Archive for the 'Books' Category

Favorite Reads of 2011

Published on December 12, 2011 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: best books, Best list, what I'm reading.

'Reading a book at the beach' photo (c) 2010, Simon Cocks - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

One of my favorite annual posts, here are my top reads from 2011. While I read about 50 books a year, only a handful are standouts. This year I may hit 70 reads!

What were your favorite reads this year?

Little Bee (2008) by Chris Cleave (F)

While I didn’t think this novel was particularly well-written, I have not been able to get it out of mind since reading it. It addresses the harsh realities of the immigration system and globalization by putting its focus on how one young girl irrevocably changes the lives of a British couple who meet her on a Nigerian Beach.

In the Woods (2007) and The Likeness (2008) by Tana French (F)

French writes detail-rich police procedurals that focus more on the lives and minds of the investigating officers than the suspects being investigated. I couldn’t put these novels down.

Stumbling on Happiness (2005) by Daniel Gilbert (NF)

Though this book is already nearing its 6th birthday, it’s still full of fascinating studies that explain how the brain works. Philosophers have written volumes on man’s pursuit of happiness; Gilbert wrote one detailing how the brain tricks us into believing we are happy even if all signs point to being unhappy. From addressing the paradox of choice to how the brain uses filler details where information is missing, Gilbert explains the science and psychology of the brain that helps you understand why people act the way they do.

Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making You Smarter (2006) by Steven Johnson (NF)

Johnson dismantles the disdain for popular entertainment from television to video games to explain how each is actually contributing to a brighter populace. Layered stories and multi-plot television programming and films require greater sophistication in comprehension to keep up. And strategic and spacial intelligence required of gamers. Johnson makes the case that pop culture shouldn’t be broadly dismissed as detrimental to society, when it’s challenging our brains in different ways from the past times of yesteryear.

The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness (2010) edited by Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith (NF)

This book is a compilation of articles from Greater Good magazine. It covers a wide range of research on ethics, empathy, happiness, showing how proper focus and framework in communications could move us all towards a greater good. The research covered in this book gives me more hope about humanity than I had before I started reading.

Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2003) by Erik Larson (NF)

Did you know that the Ferris wheel was invented in an effort to best the splendor of the Eiffel Tower? Me neither. And rigorous testing of the physics of hoisting all that metal and all those people in the air was not completed. Everyone basically crossed their fingers on the maiden rotation.

Amidst the chaos of trying to create a spectacular and profitable Chicago fair, at least one man took advantage of the confusion and miscommunication to commit unspeakable crimes, killing, disfiguring and disposing of women (primarily), children and men.

Black + White (2008) by Dani Shapiro (F)

Shapiro’s novel follows the estranged daughter, Clara, of a celebrated photographer (who shot to fame with a series of sexualized photos of her then-young daughter) returning to NYC during her mother’s final weeks of life. Clara does her best to come to terms with her mother’s self-serving actions and to understand that her mother loved her after all.

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (2010) by Matt Taibbi (NF)

Griftopia is another book that my mind keeps drifting back to consider. After reading Taibbi’s reporting it’s hard to not be infuriated that much of Wall Street and the mortgage industry has not been held accountable for systemic practices that enhanced financial risks and encouraged predatory lending, directed primarily at minorities, setting up a bubble bound to pop.

Disclaimer: Disclaimer: These books were not necessarily published in 2011. They do not necessarily belong on a list of best books ever, books to read before you die, or best kept secrets. It’s just a list of the books I enjoyed most in this calendar year.

Finding community in books

Published on April 30, 2011 in Books. 2 Comments Tags: characters, community, fiction, fictional characters, friends, reading, tribe.

a close reading of the text photo © 2009 kevin rawlings | more info (via: Wylio)Growing up socially-challenged, books were my best friends. Every spare moment in my day I filled with reading material.

I worked my way alphabetically through the children’s section of my hometown library, checking out stacks of picture books, then early readers before careful selections from spiral racks of tween books. (I eventually adventured into the fiction section to find discover Margaret Atwood and DH Lawrence.)

Yes, I started with Muppet Babies, Fraggle Rock and Amelia Bedelia, before graduating to pictureless Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, which gave way to Sweet Valley High. Long before Harry Potter and the Twilight series launched tween crazy for all things that go bump in the night, I devoured L. J. Smith’s witchy high school trilogy The Secret Circle; the dog-eared copies are still a treasured part of my book collection.

I’ve never had much interest in dissecting literature for important themes or reflections on the culture of the day. It would damage my relationship with the characters. Though I’d gladly tear apart a TV series to get at hidden meaning — Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s metaphorical examination of adolescence, anyone? — to do so with well drawn characters in books seems too cynical. I hate to look at the people between the pages as careful constructs.

After all, I solved mysteries with Nancy Drew and her cohorts. Imagined conversations with fictitious personalities helped me work through pubescent angst. And characters living out scenarios and environs otherwise outside my scope of experience pushed my mind beyond upper middle class New Jersey suburbia.

A soon-to-be-published study in Psychological Science found readers are drawn into the fictional communities of the books they read. Psychologists focused on the paranormal sub-genre using publishing sensations Harry Potter and Twilight. Even in the case of otherwordly, unrealistic plotlines, subjects self-identified with aspects of the characters lives.

It may help explain a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study reporting that adolescents with heavy reading habits are “one-tenth as likely to be depressed” as teens reading the least. Even when you feel alone in the world, you know you have friend in your favorite characters and a tribe in other fans.

Who were your fictional friends growing up?

Waning empathy and the explosion in reality programming

Published on January 3, 2011 in Books and Society. 2 Comments Tags: American Idol, empathy, Hell's Kitchen, Jersey Shore, reading, reality programming, reality Tv, television, The Biggest Loser.

Snooki at Seaside Heights NJ photo © 2010 Aaron | more info (via: Wylio)University of Michigan researchers are set to release a study reporting a sharp decline in empathy over the last decade, with the trait steadily sputtering out over the past 3 decades. As reported in a recent Scientific American article, “almost 75 percent of students today rate themselves as less empathic than the average student 30 years ago.”

Journalist Jamil Zaki suggests that a decline in fiction reading may be a contributing factor to this downward shift in sensitivity:

The types of information we consume have also shifted in recent decades; specifically, Americans have abandoned reading in droves. The number of adults who read literature for pleasure sank below 50 percent for the first time ever in the past 10 years, with the decrease occurring most sharply among college-age adults. And reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.

Instead, might we consider the number of hours young adults spend in front of television screens? In late 2009, the average American watched 4 hours and 49 minutes of programming each day, which is 20 percent more viewing than the decade prior. Earlier this year, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that children, ages 8-18 years old, average 7 hours and 38 minutes of entertainment consumption each day, including 4 hours and 29 minutes of television.

Aligned with the recent plunge in empathy is the explosion of reality programming in the past decade. In 2010 alone, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and Survivor: Heroes and Villains took 5 of the top 10 slots for prime time ratings; just 3 scripted shows made the list. From American Idol and The Biggest Loser to the Jersey Shore and Hell’s Kitchen, the revamped reality genre captivates audiences with its harsh treatment and criticisms of contestants. Creative editing makes enemies and underdogs of participants. Friendly, innocuous reality shows like Trading Spaces and What Not to Wear don’t stand a chance against the often brutal depictions and set-ups taking place on network television.

The Snookies and Situations of the world are overdrawn caricatures of real people left behind on the cutting room floor. The Jillian Michaels-esque coaches and insult-handy judges earn their livings punishing those caricatures for an hour each week on screen in your living room. The predominant characters aren’t there as relatable reflections of our lives; they are objects for our entertainment. They are the gladiators in the collosseum headed toward mass graves as their winning streaks come to an end.

With literature, people experience the richness of characters whose lives are very different from our own. From the beginning to the end of a great book, you can put yourself in that time or place and share in the struggles and successes of protagonists meant to draw you in and connect with your innermost insecurities, dreams and emotions. It’s a multi-dimensional slice of life across a variety of classes, races and cultures that allow you to see how seemingly unsimilar people’s lives aren’t so different after all.

Instead of PBS and the umpteenth BBC adaptation of yet another Jane Austen novel, Americans are choosing to watch fundamentally fake, carefully constructed, over-the-top behavior on reality programming, week-after-week, inspiring applications from those who seek entrenched Kardashian-level celebrity or the repeat of an Elizabeth Hasselbeck career transition. Can reality programming also explain the increase in college student narcissism that coincides with the decline in empathy?

If reality television is but a fickle trend, like our shift from zombies to vampires, we can impatiently wait for its replacement and hope better stories are on the way. But if it’s here to stay, we need to find the conditioning anecdote to remedy the disconnect experienced.

How do you view participants of reality programming that you watch? Do they feel like relatable three-dimensional people to you? Or do you recognize them as media constructs in place to entertain you?

VOD: So you want to write a novel

Published on December 3, 2010 in Books and Business. 0 Comments Tags: Books, novel, publishing, writer, writing.

A few years ago, a Jenkins Group survey found that 80 percent of Americans would like to write a book. (You can count me in too!) The reality is not nearly as glamorous as we’d like.

PS. What’s up with all of the videos, covering generalizations about various careers, that have been floating around of late?

The Empathic Civilization

Published on June 8, 2010 in Books and Society. 2 Comments Tags: animation, Jeremy Rifkin, summary of The Empathic Civilization.

For those of you who aren’t inclined to read all 688 pages of Rifkin’s sweeping retelling of human history and the role empathy plays in our interpersonal and intercultural affairs, here’s a video providing a brief overview of The Empathic Civilization, which was published earlier this year.

Favorite Reads in 2009

Published on December 14, 2009 in Books. 0 Comments

'Reading' photo (c) 2010, Sebastien Wiertz - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

One of my favorite annual posts, here are my top reads from 2009. While I read about 50 books a year, only a handful are standouts.

Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto by Osha Gray Davidson (NF)

I haven’t spent much time in the flyover states, but I have driven cross-country twice. When you wander off the AAA flagged gas stops in your travel guide, the patent poverty of some parts of our country is heart-breaking.

Davidson’s books gets to bottom of what has gone wrong in rural America that has left so many families in precarious financial situations, if not outright destitution. The American obsession with scaling successful businesses into monopolistic vertical enterprises has crippled the family farmer that can’t compete with big Agro, nor the lobbyist dollars that make sure agro policy helps the industrial farms at the expense of the little guy.

The Green Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems by Van Jones (NF)

Hopefully the author’s name sounds familiar; he serves as a green jobs advisor to the Obama administration.

This book outlines the potential of the Green Economy with regards to the environmental, social, and fiscal impact. By investing in clean energy, we’re also investing in a massive influx of blue collar + jobs that require a bit more than a high school diploma to provide a living wage and career opportunities. Since environmental devastation hits low-income communities the hardest (pollution, health risks, etc), the green economy would not just clean up areas struggling financial but bring solid jobs to those regions. It’s an easy read chock full of interesting anecdotes and success stories.

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler (NF)

You’ll never grocery shop the same again. Kessler’s book details how the food industry, from processed snacks to chain restaurant meals, carefully formulates each edible item it sells, maximizing palitability via the proper sugar to fat to salt ratio. Most aspects of our lives can be considered a social construct, but our national eats, they’re following a food scientist’s blue print.

The Kindness of Strangers by Katrina Kittle (F)

I should warn you that this book is heart wrenching; even so, I couldn’t put it down. The night I read it, I meant to stop at page 50. Instead, I made it to the final page, 390.

Kittle introduces us the Laden family, a young widow and her two adolescent sons who have been struggling to hold it together since the death of Mr. Laden two years ago. Sarah accidentally finds herself in the center of another tragedy: the arrest of a neighborhood couple for child pornography and pedophilia following Sarah saving their son Jordan from his suicide attempt. After Sarah’s eldest son Nate connects with Jordan, he convinces his mom to foster Jordan, which will irrevocably change all of their lives.

The Dark Side by Jane Mayer (NF) (added 12/31/09)

This books looks as the culture and climate that allowed the Bush administration to thoroughly trample the Constitution, as well as international treaties preventing torture, in the post 9/11 years. It reviews how criminal behavior became accepted via stealthily-written legalese. It’s required reading for informed citizens.

Special Topics in the Calamity of Physics by Marisha Pessl (F)

A page-turner I couldn’t wait to pick up each day. A brilliant high school senior with a nomadic, academic father settles at a seemingly arbitrary high school for her final year of secondary school. The characters are much more intimately entwined that a first glance would indicate, and the double meaning of teacher Hannah Schneider’s words is only revealed in the final chapters.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace (F)

This fall marked the one year anniversary of D.F.W.’s suicide. His loss still strikes a cord with his fans.

I loved this book. Alternating short overheard conversations with interview vignettes that run several pages, Wallace is able to tease out complicated characters with just a few paragraphs or pages. Some of the characters I wish he had dwelled upon a bit longer. Others I couldn’t wait to be freed of.

For those of you who don’t like books, there’s always the movie adaptation that came out this year.

Disclaimer: Disclaimer: These books were not necessarily published in 2009. They do not necessarily belong on a list of best books ever, books to read before you die, or best kept secrets. It’s just a list of the books I enjoyed most in this calendar year.

Related: Favorite Reads of 2008

Heartbreaking photo essay of an abandoned school in Detroit

Published on March 14, 2009 in Books and Education. 3 Comments Tags: abandoned building, Books, Detroit, learning, Public Schools.

The interior of the former Detroit Public Schools’ book depository is the first of many heart-breaking photos in James Griffioen’s Vice Magazine photo essay. It’s not only sad to see a place of learning abandoned, but that so many resources that could have been used by other school districts and charities were left to rot is just criminal.

Via The Daily Dish

QOD: Oh, the Places You'll Go

Published on March 2, 2009 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: oh the places you'll go, quote, quotes, Seuss.

photo by badjonni

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look ‘em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

from Oh The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss

Clearing off your book shelves? Ensure they find a good home

Published on January 4, 2009 in Books and Useful Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: Books, donate books, tips, used books.

photo by photocapy

I’m doing some tidying up of my unread book piles, pulling out titles that peaked my interest a few years ago, but that I’m no longer inclined to need. Given the rise of the used book market, it isn’t worth posting to half.com, when I’m likely to bring in $1 or less for most of the tomes I want to send on to their next home.

The next best thing to money is another book, which is why I list books in need of a good home at BookMooch. At BookMooch I earn points for each book I send to a fellow member. In turn, I get to use those points to mooch books from other users.

But like any retailer experiences, some books just aren’t flying off the shelves in your chosen location or demographic. Thus, I’ve been looking for alternative places to distribute books in need of new homes.

Your local library

The most obvious choice for donation is your local library, most of which will give you a receipt that you can probably use to write off the donation come tax time. Older books aren’t likely to go into circulation, but they may wind up being sold as part of the regular used book sale fundraising.

For those of you looking for more creative places to donate your used books, there are plenty of options.

Prisons

Looking to get rid of old college textbooks? Already solved that quarterlife crisis and don’t need those self-help books any more? Look no further than your local prison. While the rules vary from prison to prison, many accept a variety of educational and recreational reading materials, since their library budgets are limited.

We all know the resale value of college text books is limited since new editions with different pagination are constantly being issued. Here’s an opportunity to really pay it forward.

Books Behind Bars provides information about what types of reading materials are accepted by prisons all around the country and to whom you should ship your donation

Prisons also gladly accept used fiction, particularly paperback since it’s easier to ship.

Books to Prisoners is a volunteer organization that ships requested titles to individual prisoners nationwide. They send out close to 10,000 books a year are are always looking to replenish their stockpile.

Troops

People are still looking for ways to support the troops abroad. Shipping your collection of Stephen King paperbacks to deployed soldiers is one way to go.

Low-income kids

Basic literacy will forever be a key component of early childhood education. Unfortunately not all school libraries are well-stocked and not all families can afford to buy books for home. These groups try to put books in the hands of young learners throughout the country. So if you have gently used children’s titles to get out of the house, consider these two groups.

Books First distributed more than 15,000 books to teachers and their classes in 2007, benefiting more than 2000 pupils.
Project Nightlight reaches out to homeless children, providing “individual tote bags each filled with a security blanket, an age-appropriate book, and a stuffed animal to children (ages 0-10) in homeless shelters.” They are always looking for like new books to be included in their care packages; if you’re as obsessive about your books as I am about mine, most of them are like new.

When all else fails, Got Books? The group ensures no books winds up in a landfill. Some books they sell, donating half the proceeds to a variety of charities, and others they donate to schools.

Double Coconut Pancakes

Published on December 30, 2008 in Books and Health. 0 Comments Tags: coconut, cooking, pancakes, recipe.

photo by araswami

I am a notoriously bad pancake maker and have long resigned myself to restaurant pancakes. Not any more.

These are the best pancakes ever, and I wanted to share the recipe (from Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2007). I used unsweetened coconut flakes in mine.

Overall, Cooking Light puts together an amazing cookbook of their previous year’s magazine recipes. Some of my favorite recipes hail from their publications.

1 1/2 c all purpose flour
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp flaked sweetened coconut
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 (13.5 oz can) light coconut milk
1 tbsp butter
1 large egg, lightly beaten

1. Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups, level with a knife. Combine flour, sugar, and next 3 ingredients in a large bowl. Combine coconut milk, butter, and egg, stir well. Add coconut milk mix to flour mix, stirring until smooth.

2. Pour about 1/4 c batter per pancake onto a hot nonstick griddle or nonstick skillet. Cook 3 minutes or until tops are covered with bubbles and edges look cooked. Carefully turn pancakes over, cook 2 minutes or until bottoms are lightly browned.

Yield 4 svgs, 3 pancakes each

300 calories/29% from fat; 9.7g fat, 7.6g protein, 46.6 g carb, 1.4g fiber, 60mg chol, 521 mg sodium, 14mg calcium