BookStalking

An economics book for the hippies in your life. McKibben provides economic reasons why we should all shop at farmers markets, hook up the solar cells, and enjoy the polar icecaps for a few minutes before climate change evaporates them. 

There were some interesting facts in the book, such as a fleshed out version of the “cash = happiness” trope. (True for 10,000 dollars per person, less true for more than that.)

I think I read an excerpt from this book a year or so ago, when he did the “year of eating locally.”  I found that to be the most engaging part of the book, and I hope he does a follow up on that exclusively.

The axe he has to grind is a pretty big one- My former roommate JC would have hated this book. Central to his argument is that for much of history and most of the world, “More” = “Better”. But this is not true for most of Americans now. “More” stuff/space/food is typically what we do not need, but most people still pursue it anyways. The (heretical to JC) notion that infinite and indefinite economic growth is not what we need now is an intriguing premise for an economics book, and it would be nice if more of the book was focused on running those numbers.

I’d like to see more number in general in the book, especially with regards to policy. I’d like to see forecasts, and projections, both domestically and internationally. There is a small amount of hand-waving over what changing our growth policies would do, and I think that shouldn’t be glossed over.

To sum up:

Not bad. Of course, my reading it is preaching to the choir, but I would like to see other’s reactions to it.

Here are one line summaries of some of the other books I have read this month:

Appetite for Profit by Michele Simon

Didactic and boring. I didn’t finish it. Sure, she’s got great points, but her style is preaching to the choir and uninteresting to the rest of the world.

Rodale Book of Composting, revised edition, edited by Martin and Gershuny

Intriguingly donated to the library by the “Monongalia County Solid Waste Authority”. Chock full of 1970’s knowledge. Which is ok, since composting hasn’t really changed since, a billion years ago. I think most of the web references steal from this book.

The Green Trap, by Ben Bova

Disappointing. I started it about 3 times, before I managed to make it through. The subject is timely, but just not my style. Fans of Grisham will like it much more. Probably a fine example of the thriller genre. Just not for me.

A tale of suburban gardening, full of drama amidst the weeds. It’s not until the final chapter does the titular tomato appear. The book is structured as loose anecdotes on a theme, ranging from pests, to garden layout, to “Christopher Walken, gardener.”  The overall impression is that Alexander spends a lot of time in his garden, perhaps to his own detriment. What, indeed, does someone do with 2000 square feet of garden? That’s bigger than my house!

The book is decent enough, and captures the niche “writing about my gardening lifestyle” market that is so lucrative these days. But high drama it isn’t.  

The sum up:

Meh. A little divorced from most of the American experience. The author is well off, and the things he has to worry about seem either silly, or creations of his own causing. Meh.

This book wants to be a fairy tale in the style of the Brother’s Grim, or perhaps the more modern style of Wrede’s “Dragon” series. Unfortunately, it is a little too sacharine to be authentic, and the story is ultimately unsatisfying.

This story might be best for parents to read to toddlers or those who can’t handle complex characters. Which is odd, because the nonlinear nature of the story means that those readers may be easily confused by the back-and-forth style, in which four central characters interact loosely in different time lines.

Anybody past the fourth grade is going to be disappointed by the ending, which is altogether too pat and nice. It’s conflict resolution of the “Why don’t we all just get along” sort, and in this book, everyone genially does. 

I was initially pleased with the characterizations, because Dicamillo avoids making any stereotypical “bad guys” for the reader to hate. It’s best to have villains with understandable motives, who act reasonably in the pursuit of their goals. But a mexican standoff climax where everyone agrees to go home and have a nice cup of soup is more of an anticlimax.

For the most part, children want some gruesome in their stories- witness the success of the Lemony Snickett  books, or the “Goosebumps” series. Heck, even the bowdlerized versions of the Grim Fairy Tales are pretty vicious.

I’m going against the crowd here, because this book won a Newberry, and has about 4.5 stars on Amazon. Most people who didn’t like it are against the child abuse that is perpetuated on a character. I think that if the suffering lead to something more, then it would contribute to the story. Unfortunately, it is glossed over and ignored in the conclusion.

To sum up:

I’d like a second version of this story better- One aimed for older kids. If you are mature enough to follow the multiple threads of this story, then you are mature enough to get an ending that doesn’t patronize.

This is really much more of a “my-wife” book. She likes true stories, typically where everyone dies at the end, especially if it is about gender roles. Man, she’s gonna love this one.

Nafisi writes in a confessional style of her experiences as a teacher of literature in Iran, during the revolution. She describes in an increasingly despairing tone the changes in the society she lives in and finally leaves. She leaves her university as political pressure descend upon it, creating an atmosphere she finds untenable.  Unable to restrain herself, she begins teaching a select group of her former students in her home.

The western authors that the small group studies become increasingly divorced and relevant to their lives as religious hard liners enact sweeping social changes. Each of the women is marked by these changes, and they resent it bitterly as they become marginalized in their own country, homes and even bodies.

It is an act of bravery and rebellion to study the literature they love, and it provides a source of sisterhood and even inspiration for them. What does Nabakov’s “Lolita” mean to a society that lowers the marriageable age to nine? What does Austen’s stories of love and passion mean to girls who grow up with a fear expressing such emotions even in the most private of settings?

Nafisi’s evocative history of a time that was not so long ago should remind us that the freedoms known to our grandparents should not be taken for granted.

The sum up:

I didn’t necessarily like it, but I respected it. My wife will probably love it. 

I’m working on cataloging my collection, as I do every so often. I have reached the point where I have a good idea if I have a book or not, but only a vague idea of where it is. My estimate is that there are about 2000 books in the collection, spread over six or seven bookshelves in a few different rooms.

They are totally unorganized except for a shelve dedicated solely to mass market paperbacks. It is a double stacked corner unit, good luck locating anything on it. Some other books have been arranged by my wife to suit her purposes. She has cherry picked some of the titles to put on shelves and those are the books she likes. Another few shelves have been arranged by color, which actually looks quite nice.

I have been using the Readerware program to organize my collection. It is a database program with the most notable feature of being pretty good at auto-cataloging from an ISBN. I have an old Cuecat scanner, and that makes short work of many of the recent titles. 

Unfortunately, most books before the 80’s don’t have bar codes, and they don’t even have ISBNs before the 70’s. I have a number of books before the 40’s and they don’t have LCCN’s.  That means that I have to manually enter those in the database, which can be pretty time consuming. 

I chose Readerware because it seemed tolerable enough, and it worked on Macs, Windows and Linux. I’ve bounced between the platforms and something that was cross platform seemed like the way to go. If I was to make a fresh choice now, I would probably lean towards delicious library, as it seems to be very polished looking.

My chief problem with Readerware is that it won’t let me just haul off with a SQL statement when I want to. I know that I would probably just end up trashing the database doing something ill-advised, but that’s what backups are for, right? Also, it’s pretty ugly. I’ve gotten used to a certain level of glamour from applications on the mac, and Readerware is just not a pretty program.

It’s not bad, though, and I hope to continue with the cataloging on a regular basis. I figure a few weeks of dedicated scanning and data entry ought to do it.

I’m pretty sure Kevin Trudeau has never killed a man, just to watch him die. But I wouldn’t put it past him to seriously consider it, and I don’t think it would take more than 45 seconds and quick sideways glance before he went for the watch and wallet.

For those of you looking to jump straight to the sum-up, here it is: This book is not retarded. It just assumes you are. Imagine a Nigerian spam email that was 255 pages long, and you have a good summation of the book. There is just enough sense in the book to momentarily disguise the awesome amount of SILLINESS in the book. Only eat Organic food? Not too wacky. No Sugars or Starches? Fine. 15 enemas in 30 days? Hang on- “Use Dianetics for psychosomatic and emotional ills”? Wait, what? “Purchase and use an Electronic Chaos Inhibitor?”– Well, shoot, that sounds like the best advice yet!

I actually went to www.naturalcuresstores.com to check out this fine… inhibitor. They claim that they are entirely unconnected to Kevin Trudeau. I’m glad he was able to help such fine entrepeneurial souls by advertising them in his best selling book out of the goodness of his heart. I’d provide a deep link to the item in question, but I wouldn’t want the gift of even a smidgen of google page rank bestowed upon these grifters- I mean, business folks.

I called their number, and asked some questions of the poor order taker, who clearly has no idea what an  Electronic Chaos Inhibitor is. I asked what it did, and she put me on hold “ to research that”. I asked how it worked, and she put me on hold. I asked if it used batteries, again, hold time.  Finally, I asked if it was just a rock. There was an awkward pause. After some more hold time, it was revealed that it was in fact, a rock that I could purchase for $99.99.

And then they sold my telephone number to some “make money fast” tele-marketers.

But anyway, since Trudeau almost CERTAINLY has nothing to do with this gang, lets get back to his book.  Unlike his previous books, (Natural Cures “they” don’t… and More Natural “Cures”…) this one actually contains data on the cure.  The other books are mostly advertisements for his newsletters, which he merely charges $9.95 a month for. The Weight loss book contains most of the general information as the others, but also advises getting regular shots with pregnant lady hormone. It’s, um, organic, I guess.

The book has only minor typographical errors (don’t eat “erradiated” food) so, presumably everything in it is intentional. If he wrote fiction, it might not be too bad. He’s got a pretty good paranoid style in the old fashioned conspiratorial vein. His writing is simple and easy to follow. He could be the next Dan Brown. Except of course that Dan Brown has to fight off hordes of people who believe he put elements of truth in his story, rather than the other way around. Maybe they could team up.

To sum up, the book isn’t BAD, in a literary criticism sense. Of course, in the sense that the book will probably defraud the public of their money, injure and possibly kill the reader, and has no redeeming features other than the fact that it is easy to read… in that sense, I might call it bad.

After reading Westerfeld’s previous trilogy, I decided to check out his most recent offering. It is a hip and oh-so-modern coming of age story following the “boy meets girl, boy admires girls pluck, boy decides to become member of adbusters” genre that is sweeping the young adult market these days.

Hunter Braque is 17, lives in New York, and already has a job pulling down big bucks and product samples as a “cool hunter.” He spots trends on the cusp of their creation developed by “Innovators”, which he then sends to corporate marketing entities to be focus-grouped, demographically analyzed and eventually incorporated into next weeks commercial offerings.

His life and world view change when he meets Jen, a young girl who can’t not be an innovator. Hunter breaks the first rule when he gets involved with Jen, who drags him often kicking and sometimes screaming into an adventure about New York’s marketing world, Culture Jamming, and a really nice pair of shoes.

Media Literacy is what this book is about. Teenagers in America are the most media-inundated population ever to exist, and it is a sea they swim in effortlessly. Radio, TV, IM, Cell phones, Myspace, txting, billboards, graffiti, magazines, videogames- Modern young adults will look at all of these nearly every day, and almost every time they will also be served a dose of advertising.  They view it with a jaded, experienced eye, holding it to standards that other times and even other countries couldn’t imagine. Not that this renders them immune, of course, but they do demand impossibly high production standards to be catered to.

Modern corporate marketing and youth culture go hand in hand. Both want, desperately, to be taken seriously. Homogeneity and “fitting in” are the only thing more important than “being yourself” and finding an identity. (Or is that the other way around?) So Yesterday captures that parallel very well, painting a picture of media savvy people easily dealing with technology as an enabling mechanism, but stumbling on the question of “Enabling for what?”

The book’s ending is the letdown, as neither Hunter nor Jen can clearly articulate what they want to do next.  Maybe that is supposed to be emblematic of their lack of experience, or simply a matter of not wanting to delve past the superficiality of the subject matter, I don’t know. I expect that when the inevitable movie deal rolls around, the ending will be more satisfying.

Sum up:

I liked it.