Tag: books

I loved Julie Czerneda’s first “species imperative” book, and I loved Migration: Species Imperative #2. I was delighted to find on Czerneda’s website that there’s a third due out in a year. This volume actually does an ok job of ending at a point where you’re not desperate for the next one, but it’s also clear what the third one will be about. The cover art, by the way, has nearly no connection to the contents. You can always put a plain brown wrapper on the book or remove the jacket!

The Bean Trees is the first book I read by Barbara Kingsolver, and I was pleased to reread it recently for my book group. There were things I missed the first time (or had forgotten), and the conversation we had was very rich.

I had always thought of Taylor as the ultimate no-nonsense, competent person who can cope with anything. But as we discussed the book, I realized she isn’t really much good at coping until she’s had time to retreat from the crisis and then return to it. Discovering a new angle on a character is one of the joys both of rereading and of discussing books.

Julie E. Czerneda’s Survival: Species Imperative #1 is a real page-turner of a sci-fi book. Without reading like a heavy, self-important book, it raises deep questions about friendship, survival, and science. Czerneda was trained as a biologist, and it shows in her writing. There’s a sequel out, and I’m eager to get it.

Steve Leveen’s The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life sort of belongs in the goofy, slight, self-help category of books. But because he did actually talk to a wide range of avid readers, his summary of reading advice includes a few helpful ideas that are new to me (as well as some already familiar ones).

The first (and biggest) new idea is creating a list of candidates for reading, grouped under headings, with notes about when and why they were added. Leveen suggests there are too many books to read and that you should pay attention to what your interests are and seek to find the best books that reflect your interests. (He’s also an advocate for abandoning books that just aren’t doing it for you.) He links this suggestion to keeping a list of the books you’ve read (obviously not a new idea for me).

The obvious categories for my list of candidates included Time Travel, Speculative Fiction, Biography, Natural History, Horticulture, Botany, and Taxonomy.

Leveen suggests buying books and shelving them by the same categories so they are ready to hand when you’re looking for something to read. After he’s read books, he puts them on an intermediate shelf where he can easily pick them up to review what he learned or noted from each book before moving them into what he calls his “Living Library.”

In order to get more from reading, he suggests surveying the book before beginning to read, writing in the margins (especially questions to yourself), and reviewing the book at increasing intervals after you finish.

He includes chapters on audio books and book groups.

All in all, a worthwhile read.

Discovering Your Personality Type by Don Richard Russo and Russ Hudson was my capitulation to finding out about the Enneagram. Several friends rave about it, and my housemate has been to several training institutes. So I caved. Interesting book, a bit rah-rah and “buy our books” for my taste, but having taken their instrument and looking at my office through the Enneagram lens, it looks useful.

Here’s their website: Enneagram Institute: Enneagram Testing & Training.

And if you’re curious: active five with a four wing.

I was concerned that The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs, by Lyall Watson, might potentially put me off my pork products, but it didn’t quite manage that. It did, however, come close. Watson describes several personal relationships with pigs–none of which happen to be your garden-variety meat hog, which is why I suspect I got away with my dietary sensibilities relatively intact. (I do, however, struggle with weaning myself from animal products produced by industrial agriculture.)

I read Many Dimensions by Charles Williams because of a review at Random Thoughts and Nonsense. Unfortunately, I had several books arrive from the library as well as heavy work-related reading, so I got bogged-down about 3/4 of the way through and set it aside. Last night I finally just skimmed through the last of it.

The Eerdmans edition I got from the library has on the jacket: “Williams believed intensely in the impingement of the supernatural world, and he excelled in descriptions of experiences such as many people have had only once or twice in their lives.” Williams died in 1945 at the age of 59, and this book was first published in 1931. I thought it by turns quaint, proto-new-agey, coy, pious (in the bad sense), and mumbo-jumbo. But maybe I’m in a bad mood (I did, after all, go to the trouble of at least skimming to the end). For a much more sympathetic reflection, go on over to Random Thoughts and Nonsense.

Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River was our last book group read. A superficial plot description (psychic German dwarf growing up between the wars) didn’t have me panting to read it. But after just a few pages, I was totally sucked in. I have a few complaints about technique, but they pale beside the characterization and the questions Hegi raises about difference, secrets, power, storytelling, and resistance.

What do you know? The Unusually Useful Web Book: Everything We’ve Learned about Why Sites Succeed! by June Cohen IS unusually useful. It’s been my nearly constant reading for several weeks, prompting some very productive activities at work as we plan a revamped web magazine.

The state of self-publishing is reviewed in today’s The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > The Book Business: How to Be Your Own Publisher.

Indeed, someday you may be able to walk into your grocery store and convert your Christmas photos into an instant coffee-table book written in your own deathless prose, Xlibris’s Feldcamp predicts. Almost anybody will be able to say, ”I published my book last week.”

It’s a pretty fair summary: No, they’re not traditional vanity presses; they vary widely in practice and reputation; only in very rare cases will your book get in a bookstore; magazines and newspapers won’t review your book; the books are likely to be badly edited; a few people have self-published and been discovered.

One of the things I learned that I didn’t know: established authors like Piers Anthony have self-published in order to break into new genres or to bring back out of print books.

And of course professionally, I would have emphasized that, like lawyers, those who edit their own writing have fools for clients.