Tag Archives: I’m Insane

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee

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Synopsis:
The psychology of hoarding in its different manifestations.

Review:
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things is eminently readable, a prime example of the best of what popular psychology has to offer. Great case studies, analysis that goes deep but never wonky, and well-chosen anecdotes bring the multi-faceted issue of hoarding to life.

What struck me the most was the insight that hoarders are people who see more beauty and complexity in the world than most people, sort of like aesthetic savants. They can’t bear to throw things away because of the pleasure they take in looking at them. Other hoarders are extreme perfectionists, unable to start a cleaning job they will be unable to complete to their exacting standards. Still others attach memories to objects in such a way as to feel like they are losing their own lives when asked to throw something away.

I’m fascinated by hoarders because on some level, I understand the compulsion to keep things that look and seem pretty. But I also love giving stuff away and hate clutter, so I don’t think I’ll ever end up buried under a pile of objects. Recently I traded in a bunch of grad school texts through Amazon’s buyback program, so that I would have Amazon gift cards to buy some expensive textbooks for a new academic endeavor. I haven’t looked at these books in 15 years, and most of the ideas and content are outdated, not to mention useless. And I really need these new texts to study for the professional exam I plan to take in 2011 or 2012. Yet trading them in felt like giving away a piece of myself–each book kept because it shaped my thinking and was important to me at one point or another. To get rid of them meant acknowledging that I’m not that person anymore. Yet I’ll always have the education I received through those books and the classes I used them in. I don’t need the books to know who I am.

The Dragon of Trelian–A Wing of Dragons

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Today is Day 3 of the blog tour for The Dragon of Trelian by Michelle Knudsen, a book I thoroughly enjoyed.

My husband is not an aficionado of fantasy literature. He’s fond of saying, “How do you write a book about a dragon, anyway? Is it like, ‘There was this dragon?’” My poor impoverished dear.

Anyway, I love books with dragons. Here are some links to a few other dragon-featuring books I’ve reviewed. For even more, check out the dragons tag.

George RR Martin’s Dreamsongs Volume 1 features The Ice Dragon, one of his best short stories.

Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon kicks off a fantastic series about dragons fighting the Napoleonic Wars

Perilous Seas is the third book in Dave Duncan’s A Man of His Word, wherein dragons make a brief appearance

My favorite dragons of all time are found in Robin Hobb’s Six Duchies set of three trilogies, beginning with Assassin’s Apprentice. I read these before I started this blog, so unfortunately I have no review.

Please take a moment to check out the other bloggers on the tour for The Dragon of Trelian. I’m so happy I got to participate!

A Christian Worldview of Fiction, Abby the Librarian, All About Children’s Books, Becky’s Book Reviews, Cafe of Dreams, Dolce Bellezza, Homeschool Book Buzz, KidzBookBuzz.com, Novel Teen, Reading is My Superpower, Reading to Know, Small World Reads, The 160 Acrewoods, Through a Child’s Eyes, Through the Looking Glass Reviews

7 Random Book Facts about Me

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I was tagged by Sally for this meme. Basically we’re listing 7 random book-related facts about ourselves.

1. I give books away all the time, and never expect anyone to return a book I’ve loaned to them. Of course, when it’s a loan I do hope that the books come back to me, but I never sweat it if they don’t.

2. I always return books that I borrow in a timely fashion. I have stopped borrowing books from friends because my TBR stack is so crazy big that I would have to keep their books longer than makes me comfortable.

3. I used to be pretty good in French and read “Les Jeux Sont Fait” by Jean-Paul Sartre in the original French when I was 17. I can’t remember a thing about it now.

4. I rarely blog about the parenting books I read because I worry that I will alienate readers who have different opinions about parenting than I do. I see so much divisiveness over parenting issues and don’t want to bring them here.

5. In addition to books, I read cookbooks and magazines. I read The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly every week. Monthly/bi-monthly I read Touchstone, Cook’s Illustrated, and the free issues of Cookie, Parenting, and Wonder Time that I got just by having a baby. I’m not renewing any of those subscriptions. In the past, I would always get a trashy women’s magazine and a Vanity Fair whenever I flew somewhere.

6. Superfast Husband is not much of a reader. He is very smart and when he does read, he reads challenging stuff, but he doesn’t need to read every day. I always thought I’d end up with another book nerd, but it doesn’t really bother me because I like lots of other things about him that he wouldn’t have time to do if he was reading like me.

7. It took having a baby for me to have a day without reading.

I’m tagging:
Sense of Wonder
Rhinoa’s Ramblings
James Rovira
Imani
Eva
Restless Reader
Bybee

This is the Feast – Day 3

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On the last day of the blog tour for This is the Feast, I want to encourage you to check out author Diana Z. Shore’s official website.

She is a very busy author who does lots of book signings, conferences, and other speaking engagements. Her Author-on-the-Go program looks innovative and fun.

This is the Feast is a retelling of the Thanksgiving story. I can’t help but reflect on last year’s Thanksgiving, when Superfast Toddler was only 7 days old! Superfast Husband cooked a complete meal while I breastfed my voracious baby, except for the gravy, which is my specialty. I made the gravy very carefully because I was wearing my daughter in the sling at the time. Most delicious Thanksgiving ever. My parents came up the next day to meet their granddaughter for the first time.

This year, we will have a quiet holiday at home. Superfast Husband only has Thursday and Friday off–back to work on Saturday for six days straight–so I’ll be keeping things simple. I have also gone dairy-free so I’m looking for a pumpkin pie recipe that doesn’t use condensed milk, and trying to master vegan mashed potatoes. Homemade gravy is out of the question because I don’t know how to make a good roux without butter.

But this brings me back to This is the Feast, which celebrates giving thanks in the midst of hardship and deprivation. Doing without cow’s milk hardly compares to what the Pilgrims dealt with in the New World, but I find myself able to complain about it like I’ve been asked to go without heat in the winter. I have so much to be thankful for that it’s silly to waste a moment of time missing butter and cream.

Make sure you check out the other bloggers on the tour:

the 160acrewoods
A Mom Speaks
All About Children’s Books
Becky’s Book Reviews
Cafe of Dreams
Dolce Bellezza
Homeschool Buzz
KidzBookBuzz.com
Looking Glass Reviews
Maggie Reads
Maw Books Blog
Never Jam Today
Our Big Earth
Quiverfull Family
SmallWorld Reads

The Infamous Bill Cosby Pamphlet Found!

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My intrepid cousin Terri of Sense of Wonder found an html version of the Bill Cosby pamphlet that taught me how to speed read when I was 7. An excerpt:

Previewing is especially useful for getting a general idea of heavy reading like long magazine of newspaper articles, business reports, and nonfiction books,

It can give you as much as half the comprehension in a little as one-tenth the time. For example, you should be able to preview eight or ten 100-page reports in an hour. After previewing, you’ll be able to decide which reports (or which parts of reports) are worth a closer look.

Here is how to preview: Read the entire first two paragraphs of whatever you’ve chosen. Next read only the first sentence of each successive paragraph. Then read the entire last two paragraphs.

Previewing doesn’t give you all the details. But it does keep you from spending time on things you don’t really want – or need – need to read. Notice that previewing gives you a quick, overall view of long, unfamiliar material. For short light reading there\s a better technique.

Dewey’s Weekly Geek

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I’m new to this, though am a longtime fan of Dewey and Hidden Side of a Leaf.

This week’s theme is a sort of meme. (Hey, I rhymed!) Your basic challenge is to post author photos.

Using the meme-like list below, post photos of authors in response. Please feel free to skip any you don’t like. You’re also free (encouraged!) to add your own, but if you do that, please be sure to indicate which are yours, so that people can credit you if they use yours.

But don’t put words/names with your photos. Ask your readers to guess your answers! If you have a book to give away, you may want to offer a prize, maybe draw a name from those readers who guess correctly.

If you post your own make sure to leave a link at Dewey’s original post.

See how many you can guess!

1. Photo(s) of your favorite authors.

2. Photo(s) of the author(s) of the book(s) you’re currently reading.

3. Photo(s) of any author(s) you’ve met in person (even very briefly).

4. A youtube of (an) author(s) you’ve heard speak.

5. Any photo(s) you may have of yourself with an author.

6. A photo of the author of the book you’ve most recently finished.

7. Photos of the hottest author(s)!

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

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Synopsis:
Tigana is a country that has been obliterated by magic, down to its very name, yet a small group of rebels who remember decide to spark civil war to reclaim the honor of their homeland.

Review:
I wanted to love Tigana, I really did. Guy Gavriel Kay is a beautiful writer, excelling in exploring complex emotions and motivations within scenes that are startlingly original. There are scenes in Tigana that are achingly lovely without sacrificing dramatic impact.

However, the overall story just never clicked for me. I’m willing to give Kay the benefit of the doubt and call it the Sopranos effect–the machinations of the wranglings for power are somewhat lost on me. I’m not one for politics or strategy. I am terrible at chess and am not confident in my ability to guess the motivations of the key players because the source of their actions doesn’t like in their emotions. I don’t traffic in cold calculation and “The Sopranos” always made me feel stupid because I was always way behind the characters. I’m much more comfortable on psychological terrain, and that’s why “Battlestar Galactica” is more my style. The characters play politics, but their politics are always very personal, so I get it.

In Tigana, the main characters are playing an incredibly complicated game as they try to topple the warring sorcerers who have wiped the name of Tigana from the world. Each individual scene was gorgeous and fascinating, but by the time I got to the end I had given up on trying to figure out how it all fit together. Funny enough, that’s also the reason I got a D in AP Physics…

Chicks With Sticks Guide to Crochet by Nancy Queen and Mary Ellen O’Connell

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Synopsis:
A full color introduction to the craft of crochet, with 30 patterns.

Review:
I am a dedicated knitter and have never really understood the appeal of crochet–until I started thumbing through the Chicks With Sticks: Guide to Crochet. The patterns are gorgeous and I found at least four things I want to make immediately. I’m particularly drawn to the flower-shaped washcloths, which would be perfect for using some cotton yarn in my stash.

The illustrations make the stitches very easy to understand. The patterns are arranged in order of complexity, with each one chosen to teach you a new technique. The sidebars are filled with really useful tips. And each pattern comes with modification recommendations to help develop you as a designer as well as a crafter.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this book might just lure me to the dark side of crochet. Crazy, I know, but I like to live on the edge. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to watching So You Think You Can Dance.

Mayday! (Booking Through Thursday)

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Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember?

This is a no-brainer. If I had to sell my plasma to do it, I would buy books. If I had to sell my passport, I would buy books. There is no way in all the universe that I would get on a plane with nothing to read but Skymall.

I would pick up a new hardcover that I’ve been wanting to read, a Stephen King or Ann Rule paperback I’ve read before, and probably a trade paperback I have not read. Plus a Vanity Fair and some trashy women’s magazine. That should get me through a six hour flight–not that I will read all of that, but I won’t be anxious about running out of things to read.

As Amazon is my witness, I’ll never go bookless again.

World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler

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Synopsis:
The world has moved on, thanks to climate change, a worldwide oil shortage, and population devastation from superbugs, and in one small corner of New York State, the world is being rebuilt by hand.

Review:
Anyone who spends much time with me will eventually learn that I am obsessed with The Long Emergency, one of World Made By Hand author James Kunstler’s non-fiction treatises. I have always been drawn to the apocalyptic, and now that I am a mother I can worry about the world my daughter will inherit.

World Made By Hand is filled with Kunstlerisms–imagery and expressions that are familiar to anyone who has read his books or spent any time on his blog. He is always at his best when conjuring a decaying post-automobile America, where the suburbs are blighed ghettos and big box stores crumble without power to heat and cool them. The novel is a great introduction to the ideas that obsess Kunstler (and his acolytes, myself included), yet it’s far more hopeful than any of his jeremiads.

The protagonist of World Made By Hand is Robert, who once worked in corporate America, and who now finds himself mayor of an ersatz community in upstate New York. His townspeople just want to get by, but they’re caught between an encroaching band of religious fanatics, and a mini-despot who may have aggressively nefarious intentions towards the town. After a young man is murdered, Robert finds himself at the center of an ancient kind of conflict in a new world that looks like an old one.

I was not expecting World Made By Hand to be as lyrical as it is. If I didn’t know Kunstler’s non-fiction, I’d be taken by the poetry of many of the passages. However, as much as I was tickled to be in on Kunstler’s auto-intertextuality, it distracted me from engaging with the story. That won’t stop me from recommending it–I think it’s more accurate a picture of our future as anything found in the Jetsons!