Musing- It’s still Monday somewhere!

Very late on this week’s Musing Monday.  But I like the question.

How often do you recommend books to others, and who do you recommend them to? Do you only recommend books to your “reading friends” or to anyone you think might find the book interesting? What does it take for a book to make it to your ‘recommendation’ list?

I recommend books to other people All.  The.  Time.   I think I always have.   Friends, family, complete strangers.  I’m fearless/shameless about joining conversations I overhear in bookstores and libraries- “I’m looking for a book about this, for someone who likes that.”  A lot of the time I have an answer!

Exchanging book recommendations and opinions is a big part of how I get to know someone, and how I expect people to get to know me.  (For a future post- some of the definitive books I make sure people read as we’re becoming friends.)  I’ve never been part of a book club in the real world, though I love the dialogue of book bloggers and readers.    Many of my friendships, though, are like two or three-person book groups, riffing on a book we have in common, or exchanging and reacting to titles.

Sometimes I’ll recommend a book just because it completely blows me away.  More often, though, I try to tailor the recommendations.  Here, I’m going to draw a distinction between “mention a book” which is a cornerstone of my conversation and “recommend a book to you” because they serve two completely different conversational functions.

For example- I love both sci-fi and poetry.   Although most of the people I talk to on a daily basis are reading something- it might not be those genres.  So, unless they ask for my advice on a crash intro  course, I might not recommend the latest Orson Scott Card or Billy Collins to them.    (Having said that- I love introducing people to books in my favorite genres, and finding out what aspects of the genre a friend might welcome or dislike.  The evolution and knowledge I gain from the conversation matters so much more to me than getting them to agree with me.)

I mention books because they’re so much a part of my life- not just the work I do (and would like to expand in the coming year) as a book reviewer, but a significant part of my life.   Christmas was about books given and received.   The answer to “What’d you do last weekend?” invariably involves starting or finishing a book.

And isn’t everybody’s mind and conversation a repository of half-remembered stories and quotations that we “read somewhere?”

Published in:  on December 29, 2008 at 11:22 pm Comments (2)
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Famous Authors on Writing in Books

To fuel the Writing In Books debate:

One of my favorite Billy Collins poems, “Marginalia,” is a celebration of margin notes, including my all-time favorite: “pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”  (full text after the cut.)

ChrisL reminded me of the two ways of loving a book, courtly and carnal, as described in Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
(Which is, itself, an excellent book, and a must for all voracious readers.  Snap it up now if you’re looking for a late holiday gift for a reader you know.

During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so there is more than one way to love a book. The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book’s physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

Marginalia – Billy Collins (from Sailing Alone Around the Room
(more…)

Published in:  on December 27, 2008 at 2:55 pm Comments (2)

Writing in Books: Enhancing or Vandalizing?

Although I’m a dog-earer, a page-marker, and a spine-breaker, much to the dismay of those who like their books pristine (My Minnesotan Friend, for example) I’m faintly disturbed by the idea of writing in a book in pen. Pencil, I can do, though I feel a little awkward if I’m not doing it specifically for a class. I have plenty of books from high school and college marked with my class notes and comments in the margins.

One of the gifts in my stocking was a “Pen and Think” bookmark,penandthink

It’s a bookmark, with a handy pen so you can make notes in the book as you read along.   Dad got one too.  He was thrilled.
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I love reading other people’s books, full of margin notes, dog-ears and other evidence that the book has been wrestled with, pondered, and maybe even well-loved.  Finding a secondhand book full of notations is always a mystery and a treat.   I wish the top of the bookmark held a pencil.  Pencil is okay with me.  Dog-earing is okay with me.  I love those little Post-It flags.  But a pen?  That’s not okay.   And I can’t even explain why I have such an adamant stance about writing in books.
I’m willing to bet some of it is about my handwriting. I’m sensitive about my handwriting on uneven book surfaces (like, squished against margins or curving spines of books.) It’s unwieldy and ugly, at least in those constraints.

What do other people think? Everyone I’ve talked to, so far, has strong, visceral opinions about how much writing you can do in books. So I’m opening the discussion.

You may never want to lend me a book again….

Published in:  on at 2:45 pm Comments (4)
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Merry Bookmas To All!

A very Merry Bookmas to all!

One of my favorite parts of Christmas is the lovely collection of books given and received.   Not only did I find a few books under the Christmas tree, but also a gift certificate to a wonderful local bookstore near my parents.  So I had a Merry Bookish Boxing Day there, as well.

At the bookstore, I got myself:

And when I came home, I found a wonderful present from My Favorite Brazilian! Creepy Cute Crochet: Zombies, Ninjas, Robots, and More!
This is a brilliant idea. Perhaps it will teach me how to read crochet patterns once and for all. Or at least teach me how to freestyle amigurumi without making them look obscene. Unintentionally.

Published in:  on at 1:22 pm Leave a Comment
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Booking Through Christmas Day Thursday

Merry Booking Through Thursday, all! No, no … this isn’t the question you’re probably expecting, that asks about your winter reading habits.

What I want to know today is … what are the most “wintery” books you can think of? The ones that almost embody Winter?
Huh- not the question I was expecting. I can think of books that embody fall, or summer, or spring. Winter, though? Hmm.
The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I remember reading it as a kid.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales- Dylan Thomas
Wolves of Willoughby Chase- Joan Aiken
Veronica- by Nicholas Christopher. I first read it over winter break in college. And I can’t even quantify what it is about the prose, or the strangeness or the starry imagery. Winter.

Of course- one poem defines winter. Robert Frost.
Stopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Published in:  on December 25, 2008 at 7:22 pm Comments (3)

Hack (book review)

Hack: (How I Stopped Worrying About What To Do With My Life & Started Driving a Yellow Cab)
Melissa Plaut
Villard Press
Paperback
June 2008
$14.00
240 pages

In her late 20s, Melissa Plaut got her hack license and became a New York City cab driver. Her memoir details the strange characters she worked with, the even stranger characters she took as passengers, and her near-chronic bafflement about what to do with her life in any grander sense.
“How does it feel to be a woman and a cab driver?” or “How does a woman get to be a cab driver” are the questions she got asked the most. This book is an answer- or a compendium of the many answers. Plaut’s explorations of gender are glancing, at best- whether her own gender role behind the cab’s wheel, or the role gender may play for her passengers, or for Harvey-turned-Helen, her cross-dressing coworker at the company that leases her cab.
If there’s any overarching issue this book tackles, it is economics- the economics of a cabbie leasing the car, and starting the night over a hundred dollars in the hole, or the strange economics of a woman dabbling in cab driving as a part-timer, by choice. Plaut doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, in any overarching way, and the cab driving starts as “an adventure” which lingers on until it becomes a weird obsession. She confesses the many nights and many ways she hates the work, but hangs in there, buoyed by odd moments of kindness or cameraderie with passengers. Ultimately, it may be because I’ve seen too many movies, or read too many novels and memoirs that resolve on notes of pat uplift, that I’m looking for a more definite resolution, for Plaut’s life to take a defined direction and new pathway as a result of her time in a cab.
This book is predominantly a collection of New York stories- told with the same breezy, conversationally pithy style of a cabbie coming off shift and swapping tales with her fellows, griping about traffic, tips, and the strange moments that unfold in the backseat. It’s a fast read, told in candid snapshot vignettes of New York, from bridge to tunnel to borough. (For example- Mom got it for Christmas earlier today, and I absconded with it, and read it in one long, lazy post-Christmas afternoon.)

Published in:  on at 5:48 pm Leave a Comment

Happy Winter Holiday Of Your Choice

I’ve got a half-day at the day job, and then off to my parents’ place to begin celebrating Christmas.  And, with a few days off work, reading as many books as I can get my hands on.  That’s the plan.   I possibly packed too many books in my suitcase.  Because, of course, I know my parents will be giving me books as well.  And I read fast, but not that fast.

Things I plan to read:
Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama
The Venetian Betrayal, by Steve Berry A friend loaned it to me. The description had me at “former Justice Department agent turned rare-book dealer.”
A bunch of poetry, as yet undetermined.
I am also planning to post a couple reviews that have been in site limbo for a bit, awaiting final paragraphs.

Looking at the books involved, several hundred pages worth, I am aware that this is the kind of ambitious reading project more worthy of a college semester break, several weeks with no homework, instead of only a handful of days squished in between holiday events. Still, so needed.

I wish all readers and bloggers a peaceful winter holiday.  Stay warm, enjoy delicious food and good books, and hug the people who matter.

Published in:  on December 23, 2008 at 6:54 am Comments (1)
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Reading Challenges for 2009

I’m joining the reading challenge at War Through The Generations. It looks like the default reading goal is 5 books that have WWII as a central theme. However, I’m browsing through the reading list for the challenge, and there are so many intriguing possibilities there.
I’m feeling ambitious. So I’m going to say seven books. Possibly more.
Note- this may or may not include a re-read and round-up post of a few books I remember devouring and rereading as a kid. I can’t bring myself to read The Diary of Anne Frank again.

I still have a copy of The Devil in Vienna, by Doris Orgel.  Definitely rereading that, Summer of My German Soldier , and not sure what else. I’d love to get a copy of Night of Flames: A Novel of World War II.   ChrisL is finishing her book, called “I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Soldiers Who Dissent, 1754 to 2008.”  So I’m going to put that on the list, because it’s got some WWII in it.

I’m also doing Caribou’s Mom’s Themed Reading Challenge, though not sure what theme yet.   Books By Women is too broad.   As is “books I keep meaning to read.”

Speaking of challenges.  If any of my readers or commenters want to challenge me to read a book, or a handful of themed books, I’m game.

Published in:  on December 21, 2008 at 1:38 pm Comments (3)
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The Twelve Days of Christmas in the Cubicles

I wrote this after hearing about TallMike’s coworkers all coming back from the company Christmas party sick. It started as a joke. I didn’t think I’d come up with all twelve days.

The Twelve Days of Sickness, I mean, Christmas!
(the tune should be familiar)

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my workmates gave to me…
Twelve noses running
Eleven fevers spiking
Ten lunches losing
Nine coughs a-hacking
Eight heads a-pounding
Seven throats a-hurting
Six bodies aching
Five more sick days!
Four voices lost
Three head colds
Two sneezing fits
And that sinus thing you just can’t shake!

Published in:  on at 12:52 am Comments (1)
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Help for Moleskine Notebook Addicts

I don’t usually succumb to rampant consumerist moments here, or reveal brand loyalties. Please bear with me, this was too excellent not to share. I was in a major chain bookstore, and saw that telltale lovely leathery black cover on a nice, roughly trade paperback sized black notebook. I began the debate with myself. I’m not finished writing in my current Moleskine notebook. Christmas is the season of giving, not buying myself presents. Maybe it’s on sale. Check the price tag. Whoa, really?
Turns out, there’s a company, called Piccadilly that makes faux Moleskines at basically half the price. Piccadilly Notebooks.
I’m in scribbling heaven. Maybe this is the year that my knockoff Moleskine and I will actually finish writing that volume of poetry I’ve been talking about for the past ten years. Or I might start writing in one of the Moleskines, or other pretty journals I can never resist buying. Never hurts to start getting a jump on the resolutions, right?

Published in:  on December 20, 2008 at 8:18 am Comments (2)
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