3 you should read, tied into link love, plus a meme from Bev
Posted by: Alan in Book Reviews, Books, Humor and Memes
Entrecard continues to be a great place to meet incredible bloggers, like Realtor Cecilia Sherrard whose Cleveland Ohio Real Estate blog has been making quite the splash in the Entrecard Real Estate category, which had for a time been dominated by two great bloggers who pulled out of Entrecard recently, and whose blogs I had unfortunately not book-marked.
I sometimes hear people say that they don’t do more to live green and try to nurture the planet because it’s too hard or too expensive or just not possible. And I am a huge fan of Will Taft whose blog is a daily eloquent argument against these lame excuses. And when Cecilia recently posted It’s Easy Being Green, an excellent list of easy and inexpensive ways to lessen your burden on the planet, I decided it was time to feature three, short, easy to read and inexpensive guides that offer practical advice you can actually follow without breaking your neck or breaking the bank.
Wake Up And Smell The Planet by Brangien Davis and Katharine Wroth, What Can I Do? by Lisa Harrow and It’s Easy Being Green by Crissy Trask are all paperbacks priced under $15 (and available used for half that) as well as the library at 333.72. All three of these books offer practical and do-able advice and all three are Highly Recommended. The first is, perhaps, the most entertaining and engaging of the three and would be the ideal thing to find in a guest bathroom, should you need to linger there for a few minutes. The second would be best kept near your computer in order to check out the many, many online resources for practical planet saving that Harrow provides. And the last would be a book to keep at bedside for a bit of light reading before turning in.
And finally, today, my good friend Bev whose personal journal Funny The World is, frankly the BEST personal diary I’ve yet encountered has tagged me with a very bookish meme that I decided to go ahead and follow. There’s some questions it’s only fair to answer if you’re the guy from the library who writes all those book reviews:
Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?
Maeve Binchy. People rave about her but I have never been able to get myself interested in any of her books.
If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?
Sheila McIntyre from Fredrick Barton’s Courting Pandemonium, Michael Tolliver, of the Tales Of The City books and Malama, the Alii Nui in James Michner’s Hawaii, the house party to take place at Malama’s palace.
You are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?
Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. (Though even if my death depended on it, I doubt I’d have any more success than in the 11th grade when I relied on the Cliff Notes to get a C ‘cuz I just couldn’t bear it.)
Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?
Honestly, I can’t recall pretending I’ve read a book I’ve not been near, though on occasion I suppose reading my post you might assume I had read a book that I really only skimmed. And if a chance remark I make gets attributed to Shakespeare or someone I would never correct my listener, though honestly I couldn’t quote Shakespeare to save myself.
You’ve been appointed Book Advisor to a VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why?
The Harry Potter Books. They are very easy to read and get into and are such a cultural phenomenon I would be confident it would be a positive experience for the VIP making them more open to continuing with other titles.
A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?
Latin. I took several years of it in high school and then promptly forgot everything I learned. I really wasn’t mature enough as a teen ager to appreciate the classics that Latin opened up for me but think that I would get a lot more out of them now in my middle years.
A mischievious fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?
John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. One of my very favorite novels and one that always evokes my home town, New Orleans, perhaps better than any other fiction.
I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?
I welcome and receive many, many, many book suggestions from friends, co-workers, readers and other bloggers and I only regret that I am not able to get around to reading more of them. My friend techfun gets credit for recommending the most and most worthy choices to add to my big stack of books on the couch.
That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.
My dream library would have two fireplaces, incredibly comfortable leather upholstered chairs and sofas, a desk with a major computer setup– three huge monitors creating an enormous single desktop with Tons of memory and processor and a lightning fast connection, and a selection of books as broad and extensive as in the library where I work, with newly released materials constantly being added and a personal librarian to continually weed and manage the collection.
My thanks to Bev for a great meme and as an act of kindness to all of my friends who Hate memes, I hereby tag…..No One. Hope your week is off to a great start and please visit again tomorrow– I have some great books lined up for this week.
Tags: Bev Sykes, Book Reviews, Books, Brangien Davis, Cecelia Sherrard, Cleveland Ohio Real Estate Blog, Crissy Trask, Funny The World, Healthy Living For People and Planet Earth, It's Easy Being Green, Katharine Wroth, Lisa Harrow, meme, Wake Up and Smell the Planet, What Can I Do, Will Taft
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January 31st, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Thanks for the kind words, Alan. Also for highlighting Cecilia’s post. It is one thing to have someone like me writing on a themed blog beat the drums of healthy living and green living. But it is really great to see lists like Cecilia’s turn up on sites with an unrelated theme.
Wake Up And Smell The Planet is probably worth the cover price just for the cover art alone, but as it put out by Grist, I’m sure it is good. I have not read it, but I read the weekly Grist email and that is very well done. So well, in fact, that sometimes it makes me wonder what makes me think I am qualified to cover some of the same topics!
February 1st, 2008 at 12:41 am
I came back after thinking about your meme for a bit. I had to chuckle about Ivanhoe. That is one of a few books that I have always felt I should have been able to get through. I tried a few times when younger, but could not do it.
The Harry Potter books were one of the few where I liked the movies better. That as contrasted with the Chronicles of Narnia, where I really believe it should be illegal to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe if you have not already read the series. I read it several times as a boy and named my first dog, (who was a true “man’s best friend” for all of his 17 years), Bree.
I tried Latin in high school and hated it. But then a few years later, as a horticulture major in college, I was the best in my class at memorizing the Latin names of thousands of plants. Go figure?
You did a great job on this meme, Alan! I’m not a big fan of them either although I did do one llast fall that turned out OK. I never did pass it on though, maybe I should give it to you!
February 1st, 2008 at 10:50 pm
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