesn't have any value. What do I mean? Well, it's not worth fighting over. It's not worth worrying over, and it's certainly not worth killing yourself (or others) for. Over the course of my reading, I'm going to share some of the "revolutions" I'm trying to make over the next little while. Again, if I share the list, I'm going to stick to it, right?

1. Use what I buy. Like so many people who work above a Shopper's Drug Mart and down the street from Sephora and Holt Renfrew, I've got cupboards full of make up, creams, gift baskets, foot massagers, shampoos, etc. I keep buying more and more -- it's on sale, I'm there, I like the smell, and I used them, but our shower's all clogged up with half-empty plastic (natch) bottles. I've vowed to use up every single last bit of something before buying something new. That includes all the samples I've been saving for goodness knows what and the umpteen travel kits I've bought from Dermologica over the years. Good for the environment and good for the wallet. Although if you see me wandering around with fuzzy, dried out hair and clumpy mascara, you know why.

2. Use up my gift certificates. I don't know why I hoard these things but I do. I think that it's not a good idea to spend them so I've got them tucked away into all corners of things. Redeem all my points for more certificates and use up those too? The best thing I've done? Cash in HBC rewards points for MAC makeup and Levi's jeans. Oh, and a new coffee maker for the cottage. All FREE. Well, sort of free because we have so many points from renovation costs that we've cashed in on HBC gift certificates. Um, also, did you know you can use your AirMiles points for a TTC pass? Yeah, that's what I'm doing in October...

3. Wear what I buy. See #1 above. This one's harder because I've lost a pile of weight due to the almost-dying appendicitis nightmare and none of my clothes fit. Like, none of them. It's a good thing I own some belts.

4. Use cash. I've put my RRHB and I on a budget that we're going to try to stick to over the next few months while we try to make a pile of payments on the renovation debt. It's not easy. And it's not something we've EVER done before.

5. Engage in some serious staycation activities. We did some of this at the cottage the other weekend when we went to Petroglyphs Provincial Park. Even though gas isn't cheap, I put a little extra in our transportation budget so we can take advantage of fun things we can do within driving distance. Also, we're lucky because we have a cottage. That doesn't mean we won't take a vacation, it just means that we'll be finding some new and interesting things to do that don't involve spending $100.00 at the movies. This will be hard. I love to go to the movies.

6. Garden more. Both indoors and out. It's hard to do during the winter, I know, but I'm already planning our garden for next spring/summer because we ate so much of our own homegrown food this year that makes the effort worth it. What I won't do? Spend obsessive amounts of money on more and more seeds.

7. Pay all our bills on time, including our taxes. I'm usually pretty good at this but tend to let the taxes drift and drift and drift...

8. Take care of the important but really boring things like RRSPs, wills and other financial planning. I always put these off as "oh, I'll get around to it one day."

9. Try to find ways to write more for me. This isn't necessarily money-related but it does go to the whole idea of the true cost of the things in your life. The more I write the more potential I have for becoming a "real" writer one day. The more I write the less it becomes a hobby and more the job that I've always wanted it to be.

10. Become more crafty. And not how the Beastie Boys meant it. But more like discovering the girl that grew up making pinecone decorations and sewing. This will also be hard. I feel as though I am terribly untalented in the crafty areas. It's not a skill I inherited from my truly crafty and wonderfully creative mother.

#21 - The Omnivore's Dilemma (Also #s 22, 23, 24 & 25)

Somehow, I feel like starting off this post being hyper-critical of myself: I should really be blogging more. I should keep writing even though I don't feel like it. I should do a lot of things. I know that Michael Pollan isn't purely being self aware with The Omnivore's Dilemma, but the introspective elements mixed in with his philosophical discussion of 'a natural history in four meals' definitely makes you think. The book hums along like any good documentary should -- it's rich in investigative journalism, full of interesting points of view about the current state of the food industry, and never fails to try and observe a situation from every angle possible.

Broken into three sections (although subtitled 'four' meals), Industrial, Pastoral and Personal, The Omnivore's Dilemma unearths many real and even some invented debate (his whole rationale for eating meat in the third section I found a little hard to stomach) behind how food is brought to the table. The first section of the book, where Pollan discusses and takes apart the industrial food chain, straight from a fast-food meal eaten in the car to the fact that by-products of corn are in just about every processed item in a grocery store, was utterly captivating. One part Fast Food Nation, another part 100-Mile Diet (which I haven't read all of yet), the sheer force by which farms have become industrialized combined with the unknown and ever-reaching ramifications made me hunger even more for the weather to heat up so I could get seeds in the ground for vegetables.

I also found Pastoral, where Pollan visits and works on a farm that lets animals be animals by having developed a very real, yet still domesticated (is that the right word?) ecosystem that not only feeds the people who live there, but also supplies many restaurants and customers in the area with fresh meat and vegetables, compelling. Never doubting the value of farmers, especially ones practicing organic and more ethical ways of reaping value from the land, The Omnivore's Dilemma points out dramatic differences between industrial farms and smaller, independent outfits.

The third section, as I mentioned above, lagged for me -- probably because, while notable, the idea of hunting and gathering my own food (that which I have not cultivated in my backyard), honestly has me stumped. I couldn't imagine heading out into the woods with a rifle and shooting a wild pig. Yet, I can understand why Pollan felt it necessary, especially with the level of scholarship around which he answers the question: "What should we have for dinner?" Also, I really hate mushrooms. Perhaps this isn't something I should hold against the book.

All in all, I spent much of Easter weekend reading this book. I had to pause for a moment because we had our Fall 2009 sales conference (for which I read two of the best fiction titles I've read in a long, long time: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter, #s 22 & 23; and one truly fantastic YA novel called The Amanda Project, #24) and there was much reading to be done (and shared), but managed to get right back into it once we were through last Friday. There is no way that I will ever think of corn in the same way again. There is no way I'll think of tofu in the same way again. There is no way, in fact, that I'll think of dinner in the same way again, if I'm being honest. And isn't that a most powerful thing for a book to do -- take a mundane and utterly human aspect of one's life and turn it inside out.

Annnywaay. Over the past few weeks, I've been under the weather, mentally, physically, but I've managed to keep the garden going (loads of flower seedlings coming up; everything that needed to be planted before the last frost is in), and keep my head above the metaphorical water enough to still read. Writing, however, still remains a challenge.

Oh, and #25? I finished up Marjorie Harris's delightful Ecological Gardening and learned many, many good tips. Not the least of which was a) that I shouldn't be watering at night (oops!), b) that I should really figure out a way to compost and c) that companion planting (nasturtiums here I come!) is really my friend.

READING CHALLENGES: I'm adding The Omnivore's Dilemma (which is actually the only book I've completed) to The Better You Read, The Better You Get Challenge. One down, nine to go. It's going to be a long year of self-improvement, I think.

WHAT'S UP NEXT: I'm halfway through Coelho's Veronika Decides to Die (Buffy is playing the lead in the film adaptation; I'm excited to see what she does with it, although I'm finding it hard to imagine how they crafted dialogue out of the author's heady narrative).

#20 - Truth and Beauty

Already a fan of Ann Patchett, I knew I would probably enjoy her memoir, Truth and Beauty. When my friend Emma at work told me, no, insisted that I read it, I ordered up a copy and started it on the ride home from work last Friday. Um, I finished the book at about 10 AM on Saturday. Patchett, who befriends a gregarious, infamous girl from her college, Lucy Grealy, while both attend the infamous Iowa Writer's Workshop, writes about their "epic" (as the front cover blurbs) relationship.

Lucy Grealy, whose memoir, An Autobiography of a Face, propelled her to literary stardom before she succumbed to the lasting tragedy of a childhood illness, which resulted in thirty-eight surgeries, a lifetime of pain (literal and psychological), and a terrible drug addiction. People were simply attracted to Lucy -- they all knew who she was, and she gathered up friends and acquaintances, and filled up her world with them. Even though a rare form of Ewing's sarcoma left her face permanently altered, Lucy pushed on through life, scars showing inwardly and outwardly. While tragic, the point of the book, from my perspective anyway, was to truly exhalt the idea of friendship, how in some cases it simply pulls someone into your life forever.

While both writers struggle to start their careers at the beginning of the book, Truth and Beauty also narrates their successes. For Patchett, it came upon the publication of her fourth novel, Bel Canto; for Grealy's, it arrived suddenly with her memoir (and not from her poetry, per se). The two women support each other, derive inspiration from one another, and work extremely hard for many of the same goals (fellowships, etc.).

The most affecting part of the book for me, obviously, was Lucy's struggle with illness (I haven't read her book, by the way). There was a point in the memoir when Ann Patchett described how Lucy felt toward people suffering from disease with no outward symptoms, how unfair and/or angry (and I'm paraphrasing) this made her. In a way, I could relate -- the Wegener's has scarred my face (acne from the meds), bloats my features (prednisone), lost me a hip, and caused up and down weight gain (as has, um, age and inactivity!). But in another way, I could see what she was saying as well, that to walk around with a very physical reminder of how a disease had effectively ruined your face is quite different from dealing with some pimples and a few pounds.

Yet, I can't help thinking it was a little unfair (and perhaps I'm taking it a little too personally) to judge the amount of someone's suffering simply by outward scars of their disease. The Wegener's attacks my insides, makes me exhausted, puts me in fear for my organs, has ruined my lungs, and all kinds of other internal things that can't be seen. And I live with it every day. It's amazing, at times, to think that your body has the power to kill you when every ounce of your flesh has evolved to survive. There's a psychological struggle with disease that's there regardless of whether one has scars on the inside or out -- I suppose that's where I kind of determined there was a selfish streak to Patchett's dear friend.

Annnywaaay. Truth and Beauty is well worth the read. It's a good book to buy for your best friend just to send along to say, "I love you this much." To say, "if you had lost everything I would send you kitchen appliances and JCrew t-shirts too." To say, "this book says it so much better than I ever could."

#2 - Shakespeare

Years ago when I worked at History Television, I wrote a series of articles about Shakespeare. For a few weeks, I was obsessed by the Shakespeare question and read a pile of books both for and against the Bard's "real" identity. I've seen Shakespeare in Love about a million times and even wrote an article for the now-defunct Chicklit.com (I wish I had a copy of it to share; it was a fun article to write) about the differences between the writer's life and how he was portrayed in the film, tying everything back into the research that I did for my job at the time. Needless to say, I think I'm more obsessed with the idea of all the controversy around Shakespeare's identity than I am by the man's work. Is that a bad thing? And let me just say for the record that I believe, as does Bill Bryson, that Shakespeare was the author of his work, not Francis Bacon or any number of other writers put forth in the years since his death and ultimate canonization.

Part of the Eminent Lives series, Bill Bryson's excellent Shakespeare: The World as Stage contextualizes the little known facts of the Bard's life into a compact and utterly readable package. As Bryson continually reminds us, there are very few known facts of Shakespeare's life: the date of his baptism, his marriage, the number of children he had, how many signatures exist (6), his will, etc. The rest is conjecture, scholars over the years uncovering new evidence, failing to prove their theories, and wishful thinking. What Bryson does so ingeniously is fill in his own spaces with interesting bits of history from the time period, padding Shakespeare's life with surrounding information, giving the reader a spirit of the age rather than trying to pull a biography from thin air. He addresses the Shakespeare question toward the end of the book, and I enjoyed reading about the interesting characters who contributed to seemingly never-ending debate.

I have to admit that I found the chapter about the plays themselves a little dry, but then he grabbed me again by making the point that part of Shakespeare's lasting impression on literature goes so far beyond the plays. So much of the language we use today, so many expressions that hadn't been used before are attributed to him, parts of our speech that we take so for granted that we barely give a thought to the fact that he wrote "be cruel to be kind." The book is full of information that could give anyone an edge should they end up on Jeopardy faced with a Shakespeare category, but it also has a grand sense of humour and a calm approach to sifting through what must have been miles upon miles of scholarship. By the nature of the lack of information about Shakespeare's life, it must have been hard to write a biography about him, but I think that Bryson's done a smashing job of it: a little Tom Stoppard, a little The Professor and the Madman, and a lot of what Bryson does so very well, write history so that it's engaging, interesting and utterly compelling.

READING CHALLENGES: The first book I've finished in the Shakespeare Challenge. Next up I think I'll read Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer, but who knows when I'll get to it -- the master list for 2009 is a little overwhelming.

The Better You Read -- The Better You Get Challenge

I know I preach a lot about "green" and all that jazz. Collecting books that I never read certainly isn't the "greenest" way I could be living, especially if many of those books have socio- and/or environmental causes behind them. So here are the 10 titles I'll try to read this year:

1. What Should I Do With My Life by Po Bronson
2. Living Like Ed by Ed Begley Jr.
3. Gorgeously Green by Sophie Uliano
4. Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel
5. Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe
6. The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
7. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
8. Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs
9. The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner
10. When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate

11. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
12. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
13. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
14. The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel