This is where I have been for two months.

Last year, I tried veggie gardening for the first time. Sure, I had done tomatoes before and always had fresh herbs, but I carved out a 10 X 12 space and tried pumpkins, watermelons, and cucumbers. It was a success, there are still a few pumpkins left from the harvest.

This year I thought, let’s go big, let’s take over the world with this gardening thing. So, among other books, I grabbed Mini Farming and learned that if I did it just right, I could produce just about everything we need for a year with only 1,400 square feet per person. (Commercial Agribusinesses use 30,000 square feet per person)

That’s AMAZING. I can feed my fam with only 2,800 square feet! (and 1,400 of that is just cover crops for compost) We were ready, I drove everyone (the dog and spouse) crazy with my planning, sketching, seed collecting, little plastic greenhouse creating. Calendars were created with frost dates and planting times and harvest times and who knows what times. There was a whole pad of graph paper involved and a lot of colored pencils.

I also started shopping for chickens and goats. The dog was really on board with that plan, he needs more buddies. The spouse let me go on and on and on with my grand plans, but he drew the line at getting a cow. That was too much, too soon.

You know what? I suck at guesstimating distance and things like just how much 2,800 square feet really is. It’s a lot of space. More than that, it is a lot of flipping digging. A. Lot.

Anywho, while many have been happily blogging away, I have been curbing my enthusiasm to a more manageable level. Mini Farming is an amazing book, it gets you excited, really excited. I was ready to go out there and do it. My suggestion would be just to not go overboard like I did. Going from one successful cucumber and pumpkin year to a full 1/4 acre garden/homestead is a shooting a wee bit high.

I am going to try to get back my reviewing mojo as soon as I can feel my knees and hands again.

Until then, here are some inspiring Gardening books that I have Chewed and Digested so far.

• Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett L. Markham

• The Veggie Gardener’s Answer Book by Barbara W. Ellis

• The Everything Grow Your Own Vegetables Book by Catherine Abbott

• Pat Welsh’s Southern California Organic Gardening by Pat Welsh

Have you ever read a blurb of a book, thought you knew what it was about and then read the book and realized that you were totally wrong?

Somehow, when I read the blurb about The Irish Way, I thought I was going to learn about how my Irish ancestors grabbed hamburgers, started playing baseball, and became “American” when they got here. Wrong. Not even in the right ballpark.

The Irish, by being the first massive wave of immigrants to America, paved the way for everyone else. They were the ones that lived in the slums first, took the worst jobs, imported Catholicism, and basically, took all the heat that later groups of immigrants faced. They even had to fight to be considered “white”.

Still, through sheer numbers, their being literate, dedication to education, and willingness to help others, they succeeded in carving a path to their own definition of what being an American meant.  When the next wave of immigrants came, mostly from Eastern Europe, those Irish were the people they saw every day on the street. They were the cops, their neighbors, the fireman, the small business owners, etc. To the newcomers, they were the Americans. They followed the Irish Americans lead and slowly but surely, created their own definition of American.

The Irish Way was so much more than a story of how the Irish became Americanized, it is the story of blazing trails, of hopes and failures, of good guys and corruption, of one path that became the yellow brick road of many.The structure of the book makes it interesting as well. Barrett separated the sections in the ways that all immigrants would see them, The Street, The Parish, The Workplace, The Stage, The Machine, & The Nation.

The chapter on Catholicism (The Parish) blew me away. Call me naive, but I always thought that being Catholic was pretty much the same across the board; that it didn’t matter where you came from. Not so much. While the priest, to an Irish Catholic, is pretty much a direct line to God, for the Italian Catholic at the time, they were not as connected to or trusting of the clerics. For good or ill, if you were a Catholic in America, you were going to be an Irish Catholic, no matter where you hailed from.  I always took that as a given, because there were so many of us. No, it was because we Irish-ized all Catholics. Not really nice.

The picture of the Irish American isn’t always pretty. It’s complicated and the terrain is rocky along the path. There is one thing that stands out though, they came, they saw, they changed the face of America, and they showed others how it was done. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Years ago I read, How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. Both that one and The Irish Way made me proud and humble at the same time for my heritage. We ain’t perfect, but we do have a certain panache that keeps the world smiling.

This book wasn’t what I thought it was; it was so much more. From Minstrel shows to unions, or Tammany Hall to nuns running orphanages, Catechism to the Fighting 69th, Irish Americans carved a niche, no make that a wide gap, through which everything is possible. There might not be a pot of gold, but it is The Irish Way.

The Irish Way by James R. Barrett

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (March 1, 2012)
• ISBN-10: 1594203253
• ISBN-13: 978-1594203251

I received this book from TLC Book Tours. 

Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

Ghaemi has a very controversial idea/premise here….

“This book argues that in at least one vitally important circumstance insanity produces good results and sanity is a problem. In times of crisis, we are better off being led by mentally ill leaders than by mentally normal ones.”

Now, I am sure that many people would read that or the blub on the book and think that Ghaemi is mad himself. I have chronic depression (often called dysthymic disorder) and I read this and thought, “Wait, there are people that can do great things while suffering from this? And sometimes, might even be better equipped than people without it?”

Note: I am not at this time announcing my candidacy for President and don’t pretend to think that I am going to change the world because of my condition. The idea that it can be overcome to the point of being a leader is inspiring though.

Ghaemi mentions four elements or characteristics of mania and depression that come in handy in a crisis; Empathy, Realism, Creativity, and Resilience. Then, he breaks down the book, by highlighting leaders that most likely had a mental illness and used one of those elements to their advantage.

For instance, he looks at General Sherman when talking about Creativity. While I am that they are some that would argue about whether or not Sherman actually was bipolar, there is no doubt that he had major mood swings throughout his life. What no one will quibble about is that Sherman created an entire new form of warfare with his march to the sea. He could see that the war was getting nowhere fast and that there had to be a way to end the bloodshed. His solution was to take the war to the people in order to break down the morale of the entire South.

“Creativity may have to do less with solving problems than with finding the right problems to solve.”

Getting back to the book as a whole. There are a few stumbles……

• Ghaemi tends to overuse phrases, like “We shall soon see…” and while constantly redefining terms so that you don’t have to flip back to remind yourself of what he meant is nice, he does it ad nauseam.
• Also, I am still completely flummoxed as to why Ted Turner is in the book at all. While he does probably suffer from a mental illness, I don’t think he belongs on a list of leaders that include, Sherman, Lincoln, Churchill, Ghandi, MLK, or even Hitler.
• The last problem I had was with his bias coming out during the sections on George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Call me crazy, but if you want the idea of writing a psychological history to take off, you shouldn’t be letting your political bias ooze out quite so much.

I found the book absolutely freaking compelling. So much so that while I borrowed the ebook from the library, I just ordered the hardcover so that I would have an easy copy to refer to in the future. I couldn’t stop reading passages to my family members as I was reading it.

Are there going to be leaps that Ghaemi asks you to take that you don’t want to or don’t agree with?  Yes, even I wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid for everything and you shouldn’t either. Walking away though, you might find yourself with a deeper understanding of what it means to be mentally ill and that the stigma that society places on us are just that, a stigma, not based in any actually fact. There are plenty more eye-openers to take-away as well.

Quick phrase association game-

When I say Tea Party, what do you think of?
Let me guess, you thought Boston and the beginning of the American Revolution. Right?
You may have also thought of the current political craze/party as well, but forget that for this exercise.

The Tea Party that rocked the world didn’t happen in a vacuum, it was actually a catalyst for many other tea parties all over the colonies. Towns up and down the Atlantic reacted to the passage of the Tea Act in 1773, sometimes with simple angry editorials or boycotts and other times by going so far as destroying tea and the ships that carried it.

We learned about the kerfuffle in Boston when we were in school, but most K-12 history books fail to mention that there were protests in many other places as well. For example, did you know that women for the first time, protested for rights in America?

The women of Edenton, North Carolina sent a letter to be published in the Morning Chronicle and the London Advertiser.

“We the ladies of Edenton do hereby solemnly engage not to conform to ye pernicious Custom of Drinking Tea or that we, the aforesaid Ladies, will not promote ye wear of any manufacture from England, until such time that all Acts which tend to enslave this our Native Country shall be repealed.”

The Colonists as a whole, male and female, Bostonian or Philadelphian, were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. They reacted, in a multitude of ways.

By choosing to highlight just ten cities, Joseph Cummins makes it clear that no longer were the colonies just scattered, selfish, and independent of each other. They were ready to band together and fight the oppression in a way that the English never saw coming. The book itself is easy to chew and digest for just about any reader because he gives enough detail to paint the differences of each city, but doesn’t go on and on like a more scholarly book might. That makes it a quick and enjoyable read. It is also great to learn that women took a more prominent role than what we have been led to believe from those musty old American history textbooks.

 Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot by Joseph Cummins

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Quirk Books; 1 edition (January 17, 2012)
• ISBN-10: 1594745609
• ISBN-13: 978-1594745607

I once read a book that was over 17 feet long and yet, it only had 82 average size pages.

The concept and packaging is what makes this one stand out. You always hear that there are two stories to every relationship, his and hers in this case. What you never come across is a book that you read both sides of the story like The Thorn and the Blossom.

The pages are connected like a fan or an accordion, there are two covers and no spine, allowing you to just flip it over and read the other viewpoint. The experience was a bit freaky at first, didn’t know where to put my hands without the strong guidance of a spine provides. Once I got over that and got into the story, I couldn’t put it down because…I knew that if I kept reading, I was going to be able to fill in the bigger picture of the story.

The story itself was, somewhat forgettable. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t the world’s best love story. The magic of the book is the format; the utter uniqueness of the connected pages and novel (pun intended) concept of reading in two directions.

Of course, the novelty of it also makes it challenging to review. Introverted Jen did it much better than I did.

The Thorn and the Blossom by Theodora Goss

• Hardcover: 82 pages
• Publisher: Quirk Books (January 17, 2012)
• ISBN-10: 159474551X
• ISBN-13: 978-1594745515

Taft 2012 by Jason Heller

• Can you allow yourself to totally suspend disbelief?
• Are you as tired of the Presidential Rat Race, I mean election, as I am?
• Let’s go back to that suspending disbelief question, can you really let yourself go?
• Do you enjoy alternative history or mash-ups?

If you are still with me, welcome to Taft 2012.

On March 4, 1913, when President Wilson was being inaugurated, outgoing President Taft just up and vanished without a trace. They never found him and he never was the Chief Justice of the  Supreme Court or anything. They ended up burying an empty casket and moving on.

Fast forward to the Fall of 2011 and the big man himself suddenly appears out of nowhere. What ensues is a light political satire that is enjoyable only if you totally let yourself go and have fun with it.

History is re-written, small barbs are thrown at real political figures and the media, real problems are treated in a light-hearted and often flippant way and a few classic movies are totally mangled in the process.

Yes folks, I finally learned that I do have a line in the sand when it comes to fiction and mash-up like books. You can mess with Pride and Prejudice by adding zombies, you can turn Kakfa into a kitten for all I care, but there is one little thing you can not do. You can not mess with Citizen Kane or Meet John Doe, two of the best movies ever made. That made me angry in an irrational way that is hard to admit and even harder to explain. So, I won’t try.

I like Taft 2012, or maybe I liked the idea of the book and where the author was trying to go. The problem was I had to constantly tell my brain to let go of each and every rational brain cell and I think that good satire can be made with creativity, not by stealing plot lines from old stories and movies. Yes, somebody said that every story has already been told, but that doesn’t mean you can just change the names and call it your own. You have to make it your own. (and FYI, this is where me calling it a mash-up comes in, the book is a mash-up of a lot of borrowed plot lines.)

So, for some light reading and to see what it might be like if a progressive Former President was to step up to the microphone today, read Taft 2012. If you can turn your brain off, it will be a short fun romp. If you can’t…you too can write a totally murky post about not messing with Gary Cooper, Orson Welles, and Frank Capra like I did. Taft came out as a good guy though and that’s nice. The poor man is often overlooked or put down when it comes to Presidents, when really he was just a victim to bad timing and the juggernaut of Teddy Roosevelt.

Disclosure: The moment I heard about this book, I started bugging Quirk Books to send me a copy. They did and I hope we can still be friends after my review.

Deciding to have some fun with my last read of 2011, I chose Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winning The Sense of an Ending and it was more apt that I had even realized.

Memory is a tricky thing and looking back over the list of books I’ve read this year, some standout and many have already faded into obscurity. Tony, the main character, is finding much the same experience when he is forced to look back on his college years some forty years after the fact.

We remember the first kiss, that professor who shocked us or made us laugh with his disheveled appearance, and we still feel a touch of the pain when other’s slighted us. However… how well do we remember when we hurt others? Sure the biggies are there, for me, like the first breakup I instigated, but what about the times when we lashed out and then promptly moved on with our lives? Were those people able to move on as easily as we were, or did it follow them, haunting them, seeming to linger over their future like the dark hand of a curse?

Memory is a tricky thing, filtered by each individual’s experience. We don’t know, what we don’t know, and sometimes there are things that we just can’t know. The past is a really big mess when you sit down and ponder it for a bit. Tony realizes this in The Sense of an Ending and bless him, he wants to try and not only understand what he missed, but undo some of the crap that made him look bad in the eyes of others. Closure is what many shrinks say that we need to have in order to move on in life, but that isn’t always possible. Sometimes we are unable to close the door and are stuck with what we’ve got, the sense that it is over and there is nothing we can do to make it better.

Now I feel like Tony when I look over the list of books read in 2011. Did I focus too much on quantity over quality? Did I waste too much time devouring the entire 39 Clues series? Did my nonfiction reading really teach me anything or did it just leave me more convinced that there is no hope and that history does indeed repeat itself?

How has my reading changed me? How has your reading changed you?

Enough of the navel gazing, let’s just make a pact to have a better year than last year, ‘kay? That isn’t saying that last year was bad, just hoping that 2012 will be the teeniest tinniest better.

P.S. In case you hadn’t noticed, I really enjoyed The Sense of an Ending. What started out as a pun, ended up being a much deeper experience.

Or maybe I should really say that it is a very Tom Thorne Christmas. Tom Thorne is the middle-aged UK Detective Inspector that Billingham brings to life in his books and I have been spending some major quality time with him this month.

Thorne is a hard man to pin down, even Billingham has described writing him as “peeling back the layers of an onion” with each book. One of the coolest things about him is that he is different for every reader. Billingham purposely doesn’t describe him physically, so that we all can have our own version in our heads. Of course now that they have made a TV show on Sky, it sort of dims the neat trick for those that live in the UK.

There are 10 books in the series and having read a few out of sequence, (Bloodline, Death Message, & Buried) I decided that, this month, was going to be the one where I go back to the beginning and read the ones that I have missed, in order. Some might say that being mired in death, crime, and Alzheimer’s that the Thorne series brings isn’t very cheery at Christmas.  To those that say that … you have never met my family. Well, we haven’t had any murders, but some say that the Doc giving my Great Uncle George his chemical peel killed him.  (hmm, two references to “peel” in one post.)

There are learning the many benefits of reading a series, one right after another. Everything stays crystal clear in your mind and yet, my picture of Thorne still remains fuzzy, in a good way. One book may have him being tortured in his dreams by the victims of his current case, in the next, he can’t even manage sympathy. One has him so painfully inept at dealing with women that you want to put him out of his misery and the next he will be juggling more women than any man knows what to deal with. That is what, in my mind, makes Billingham an awesome writer, his books don’t become formulaic like so many others that I won’t mention. He hasn’t pinned down his character, so we can’t either. The reader never knows where the line in the sand is for Thorne or how far he will go to solve the case. About the only thing that you can depend on is that the outcome will leave an impression on you almost as strong as it does on Thorne.

Okay, enough with the blathering. I am hip deep in UK crime and slightly in love with both Billingham and Thorne.

Have you ever gone gung-ho on a series?

Merry Christmas to ya’ll.

I know, the book world is all ablaze with the “Amazon is evil” theme right now and I am indeed playing with fire by raising my hand to tell you that I bought a Kindle Fire. (Well, really, it was a gift, but I asked specifically for it, so same difference)

There were many reasons for me choosing the Fire and continuing my relationship with Amazon.

• I already had a Kindle Keyboard that I loved and therefore, the books bought for that one would transfer easily.
• I have an iPod touch that I use often and really wanted something like that, but with a bigger screen.
• I already had Amazon Prime because I like my McCann’s Oatmeal by the case. Now I can watch free streaming movies and TV shows on the Fire.
• To say that my budget is limited is an understatement.
• There aren’t any independent bookstores near me. There are a couple used ones that I do go to once in a blue moon. Sure, I could drive the half hour to Barnes & Noble, pay for parking, and all that, but I don’t go into town that often for anything.

The Fire fulfills a need that I had, for a price that I could justify and seamlessly meshes with what I already own.

The Review

The Fire is a great entry-level tablet with the added customer support that all of the other low-priced tablets can’t even begin to match. While the low amount of onboard storage space concerns me a tad, the reality is that I just don’t need all of my books, videos, and music on a portable device at one time. (Even my Kindle Keyboard got sluggish when I had it loaded to the gills, so I have learned that less is better)

So far, it has been able to do everything that my Touch could do and more. That is what I wanted and needed. The Amazon App store is still a bit limited, but I can sideload apps from other places easily.

The reader app itself is the only thing that I think needs a bit of improvement. Since the Fire isn’t a 100% dedicated reader, the experience is more like using the reader apps that you may already have on your phone, PC, or iPod. It isn’t as full featured as my actual Kindle Keyboard.

Many have whined that it doesn’t have parental controls and therefore it is easy for Betty Sue or Billy Bob to buy books and videos that aren’t age appropriate, or for that matter to buy anything to their hearts content. I don’t have kids, so this isn’t an issue. However, I would feel comfortable handing this over to my step-grandkids without a problem. Since they aren’t genetically related to me, they are smart and know that when they click a button that says “buy” they are buying something.

So, have you made the jump to a tablet/iPad? What are your thoughts? Have any questions for me? Want to rant at me for supporting Amazon? Want to know why McCann’s oatmeal is the best?

Okay, tell me the truth, have you thought of stepping out from the books and writing your own? Come on, just between us, have you? Have you been busy with NaNoWriMo?

Fine, don’t tell me. I have. However, the thought of the waiting game and rejection letters terrifies me. The emergence of the ebook market had me thinking that maybe I should take a gander at self-publishing. Enter Joel Friedlander of the blog, The Book Designer and his book, A Self-Publisher’s Companion.

This Companion isn’t a how-to, it is more of a why-for. (Yes, I just made that up) He took some of his best blog posts and wrapped it up into one package that allows you to explore your motivations, think about just what it means to be self-published, and a whole lot more.

There are a million books out there that will tell you how to self-publish, but this is the only one that asks the important questions like should you self-publish or what does success mean to you.

These are important questions to answer. I would HIGHLY recommend reading this if you have thought about or perhaps mused upon writing. It is so thought provoking and will answer so many questions you may have about self-publishing. (And it doesn’t mean that you just slap a cover on your ebook and send it out to the world)

As for me and my writing, I am still trying to figure out what success means to me and what I am hoping to gain by it. Oprah is gone, so that dream is out and I am not sure that have the stones to submit my manuscripts over and over again only to be courting rejection. On the other hand, I am not sure that being able to hold a book with my name on it (that no one would buy) is enough for me. Thanks to The Self-Publisher’s Companion, I have a better grasp of what being self-published really means and just what it might mean to me.

What does success mean to you? This book might be an important step to achieving whatever it does mean to you.

Joel Friedlander has a great blog, The Book Designer, so if you are still on the fence about this, check it out.