Smell 'ya later, 2015! Get on in here, 2016! (Come for the books, stay for the pie!)

2015 is being crammed in the recycle bin, hello 2016!  This has been a year of amazing reading and life and I think it was pretty damned excellent.

So, how did I do on non-reading resolutions posted back in January 2015?

1. Be mindful in my reading and bookish purchases - keeping this up will help so much with financial responsibility and the general amount of excess stuff in my house that I will never get around to reading/liking/re-reading. - This resolution went well until about fall and then ALL the books were published, so not terrible but not great.
2. Be timely on reviews - such a big deal, especially for books that I have requested as a reviewer (I know that there has been a lot of discussion in the book blogging community about what is "owed" to a publisher but, in my opinion, if a publicist, etc. has taken the time to send me an ARC or DRC then I should return the gesture by reading and reviewing the book in a timely manner). - Slightly better, but I tend to have review-writing binges because, let's be honest, I like to read books far more than write about them even if I do like to write about them.
3. Drink more water - do I need to drink as much Dt. Pepsi as I do? No. Although, #deathbeforedecaf is still a mantra (you cannot separate me from my coffee). - eh, I did better not buying two+ mochas per day? I made my own coffee?  Didn't drink that much more water.
4. Move more - the hip (and knees and back) and I have come to an agreement on ways of moving so I should be able to at least get on the elliptical and basic weights at the gym. - The hip got worse (in fact, I had two cortisone shots last week) so gym was not an option but I did walk a lot.
5. Cook for myself - I got a Dutch oven and new pots and pans for Christmas so this year the goal is to wean myself off of frozen dinners for 2/3 of my meals (they are handy, but my MSG-sensitivity is much less of an issue if I cook food for myself). - This went really well.  Fell off a bit in the summer but got back in the cooking groove in September.
6. Be brave - I still hate having my picture taken or meeting new people but I need to keep putting myself out there. Nothing gets accomplished by holing up in my house with the cats and books and not interacting with actual people in a social setting.
7. Take a vacation - I hope (HOPE HOPE) to have the finances sorted out enough to visit my friend Kate and see Rhinebeck (aka New York Sheep and Wool) this year. ALSO, Book Riot announced their first live event in early November in NYC and I really, really, really want to go to that, too. (And see my friend Beth! And maybe Karen!)
8. Relax - cf. resolution #7. - For 6, 7, and 8, this is all down to Book Riot Live.  I took a real vacation and flew out to see Beth for a few days then we went to BRL which was amazing.  And I rode the subway all by myself.

And now for the pie!!  Pie charts!

To start, I blew past last year's total of 195 books with 269 books (I had a brief spat with Goodreads, who thought I'd read 270 but it turns out the site had recorded a "finish date" for a book in progress...data, man).  I read so much great stuff this year, too many to pick a favorite, but standouts include runs of ODY-C and The Wicked + The Divine, Between the World and Me, Citizen, Come as You Are, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Rogue Not Taken, Dancer, Edinburgh, When a Scot Ties the Knot, and The World Between Two Covers, which influenced a lot of my book purchasing and reading for the rest of the year and beyond.

How many different genres did I read?  More books = more genres!

 

I leaned farther toward physical formats than digital this year, mostly due to a dislike of how Comixology was redesigned after the sale.  I let my subscriptions expire there and transferred them to my LCS (Geek City Games and Comics, holla!) if I wanted any of the new runs.  This will also be the last year for Oyster in my stats (boo!) but in July the three local libraries pooled their digital resources to make Digital Johnson County - now I can borrow ebooks and e-audiobooks using Overdrive!

Speaking of library use, I put that library card (all three) to good use this year and started snagging library books and audio CDs instead of buying all the things.

This year I started tracking whether the book was translated into English, a result of my having read The World Between Two Covers.  An informal count for last year puts my number of "books read in translation" under 10 so this is an improvement.

How about the percentage of genders?

This was the first year in a long while - since 2006 -  that male authors crept up to the 50% mark, due to the runs of ODY-C, The Wicked + The Divine, and Wayward where the writers and authors are male (white males, too, which will come up again in a bit), to the tune of 20+ issues read in physical comic form.  In contrast, my aversion to the Comixology format caused me to forgo reading Ms. Marvel in issues and wait until the last two trades were available in paperback to read them - changing approximately 11-12 issues into two books.  It changes the "opportunities" in the data for G. Willow Wilson.  Also worth pointing out, to my knowledge all of these authors are cis-gendered; I don't really track orientation, though I know a number of authors I read in 2015 are gay or lesbian.

So here's the big, big deal: did I read more authors of color?  Last year, only 11 of 195 (5.6%) authors were non-white so I gave myself a D- in Diversity.  This year:

Not a great jump, 15.5% non-white, but at least it didn't go backward.  So I will advance myself to D+ status.  Still, not a passing grade.

I decided to do a second breakdown, this time race by genre, to see where non-white authors are coming into my reading and where I really need to start looking (and actually reading - I have a lot of POC in my TBR stacks).  I deliberately didn't combine comics and graphic novels/manga so I could see that all the comics issues have white writers (to be honest, the East Asian authors in the GN/Manga bar are all from the manga genre).  There are a lot of places to improve.  A LOT.

My reading is still very heavily from Anglophone countries, however, my reading The World Between Two Covers did prod me to widen my reading to include more authors with origins outside my very safe US/UK/Canadian reading borders.

What are my plans for 2016?

1. #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks
2. Be timely on reviews - I have made serious use of my OmniFocus apps to get the release dates for DRCs/ARCs I have organized and to help my organize my reading into individual tasks (GTD FTW!!) which should (ideally) help with getting reviews written and posted in a more timely manner.
3. Drink more water - the FitBit app can help track this, so I should use it.
4. Move more - the cortisone shots take full effect by the end of January so I hope to at least be back on the elliptical in a regular manner.
5. Cook for myself - this is going really well.  I also received My Kitchen Year by Ruth Reichl and I want to make all the things!  This is also good for the budget.
6. Be brave - I'm better at not hiding in general but if you throw me into a crowd by myself I tend to either not talk to people or glom onto the one person I actually know and talk A LOT (read: too much about nothing in general).  And in that vein...
7. I am going to BEA!!!  I just got registered for my very first BEA (ouch, the dollars) so I will have to be super brave, and network, and find my way around a huge convention center filled with people and not glom onto my roommates for the week.
8. Stop driving to work - last week was a bust with the cortisone shots, but this week in taking the bus to work rather than driving has been going well.  I hope to keep it up because $10-15 per day to park the car (plus the extra gasoline) vs. $2 per day riding the bus is a way better fiscal plan.
9. Last, but certainly not the least at all, I need to increase the percentage of books and comics I read that are written by non-white authors.  Some genres (like fiction) will be a simple matter of reading books already on my TBR, others (comics, romance, biography, sciences) need me to put forth a far more conscious effort.  I would also like to start tracking LGBTQIA as best I can - I use a relational database, so it's not hard to add and even compare to previous years, but this might take more than just reading an author's bio.  People do not fit neatly into boxes, and I certainly don't want a world where each author fills out a form and checks all the boxes related to diversity just because that makes it easy for poor little me, but I need to think about how to look for that information.  (My default right now is "white, cis-gendered, straight, USA" if I can't find information that is self-identified otherwise.)  I'll try to take a look at reading stats at least halfway through the year, if not more, to see how I'm doing.

And that's it!  Bring it, 2016!

The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery by Rob Dunn

Summary from Goodreads:
The secret history of our most vital organ--the human heart
"The Man Who Touched His Own Heart" tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries-which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived-to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process.
Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion-effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest?
Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.

I love the history of medicine.  Get me a copy of Oliver Sacks, or a biography of cancer (The Emperor of All Maladies), or a discussion of medical ethics (When the Wind Catches You and You Fall Down or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) and I'm all in.  So I was really intrigued by the title of this book.

Well, it wasn't exactly what I thought.  I was hoping for medical case studies from history - what The Man Who Touched His Own Heart is really about is the history of human concepts of the heart as an organ and the history of cardiac medicine and surgery.  Sooo...OK, I'm still in, at least for most of it.

I like the idea and concept of this book very much.  Dunn, who is a professor of ecology and evolution, starts back at the very beginnings of Western medicine, when practitioners just began to speculate about the function of the heart and what that organ represented in our religions and cultures.  Galen, Avicenna, da Vinci, and Vesalius all appear as humans began to dissect corpses to learn the correct human anatomy of the heart (only mammals and birds have four-chambered hearts, so examining, say, a frog doesn't get you very far).  Once Harvey posited the motion of the blood and the microscope was invented discovery accelerated - the first known open-heart surgery, the first heart-catheterization, the attempts to build heart-lung bypass machines to allow more extensive cardiac surgery, and - in a major part of the book - the attempts to determine the correct origins and treatment for that scourge of the modern age, arteriosclerosis (or so we think).

Now, this book is for a lay audience - which isn't even remotely my bailiwick given the epidemiology degree - and I think it works quite well most of the time.  However, a few of the arguments felt a bit convoluted.  For example, he discussed a 2012 meta-analysis (that link might not get you access to the article if you're not academically affiliated - the citation is Stergiopulous and Brown, Initial Coronary Stent Implantation With Medical Therapy vs Medical Therapy Alone for Stable Coronary Artery Disease: Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials, Arch Intern Med. 2012;172(4):312-319 - also, that citation wasn't actually noted in the text; just a note about how randomization works....gonna give a bit of editorial side-eye here) looking at medication+angio/stent for atherosclerosis vs medication alone then jumped back about 30 years by referencing two studies in the 80s/90s that contradicted the meta-analysis's findings because statins weren't available then...huh? I do research and those paragraphs didn't flow well. I also felt like bits were missing from the story of cardiac medicine such as the development of heart valve replacements or repair, the extension of the heart-lung machine to ECMO (extracorporeal membranous oxygenation - it allows the lungs to rest and heal while the heart pumps, which could have been briefly introduced/explained), and the development of extremely complex operations to save children born with severe congenital diseases like hypoplastic left heart syndrome.  The sections near the end of the book on comparative anatomy and evolution are very good, as they should be given Dunn's background

One thing that I think would have been very helpful, considering the intended audience, was an actual anatomical description - with pictures - of the normal working anatomy of the heart at the beginning of the book, then a picture of the condition or injury Dunn is describing in the relevant chapter. In example, there's a point at which Dunn describes, in writing, the congenital malformation Tetralogy of Fallot (a consistent appearance of four cardiac anomalies - stenosis of the pulmonary artery, ventricular septal defect, biventricular connection of the aortic valve, and hypertrophy of the left ventricle), but not completely.  I had to stop and look it up, even though I know what the condition entails.  For a reader not versed in medicine or anatomy, I'm sure a section like that is very confusing.  So perhaps a few more illustrations for the paperback edition? (If they were added after the digital advances were released you can ignore the comment - I haven't had a chance to see a finished copy, yet.)

(Caveat for the entire book: if you are an animal lover, this book may not be for you. The history of medical discovery is paved with the use of laboratory animals for research, often in non-ethical and very lethal ways, none more so than the treatment of cardiac ailments.)

Dear FTC: I was given access to a digital advance copy by the publisher.

In which I discover Instagram (and consequently love my iPhone a little more)

I finally downloaded the Instagram app to my iPhone.

First pic?

Yup.  Knitting (and a cute little project bag from Jennie G).

A Dance with Dragons

OMG, it's here!  I have read it!  It was amazing!  I need more!!!!  (Ugh, I need some sleep, too.)

Having read through book four of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, I could finally understand why people were getting really twitchy about his fifth book.  Why we'd get yet another person coming into the store looking for A Dance With Dragons and then heaving a tremendous sigh of disappointment when we said there wasn't a publication date available.

I get it now, I really do.

And that is why I read 1100+ pages in six days.  I'm probably going to spoil some things so you're forewarned.

We catch back up with Jon and the "rock and another rock and a hard place" situation of being Lord Commander of the Night's Watch when Stannis is trying to get him to reneg on his vows by offering him Winterfell, dead things walk in the night and try to kill people, and the sudden influx of Wildings causing a dire need for more food, shelter, and discipline, as well as distrust from half his Sworn Brothers.  Roose Bolton and his really, REALLY sadistic son also cause problems.  Tyrion has been smuggled out of King's Landing by Varys and sent to Illyrio (whom we haven't really seen since A Game of Thrones).  From there he is sent on a journey toward Daenerys and Mereen in the company of "Griff" and "Young Griff"... but gets waylaid and captured in a brothel (of all places) by Jorah Mormont.  He also meets another dwarf, Penny, whose brother was killed by men eager to claim Cersei's promised lordship, and she provides a new perspective on being a dwarf for Tyrion.  Daenerys has got herself into royally (pun intended) hot water by establishing herself at Mereen to keep the slave trade from reopening there and a guerilla war by the Sons of the Harpy forces her to make some really dense choices.  Her dragons are also causing serious trouble because, guess what, they have grown a great deal and seem to have started eating people (children at least).  At the end of the North and Essos chapters we start catching up with other characters, chiefly Jaime, Cersei, and Arya (Cersei's punishment...never, EVER could have guessed that, ever).

GRRM gives us great perspective chapters from old/new characters like Ser Barristan Selmy (yay!), Ser John Connington, Quentyn Martell, Asha Greyjoy and Melisandre (wtf! - need more from her/her history).  And THEN we get perspective chapters from Reek, aka the wreck-that-used-to-be-Theon-that-douche-who-double-crossed-Robb, AND DAVOS!!!  Can I just tell you how happy I was that Davos is still around?  Granted, his storyline just got wierder because he has to go find Rickon and Osha, whom we haven't seen since they parted company with Bran, Hodor, Jojen, and Meera, but he's not dead and he's one of my favorite POV characters.

Speaking of Bran, he's got really boring chapters.  As does Victarion Greyjoy.  We all have our favorite characters/characters we love to hate and I found myself starting to skim the POVs that I didn't care much for.  Although...GRRM did toss up something odd in one of Bran's chapters that I had to go back and re-read:  Bran can "jump" into the heart-tree at Winterfell and see its whole history and there was a brief flash of Eddard Stark praying something about Jon's mom....  And that was it!  I was like, wait, what???  Tell us more!!  People have some seriously crazy ideas about Jon being Lyanna and Rhaegar's kid (I'm fence-y, given that Jon would need to be at least a year older than Robb and it's acknowledged that he's younger because Eddard knocked up Catelyn before he went off to war) - when is someone going to let Jon know where he comes from??  All those chapters from characters I don't care so much about...they are important, just don't know why as yet.

However, two important characters didn't make an appearance at all in A Dance with Dragons:  Sam, now forging his chain in the Citadel, and Sansa, hiding in the Vale with Petyr.  Sam just has a great voice and I want to see how Maesters are trained.  Sansa, however, is a character I didn't like in A Game of Thrones but have come to be very invested in her outcome.  Her situation is just as dangerous as Arya's: she's masquerading as Petyr's illegitimate daughter, accused by Cersei of helping Tyrion poison Joffrey (it was really Petyr/Margery's kooky grandma), but GRRM makes it clear that Petyr thinks Sansa is as beautiful as her mom.  And Petyr still has a thing for Catelyn, as evidenced by how easily he pitched Lysa out the moon door in A Storm of Swords.

So...now I wait like everyone else.  What would I like to see in Book 6 (please GRRM, write fast!)?  Since we're giving out POV chapters to a wider range of characters I'd like to see ones from Jeyne Poole (poor girl), Jorah Mormont (dudes, he is OVERDUE for a chapter), Osha, Petyr (how does that sneaky little mind work), and Varys (how does HIS sneaky little mind work).  I'd love a chapter from Kevan's POV, but he got taken out by Varys's "birds" in the Epilogue.  ADDITIONALLY, I would really, REALLY like to see Daenerys take everyone (the dragons, Ser Barristan, Jorah, Tyrion, Penny, her Unsullied, etc) and get the heck out of Mereen, perhaps by way of Old Valyria - the Doom of Valyria keeps being mentioned, as well as how no one goes there anymore, and that seems important.

And then I'd like to see Arya let loose on Westeros.  She is now officially the scariest child-character in fiction.

(Apologies for the fangirl review)

The Age of Wonder

I kept seeing Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science on all sorts of best-of and nominations lists, winning the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (yes, that Royal Society).  Then the book won the General Nonfiction Award from the National Book Critics Circle.

So I downloaded to my nook and started reading.

The Age of Wonder chronicles the intersection of art and science in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain (primarily Britain, there's a little continental Europe in there).  This is the period when scientific progress just takes off, the discoveries in chemistry, physics, zoology, and astronomy come so fast.  The Romantic movement in art and literature also rises in this period, eschewing rational and realist ideals for sensibility and the sublime in nature and emotion.

Holmes covers approximately one hundred years of scientific history and his book is such fun to read. I had no idea that so many revered scientists - Herschel, Davy, Banks - wrote elegant poetry and prose and so many of the literati - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron - were deeply interested in progress in "natural philosophy."  We don't foster polymaths anymore so it's easy to forget multi-talented individuals exist.  Holmes also brings a forgotten contributor, Caroline Herschel, to the forefront; Caroline, sister of Sir William Herschel, tirelessly performed work that was essential in mapping comets and deep stars in an age when women's contributions to science were miniscule.  There's a chapter on the ballooning craze that swept Europe after the discovery of the properties of gasses.  There's a chapter on vivisection and vitalism that inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  It is all so fascinating, the way all the pieces interconnect.

Although a "history of science" book, Holmes doesn't dwell on the scientific explanations and instead concentrates on the development of the scientific process and the way science fed the inspiration of the poet.  I feel like there is an assumption that the reader of this book will do his or her own background reading if necessary and that is so refreshing in a scientific book - I can enjoy it without getting side-tracked by explanations I don't need.  I really loved reading The Age of Wonder.

The Poisoner's Handbook

No, not that type of poisoner's handbook; think "true crime".

The Mystery Book Club that meets at my store picked The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum as one of their next reads (I think April, maybe May).  So I was like, "Hmmmm, a history of forensic medicine, specific to poisons and chemistry, in Jazz Age/Prohibition New York....I'll read that!"

From a true crime/history of forensic medicine standpoint The Poisoner's Handbook is interesting and fun to read.  Blum focuses on a major poisoning case in each chapter, be the agent methanol, arsenic, thallium, carbon monoxide, cyanide, or radium.  Medical examiner practices we take for granted today (timely autopsies, accurate death certificates, etc) were implemented to lend the profession credibility; corrupt and ill-trained coroner systems as well as the political machine that was New York City politics had to be dealt with.  It's all very fascinating and readable.

But then there are some things that bug me about this book.  There are no graphs or pictures in this book - not even a Periodic Table.  A picture is worth a thousand words when you're explaining why radium is taken up by the body in the same manner as calcium (they're in the same group so they have the same basic chemistry) but radium causes major problems because of its reactivity and radiation (it's easier to explain radioactive decay of alpha, beta, and gamma particles if you've got a picture).  Similarly, I can line up the molecular models of methanol and ethanol in my head along with their acid and aldehyde by-products and understand how those chemicals act in the liver but I'm thinking the average Joe with a high school chemistry background (at most) won't be able to do that.  I've had six semesters of chemistry, up to advanced organic, and I have a degree in biology, so I understand all the physiologic processes described in the book but a non-science-background reader might need a boost.  So, diagrams would be nice and maybe also the photographs of the scientists and other historical players described in the text.  Also, some of the text descriptions of what happens chemically are kind of vague ("titration" is not really described as titration but as a progression of colors when you add acid to a solution); vagueness makes my little chemist's heart sink (I am a member of Alpha Chi Sigma Professional Chemistry Fraternity - so is Bassam Shakhashiri who is thanked in the acknowledgements). 

I also found the chapter layouts a little weird.  Each chapter revolves around a specific poison, which is nice, but the middle of each chapter gets into the general history of the crime lab for that time period before returning to the case involving the specific poison.  It gets a little confusing to read about cyanide poisoning then about all the methanol deaths during Prohibition (and the enforcement laws about denaturing industrial ethanol) before returning to a case of death by cyanide.  It would have been a little more clear to have separate chapters for the poisoning cases/poisons between chapters about the general history of the department. 

If you love true crime or history of criminology, definitely read The Poisoner's Handbook.   If you see this on the shelf with the rest of the chemistry books in the "Science" section of the bookstore be forewarned that it might not have as much chemistry as you would like but it's still fun to read if you're looking for something light.

Buff and Shine

I've given the site a buff-and-shine. 

A little new paint, a new layout, and a new picture for my header.  The major reason for changing the layout was that the old template wouldn't let me move the header to the top; I grew tired of having it in the upper-left corner and my CSS abilities are miniscule.  So I picked a new one out of Blogger and fiddled around with the colors until I had a set I liked.  I decided to add a picture to my header and took about 20 minutes setting up the shot for the picture in the header (most of that time was spent making the ribbons from my old pointe shoes fall "artistically").  You can't see the covers on the books in the picture but I chose them because the colors in the cover art coordinated with the colors in my knitting project; the jackets of the lovely hardcover editions of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles have the prettiest designs and colors (you can see the covers here in the first six entries on the search).

I do feel a bit like a heel because Natasha hosted Bloggiesta this weekend.  Bloggiesta is an online fiesta of bloggers where everyone takes the weekend to do blog maintenence, catch up on posts, write templates, etc.  People host mini-challenges and have a really great time.  Participating in Bloggiesta was actually one of my New Year's blog resolutions but I was down to work all weekend and I hadn't managed to scrounge up a Blogger manual to help me out (did I mention that I'm CSS/HTML impaired?) so I didn't want to sign up for Bloggiesta and then not put the time into it.  Well....turned out that I didn't have to work today (wrote the wrong day down)...and while I was at the store I found a new edition of Elizabeth Castro's Visual QuickProject book about Blogger...so when I came back home I sat down at the laptop and wrote posts and played around with my blog.  I had a teeny Bloggiesta.  So the lesson I learned is that I should sign up for Bloggiesta anyway!  Next time round maybe I will have found a CSS guide (I have an HTML one) because I think I would like to make some changes to my widgets and I think that's going to be more involved than deciding which Blogger template and colors to use.

The Elements

This isn't so much of a "review" as a shameless plug.  I am not above shamelessly plugging things that teach us about chemistry.

The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe is an absolutely fantastic book about the Periodic Table of Elements and is a must-have for every coffee table owner.  Theodore Gray writes the Gray Matter column for Popular Science and likes The Periodic Table, an understatement (you've probably seen his photographic periodic table poster - you can see the interactive version here).  His new book about the elements that make up every fiber of our being is full of breathtaking photography.  It's also incredibly fun to read with descriptions of each of the 118 elements of Mendeleev's table (there's an element found in old implanted medical devices that must return to Los Alamos when you die...now you'll need to read the book to find out which one it is).  Everyone will like this book, from children to adults. 

Especially science nerds like me (did I mention I was in a chemistry fraternity?).

Go. Buy. Now.  Yay, chemistry!

Current book-in-progress: Illness, What are Intellectuals Good For?, and A Jury of Her Peers
Current knitted item: baby sweater for my new niece
Current movie obsession: You've Got Mail
Current iTunes loop: Lucy Woodward

No BEA? Books anyway!

I started my "No BEA? Books anyway!" buying a day or two early. I can't help it; I work in a bookstore (and we have employee appreciation days coming up...score!).

Items purchased over several days from my bookstore:
What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science: Original Essays from a new Generation of Scientists edited by Max Brockman
Fearless Girls, Wise Women, & Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World edited by Kathleen Ragan
Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits by Jack Murnighan
Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Items bought today at the local independent:
Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary by N. Katherine Hayles (it comes with a CD-ROM!)
The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction edited by Jerrold E. Hogle
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel (2nd edition, revised and expanded) edited by Steven C. Weisbenburger

Item that arrived on my doorstep (courtesy of BN.com editors):
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers (this is for the book group I r-mod at BNBC - it starts on Monday!!)

I guess I'm most excited to read Beowulf on the Beach (already started, actually) not because it's like a crib sheet to the world's greatest but because the professor who writes it is a stitch (how many euphemisms for the word "sex" can he use in one book?)! I'm also really interested in Electronic Literature because that seems to be the way the world is going these days and Angels and Insects since I must have my Byatt fix (the Angels and Insects movie was very interesting.....very interesting indeed) because we Americans suck and won't get her new book until fall.

But what I'm most excited to read is Of Bees and Mist with the First Look Book Club on BNBC - it's really good and I've been holding myself back!

If you went out and supported BEA by buying books make sure you link your post up with Mr. Linky here (which is what I'm going to do now).

PS: I'm a nerd, if that wasn't already apparent.

Movie weekend!

****WARNING: If you are any of my friends who haven't seen Twilight yet and don't want anything spoiled, read this post later.****

So I had movie weekend - fueled partly by a sleepless night where I watched four movies and one mini-series. Stupid brain.

Movie #1 Ballet Shoes: remake of the Noel Streatfield novel of the same name; I loved the book as a child and I was really glad to see that the feel of the novel was retained with some cute additions; Emma Watson (yes, that Emma Watson) was excellent in a non-Hermione role and I can't wait to see her in Desperaux in December
Movie #2 Pride and Prejudice: not a new movie to me, but I was trying to fall asleep; it may not be my favorite rendition of my favorite novel but it has beautiful piano music played by Jean-Yves Thibeaudet
Mini-series Sense and Sensibility: ITV mini-series shown last spring on IPTV for "The Complete Jane Austen" during Masterpiece Classic (thanks Dad for finally getting this recorded off the DVR for me); very well-shot, well-adapted, and well-cast (Janet McTeer as Mrs. Dashwood was especially nice); the mini-series format allowed for all of the characters to be present (including Lucy Steele's vile sister, ugh); I actually liked it and got involved so this may not have been the best choice for trying to fall asleep and the IMDB page has some interesting facts about the costuming
Movie #3 Persuasion: also an ITV production and one that I do not like for various reasons (exception being Rupert Penry-Jones as Captain Wentworth, although he's no Ciaran Hinds); Mary Musgrove nee Elliot acted like someone recovering from a neurological injury (whoa, crazy), Anne breaks the fourth wall a lot to think to the audience, and then she runs up and down the streets of Bath in the letter scene chasing Wentworth; all wrong
Movie #4 Northanger Abbey: not a new movie to me, either, but I did finally fall asleep to this one.

Then tonight I went with Jackie, Rachel, Janice, and Annie to see Twilight. I was prepared for a lame and utterly cheesy teenage movie but it was really cute. There were a few wierd things, though. Edward looked like he ate some bad cougar the first time Bella walked into biology lab, there was a little too much teenager angst from Edward (who's supposed to be over 100 years old), Carlisle's makeup artist was seriously phoning it in from Data's makeup artist on ST:TNG, and the dude playing Jasper either needed more anti-psychotics or less because it was a creeper-worthy performance (and he's supposed to be the mood-altering vampire). I thought the script adaptation was faithful with two exceptions: too much foreshadowing on the run-up to the emergence of the three "bad" vampires and I really missed a "Bella trapped in the bathroom by Alice before the prom" scene. Oh, and Bella's prom dress was pretty, but not what I'd imagined. Overall impression: cute teenager movie and no gag-worthy moments (I wanted to rid the theatre of a few stupid teenagers who were attempting to ruin the movie for everyone else - lame).

Okey, dokey, fun with previews:
1. Know1ing - Nicholas Cage/apolcalypse flick about a secret code from a time capsule that correctly predicted all the natural disasters (including death toll); major problem is what happens when the code stops
2. Valkyrie - the long-talked-about Tom Cruise biopic of the plot to assassinate Hitler; looks good (at least no one faked a German accent) and looking at the IMDB page it lists Eddie Izzard as one of the conspirators (???); looks good....but it has Tom Cruise
3. Confessions of a Shopaholic - based on the book of the same name; I have some friends who would love this movie (I probably would not)
4. Push - conspiracy/sci-fi movie about people with superhuman powers like telekenisis, prophecy, and the like (smells a little like X-men as far as powers, but no mutants); Dakota Fanning plays a girl who can predict the future (creepy)
There might have been one more (must be forgetteable like the super-lame commercial we had to watch about Diet Pepsi Max that completely ran the old "Night at the Roxbury" sketch into the ground). Major disappointment: NO HARRY POTTER TRAILER!!!!!! Jerks.

Kat is totally in trouble...

...for making, er, suggesting I read Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. I can't stop!!!!

She's got this really interesting endcap up with the unofficial title of "Books Kat Wants You to Read" - the official name is something like "Noteworthy Fiction." Kat tends toward offbeat, different authors (not different as in "so post-modernist you'd rather shoot yourself in the eye than read it," but more quirky than the norm) and she's never recommended anything that I thought was uninteresting. I've always been able to quit and go to bed on my own.

However, this one has its hooks into me - I was just innocently picking it up to peruse while the computer and I were having a disagreement (I said it was going to delete an unused program and the computer demurred because it kept thinking a portion of the file was in use - it totally was not) and 130 pages later the damn thing is acting like book-heroin (Pessl has a little bonus for all us little book freaks: all the chapters are headed with the title of a work of fiction and citations for books the main character references are included parenthetically).

Oh, by the way, I won. The program was eventually deleted.

Big Bang

This is pretty cool. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, was turned on today. They've been working on this project since 1984 and only just started smashing atoms today. Wow.

Summer Reading Project - The Newberys

Jackie, my fellow bookseller and kids' lead, thought that it would be really cool if a bunch of us read all the Newbery Medal winning children's books.

And I thought, "Why not?" I can count on one hand the number of Newbery books I've read previously - only five. I think it would be really interesting to see how the winning books have changed over time. There is an added bonus. Because these are children's books, only a few of them are very long so I can read them very quickly. Should satisfy my start-itis-type urges.

Kate dug the list of Newbery winners out of the ALA website. Honest to spit, I never realized that the Newbery awards started back in 1922. This is definitely a summer project. As it turns out, the University of Iowa Libraries has at least one copy of each title (except I think one might be available only in Special Collections). It helps when the College of Education has a Curriculum Lab, aka a library full of children's and teen's books. So I checked out both the 1921 and 1972 editions of the first Newbery winner, The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon. The 1999 edition (the one that's linked) is currently available. First impression? The language used in the book is so completely stilted and non-PC that it is laughable. Here's an example:

"Like many of the animals who fill the Zoo with their strange noises, early man liked to jabber. That is to say, he endlessly repeated the same unintelligible gibberish because it pleased him to hear his own voice" (pp 11-12, van Loon 1922).

It's a bit like the old educational filmstrips from the 1950s. Sing-songy.

In a related incident, I did finally acquire a library card. I really don't need seventy children's books. Especially the ones I don't particularly like.

PS: Jackie, you need to update your blog.

Current book-in-progress: The Story of Mankind, The Black City, The Lord of the Flies (I am revisiting old books I hated in school), The Shakespeare Wars (way more gossipy than I thought it would be), and ideas (bedtime book).
Current knitted item: Tan neckwarmer, which turns out not to be tan but dark gray because I forgot what bland color I bought and just remembered wrong. Essentially a 4x4 ribbed short scarf with buttonholes.
Current movie obsession: Just finished Excalibur (great performance by Helen Mirren as Morgana; I love Dame Helen); am currently working on Becoming Jane which feels miscast a way (Maggie Smith=good; Julie Walters=also good, and she would make a great Mrs. Bennet someday; Anna Maxwell Martin=excellent; Anne Hathaway=really? there weren't any British actresses willing to play Jane Austen?)
Current iTunes loop: Chill Tracks list and Juno soundtrack (happiness)

Pictures of Varying Types

As promised - I have pictures for certain events from the weekend.

First up is "Cats on the new coffeetable." Unfortunately, the really cute picture of the animals inhabiting the table before it was finished didn't turn out so well. So here is Chaucer on top of the finished table - he was getting a little frisky with an imaginary toy.

Second, was the Sunday evening yarn stash organization party, ocurring because the book group party was postponed due to weather. THAT all came out of the closet. And it all went back into the closet, neatly organized, and I even wound up the unrulier skeins on the ball winder.

Kind of a jumble, wasn't it? There was also a skein of Noro Kureyon that the Dante kitty made a holy mess of about 2 years ago. Think a sheep undergoing electroshock therapy. It took about 30 minutes, and I had to pitch a bit that had obvious cat damage, but I managed to get the skein wound up (I considered a "before" picture, but it would've made people cry).

Lastly, for the BNBC people, here's some pictures of my crazy book collection. Yes, I have a small obsession with Pooh.

Don't look behind the doors on the right - that's the clutter keeper. There are books in there, too.

(This is the cabinent with the textbooks.)

The little alien under the rocking chair is Chaucer. Dante surprisingly did not want his picture taken and ran off.

Go me

I totally just had a kick-ass performance review. Hah!

I guess being an obsessive-compulsive detail freak really pays off some days. (Oh, and I got a birthday present of yarn from my boss - what shall I do with it?)

Current book-in-progress: Need to finish some things, but I checked out Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume - really great personal essays about how Judy Blume's writing made a difference in young women's lives (of course, these women are all grown-up writers now)
Current knitted item: I have 3 inches done on the tank; I need a beer to get Eeyore's seams sewn. Bleah.

This is why Friday can't get here fast enough

Not so I can read the last HP book (bonus), but because all the security and secrecy is completely unreal.

Check out this Yahoo article about the security at B&N - the reporters can't reveal the location of the warehouse. Neither can I, nyah-nyah (in reality not particularly "nyah-nyah" since I don't know which warehouse the books are at in the first place).

Current book-in-progress: Articles about Wharton's The Buccaneers - there's surprisingly not much scholarship about the book, but since the edition I read had about 1/4 "created" by the editor in an attempt to finish the book I'm not too surprised.
Current knitted item: The last HP surprise

This was more interesting about 20 years ago

So some guy in Oregon turned his lawnchair into a hot-air balloon. Pretty sure it was more interesting when Cutter John from the Bloom County comic strip did the same thing in about 1985 - only Opus somehow got tangled up in the mooring lines and went along with. Then Cutter got captured by the Russians and was traded for Bill the Cat (who apparently was a Communist spy, who knew?) and Opus, who the Russians left behind, wandered his way back to Bloom County with a severe case of amnesia.

Definitely more interesting than floating from Oregon to Idaho.

Please tell me there are more fans of Bloom County out in cyberspace than just geeky-ol' me.

Current book-in-progress: The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter (the articles are really interesting)
Current knitted item: I looked at the kntting, does that count (there was another grant due, ack)?

Who is that masked man?

While playing Myst III (I finished by the way), I kept thinking "Gosh, that crazy guy Saavedro looks an awful lot like Brad Dourif." So the credits ran, and guess what? It IS Brad Dourif (the dude who played Grima Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings movies). Totally bizarre since I just saw him in "Ragtime" the other night on cable.

In other news, I finished The Buccaneers today. Now I can watch the miniseries adaptation (Mira Sorvino plays Conchita, didn't quite picture the character that way).

Current book-in-progress: The Marquise of O-, Cultural Amnesia, still polishing off Abalsom, Absalom! (less than 100 pages left)
Current knitted item: It is still the blue "Harry Potter surprise"

You know you're pretty nerdy when....

...your Friday evening consists of working at the bookstore, playing 4 hours of "Myst III: Exile" after you get home from work at 10:45 pm, then reading 30 pages of Faulkner before finally crashing.

I am actually doing pretty good with the Myst game. I remembered to write things down while playing "Riven" and a number of the symbols are showing up in this game, so I'm not totally lost.

Current book-in-progress: The Buccaneers, Cultural Amnesia, finished The Story of French, and I'm working on polishing off Abalsom, Absalom!
Current knitted item: The blue "Harry Potter surprise" (what, you thought I'd be done? Psh, I have books to read and I'm getting really tired of people on the bus asking me "Is that hard?" Of course not, six-year-olds in impoverished countries can do this and probably much faster than I can.)