I got this as an audiobook as a cure for some of the drier nonfiction I’ve been listening to. It’s about what you’d expect of an urban fantasy. The protagonist is a vampire private investigator soccer mom named Samantha Moon. She’s asked to investigate the attempted murder of a man who’s a criminal defense attorney (and also a werewolf.)

Since I write urban fantasy, I have a thick filter for others’ work in this genre. Some aspects didn’t please me at all. Samantha goes on and on about how difficult it is to live as a vampire, but she’s able to walk in the sun! She can drink blood from a butcher shop! There are real humans alive today whose disabilities are far beyond what Samantha Moon whinges about. She worries about providing a good home for her kids now that she’s a vampire, but honestly, her lifestyle is less abnormal than someone who works nights. Her diet is less onerous than that of some people I’ve met. (The blood doesn’t have to be kosher or halal or locally sourced or certified organic.)

The mystery is competently done, but it’s not really central to the book so much as a vehicle for exploring Samantha’s vampirism and her relationship to it. That’s actually fine by me. Part of what I like about mysteries is the way in which the familiar path of the plot leads you along so easily that the reader can relax and admire the scenery. In this book, the scenery is her crumbling marriage and her vampirism. While I found her marital struggles interesting, the vampire part kind of bored me because I’ve read so many vampire books that nothing is really new to me anymore. Yes, yes, she’s powerful and hungry. Been there, done that. Tell me more about her relationship with her sister. I’m at the point where I want vampirism to be just a small aspect of her character, not the totality of it. It’s like when I read a mid-century novel and the author feels the need to explain to me drug terms, like “cold turkey” and “the works.” Or if a Regency author set aside a paragraph or two to explain what Vauxhall was and why they all had to get dressed up to go there. I know these things, and don’t need to have them explained.

Of course, I also know that I may not be the target audience. Some of the fantasy elements were clearly of the wish-fulfillment variety. Samantha can beat up professional boxers. Samantha kicks the shit out of bad guys (It’s okay if they die, because they’re gangbangers.) Samantha runs across and wins the heart of hunky men. Samantha is given mysterious jewelry by sexy strangers. I found the way she caved in to her husband to be implausible (given how blase she was about demonstrating her vampirism elsewhere, such as in the street and in the boxing studio, it didn’t make sense that she was so afraid of being outed that she’d cave in to heinous blackmail), but it didn’t ruin it for me.

This is all great popcorn stuff. It’s easy and fun, and while it’s not likely to make anyone’s top ten list, it’s good enough that if you want a reliable beach-read, this might be your series.

I got this book on audible, and the narrator did an excellent job. I didn’t cringe at the voices at all. Samantha sounds sultry, and everyone else sounds different enough to be distinctive without being annoying.

View all my reviews

For some reason, I thought this book would be funnier. Why would a book about parasites be funny? Maybe because I associate parasites with travel horror stories, and travel horror stories are almost always hilarious. It does manage to be funny at parts, but mostly it’s gross.

I always prefer non fiction books in which the author is presenting his or her own original work, rather than material gleaned from other books I’ve probably already read, so this meets my first criterion. This feels like a memoir of sorts, a collection of interesting stories and lectures from a long career teaching parasitology.

The author states in the epilogue that as a teacher, his goal is to make his students share in his fascination for the subject matter. I love reading about tropical medicine, diseases I don’t have, and lurid details of medical tragedies. This book does not make me want to study parasitology further. It also makes me want to never do any of the following:

Swim in a lake
Eat lettuce
Use a hand towel
Eat street food in 3rd world countries
Pet dogs
Eat raw meat or fish
visit Africa

There were some unforgettable stories in this, like why river blindness is called river blindness, and why schistosomiasis is now top on my list of “diseases I never want to have.”* Most gruesome was the woman who thought she was pregnant, only to find that it wasn’t a baby, it was a disgusting parasitic cyst 20 years in the making. But wait, there’s more! Let’s put it this way, flukes and tapeworms are not the grossest thing in this book. I don’t think of myself as squeamish, but I almost dry-heaved at the discussion of roaches and the icky things living in their guts.

I can tell the author really loves his subject matter, and there were times when the stories almost reached the point where they were hilarious, but something was missing. Maybe it was the narrator, whose dry-deadpan professor voice deadened the punchlines. I could tell in some chapters that the author was trying to milk the story for all it was worth, and sometimes it dragged it out too much. Also, the pure ickiness of the subject matter sometimes made the humor feel inappropriate, like a risque joke told by a dirty old man.

The science was compelling, if a little hard to follow (not a Biology major here), and the stories were generally good, if not quite excellent. There’s a chance that they’ll be much funnier and more interesting when read rather than listened-to.

I recommend this for people who like biology, for people who like travel stories, and for people who do not get disgusted easily.

*The list of “diseases I would like to have” remains empty.

View all my reviews

This is a story which has not often been told, the story of America’s internal migration of black southerners to the west, midwest, and north-east during the first half of the twentieth century.

Because I got this as an audiobook, it felt very much like an extra-long episode of “This American Life.” Wilkerson chose three separate families and followed their exodus from the southern (Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi) states of their birth. She focused on one particular person from each family, but included how the move impacted their extended family as well.

I did have some trouble following along with the stories, because there seemed to be so many different characters that I couldn’t keep track of who was who. I figured it out mostly by the end of it, but I’d missed out on some of the beginning information because I couldn’t connect the characters. It may have been different if I had been reading it in a chair and concentrating instead of listening to it on my commute.

Because this book deals with race relations in America which–let’s be honest–still aren’t that great, it’s likely to hit your indignation buttons if you’re even a little bit liberal. One example was the story of recent immigrants to American who rioted and destroyed the property of a black family for the crime of legally renting property in their neighborhood. The irony of first and second generation Americans protesting to keep “them” out of their neighborhood, when “them” were people whose families had been in American for hundreds of years, was pointed out by the author. She manages to avoid most melodrama and let the facts speak for themselves.

There are a few demographic facts sprinkled throughout the book, but the bulk of the content involves just the factual and emotional memoirs of these three families. This is a good way to get a feel for the era, and to feel some empathy for the people involved, but those who want something drier and more statistics-based might be disappointed.

I recommend this for people who want an easy way to learn about an important aspect of American culture. If you’re interested in American history at all, this should be on your list.

View all my reviews

Stewart wrote FLOWER CONFIDENTIAL about the floral industry, so one can posit that like me, she loves plants. Like me, she’s also fascinated with poison and murder. The book is lush with exquisitely beautiful (and sometimes exquisitely macabre) illustrations. With short chapters, plentiful illustrations, and a thorough table of contents, this is a fast read.

(I’m not going to go so far as to say that this is the perfect book for the back of the toilet, but WICKED PLANTS does have short entries, each of which is interesting, and yet none of which will take longer than five or ten minutes to read. Just sayin…)

It’s a little light on the science for science fans, but at least there aren’t a huge cast of organic chemicals clogging up the prose like characters in a Russian novel. It’s a little light on the gardening tips for passionate botanists, but has enough new facts in both categories that you’ll learn new things. I didn’t realize that I had three of these plants in my own yard. I knew oleander was poisonous (everyone knows that) but sago palm?

This is a good gateway book for people who aren’t into non-fiction but would like to be. It’s also a good book if you have anyone in your life who doesn’t read much because they think novels are a waste of time.

View all my reviews

The main problem with reading classic literature of the sort which has influenced an entire genre is that the most groundbreaking and creative aspects seem trite and derivative. I chose this because, as a novella, it consists of fewer hours than a full novel, and because it’s considered a classic. Since I hadn’t seen the movie, I didn’t know much about what the story was about (except a non-vampire in a world of vampires) and although I knew there was some sort of “twist” ending, I wasn’t sure what it was.

Robert Neville is the uninfected protagonist, the lone human who is plagued by vampires at night. The white-faced vampires plead with him to come out of his house so that they can drink his blood. By day he hunts them, stabbing stakes in their hearts. He’s got a fortress that would make any libertarian proud. He has boarded-up windows, generators, and a supply of canned and frozen foods. He listens to classical music constantly, to drown out the moans and pleading of the undead, and he drinks whiskey constantly to drown out his sorrowful memories.

One of the disadvantages of an audiobook is that you can’t stop and flip it over to find out information, such as who wrote it, or when it was published. It’s set in 1975, but even without looking up the publication date (just checked–Google says 1954) I could tell that it was written well before 1975. A big tip off was that Neville had a solid middle-class job, yet didn’t have a car. I can’t conceive of someone not having a car in Los Angeles without that defining their existence. Not having a car in Los Angeles is like not having a boat if you live in a swamp.

More telling for me was the way in which the gender roles were presented. Reading older literature is like having a window on the past. Neville lives in a 1975 that has never seen women’s lib. When his wife dies, he stops cleaning his house, showering, etc. I guess back in the 50′s, a man left such civilized niceties as “soap” and “razors” to the womenfolk, never figuring that these are skills he might accomplish on his own.

The women are presented as predominantly vessels of love and desire. His late wife exists only as a vehicle for Neville’s love and sorrow. Her reactions to the dust storms and the plague aren’t even hinted at, nor are those of her daughter. The female vampires he kills and sometimes experiments on are also mere objects to him, and he blames them for the lust which torments him. (How much more tragic when the apocalypse happens in the days before varied and plentiful porn!)

Neville is not a nice guy. He’s a serial killer who loves to prey on the helpless. He hates everyone and everything, including himself. That, at least, I could empathize with. I hated him too. At one point, he sees a stray dog that somehow survived the vampire sickness, and his clumsy attempts to woo the dog give him some human appeal, but not enough to make up for the rest of his behavior. I didn’t feel sorry for him, or root for him. Was I supposed to?

I knew from the first word to the last that I was never intended to be the target reader for this novel. Literature from other centuries always makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. It’s one thing if the protagonist has a narrow worldview, but when the author doesn’t seem to understand anyone outside his narrow demographic (or care that they don’t), I feel unhappy. I believe if you want to write about people, you have to try to understand people who don’t have the same skin color and plumbing you do. Modern authors seem to take this more seriously.  For example, because brown people didn’t exist before 1970 (or so television has told me) all of the people in this story are white. Los Angeles without Hispanic culture feels as authentic as Seattle without rain.

I imagine the target reader for this novella was a SF fan (presumed male) back in the 50s, who probably would have loved the idea of holing up in his modest ranch house (with all the modern conveniences!), venturing out like a diurnal VanHelsing to prey on helpless, vampiric women.

Would the target reader have seen his behavior as noble? Would they have had a shocking twist as they realized, perhaps late in the novella, that his behavior was abhorrent? I rolled my eyes that the only woman allowed to speak has to be a sex-object. Would the target reader have been oblivious to the fact that the woman he meets just happens to be young, happens to be pretty, happens to be single, happens to be white, happens to be wearing a dress?  When she confesses her love for him, I felt disgusted. She was almost a real character before the author made her do that. Really? This murderer chases her down, hits her, kidnaps her, and then interrogates her in a threatening manner, and she still falls for him in less than 24 hours? I cry shenanigans. That’s not a person, that’s a fantasy.

I got this from audible, and while the narrator’s version of Neville wasn’t bad (if a bit over-dramatic for my taste) I HATED how he did the women’s voices. Note to anyone who does voice acting: reading anyone’s part in a falsetto says “I feel nothing but contempt for this person.” Reading all the women’s voices in a falsetto makes me furious.

I recommend this novella for English classes and discussion groups where people want to talk about society and morality and the like. It’s pretty dark and depressing, so I don’t recommend it for people who are hoping for hope and romance.

View all my reviews

Here’s a picture of my first proof for Seeing Things. I guess I put a photo up here before. There’s something really exciting about holding a paper version of your book in your hand.

It took a lot of frustration and exploration to get it to this point. I had been told I had to get my book in PDF form in order to get it on CreateSpace. A PDF converter is easy enough, but I could only convert it as an the 8 1/2 x 11″ document that it defaulted to on word. It took a while to realize that Word has hidden tools that will let you change the paper size and margins. But what paper size? What margins?  Well, they say if you want to do something well, a good idea is to copy someone who did it right. Enter Ms. Valentine’s lovely book (which you ought to read.)

This is kind of what I wanted my book to look like. So I opened it up and took a ruler to measure margins and page size. I used it to tell me where to have the title page and where to have the isbn page, and all those other things you think you know just because you’ve read a zillion books (but don’t.)

I had some obstacles formatting it to this stage. The biggest one was figuring out how to remove the headers and footers from the title and blank pages. The CreateSpace forums told me how to do it, but it still wasn’t obvious or intuitive. I tried to follow the directions, but it wasn’t working. I’d get frustrated to tears, then have to take a break and go back to it, hoping I’d see something I hadn’t before. Finally I got past this. I uploaded my document (and you don’t have to convert it to PDF after all, so I didn’t even need the PDF converter software I’d downloaded). I uploaded my photo. I reviewed it. I ordered a proof. I waited.

Then the book came.  See photo above.

When I first decided to make the cover, I used the same photos as I’d used from the ebook cover. It wasn’t until holding the proof in my hands that the poor resolution became apparent. The text, especially was not pretty. I knew the original photo had been with an older camera, so I chalked the poor resolution of the cup to that, and assumed that GIMP just had weak text tools. Like I mentioned before, Jeremy had similar problems making a CD cover, and he told me he used Paint or another tool, then created a PDF of that text and used it as an image.

We took new photos, and I started over from scratch. However, no matter what I used to make the text, it remained blurry. Finally, we figured out the problem. I hadn’t set the image resolution high enough when I created it.

So I started over again with new photos.  I couldn’t get the shadow right, so I decided to just make an oval that looked like a shadow. This took me maybe eighteen tries.

The other problem with the first draft is that the margins were off. Somehow it had defaulted itself to 1″ lower margins.  The page numbers were too high as well (.5″ instead of .3″), and it took a while to figure out where to go to fix that. That took a few pages off my manuscript length, which meant that the PDF would have to be resized, but I figured 6-10 pages wasn’t going to make a difference.  The gutter margin was a little deep, but I’d been told to make it deeper than you think it needs to be, so I left it.

Other problems: the lower margin seemed to flutter from page to page. I was told to “shut off widow and orphan control” to take care of this. I did that, and it removed 7 pages from my manuscript, but I figured 7 pages wouldn’t make a difference.

I did a lot of digital proofs to get this one.  Tweak, submit. Wait a day. Open, review. Tweak, submit, wait a day. Open, review. Tweak, submit, wait a day. Open, review. I think it took three times before I was ready to order another proof.

And…here’s my lovely proof! Oh, wait. Why is it orange? It’s supposed to be burgundy. The first one was a kind of reddish brown, which was close, but this is definitely orange. Also, the shadow looks weird. Good news though, the auto-correct PDF that CreateSpace did didn’t alter the image significantly.

Flipping it open, I see that now the “a little bit wide, but okay” gutter margin looks HUGE. Once I fixed the bottom margin and the page number placement, the aspect ratio of the extra-wide gutter margin was way off. Displeasingly off.

Doing some research, I figured out that the problem was that the “gutter margin” meant what you add in addition to the left or right margin, not instead of the left or right margin. So instead of .75″, it was 1.35″. Okay, that’s easy to fix. Just change the numbers. This removed over thirty pages from the length of the manuscript, but the PDF sizing adjustment had worked fine before, so I wasn’t worried about it.

Also, the page numbers weren’t right. Each chapter page has its own section, and I had to alter the page number margin for every one.

After I finished the interior, I tinkered with the coloring of the exterior, altering several layers so that it was closer to the dark red I wanted. My friend Keyan had made some promo postcards last year with quotes from some positive reviews, so I used those quotes on the back. I liked the way they made the layout look.

Upload, submit, wait. Review digital proof, order physical proof. Wait.

Got this last Thursday. I was so excited, and showed it to everyone. It’s finally done, I said. People asked when it would be available for purchase, and I said “soon.” I was relieved. It’s finally done.

Then I showed it to Jeremy. He immediately pointed out that the cover was squished. The cup wasn’t round anymore. That last 30 pages made a difference. Also, they’d warned me that the author photo wasn’t high enough resolution, and while I didn’t notice or care, Jeremy pointed out the pixellation along the nose, and then I did notice (and care.)

No. It was good enough, I insisted. At least the interior was perfect, I said. Then I idly flipped through and found out that wasn’t the case. Some of the continuous page breaks came on the wrong side of the carriage return, causing weird word spacing. Noticable word spacing.  My fingers are pointing to the line on the left.

Frankly, I sulked. I didn’t want to work on it anymore. I’m so tired of working on it. I pouted. Also fumed. Then I cried. Then I resigned myself to one more proof.

Jeremy figured out how to upload a better resolution of the photo. I altered the cover art to shrink the horizontal measurement without comprimising the significant layers. I fixed the strange sentence spacing. I stayed up late so I could submit for review and order my proof the next day. On Saturday, April 7th, I ordered another proof.

I noticed the next must-fix mistake before I’d even gotten the proof back. Those widows and orphans? Yeah, apparently there are people who care about that stuff. To me it’s like worrying whether your napkin has been folded into a swan or not. WHO CARES?

But people do care. I didn’t manually alter the kerning and line spacing to make sure there were no widows at all (I assume word can do that, but have no delusions that it’s easy or clean). I completely ignored orphans. I did, however, alter sentence structure so that one and two word widows or “runts” got sucked back into the previous page, and when that wouldn’t work, I added descriptions to the end. I think it looks a little neater. It’s not flawless, but 99.8% of readers won’t notice.

Still waiting for the proof to arrive later this week, at which point, I’ll upload the new interior, make any corrections to the cover’s color, submit, review, and order another proof. Maybe that one will be done. I’d like to just take a break from it for a while, but I know of a couple book clubs that are looking at adding my book, and it’s hard to make a book club get a book that’s only available electronically.

I sure hope TREEMAKER goes easier.

I really enjoyed Matthew Cody’s first book, POWERLESS, so I was delighted when a copy of Cody’s latest MG fantasy THE UNDEAD GENTLEMAN arrived in the mail.

Unabashedly steampunk, this novel throws steampunk elements at the reader like a magician flinging cards. Submarines! Goggles! Mechanical birds! Time travel! One of the two protagonists, Tommy Lerner, even comes from the right time period. Tommy’s an Explorer, last of a secret society devoted to exploring the hidden mysteries of the world. Jezebel Lemon, fellow New Yorker (albiet of a modern century) meets him when he appears in her room to warn her that the monsters in her closet are real.

As the title implies, the events of the novel revolve around the dead gentleman, an evil lich who wants to take possession of Merlin, the mechanical bird that is the unofficial mascot of the Explorer’s academy. Tommy and Jez don’t know why the undead gentleman wants the bird, but they do know that if he gets it, he will destroy the world.

This book is written to appeal to preteen readers, and I suspect it will do so admirably. How can it not? It’s got adventure! Dinosaurs! Monsters! Airships! I couldn’t help but put exclamation points after them, because it felt like that’s how the elements were introduced.

I rarely say this about anything (plodding dense novels being anathema to me) but this book was actually too fast-paced for my taste. In one scene we’re near the bottom of the ocean, and then we’re in the land of the lost, and then we’re in the Academy, and then it’s a hidden city, and then it’s back in New York again, and it all went so fast I felt I never quite got my bearings. I never figured out how things worked. How did they go to other dimensions? Why was Tommy chosen as an Explorer? What, exactly, did the trogs think about him? Where was Jez’s father this whole time? I’m sure somewhere there’s a 10-year-old who has read this book eighteen times already, and can sit me down and impatiently explain the whole manifesto, but I want to be able to figure things out on the first read.

I have mixed feelings about the characters. I liked Jezebel Lemon well enough, but Tommy Lerner grated my nerves from the first sentence to the last. I think he was supposed to be a swashbuckling brave street kid, but he came off as a smug brat who thought he knew everything and didn’t listen very well. The other characters weren’t involved enough for me to get to know any of them. Even Captain Scott had what felt like a small cameo. I liked what little I saw of Jez’s father, but he wasn’t around very much. The action-packed plot pretty much dominated the novel, leaving little room for character development or world-building.

Some books written for younger readers transcend their age group and appeal to everyone. Harry Potter was one of these. I wouldn’t classify THE DEAD GENTLEMAN as one that parents will be snatching out of their kids’ grasps. This book was written for middle-grade readers, and as I said before, I think it will appeal to both boys and girls. If you have a child or a young friend with a voracious appetite for books, slip this on their stack. They’ll likely find it to their taste.

View all my reviews

This is a charming story about a young woman’s experiences living overseas. As the back flap will tell you, Eve had been toying with the idea of joining the Peace Corps for years, but her mere idea became a must-do when she fell head-over-heels in love with her Peace Corps recruiter, John.

Desperate to prove herself worldly enough for him, Eve joins the Peace Corp and moves to Ecuador. At first, the poverty and depredations make her miserable, but eventually she finds a place for herself as a social worker/reverse Peter Pan, helping lost boys find their way home.

When a medical event causes her to move back to the states, Eve goes back to dating John, sure that now that she’s proved herself, they can live happily ever after in a first world country. But John hasn’t shaken the ex-pat bug, and the two soon find themselves living in northern Uganda, in a city that most Americans are forbidden to go to (because it’s too dangerous.)

I thought this was going to be something of a cautionary tale about what happens when a woman does something she really doesn’t want to do in order to be with the man she loves. But it’s not that, not really. It’s mostly just a memoir of someone who did what many of us wished we had done–travel the world and have adventures. Even the stories of getting malaria and dysentry, of gunfire in the streets and termites swarming in the house didn’t keep me from envying her, just a little.

Like most good travelogues, this book will make you feel that you experienced the good parts of her trips while shielding you from some of the bad parts. It may make you wish you could go on a safari of your own, or wistful that you, too, didn’t join the Peace Corps. (Or is it really too late? They take old people, don’t they?)

I listened to this as an audiobook, and shockingly enough, I didn’t hate the narrator. She “did voices” for most of the people, but I felt the voices added, rather than detracted, from the story.

I recommend this for former ex-pats, people who wished they were ex-pats right now, and people who like travelogues.

View all my reviews

Before I listened to this book, I took some online quizzes to find out if I was more right brained or left brained. Three quizzes said I was left brained, one said I was right brained. So when I say I didn’t like this book, you can chalk it up to my left-brained narrow-mindedness.

Pink starts out his book with one solid premise: left-brained tech centered jobs are being outsourced overseas and taken over by computers. If you want to succeed, you need to learn how to be more in touch with the right side of your brain. I get the feeling that his target demographic is computer programmers and the upper management of tech companies.

He launched into his arguments by throwing around statistics; such and such million dollars are spent on design, design is important, we live in an age of abundance, so good design is what sells, therefore an MFA is the new MBA. I already started to feel skeptical. If you’re a designer, you probably already have a solid background in art. If you are not a designer, learning to draw is not likely to make you into one. Saying that because good design is important, learning art will help you get ahead is like saying that since the best college athletes get full scholarships, if you learn to throw a ball your tuition will be cheaper. Its logic did not convince me.

Much of the other examples seemed too specific to be useful. He talks about how empathy is important to doctors, which is great, if you’re a doctor, but most of us aren’t. (no advice on how to be less empathic, which is what I want, so I can avoid cringing when people crack their knuckles near me.) He also gives an example of a model highschool, where the kids have an art based curriculum that encourages their creative sides to flourish. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m getting a little tired of non-educators talking about “what’s wrong with our schools.” Again, if you’re an educator, this might be useful [doubt it, cough cough], but how many of us are?

By part two, I was solidly feeling that I didn’t like this book, and I tried to figure out why.

My left brain says that it’s because he started out by making an argument (see above), failed to convince me of this argument, and then proceeded to talk about different topics that had little to do with the original argument. My left brain wanted a neat, logical progression from hypothesis to proof, to summary. Not that that’s the only kind of book I like. I adored Malcolm Gladwell’s books, which did not strive to prove anything, but instead used well-researched essays to elaborate on a theme. Pink’s book spends a little time trying (unsuccessfully) to prove his hypothesis, and then devolves into “how to make your life fulfilling.” Nothing wrong with a book on how to give your life meaning, but that’s not the kind of book it promises to be. It struck me as weird that, at the tail end of a section on using labyrinths as meditiation, he segued directly into “if you can’t get in touch with this side of life, you’re going to get left behind” jargon. Huh? It’s like saying “money isn’t important, family is, and people who don’t remember that aren’t going to earn as much in their paychecks.”

My right brain says I just didn’t trust the guy’s authority. Because I didn’t think he proved his first proposition, my mistrust snowballed with every bizarre suggestion he made. He thinks that you should subscribe to good design magazines, and he reads the titles and urls so you can, I dunno, write them down while you’re driving or at the gym or wherever you happen to be listening to the audiobook. Does reading design magazines make you a better designer? Or does it just make you into a know-it-all who thinks good design is easy? He suggests you make a journal of good designs, and will “be amazed” at how your own capacity for recognizing good design has improved. Really? Has he tried this? Maybe he has. Maybe he’s tried everything he suggests, but I didn’t believe it.

His advice struck me a lot like the advice in the book (which he lauds) DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN, which was inflicted on me when I was an art student in high school. Some people love this book, and if you’re one of them, good for you. It takes people whose art ability is at a zero, and makes them draw at a five. It also takes people whose art ability is at a seven, and makes them draw at a five. It’s like training wheels for a bicycle. If you can’t do it at all, it helps you do it a little. If you’re trying to shave a few minutes off your 100 mile time, training wheels are a pain in the ass. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like this book, because I’m left brained in that I’m not late for things, I’m organized, I think logically, I’m verbal. But I also draw, paint, sculpt, create stories, garden, and am more empathic than I would like to be. Maybe his advice seems facile and fatuous because I don’t need it. Maybe there are people who need his training wheels, who think that having story parties or laughter clubs or the other odd suggestions are more than just a way to waste time and mark yourself as a weirdo. Maybe you’re not expected to actually do them. Maybe they’re like Martha Stewart craft suggestions, where the reader and author are indulging in the fantasy that the reader is the kind of person who is willing and able to spend $800 dollars in imported roses and 14 hours to create a wreath to decorate a child’s bassinet to make your christening party perfect. Maybe Pink’s suggestions are just what they seemed to be: half-assed, un-tested woo-woo ideas that no one, least of all the author, would really try.

Or that could be my cynical left-brain talking.

Pink has read a lot of good books; I know, because I’ve read a lot of the same ones he’s read. But he seems like he’s used high quality ingredients to come up with a mediocre dish. He had the ingredients for a “how to find meaning through beauty and spirituality” and instead tried to make it a business guide on how not to be unemployed when computers or Indians do your job. I recommend this for people who want to peruse a bibilography for better books to read.

*A note on the audioversion. Pink read this himself. He’s not a trained speaker, and there were parts where his speech slowed down to the point of sounding stilted, but that didn’t really get in the way. I liked that when he did quotes, he started out by changing his cadence just enough to let you know that there was a different speaker, but then he went back to a normal speaking tone. I thought he missed a wonderful opportunity, during one section when he was talking about Mahler and Beethoven, to include a clip of music. It would have added a lot more than the insipid intro music did. I got really irritated with his insistence on reading out urls. I especially disliked that he felt he had to read “DOUBLE YOU DOUBLE YOU DOUBLE YOU” before every one. Does anyone even need that anymore?

View all my reviews

I read this book on the strength of the recommendation of my favorite 10-year-old, who said she read it in class and that it was really good. By a stunning feat of emotional fortitude, she managed to not give me any spoilers, so I’ll extend the same courtesy.

The book begins with Stanley Yelnats, named after his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, incarcerated at a boy’s camp after being falsely accused of stealing some old tennis shoes that had been donated by a famous athlete for an auction. At this camp, the boys are expected to dig a hole every day, five feet in diameter and five feet deep, on the dry bottom of an evaporated lake in the middle of Texas.

The real reason why they are digging holes in the desert becomes clear through the stories of Stanley’s great grandfather and of the infamous Kissin’ Kate Barlow, a famous outlaw who once robbed him.

The theme–for those of you who don’t want to read the book and are cribbing synopses off Goodreads to write a book report–is about redemption. Stanley is doing penance for a crime he didn’t commit (stealing the shoes) and he also believes that his entire family has done penance for the crime that his great, great pig-stealing grandfather committed long before he was born.

Unlike most of what I read, this isn’t a fantasy book, though there are somewhat implausible elements in it (beyond the incongruity of the coincidences). There are onions with near-magical healing properties, a methusian donkey, a gypsy curse, and deadly yellow-spotted lizards.

Stanley’s a good character, in that he’s a GOOD character. He always considers others’ feelings, and he tries hard to make the best of his situation, even when it’s patently unfair. The other boys at the camp are also good characters. For the most part, they get along with amazingly few conflicts, such as the men do in great prison escape movies. I found this refreshing.

The book I read has extra materials, such as an essay by the author’s daughter and brother, about what a quiet genius Louis Sachar is. It also has photos from the film, which I didn’t see. Actually, I think I may avoid the film. It was a pretty good book, and I have a hard time seeing how the film could improve on it.

I recommend this for your favorite 10-year-old, no matter what age he or she may be now.

View all my reviews