Book Review Time!

I just finished A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage. I'm not usually into nonfiction, but this was awesome. He basically shows how major world events were shaped by beer (which he presents as partially responsible for civilization), wine, liquor, coffee, tea, and Coke. Read it! It's great!

Bethie's book list

PS, I just read Turn of the Screw by Henry James...pretty good ghost story if you can get around his run-on sentances. I'm in the middle of Great Expectations, which is really good (Katie didn't think it was as good as East of Eden...which for those keeping track, was an EXCELLENT book), and am leafing through Germs, Guns, and Steel by Jared Diamond (good history, socioeconomics, evolution book).

Book Review time!

We lost power today with all the wind, so I had lots of reading time , since it was too scary to go outside and too boring to look at a blank TV. I started, and finished, a detective novel Suz gave me to read called Oblivion. It's about a private eye who starts a case, but then halfway through the book has a brain leak or something because of a tumor, and has to spend the rest of the novel trying to figure out what case he was working on. It was pretty good, I'd recommend it, and the idea was neat.

In order to read that, I decided to give up on one of two other books that I've been reading for a couple months. Coincidentally, I've been reading two very thought provoking, but very sad (auto)biographies (unusual for me since I normally stick to fiction). One is called Wild Swans, and it's by the first modern Chinese woman to earn a doctorate from the UK. It's the story of her family, first of her grandmother getting her feet bound when she was two, sold off to be a concubine and then widowed, then married (as a proper wife) to a Manchurian doctor, who's family then disowns him and his son commits suicide because he wants to marry a former concubine for love, instead of thinking of his family's honor. It just sort of spirals down from there, as the family then has to deal with the communist revolution tearing everything apart. Right now I'm at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and it is really truly awful. I only knew a little about the communist revolution before reading this book (which is banned in China, by the way), but it is really shocking what went on.

Zookeeper's wife is about the owners of a zoo in Warsaw hiding Jews during WWII, although I think that's sort of a misleading title because 1) yes it was a zoo, but not for most of the book after all the animals got shipped away by the Germans and 2) the most interesting character is the actual zookeeper, who does all this cloak and dagger resistance stuff. The wife is merely the one who kept the journal that the biographer found, and the book is, I think, a disjointed collection of anecdotes and happenings, and it's hard for me to stick with it. The anecdotes will start and end in the middle of chapters, and I never know what's the "main idea" of a chapter or a paragraph because it's all over the place. Just when something starts to get interesting, the narration veers off to something totally different and I get lost. For example, she'll spend two chapters introducing a new person, and then nothing happens with that person again except that they move into the zoo and fit in very well with the family life. I don't know, I found it hard to read, despite my interest in the topic.

Wild Swans is really good and very well written. Zookeeper's Wife, not as much, so when the combination of the two really started getting to me, I realized I had to give up on one of them. So, Zookeeper's Wife is going back to the library. Maybe I'll reread Harry Potter next, but not the last one, that was pretty depressing, too.

Book Review Time!

It's time again for long unsolicited opinions of my latest reads, starting with Ishmael. I picked this one because of those surveys about high school kids' reading preferences that I typed up. One kid said her favorite book was Ishmael, and because I'm reading Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael...") I thought they would dovetail nicely, even though I didn't have any idea what it was about. Ishmael turns out to be a philosophy book about a man who finds his guru, a gorilla named Ishmael who can communicate telepathically. This is surprisingly not a major plot point; I think this is really just a way to present his as an outside observer of humanity, whereas of course any human wouldn't be an outsider. Anyway, the whole book is a conversation between the two of them trying to discover why humanity is destroying the environment whereas animals don't. The gorilla breaks people down into Takers (people who've adopted what we would call civilization) and Leavers (those who didn't).

Although I think finding a way to live here more harmoniously is very important, I found this book rather frustrating to read because I thought it had some major logical inconsistencies. For example, at one point it stressed that there are some Leavers who practice agriculture, they're not all hunters and gathers. But at a different point, the major breakthrough moment of the book, the man comes to the realization that the primary difference between Leavers and Takers is that only Takers try to control their environment by practicing agriculture. Also, there was a lot of "historical reconstruction" of things that happened thousands of years ago using myths, which is never something I tend to be convinced by. It SOUNDS like a nice theory, but there's no way to prove it, or even disprove it. Bottom line: a disappointing book, more so because I agree with the author that it's important for us to find ways to leave smaller footprints.

Moby Dick, by the way, is getting interesting, but Beth has read a little farther ahead of me and she claims that there's not much more in the book that makes sense. Sigh!

I sort of skimmed through the parachute book. Generally it was about the whole process of applying for jobs, from networking to your resume to interviewing, and I'm more interested in just getting ideas for what careers to look into next year, sort of something to point me in the right direction, or any direction. It finally got sort of to this towards the end, but it had a lot of what I'm sure are good tips on self reflection and prioritizing, but it just made me want to watch cooking shows instead of find a career path. Plus, I never found out what the heck the title of the book meant. There was no mention of parachutes or colors or anything.

Anyway, I mentioned all this to my officemate Jane. Jane is the sort who, well.... Jane is really friendly, and she used to own a used bookstore so she did a lot of reading of lots of random stuff, and she's a mom who is very involved in her children's lives, and this involvement sort of spills over into all her relationships. If you have any problem or question or curiosity, she either knows the answer or will attack it like Ian's Shih-tzu Zeus goes after his little toy badger (this isn't Zeus, but it gives you a good idea. Turn your sound on). She brought me a book called Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for you Through the Secrets of Personality Type.

Chris scoffs at personality typing, but I think it's an interesting way to look at things. This book uses the Meyers-Briggs, which is the one with the four letters (ISTP or ENFJ, for example). First it walks you through figuring out your personality preferences, making sure you understand that it's really just a preference not an always. If you're J, it means you like making decisions rather than keeping things open-ended, but that's not ALWAYS and not in every situation. Anyway, then it tells you what sort of positions are generally appealing to people of that personality type. For example, INFP types (Introvert, iNtuition, Feeling, Perceiving) generally tend towards jobs where they have a lot of creative control where they can express themselves and help people, so they tend to be more comfortable as, say, a professional artist or a therapist rather than a job that requires more getting out and meeting people and convincing, like a salesman or politician. It didn't really tell me anything I didn't know about my preferences in a career. but it was more helpful to make it clear that my preferences aren't EVERYONE'S preferences. The book lists the characteristics of a job that personality types tend to like, such as working with a team vs. not, having a structured ladder to work up vs. organic unstructured companies, etc., and I was reading the ones for my personality type thinking, well of course everyone would want this in a job. And then I turned to some of the other types and they were making me cringe thinking about having to work in those environments, but some people prefer that. Some people LIKE making cold calls, which is not something I can ever begin to imagine liking. Anyway, it all makes sense, and I'm sure I already knew that on some level, but it was nice to have it presented like that. It's a neat book, if you're interesting in personality typing I'd recommend it, even if you're not looking to change jobs.

Finally, here's a picture that I found on the internet of what Harper might have looked like as a puppy (one of our great regrets is not seeing what she looked like as a puppy, although that's more than offset by her coming to us already excellently housebroken, which we don't think we would have been so good at teaching her).

I tried to read Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and I just couldn't wade through it. On to Moby Dick, which I'm reading with Bethie. It's a little easier to read, more funny, and has more colorful language. I think I'll like it, I like good naval stories. I just started, so they're still on land, but I enjoyed meeting Queequeg.

Time for a book update! I finished Chocolat. I hated the ending of the book. It's so similar in so many ways to the movie, but so different in all the wrong ways. Very disappointed. Let's just say, when my friend told me she wasn't into romantic books, I told her Chocolat the book might suit her just fine. Otherwise, I liked it.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is still irritating me sometimes. I really love the parts when she's actually talking about her farm, but it's when she gets into politics and trying to be persuasive that I get irritated. It pains me to say this because she's such a skilled writer, and Poisonwood Bible is one of my three favorite books of all time, but she just shoots herself in the foot needlessly. Here's the most recent example. She's talking about commerical organic produce farming, and how there's a non profit that helps farmers sell their organic produce (there are all kinds of rules). She says, "In 2005, ten years after the program began, participating family farms collectively sold $236,000 worth of organic produce to regional retailers and supermarkets, which those markets, in turn, sold to consumers for nearly $0.3 million." Ok. First of all, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this fact. In the context, she doesn't really help her reader know if this is a large number or a small number, or what. She seemed to think this was a good idea, but on the other hand, if you've got more than say five farmers, I bet $236K doesn't split up to be a large enough amount to cover their costs (which she says are substantial for organic farmers) AND make a living, and I'm guessing that we're talking about more then five farmers.

Secondly, I'm not a math person, but $236,000 and nearly $0.3 million sound really close to being the same number to me. Why change the format? Why not tell us the exact number? I can only assume that either this is an editing error on the part of the publisher, or she wrote this to make the second amount seem much larger and more impressive. I don't like being manipulated by fancy slight of hand if this is the case. However, again, the context doesn't tell me if we want the profit for the grocery store to be big or not. Is it good that the market is big, or is it bad because the grocery stores are making more of a profit from the produce? (Although, grocery stores traditionally have low profit margin, I'm told by a certain economist.)

This is really difficult for me. I really want to like this book, and I do like a lot of it and am very inspired to do some of the things she does in the book. But I can't help feeling like she's trying to manipulate the readers by not presenting all the facts and skewing the ones she does present. This is disappointing, especially considering her early career was in journalism (although, this may be why she's no longer in journalism). Sigh! Just looking at the critical reviews on Amazon, I don't seem to be the only one who feels this way, but most people by far gave it 5 stars.


I also just started The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. I like it so far. It's told through the eyes of an autistic boy who's trying to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor's dog.

By the way, I gave up on reading Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris. It was REALLY annoying. Lots of "had I known that my life would never be the same from that moment on..." or "we didn't know that we were making such a huge mistake..." and then you don't find out why what happened was so awful. Annoying.

Man, I'm just a post-maniac tonight. I have to vent. I started reading the Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. She won the Nobel prize for literature, I figured I should give it a shot. The whole first chapter, which was at least 50 pages long, was nothing but this awful, canned dialog. Like the kind that's only purpose is to insert conflict for conflict's sake, and to introduce us to the characters, like "As you know, my oldest friend Anna Wulf, I was divorced from Richard for 20 years and have just returned from a year abroad. As you also know, I am a amateur actress and I tend to talk with my hands." It was AWFUL! And it's not like it was poorly translated, she's British! Now, I will say that once I slugged through the first chapter, I did notice that the next chapter seems to be a complete different style, so maybe it'll be better. If not, I'm returning that sucker to the library and getting some more Agatha Christie. You got to love that Miss Marple, she's such a card.