Mental multivitamin

Curated content

2012-01-27T09:32:00.002-06:00

If you want your child to be a writer, go bankrupt.

The evidence confirms it. Failing that, at least suffer a severe financial reversal, obliging your son or daughter to endure the social opprobrium of changed schools and dropped friendships. Let him know the shame of fallen status, that he might grow ever more attuned to the minutest of slights, real or imagined. Careful scrutiny of his fellows will likely become a habit, a good sense of humor his first line of defense. Imagination will be his refuge. If you want your child to be a writer, do all this, and you may yet join an impecunious fraternity of writers’ parents that includes John Shakespeare, John Joyce, John Clemens, John Dickens, John Ernst Steinbeck, and Kurt Vonnegut, Sr.

Chicago Tribune: Pajama ban: Are pajamas a public menace?

The latest trend should be a relief to anyone averse to immodesty. This is not racy lingerie but baggy, even frumpy, clothing that typically furnishes coverage a Victorian could love. Fathers of teenage daughters, it's safe to say, would prefer that their little angels venture forth in shapeless flannel pajamas than micro-minis and flimsy tank tops.

Wired: Physicists Discover Quantum Speed Limit

In non-relativistic systems, where particle speeds are much less than the speed of light, interactions still occur very quickly, and they often involve lots of particles. As a result, measuring the speed of interactions within materials has been difficult. The theoretical speed limit is set by the Lieb-Robinson bound, which describes how a change in one part of a system propagates through the rest of the material. In this new study, the Lieb-Robinson bound was quantified experimentally for the first time, using a real quantum gas.

The Wilson Quarterly: In the Footsteps of Giants

Well, I was a freelancer—a polite term for unemployed—at the time, so I extorted a tiny advance and went off to collect everything I could find out about Solzhenitsyn’s life. Looking back, it’s curious that I had the biographical itch from the beginning, because I could have written about many things, I suppose, and it didn’t necessarily need to be a biography, but that was the way I thought about it. However, Solzhenitsyn was so successful at covering his tracks that I couldn’t find out nearly enough to satisfy me, and I simply gave up.

The Atlantic: The Great Unbundling of the University

The big question for universities going forward is this: Can control of credentialing last for long without control of knowledge? If a great many people learn from Sebastian Thrun and Udacity how to create a search engine, and if some of those are very good search engines, might not the most successful students simply point to their work as a sufficient indicator of their coding chops? Who needs a credential when they can use a simple URL to show potential employers not just what they're capable of but what they have already achieved?

Capital New York: Why Hollywood makes Creepy Kid movies

It's not hard to understand why the theme is so attractive, even though it's also so repulsive. Children are supposed to be innocent. Adults deserve what they get, if they are bad, but children should always be exempt. Our entire moral understanding depends on everybody agreeing upon this. Audiences project onto children their own feelings of protectiveness, and depicting a child in distress is one of the most effective ways of engaging an audience in any story.

How to Survive in the Age of Amazon

Because in order to survive, bookstores must stop trying to compete with Amazon.

I should pause here to clarify that when I use the word “bookstore,” I mean “independent bookstore.” Considering that barely any bookstore chains are left standing, this should be fairly apparent—but just in case any of you might think I’m talking about the few remaining Barnes & Noble or Borders megastores that still rise like brick-and-mortar colossi over the exurbs, I’m not.

Wired: Watch a Baby Condor Hatch and Grow on Live Webcam

California condors are very nurturing parents. They’re also very egalitarian: Both parents take care of their young. Sisquoc and Shatash will discipline, groom and play with their baby. They’ll give it feathers to play with and rub their baby’s soft pink face with their own.

The Atlantic: The Autumn of Joan Didion

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

The American Conservative: Revenge of the Nerd

Ray Bradbury loves human beings, and his hatred of the digital devices that divide us from us stems from their dehumanizing influence. Sure, they make us more passive and corrode our mental circuits. But of greatest importance, technology, amidst a million obvious benefits, has the overlooked drawback of making human life less human. Basement Internet porn addictions preventing relationships, video games supplanting sports as an afterschool activity, vicarious social life through reality television, and hundreds of Facebook friends without a single true friend are all manifestations of the way technology helps man dodge his fellow man.

You'll find the library of my links here.

Reading right now

2012-01-25T06:26:00.003-06:00

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Susan Cain)

Two related items of interest:

■ "The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance" (Scientific American, January 24)

■ "Time for introverts to get some appreciation" (USA Today, January 23)

"The cake is a lie."

2012-01-24T17:53:00.004-06:00

Last year, Miss M-mv(ii) baked Miss M-mv(i) the most wonderful cake for her birthday. When she offered to do so again, I fervently hoped the birthday girl would ask for the same (an Andes Mints cake; recipe here).

But she did not.

As early as September, she was talking about a Portal cake. Fortunately, Miss M-mv(ii) was easily persuaded to bake the Andes Mints cake for the holidays.

One word: Yum.

Well, a Portal cake is also quite nice. Devil's food cake. Chocolate icing. Whipped cream. A handful of M&Ms.

The first Portal cake met an unfortunate end, however.

It was all my fault.

Trip. Splat.

These are easygoing, good-natured people we've raised, though. "No problem," they said. "Let's make another one."

So we did.

Everything you need to know about them

2012-01-24T17:19:00.001-06:00

2012-01-21T21:55:00.000-06:00

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

The Feast: an intimate Tempest

2012-01-20T09:43:00.002-06:00

From the playgoer's guide:

With his axe as a magic staff and his sketches in a magic book, our Prospero has carved a whole world of his own out of wood. He longs to hear the story of his life the way it SHOULD have been, and it unfolds out of this wooden world over which he has complete control. He is not quite alone. He needs his actors to perform the story. Ariel and Caliban, now bound to his command, are his performers and puppeteers.

But no matter how frightening the tempest, how beautiful the wedding, and how violent his revenge on his enemies...it somehow does not satisfy. He begins again, and again, in hopes that once the story is PERFECT, he will have peace.

Staged upstairs at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, this production features three actors and, yes, puppets. But before you do what I nearly did (i.e., "Bosh! Puppets? Really?"), let me assure you that this retelling is textually true and emotionally intense. We were intrigued, absorbed, and moved. You'll find more information about this unique production here and an article here.

(And can I tell you? Every time the Misses and I espy Barbara Gaines -- twice this visit -- we gasp, as if we had caught a glimpse of a rock star or Hollywood A-lister.)

The Shakespeare Project of Chicago

2012-01-16T17:16:00.000-06:00

The Shakespeare Project of Chicago was created in 1996 to bring to life the words of William Shakespeare, present his plays to the community for free, and foster the talents of members of Actors’ Equity Association.

This month, the Project presents The Duchess of Malfi, a dark, Jacobean tragedy in which Love and Goodness do a slow dance with Evil and Corruption, set to the music of Revenge. Rich in poetry and dramatic imagery, John Webster’s masterpiece weaves a tapestry of conflict between appearance and reality. Featuring the Shakespeare Project’s dramaturge Michelle Shupe in the title role, the reading will be directed by founding member Stephen Spencer.

~ Performance Dates ~

Saturday, January 21, at 10 a.m.
The Newberry Library

Saturday, January 21, at 2 p.m.
The Wilmette Public Library

Sunday, January 22 at 2 p.m.
The Highland Park Public Library

On the nightstand

2012-01-15T09:49:00.004-06:00

■ The Social Animal (David Brooks)
Non-fiction. My reading goal in 2012 is a simple one: Read more non-fiction. The only problem with this goal is that I read non-fiction at a considerably slower pace than I read (consume, wolf down) fiction. Still, I've added this title to the pile. Related TED Talk here; review here.

■ The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)
Non-fiction. Ayup. Still working on this one. To repeat, Carr created a stir three and half years ago with the publication of the essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (The Atlantic, July/August 2008; related M-mv entry here). Two links: NPR's "All Things Considered" on "'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online" and Carr's blog, Rough Type.

■ The Project (Brian Falkner)
YA fiction. Another solid effort from New Zealand author Brian Falkner (related entry here), this novel was inspired by his three-month residency at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. He arrived in the region shortly after the flood of 2008, an event that informs The Project.

■ Wool (Hugh Howey)
■ Wool 2 (Hugh Howey)
Fiction. Yes, that's the iPad on the stack. I toted it this week's swim meet and enjoyed the first two slim novels (novellas?) of a reported five-book series. Aunt M-mv casually asked if I had read Wool, and two clicks, a few reviews, and the phrase "post-apocalyptic fiction" later, I had it loaded into my Kindle cloud. A compelling story, capable character development, and competent enough prose led me to Wool 2. I will treat myself to 3 and 4 later today or tomorrow, when I finish grading papers and making some progress toward my non-fiction goals.

Not pictured:
■ The Lost Art of Reading: Why Reading Matters in a Distracted Time (David L. Ulin)
Non-fiction. Still reading on the Kindle. See Ulin's essay of the same title (Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2009).

2012-01-14T07:07:00.000-06:00

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Whales, presidential campaigns, and Die Zauberflöte

2012-01-12T08:33:00.013-06:00

In the first hour of yesterday's program, John Williams interviewed Jorge Newbery and Steve Peterson, the faces of American Homeowner Preservation (AHP), an "Investment Fund [that] Helps Foreclosed Homeowners Hang On." Essentially, AHP buys distressed loans from lenders and then works toward "consensual solutions" with the residents. As Deal Estate reports, the "Chicago-based investment fund wants to prevent foreclosures from going vacant in the first place. It wants to acquire those properties and then rent them back to the foreclosed former homeowners at a deep discount."

We heard the program as we made our way into Chicago to see "Whales: Giants of the Deep" at the Field Museum and, later in the evening, The Magic Flute at the Lyric Opera. When explaining why the lenders weren't more readily embracing this approach to the mortgage crisis, one of the guests described the firm's work as a market proposal for a social problem.

Perhaps you can understand why "A Market Proposal for Saving Whales" at Wired Science attracted my attention this morning. The phrase, market proposal, coupled with the subject of the exhibit, whales... As regular readers know, I just love that sort of synchronicity, serendipity, and synthesis.

Seeing the exhibit was actually Miss M-mv(i)'s idea. Her sixteenth birthday is approaching, and we asked what she'd like to do to celebrate. One of the activities on her list was "Whales: Giants of the Deep," but it closes Monday. No problem, I asserted. We'll leave early and see it before The Magic Flute.

What a terrific exhibit! Let me begin by admitting, yet again, that the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. For example, I did not realize until yesterday that dolphins and whales belong to the same order, Cetaceans. (The Misses did, and I am greatly encouraged by this. Insert wry grin.) And I understood little about their evolution. (Related article here.) Because of the beautiful film Whale Rider, though, I am familiar with some of the Maori mythology involving whales, and over the years, I have learned a bit about the whaling industry, but "Whales: Giants of the Deep" gives all of this information -- science, mythology, business, ecology -- a cohesive narrative that is both intriguing and worthwhile. Good stuff.

After a quiet meander through some old favorites -- "What Is an Animal?" "Animal Biology," and "Mammals of Africa" -- we decided to head to dinner and the opera. Although we had heard on the news that the President was in town for several fundraising events, I'm not sure being prevented from leaving the museum campus when the helicopters arrived at Soldier Field necessarily qualifies as synchronicity, serendipity, or synthesis. It certainly qualified, however, as a somewhat stressful experience. After all, it's intimidating enough to be stopped by a police officer. The addition of what appeared to be Secret Service types really makes one's pulse quicken, I'll tell you. Afterward, police sedans, emergency vehicles, and official cars streamed past us to "the re-election headquarters his campaign opened in May, [where the President delivered] a rally-the-troops message to staff and volunteers who fill one full floor of the Prudential Building."

Unsure how the rolling street closures would affect our path through the city, we headed directly to the Lyric. After a quick bite, we attended the pre-opera lecture given by David Buch, visiting professor at The University of Chicago. Buch likened Mozart's last opera to a Shakespearean play -- that is, an entertainment designed to have the widest possible appeal to the widest possible audience.

And it does. And maybe that was my problem. The music is exquisitely beautiful, and the ol' synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis at work last night was that Nicole Cabell, who mesmerized us last year as Micaëla in Carmen, returned to sing Pamina with graceful skill. Stéphane Degout as Papageno and Günther Groissböck as Sarastro also delivered memorable moments. In fact, Mr. M-mv particularly likes the aria "O Isis und Osiris" and thought Groissböck did a more than serviceable job.

But some of the things that delighted the audience in this fairy-tale opera -- the (badly) dancing animals, for instance, the children clad in Chicago team jerseys, and Papageno's English outburst -- struck me as more "Opera for Dummies" than opera that appeals to the masses (because I really don't think those two phrases were meant to be synonymous). Apparently, John von Rhein shares my view, although writing in Tuesday's Chicago Tribune, he also notes:

Monday's audience seemed to find the gobs of shtick and childlike whimsy in Matthew Lata's restaging of August Everding's well-worn 1986 production to their liking, so perhaps we critical churls who complain about over-familiarity should keep our carping to ourselves.

Well, color me unabashedly churlish, then (even though, with but three operas in my knapsack, I can hardly be called over-familiar), because I left feeling distinctly dissatisfied last night. Unfairly, perhaps, part of my dissatisfaction may have nothing to do with the kitschy staging. You see, while I utterly and completely embrace the idea of appealing to groundlings, and I realize that everyone is an opera virgin once, I just don't think it's uncharitable to ask that said groundlings and virgins behave better than they did last night.

Some carping, then, that I simply can't keep to myself:

❧ Don't share a snack that requires repeated extractions from a loudly crinkling plastic bag.
❧ Don't place your coat or bag in any seat but your own.
❧ Don't laugh too loudly.
❧ Don't talk during the performance. Not even to tell others not to talk.
❧ Don't disregard the request to silence your phone and electronic devices.
❧ Don't evacuate your nasal passages during an aria. In fact, avoid evacuating your nasal passages during the performance. Period.
❧ Don't race for the exit before the program has concluded.

I realize that this is "white whine" of the absolute worst sort -- as in, Oh, Muffy. You would not believe how badly the groundlings and virgins behaved at the opera last night. How loudly they laughed. And their nose-blowing. [*shudder*] Who lets these people in? Shall you call Tony [Anthony Freud, General Director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago], or shall I?

Still, the seeming, shall we say, lack of breeding was pretty feckin' annoying.

I'll conclude on a lighter note, one that wraps up this adventure in a note of synchronicity, serendipity, and synthesis, all right? So. What links a scientific research station in Antarctica with a unique opera performance in Germany's capital?

The answer, unlikely as it seems, is underwater sounds. Since 2005, a remote acoustic observatory has been recording the sounds of the deep sea using underwater microphones placed below the ice shelf. These otherworldly sounds provided the inspiration for an opera that premiered on Sunday night in Berlin.

As you might imagine, this was no ordinary opera. Staged in the breathtaking Neukölln baths, the AquAria_PALAOA took place almost entirely underwater. Fully clothed performers entered the pool up to their necks so that their voices could be heard above the surface as well as below it, whence two underwater microphones broadcast the submarine sounds. Around the water's edge, musicians accompanied the singers. As the drama intensified more of the performers and even some instruments entered the water, creating ethereal and extraordinary sounds, which were interspersed with recordings of whale and seal songs from the Antarctic depths.

Curated content

2012-01-09T18:59:00.003-06:00

Language Log: More comments on comments (just between us)

No, what I discovered a year ago was that what displeased me the most was dopiness. Asininity, dim-wittedness, doltishness, dullness, dumbness, foolishness, idiocy, nescience, witlessness, pig-ignorance, senselessness, stupidity, — to capture it in a word, the kind of sheer knuckle-dragging moronic lack-wittedness that makes you think you would rather be listening to Vogon poetry.

What I discovered about myself was that the pain of seeing the dopey things posted by some commenters (not you) outweighed all the pleasure of doing the blogging.

New York Times: Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

But controlling for numerous factors, including students’ backgrounds, the researchers found that the value-added scores consistently identified some teachers as better than others, even if individual teachers’ value-added scores varied from year to year.

After identifying excellent, average and poor teachers, the economists then set out to look at their students over the long term, analyzing information on earnings, college matriculation rates, the age they had children, and where they ended up living.

The results were striking. Looking only at test scores, previous studies had shown, the effect of a good teacher mostly fades after three or four years. But the broader view showed that the students still benefit for years to come.

Publishers Weekly: Barnes & Noble May Spin Off Nook Business

Barnes & Noble could be a very different company one year from now. Following a report in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that B&N is looking to sell Sterling Publishing (a process that a source told PW “is moving along”), the company disclosed Thursday morning that it is considering spinning off its Nook business into its own company. The disclosure came as part of B&N’s holiday sales report that showed large increases in sales of Nook devices, but also revealed that EBITDA, hurt by lower than expected sales of the Nook Simple Touch and increased investment in Nook products, will be less than forecast only a month ago.

Smithsonian: An Eye for Genius: The Collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein

If the picture startles even after a century has passed, imagine the reaction when Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat was first exhibited in 1905. One outraged critic ridiculed the room at the Grand Palais in Paris, where it reigned alongside the violently hued canvases of like-minded painters, as the lair of fauves, or wild animals. The insult, eventually losing its sting, stuck to the group, which also included André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. The Fauves were the most controversial artists in Paris, and of all their paintings, Woman with a Hat was the most notorious.

Fox News: 'Dance Moms' Star Abby Lee Miller Says Most Parents Suck

I think parents today enable their children to fail. Years ago you had to actually work for something. When dance competitions first started, there was a first, second and third prize, everybody else went home with nothing. Nowadays kids get a trophy for being born. It’s ridiculous. Everybody gets gold or silver or a bronze and it goes on and on and on. It’s like they’re trying to pacify everybody instead of making the kids work to be the best. And you know what? You’re not going to always be the best. There’s somebody else out there, somebody who’s working harder or improves quicker, whatever, and they’re going to win. I don’t think it’s an asset to win all the time. I think it’s good to lose, it builds character. I mean, I want to win all the time because I have enough character!

Newsweek: Buff Your Brain

Yet that’s what we all want—to know more, to understand more deeply, to make greater creative leaps, to retain what we read, to see connections invisible to others—not merely to make the most of what we have between our ears now, but to be, in a word, smarter. By raising our mental game we would be able to pick out the most significant data in a company’s annual report, see immediately when a marketer or advertisement is conning us (“increase the molecular structure” of water to make it healthier for your Siamese fighting fish, as one bottler promises? Don’t think so), understand medical studies relevant to what ails us, grasp the significance of the euro meltdown to our retirement savings, and make smarter decisions in work, love, and life.

Newsweek: The Real Tragedy of Natalie Wood

The latest twist in Wood’s dramatic life and death came last month, when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department decided to reopen the case based on new testimony from several witnesses, including the boat’s captain, Dennis Davern. In 2009, Davern published a book about Wood’s death, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour, and it caught the eye of a Washington, D.C., patent lawyer named Vincent DeLuca, who describes himself as “a fan always bothered by how Natalie died.” DeLuca decided to start an online petition calling for the case to be reopened, and together with Davern’s coauthor, Marti Rulli, he gathered 800 signatures and sworn statements from Davern and other witnesses. “The book didn’t jump-start law enforcement because words are hearsay,” says DeLuca. “But ignore a sworn statement and they’re saying, ‘Davern lied to us, but we’re doing nothing about it.’ They had to act.”

Newsweek: How the Higgs Boson Could Change the Universe

“Hadron,” in fact, refers to particles that interact through one of the four forces of nature known as the strong nuclear force. The Higgs-boson experiments are taking place at the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous particle accelerator crossing the French-Swiss border. In the LHC’s underground labyrinth, scientists can observe the collision of protons—a type of hadron—that have been accelerated to nearly the speed of light. These protons collide a billion times a second in a tiny region smaller than a human hair. When they do, they can turn into energy, as predicted by Einstein’s theory, and that energy can then create new types of matter, never before seen.

National Geographic: Twins

To these scientists, and to biomedical researchers all over the world, twins offer a precious opportunity to untangle the influence of genes and the environment—of nature and nurture. Because identical twins come from a single fertilized egg that splits in two, they share virtually the same genetic code. Any differences between them—one twin having younger looking skin, for example—must be due to environmental factors such as less time spent in the sun.

The Atlantic: I Was Wrong, and So Are You

Buturovic was exploring the possibility that ideological differences stem more from differences in people’s beliefs about how the world works than from differences in their basic values. It was in pursuit of that thesis that she undertook the survey, and designed the questions for it. But when I got my hands on it, I saw its potential for assessing economic enlightenment.

NPR: A Self-Published Author's $2 Million Cinderella Story

Finally, last fall, Hocking joined an elite literary club that includes only 11 other authors, including James Patterson, Stieg Larsson and Nora Roberts: She sold her 1 millionth book for the Amazon Kindle.

And she has made $2 million doing it. Movie rights for her work have been optioned, and the publishing companies that once rejected her came back around. She signed a multimillion-dollar deal with St. Martin's Press, and her first print book, Switched, is out now.

NPR: Louis C.K. On Life, Loss, Love, And 'Louie'

"I get a lot of email from people saying, 'I saw something you did on TV that was clean.' Like I did this clip on Conan that went viral that everything is amazing and no one is happy, and it just was about appreciating what the world is like and not grousing about it. And it got really popular with Christian groups. And I heard that a lot of pastors would play it before their services and stuff. So a lot of people that saw it would go to my website and be horrified by everything else that I say.

So I got a lot of emails from people saying, 'Why can't you just keep it clean? Because I am now shut off from your act by the horrible things you said, and that's such a shame.' And I would not usually respond to them because I don't return emails, but in my head and to a few of them I said, 'Well, you're the one putting the limit. Not me. I'm saying a bunch of stuff, and you're the one saying I should only say one facet of it.' That's a limit. But at the same time, when these people would write to me I'd kind of like them. Whenever I've encountered a Christian saying, 'Why don't you stop talking like that so I can hear you?' I think, 'Well you're the one putting the earmuffs on, but I wish you could hear me because I like you.'

Lapham's Quarterly: The Meaning of Home

What vexed Miller were the stories Americans have told themselves about the power of positive thinking, the instant money and spiritual purity that are sure to follow from unfettered entrepreneurship, the decency of the profit motive, the goodness of the national past, and, when all else fails, the possibility of escape and reinvention in the West. This land is your land: Henry David Thoreau crosses uneasily with Norman Rockwell; the tenets of Ayn Rand crash into the gospel of Jesus Christ; the Book of Mormon reads strangely in parallel with the Bill of Rights; Huckleberry Finn lights out for the territory but never becomes the Marlboro Man, exactly. Above all, Miller responded to a culture that cherished a sanctimonious and noxiously sentimental vision of family life as a beacon of health and wealth.

The American Scholar: How to Pay for What We Need

Conservatives and liberals alike should step back from conventional thinking in the face of our current conditions. None of the prevailing economic orthodoxies—neither the liberal ones of Keynes nor the conservative counterorthodoxies of Milton Friedman or Arthur Laffer—touch sufficiently on the central point that we ought to be considering now: the nature of money as an economic thing-in-itself, because modern money is a fluid—an evolving—construction.

You'll find the library of my links here.

Chapbook entry

2012-01-09T07:59:00.000-06:00

Act II, Scene 1
Meninius:

I know you can do very little alone; for your helps
are many, or else your actions would grow wondrous
single: your abilities are too infant-like for
doing much alone. You talk of pride: O that you
could turn your eyes toward the napes of your necks,
and make but an interior survey of your good selves!
O that you could!

Act III, Scene 1
Meninius:

His nature is too noble for the world:
He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for's power to thunder. His heart's his mouth:
What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent;
And, being angry, does forget that ever
He heard the name of death.

Act III, Scene 2
Coriolanus:

Must I go show them my unbarbed sconce?
Must I with base tongue give my noble heart
A lie that it must bear? Well, I will do't:
Yet, were there but this single plot to lose,
This mould of Marcius, they to dust should grind it
And throw't against the wind. To the market-place!
You have put me now to such a part which never
I shall discharge to the life.

On the nightstand

2012-01-08T15:04:00.007-06:00

■ Feed (M.T. Anderson)
Fiction. Seven years ago, Mr. M-mv and I read this with our son. At the time I wrote:

Another book that has, for better or worse, (re)shaped the geography of our imaginations this week is M.T. Anderson's Feed. The book has been pitched to "young adults." [...] Hence, a number of children will read it. The clever among them, then, missing the [point], will dismiss it as "shallow" or "dumb." The rest simply won't get it. Frankly, many teens won't get it. Far more worrisome? Most adults may miss the point. Or will get it, and, in their great discomfort, reject it. We're not pretending this is great literature. But, "Oh? Wow! Thing!"

Well, in addition to Coriolanus (related entry here), the family book club decided to read Feed this month. Does it hold up on re-reading? Both Mr. M-mv and I agree that it does. He revisited the book via an excellent audiobook edition, read by David Aaron Baker ("Terrific!"), and I split my return nearly equally over the paperback I first read and a Kindle edition. Our recent book club discussion included such issues as the novel's prescience, its spot on riff on the vapidity of "teenspeak," the fact that Violet is (of course!) homeschooled, and the observation that Titus is not an entirely an unsympathetic character, nor is Violet an entirely sympathetic character.

Some passages for the chapbook:

p. 4

The thing I hate about space is that you can feel how old and empty it is. I don't know if the others felt like I felt, about space? But I think they did, because they all got louder. They all pointed more, and squeezed close to Link's window.

You need the noise of your friends in space.

p. 31

I wanted to buy some things but I didn't know what they were. After we walked around for a while, everything seemed kind of sad and boring so we couldn't tell anymore what we wanted.

p. 47

People were really excited when they first came out with feeds. It was all da, da, da, this big educational thing, da da da, your child will have the advantage, encyclopedias at their fingertips, closer than their fingertips, etc. That's one of the greatest things about the feed -- that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit.

p. 135

The place was a mess. Everything had words on it. There were papers with words on them, and books, and even posters on the wall had words. Her father seemed like a crank.

By the way, can I give a little "Squee!" about the synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis at work here? Re-reading Feed while still engaged with Nicholas Carr's The Shallows was, in a hyphenated word, mind-blowing.

■ Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing (Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer)
Non-fiction. From Daniel Simon's foreword to this slim but wonderful volume:

There is a sentence in a Jewish prayer: A person's thoughts are his or her own, but their expression belongs to God. You feel it in the writings -- and the talk -- of both these men. As one who believes in the redemptive power of literature, I think Kurt and Lee both write to catch His eye. Neither one of them is taking any chances.

That I love Vonnegut, most of you already know; this transcript of his October 1, 1998 conversation with Lee Stringer only increased my affection. And I added Stringer's Grand Central Winter to my Kindle after closing the book.

■ The Lost Art of Reading: Why Reading Matters in a Distracted Time (David L. Ulin)
Non-fiction. Ah, the irony. Yes, I'm reading this on the Kindle. From Ulin's essay of the same title (Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2009):

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

■ The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)
Non-fiction. Still working on this one. I mentioned it in last week's "On the nightstand" but will repeat here: Carr created a stir three and half years ago with the publication of the essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (The Atlantic, July/August 2008; related M-mv entry here). The book is every bit as compelling as the article led me to believe; a chapbook entry will follow. Until then, two links -- NPR's "All Things Considered" on "'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online" and Carr's blog, Rough Type.

■ Adventure Unleashed (______ __. _________)
Fiction. The comb-bound book on the bottom of this week's pile is my daughter's self-published novel, the first in a fantasy trilogy.

2012-01-06T20:46:00.000-06:00

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

"The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious."

2012-01-05T10:17:00.003-06:00

The wonderful Stephen Fry on the subject of language.
Hat tip: Girl Detective.

"Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?"

2012-01-05T10:07:00.003-06:00

Hat tip: Girl Detective.

Curated content

2012-01-04T14:18:00.003-06:00

Wired: "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us"

This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern world when we use our perceptual habits to explain events that we can’t perceive or easily understand. Rather than accept the complexity of a situation—say, that snarl of causal interactions in the cholesterol pathway—we persist in pretending that we’re staring at a blue ball and a red ball bouncing off each other. There’s a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world.

The Atlantic: "What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success"

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

Brain Pickings: "A List of Don'ts for Women on Bicycles circa 1895"

Don’t coast. It is dangerous.
Don’t boast of your long rides.
Don’t criticize people’s “legs.”
Don’t wear loud hued leggings.
Don’t cultivate a “bicycle face.”
Don’t refuse assistance up a hill.
Don’t wear clothes that don’t fit.

Rough Type: "Thinking about reading"

When we open a book, it seems that we really do enter, as far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its rich emotional force.

Letters of Note: "Scratching the Back of the Hand that Feeds You"

I recognize the unconscious spirit of rebellious independence that exists in all of us, and the compulsion you or I may have to demonstrate that we wear no man's yoke. I have always felt, however, that there were better and more rewarding ways of doing this than in conspicuously avoiding or flouting the products of the people who pay our way.

You'll find the library of my links here.

We'll only need three mugs of tea today.

2012-01-03T15:41:00.006-06:00

Sigh.

Our eleven-day winter break has concluded. Mr. M-mv returned to the office, and the Misses and I returned to our studies. And although all of us are engaged by our work, we certainly relished the time together.

(And frankly? I really relished someone else taking over mealtime. Oh, but golly, there is nothing like having someone else attend to the task of cooking and cleaning up. Wonderful. Won. Der. FUL.)

It was a local and low-key break -- some movies (the last in the Harry Potter series, The Tempest with Helen Mirren, the 2002 CBC Television production of Elizabeth Rex, Rise of the Planet of the Apes), some games (including Logan Stones and Ticket to Ride), a family book club selection (Coriolanus), a little archery practice, nine walks, music, and ample doses of talking, reading, and relaxing.

It was the sort of respite that readies one to return to his or her regularly scheduled programming with fresh eyes and a limber mind. So, yes, we miss Mr. M-mv, but it was a good, good day. Productive. Interesting. And, in its way, fun, even.

On the nightstand

2012-01-02T12:51:00.006-06:00

■ Coriolanus (William Shakespeare)
Play, classic. The family book club decided to tackle this one, and, honestly? It's so compelling that I don't know how we missed before. So, thank you, Ralph Fiennes. Thank you very much.

■ The Autobiography of an Execution (David R. Dow)
Non-fiction. One word: Un-put-down-able. All right. That's not really a word, but it ably describes how I felt about Houston lawyer David R. Dow's memoir / meditation on the death penalty. The casually familiar narrative style might seem at odds with the subject matter, but it coaxes readers through otherwise difficult material. You'll find a NYT review here.

■ The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)
Non-fiction. You may remember the stir Carr created three and half years ago with the publication of the essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (The Atlantic, July/August 2008; related M-mv entry here). The book is every bit as compelling as the article led me to believe. Chapbook entry to follow. Until then, two links -- NPR's "All Things Considered" on "'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online" and Carr's blog, Rough Type. (Bookmark that last one; a great site for readers, thinkers, and autodidacts.)

■ Artist's Journal Workshop (Cathy Johnson)
Art. Subtitled "Creating Your Life in Words in Pictures," this beautifully illustrated introduction to art journaling includes examples in a a range of media from the notebooks of twenty-seven artists. Johnson's text is both practical (Collage over an entire offending page, if you must) and encouraging (Celebrating the everyday is one of the loveliest uses of an artist's journal).

Not pictured:

■ The English Teacher (Lily King)
Fiction. Apparently, this novel was chosen by both Publisher's Weekly and the Chicago Tribune as one of the best novels of 2005. I missed it then and cannot begin to remember how it ended up on my TBR stack, but I will tell you that I appreciated King's skill from the opening line: That she had not killed him in her sleep was still the great relief of every morning. She narrates a compelling character study in the taut, measured tones of psychological thriller -- and delivers.

Note: I had already closed out "The year in books" for 2011 when I finished The English Teacher on New Year's Eve, so it is now the first book on my 2012 list, with Artist's Journal Workshop second, Coriolanus third, and The Autobiography of an Execution fourth.

Falstaffian

2012-01-02T12:34:00.003-06:00

The year in books

2011-12-31T07:14:00.001-06:00

Books read in 2011: 125

You'll find 10 memorable books read in 2011 here.

January (reviews/discussion here)

■ The Nest Home Design Handbook (Carley Roney)
■ Decorating Ideas That Work (Heather J. Paper)
■ Speed Decorating (Jill Vegas)
■ Flip! for Decorating (Elizabeth Mayhew)
■ Home Decor: A Sunset Design Guide (Kerrie L. Kelly)
■ Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Amy Chua; memoir, parenting)
■ Macbeth (William Shakespeare; play, classic)
■ The Other Side of the Island (Allegra Goodman; fiction)
■ A Lantern in Her Hand (Bess Streeter Aldrich; fiction)
■ Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Winifred Watson; fiction)

March (reviews/discussion here)

■ The Source of All Things: A Memoir (Tracy Ross; memoir, review copy)
■ Heaven Is for Real (Todd Burpo; memoir, religion)

April (reviews/discussion here)

■ Things a Brother Knows (Dana Reinhart; YA fiction)
■ Illyria (Elizabeth Hand; fiction)
■ The Merchant of Venice (William Shakespeare; play, classic)
■ Model Home (Eric Puchner; fiction)
■ Mouse Guard, Volume 1: Fall 1152 (David Petersen; graphic novel)
■ Mouse Guard, Volume 2: Winter 1152 (David Petersen; graphic novel)
■ The Worst Loss: How Families Heal from the Death of a Child (Barbara D. Rosof)
■ Beyond Tears: Living after Losing a Child (Ellen Mitchell)
■ Love Never Dies: A Mother's Journey from Loss to Love (Sandy Goodman)
■ After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years (Ann K. Finkbeiner)
■ Trapped (Michael Northrop; YA fiction)
■ Sherlock Holmes: Short Stories (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; fiction)
■ The Colony (Jillian Marie Weise; fiction)
■ The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country (Neil Gaiman; graphic novel)

May (reviews/discussion here)

■ Daughters-in-Law (Joanna Trollope; fiction)

■ Sempre Susan (Sigrid Nunez; memoir)
■ Gardening Step by Step (Phil Clayton, et al.)
■ John Brookes' Natural Landscapes (John Brookes)
■ Month-by-Month Gardening in Illinois (James A. Fizzell)
■ The New Gardener (Pippa Greenwood)
■ Glorious Gardens (Jacqueline Heriteau)
■ Midwest Top 10 Garden Guide (Bonnie Monte, ed.)
■ Midwest Gardens (Pamela Wolfe)
■ Low Maintenance Garden (Jenny Hendy)
■ The Complete Beginner's Guide to Archery (Bernhard A. Roth)
■ Know the Sport: Archery (John Adams)
■ Sherlock Holmes: More Short Stories (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; fiction)
■ The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton; YA fiction)
■ The Raising (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ The Life before Her Eyes (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ No Time for Goodbye (Linwood Barclay; fiction)
■ Too Close to Home (Linwood Barclay; fiction)

June (reviews/discussion here)

■ The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth (Alexandra Robbins; non-fiction, education)
■ Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (Alison Arngrim; memoir)
■ Pitch Uncertain (Maisie Houghton; memoir)
■ The Silent Land (Graham Joyce; fiction)
■ A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare; play, classic)
■ The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; fiction)
■ Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson; science fiction)

July (reviews/discussion here)

■ Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (Lauren Redniss; graphic biography)
■ A Short Course in Canon PowerShot S5 IS Photography
■ Short Stories (Doyle, Henry, Poe; fiction)
■ The Winter's Tale (William Shakespeare; classic, play)
■ Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card; science fiction)
■ The Sister Knot (Terri Apter; psychology)
■ My Man Jeeves (P.J. Wodehouse; fiction, audiobook)
■ Acceptance: A Legendary Guidance Counselor Helps Seven Kids Find the Right Colleges--and Find Themselves (Dave Marcus; non-fiction)
■ The Millionaire Next Door (Thomas Stanley; non-fiction, personal finance)
■ Fear the Worst (Linwood Barclay; fiction)

August (reviews and discussion here)

■ The Time Machine (H.G. Wells; classic science fiction)
■ Umbrella Summer (Lia Graff; YA fiction)
■ Sarah's Key (Tatiana de Rosay; fiction)
■ Never Look Away (Linwood Barclay; fiction)
■ Blank Confession (Pete Hautman; YA fiction)
■ Joy for Beginners (Erica Bauermeister; fiction)
■ Boy Heaven (Laura Kasischke; YA fiction)
■ Feathered (Laura Kasischke; YA fiction)
■ Daytripper (Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon; graphic novel)
■ In a Perfect World (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs; non-fiction)
■ One Day (David Nicholls; fiction)
■ The Idle Parent (Tom Hodgkinson; non-fiction)
■ Drawing Birds (John Busby; non-fiction)
■ Be Mine (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ Suspicion River (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ White Bird in a Blizzard (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ Want to Go Private? (Sarah Littman; YA fiction)
■ Mid-Life (Joe Ollmann; graphic novel)
■ A Hope in the Unseen (Ron Suskind; non-fiction)
■ A New Culture of Learning (Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown; non-fiction)
■ The Accident (Linwood Barclay; fiction)
■ The Hypnotist (Lars Kepler; fiction)
■ This Beautiful Life (Helen Schulman; fiction)
■ Beginner's Guide to Traditional Archery (Brian Sorrells; non-fiction)
■ This Girl Is Different (J.J. Johnson; YA fiction)

September (reviews and discussion here)

■ Before I Go to Sleep (S.J. Watson; fiction)
■ A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith; fiction)
■ 101 Things I Hate about Your House (James Swan; non-fiction)
■ DMZ: Volume 9: MIA (Brian Wood; graphic fiction)
■ The Leftovers (Tom Perrotta; fiction)
■ Barns of Illinois (Larry and Alaina Kanfer; non-fiction)
■ Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work (Tim Gunn; non-fiction)

October (reviews and discussion here)

■ The Sibling Effect (Jeffrey Kluger; non-fiction)
■ The Magic Flute (P. Craig Russell; graphic retelling)
■ Johnny Tremain (Esther Forbes; fiction)
■ Henry IV, Part I (William Shakespeare; classic, play)
■ The Belles Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry Prince of France (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1956; art)
■ Très Riches Heures: Behind the Gothic Masterpiece (Lillian Schachert; art)
■ The Walking Dead: Rise of The Governor (Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga; fiction)
■ Feynman (Jim Ottaviani; graphic biography)

November (reviews and discussion here)

■ Blue Nights (Joan Didion; memoir)
■ Henry IV, Part II (William Shakespeare; play, classic)
■ Elizabeth Rex (Timothy Findley; play)
■ Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (Michael Pollan; non-fiction)
■ Toxic Parents (Susan Forward; psychology)
■ DMZ: Volume 10: Collective Punishment (Brian Wood; graphic fiction)

December (reviews and discussion here)

■ The Schwa Was Here (Neal Shusterman; YA fiction)
■ My Lobotomy (Howard Dully; memoir)
■ World War Z (Max Brooks; fiction)
■ Mean Mothers (Peg Streep; psychology)
■ Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs; fiction)
■ Twisted Summer (Willo Davis Roberts; YA fiction)
■ The Grounding of Group 6 (Julian F. Thompson; YA fiction)
■ Lord of the Flies (William Golding; fiction)
■ Brain Jack (Brian Falkner; YA fiction)
■ Tomorrow Code (Brian Falkner; YA fiction)
■ Missed Connections (Sophie Blackall; art)
■ Why We Broke Up (Daniel Handler; YA fiction)
■ Drawing from Memory (Allen Say; graphic biography)
■ Pilgrimage (Annie Leibowitz; photography)
■ The Heights (Peter Hedges; fiction)
■ The Creative Habit (Twyla Tharp; non-fiction)
■ The Kitchen Madonna (Rumer Godden; juvenile fiction)

Reading life review: December

2011-12-30T08:53:00.000-06:00

Books read this month: 17
Books read in 2011: 125

I've got a rapidly advancing bookmark in Lily King's The English Teacher, and both The Autobiography of an Execution (David R. Dow) and Like Shaking Hands with God (Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer) are poised on my nightstand for all-in-one-gulp consumption. But this seemed as good a place as any to call it a month... and a year.

■ The Schwa Was Here (Neal Shusterman)
YA fiction. A delightful and clever story from the author of Unwind, this reminded me of Richard Peck's work, as well as Gary D. Schmidt's The Wednesday Wars and Trouble.

■ My Lobotomy (Howard Dully)
Memoir. Although it seems clear that the author's message is one of hope and triumph through research and self-knowledge, this was still one of the saddest, most horrifying stories I have ever read. Related link here.

■ World War Z (Max Brooks)
Fiction. Gosh, it took me forever to finish this! But that's really more a remark on my distractedness over the last couple of months than on this compelling novel. Published three years after his popular The Zombie Survival Guide, Brooks' post-apocalyptic tale is related through a series of eyewitness reports, a device which makes the audiobook particularly compelling, according to Mr. M-mv. (Note that the full-cast audiobook, while superlative, is an abridgment.)

■ Mean Mothers (Peg Streep)
Psychology. Subtitled "Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt," this exploration of a provocative subject provided background material for a recent research project.

■ Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs)
Fiction. The photos were a neat "hook," and I appreciate genre "shake-ups" (e.g., Dan Wells' I Am Not a Serial Killer), but, in the end, Peculiar fell short for me. Related aside: I began reading this on the Kindle but finished reading it on the iPad. This is definitely a book that should be read in the traditional format or on a larger format e-reader; the Kindle simply couldn't offer the clarity needed to appreciate the photographs.

■ Twisted Summer (Willo Davis Roberts)
YA fiction. A cozily predictable mystery for the youngest YA readers, Twisted Summer features Cici, a fourteen-year-old girl who wants to be acknowledged as one of "big kids." What I appreciated about this simple story was that Cici demonstrated her maturity through her displays of tenacity, intellect, and loyalty -- not through, say, sexual and/or substance experimentation. I know, right? How positively old-fashioned.

■ The Grounding of Group 6 (Julian F. Thompson)
YA fiction. When it was first published in 1983, Grounding caused a bit of a stir with its blend of satire and psychological thrills (to say nothing of its frank sexual content, which, though tame by today's standards, was quite taboo then). I was nineteen when it was first released and missed its ascent into cult classic status (enthusiastic review here). And though I had rediscovered the merits of YA fiction by the time Grounding was re-leased in 1997, I somehow missed it again. Arriving at the book sans hype, then, I would say that it is both competent and compelling, though not nearly as memorable as a more recent entry into the "really, really bad parents" sub-genre of YA fiction: Neal Shusterman's Unwind.

■ Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Fiction. With the Misses. This was my fourth go-round with Golding's classic, and I see something new each visit. What a startlingly perceptive view of people and what little holds us together, eh? And how eye-opening to read this after having seen, loved, and dissected "LOST." I'll have more to say about this one in January.

■ Brain Jack (Brian Falkner)
YA fiction. This fast-paced blend of cyber-geekery and thriller put me in mind of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Robert J. Sawyer's WWW: Wake: Teen hacker Sam Wilson lands a position with a national cyber defense organization in lieu of a jail sentence. His job? To help protect the world from a malicious presence on the internet.

■ Tomorrow Code (Brian Falkner)
YA fiction. Not quite as seamless as Brain Jack, this was still a competent effort from New Zealand author Brian Falkner. This time, the protagonists race against (and through) time to save humanity from a virus.

■ Missed Connections (Sophie Blackall)
Art. This collection of illustrated love stories is delightful and touching. Have you seen the Australian illustrator's whimsical art before? If not, start with the blog that inspired the book.

■ Why We Broke Up (Daniel Handler)
YA fiction. Written by none other than the man behind the pen name Lemony Snickett and illustrated by the incomparable Maira Kalman, this is, quite possibly, my favorite book of 2011. Imagine Ellen Page's Juno narrating the unlikely (and short-lived) romance between a smart-talking, "different" girl and the co-captain of the high school basketball team. Now couple that sarcastic and searingly honest insight with the detritus of a failed relationship -- the ticket stubs, books, shirts, combs, matchbooks, and so on that hold so much meaning. Voilà! It's magic. It's also wonderfully cinematic; I will not be surprised when plans to translate it into film are announced. Highly recommended.

■ Drawing from Memory (Allen Say)
Graphic autobiography. I agree with the Chicago Tribune: "This visual memoir is captivating and always unexpected."

■ Pilgrimage (Annie Leibovitz)
Photography. Elsewhere, folks are rather awed by this volume, but I was left somewhat cold by the effort. The photographs are stunning, but that admission addresses not Leibovitz's eye or art but rather the compelling subjects themselves: Emily Dickinson's dress. Virginia Woolf's sitting room. Charles Darwin's specimens. John Muir's field notes. Annie Oakley's boots. Unfortunately, these fascinating subjects suffer from a poor, disjointed layout and a, for lack of a better word, distant text. Call me soulless, but when Leibovitz notes that her journey began with the headline-grabbing financial crisis that sent her into personal and professional turmoil, I didn't think she was experiencing some sort of life-altering epiphany. I thought, Yes, so you decided to get to work, put out another book, and make some money. Smart woman. All of that said, I urge you to seek out the volume for the valuable history-museum-in-a-book that it is. How many of these amazing places and objects might we miss if not for such books?

■ The Heights (Peter Hedges)
Fiction. Told in alternating voices, The Heights chronicles, as one reviewer put it, "marital claustrophobia." The dark humor, crisp narrative, and wickedly wise social observations put me in mind of Tom Perrotta and Meg Wolitzer.

■ The Creative Habit (Twyla Tharp)
Non-fiction. Chapbook entry here.

■ The Kitchen Madonna (Rumer Godden)
Juvenile fiction. In search of something different but also sweetly simple, even childlike, for our Christmas week read-aloud (because (a) they are never too old for read-alouds -- just ask them; and (b) "sweetly simple" just feels right by the glow of the Christmas tree, whether you are four, fourteen, or forty-seven), I pulled out The Kitchen Madonna, which I first heard about over at Here in the Bonny Glen. The Misses and I loved this beautifully moving story.

Chapbook entry

2011-12-29T08:11:00.002-06:00

p. 8

Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart. Certainly, he had a gift that set him apart from others. He was the most complete musician imaginable, one who wrote for all instruments in all combinations, and no one has written greater music for the human voice. Still, few people, even those hugely gifted, are capable of the application and focus that Mozart displayed throughout his short life.

p. 39

I don't mean to get too caught up in observational focal length. It's one facet of many that makes up an artist's creative identity. Yet once you see it, you begin to notice how it defines all the artists you admire. The sweeping themes of Mahler's symphonies are the work of a composer with a wide vision. He sees grand architecture from a distance. Contrast that with a miniaturist like Satie, whose delicate compositions reveal a man in love with detail. (It's only the giants like Bach, Cézanne, and Shakespeare who could work in many focal lengths.)

p. 63

I spend a lot of time worrying about memory. One of the horrors of growing older is the certainty that you will lose memory and that loss of vocabulary or incident or imagery is going to diminish your imagination.

As a result, I try to give my memory a workout, training it to keep it sharp.

p. 64

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we're experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember, it's how we interpret -- for ourselves and others.

p. 101

If you're like me, reading is your first line of defense against an empty head. It's how you learned as a child. It's how you absorb difficult information. It's how you keep your mind disciplined. If you monitor your reading assiduously, it's even how you grade your brain's conditioning; like an athlete in training, the more you read, the more mentally fit you feel. It doesn't matter if it's a book, magazine, newspaper, billboard, instruction manual, or cereal box -- reading generates ideas, because you're literally filling your head with ideas and letting your imagination filter them for something useful. If I stopped reading, I'd stop thinking. It's that simple.

p. 165

Confidence is a trait that has to be learned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. This means vigilant practice and excellent practice habits. You've heard the phrase "Practice makes perfect"? Not true. Perfect practice makes perfect. The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they have to practice to maintain their skills. Art is a vast democracy of habit.

p. 235

Some people find their curiosity shutting down as they age, losing their taste for the new and settling in to reread their favorite books and listen to the music of their youth. And it's certainly possible to get distracted by family obligations. But there is nothing necessary or inevitable about it. We can fight the lockdown of our curiosity. We can sign up for the long run even if we might not cover the course as elegantly as our heroes.

Ten memorable books read in 2011

2011-12-28T13:49:00.013-06:00

At this writing, I have read 123 books this year. Many of them were quite good. Others? Maybe not my cuppa. (I'm thinking particularly of the tedious hours spent with gardening books earlier this year.) So which books were real stand-outs? Setting aside the Shakespeare plays and all of the Sherlock Holmes adventures since, as the Misses have pointed out, “Those are obviously the favorites,” I am left with the following (presented in the order in which I read them):

■ Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Winifred Watson)
Fiction. Girl Detective recommended this, calling it "cheering." And it was. It was also old-fashioned and improbable, both of which likely contribute to its appeal. First published in 1938, this breezy novel is a fairy tale of sorts, in which a down-at-heel nanny is sent to the wrong address for her next assignment and is thrust into the romantic and glamorous circle of one Delysia LaFosse. Witty banter and unlikely entanglements ensue.

■ Things a Brother Knows (Dana Reinhart)
YA fiction. After a long period of listlessness, this book reminded me that I am, in fact, a reader. (Thank you, Dana Reinhart.) A well-wrought examination of one Marine's journey home -- and, perhaps more significantly, the impact this difficult journey has on his family -- Things a Brother Knows is both excellent and timely.

■ Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (Lauren Redniss)
Graphic biography. An artful combination of science and romance, Radioactive manages to be both informative and beautiful. From "The Curies, Seen Through an Artist’s Eyes" (New York Times, December 21, 2010):

Described simply, “Radioactive” is an illustrated biography of Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist famous for her work on radioactivity — she was the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice — and her equally accomplished husband, Pierre. It lays bare their childhoods, their headlong love story, their scientific collaboration and the way their toxic discoveries, which included radium and polonium, poisoned them in slow motion.

■ Daytripper (Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon)
Graphic novel. How can it be that a book in which every chapter concludes with the protagonist's death is so, well, life-affirming? From a review earlier this year (Publishers' Weekly, January 11):

A stunning, moving story about one man's life and all the possibilities to be realized or lost along the way. Brothers Bá and Moon take readers through the life of a man named Brás de Oliva Domingos, selecting a series of individual events of great significance to Brás, showing each as if it could be the day Brás dies, and in so doing creating an examination of family, friendship, love, art, life, and death that urges the reader to turn the same careful inspection on their own life.

■ In a Perfect World (Laura Kasischke)
Fiction. As I mentioned when I first wrote about this book, as much as I enjoyed my whirlwind tour of Kasischke's oeuvre, I was fairly certain she could no longer surprise me -- until this novel. In a Perfect World coyly misleads an inattentive reader to believe it is simply an exploration of otherwise mundane subjects: a doomed marriage and an equally doomed foray into step-motherhood. And then it blossoms into a beautifully written and melancholy meditation on the end of the world as we know it and how we might become our most authentic selves when it all falls apart. If my previous recommendations didn't persuade you to give a Kasischke a try, let this one do so.

■ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs)
Non-fiction. The appearance of this title on my list will not surprise regular readers. I did rather carry on about it. Chapbook entry here; two other related entries here and here.

■ A Hope in the Unseen (Ron Suskind)
Non-fiction. Suskind won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for the series of articles that grew into A Hope in the Unseen, the chronicle of Cedric Lavar Jennings' journey from an impoverished and dangerous Washington, D.C., public high school to Brown University. Subtitled "An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League," Unseen unflinchingly and repeatedly points out that Jennings didn't graduate from Brown (and later, Harvard and the University of Michigan, according the afterword in this revised and updated edition) because of extraordinary academic gifts; he succeeded through hard work alone -- the grueling, single-minded study of a "headstrong monk." I was transfixed by the story, a result of its compelling subject as well as Suskind's assured narrative style.

■ Feynman (Jim Ottaviani)
Graphic biography. Both the private and public lives of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman are described in this wonderfully accessible biography, which is illustrated by Leland Myrick. You'll find an excellent review here: "The Feynman picture-book is a fine example of gekiga for Western readers." Note: I gave this book to Aunt M-mv for Christmas. Is there a higher recommendation than that?

■ Elizabeth Rex (Timothy Findley)
Play. Again, regular readers will be unsurprised by the inclusion of this book. (Chapbook entry here.) The excellent CBC Stratford Festival Reading Series recording accompanied my reading of this wonderful work, and in addition to seeing Diane D'Aquila in the recent Chicago Shakespeare Theater production (related entry here), we also had the pleasure of seeing the CBC Television production from 2002, the year after D'Aquila originated the role at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

■ Why We Broke Up (Daniel Handler)
YA fiction. Written by none other than the man behind the pen name Lemony Snickett and illustrated by the incomparable Maira Kalman, this is, quite possibly, my favorite book of 2011. Imagine Ellen Page's Juno narrating the unlikely (and short-lived) romance between a smart-talking, "different" girl and the co-captain of the high school basketball team. Now couple that sarcastic and searingly honest insight with the detritus of a failed relationship -- the ticket stubs, books, shirts, combs, matchbooks, and so on that hold so much meaning. Voilà! It's magic. It's also wonderfully cinematic; I will not be surprised when plans to translate it into film are announced.

A Christmas gift

2011-12-25T13:21:00.004-06:00

I know. How awesome is he, right? Another cool gift? The three-volume, hardcover edition of The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Yes, from the wonderful Mr. M-mv.

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We were sick, and now we're tired, but our holiday has been lovely. I hope yours has been, too.

It's warm here, but it's hard to imagine setting a foot outside the little forever home on the prairie. Still, we may.

Merry Christmas, readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. I'll be back when I can hold a laptop without yawning every forty-seven seconds.