The Thin Red Line

Happy Tuesday!   The first  book up today, I’m sorry to say is definitely Not a winner.   I only managed to read the introduction and part of the first chapter of Nancy DeVille’s Death By Supermarket and was more than turned-off enough by the very strident and accusative tone to simply dismiss it.   Ron, however, read most of it and said that many if not most of the academic studies DeVille cites have been dis-credited or dis-proven.  Clearly,  Nancy DeVille is a woman with a mission to demonize the supermarket and packaged foods industries.   While these industries may well deserve scrutiny and criticism,   this book is of little value to anyone.    Not Recommended.

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When Ron was in the hospital having surgery,  Staci and I did major cleaning and the huge stacks of books that used to live on my couch now have their own place on the bookshelf.   The downside of this of course is that with the books safely over on the bookshelf I may go for weeks without even Thinking about those books.   So from time to time whether off the shelf or the couch,  I have to send back some of my selections, unread and un-reviewed.

Then yesterday I read something on Entrecard about doing a weekly link love to your top droppers and decided that this worthy endeavor would make a great way to dispose of ten books, all of which impressed me in their way, but which I am just Not going to get around to reviewing.    Here then are my top ten droppers and top ten un-read titles being moved to the Return-To-The-Library shelf today.

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I have to say right off, going in, that I really wanted to like Clifford A Wright’s Bake Until Bubbly– The Ultimate Casserole Cookbook.   But Wright in several ways made that very hard for me to do.    The first time in the early pages he decried using canned cream of whatever soups in favor of freshly prepared bechmael sauces.  All of what I would call the easy steps in casserole-preparation have been replaced with extremely labor-intensive recipes which seem as though designed to show just how much hard work is normally replaced by the use of canned soup in casseroles that by the end of the 450 page plus new 2008 release I was mainly seized by an imperative urge to hurl the bloody book across the room.   This one is Not Recommended.

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My regular readers who’ve been with me awhile already know that I really hate memes, though like Turnip of Power wrote in this post I generally try to be a good sport about them albeit most always with a twist of my own. (See The Einstein’s Brain God Does Not Exist Meme or The Why We Want To Kill You For Not Understanding Iraq Meme.) So none of my friends should be too surprised that having been tagged by my friend JD over at Techfun with Geek Mom Mashup’s Seven Weird Things About Me meme I am NOT in fact going to paste in and follow the instructions. Instead I decided to post about seven books, each of which while not exactly "weird" is a bit unusual or at the very least a bit interesting. (Saavy readers will realize that I am using this as yet another excuse to clear my stack of a bunch of books that I’m just not going to get around to reading. SHHH!!!. Please don’t call the Meme Police on me.)

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April Fools!

Awhile back I did a post about Gary Trudeau’s latest Doonesbury collection and Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold and remarked that while both were excellent books I find I no longer have the stomach to read about our inept and corrupt politicians.   After reading an article in Newsweek  I recently posted to my politics blog (for the first time in ages) to plead my case that opposing Hillary Clinton does NOT constitute misogyny or sexism.   But the four books I am featuring today,  all of which have been in my stack for well over a month and some of which are Past Due at the library,  and  none of which I have been able to bring myself to read strongly suggest that I really am burned out on reading about political stuff.

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Happy Friday!    Back when I was in the eight grade one of our teachers made our course grade dependent upon a special project in which we would strictly limit the amount of television we watched and keep a journal and report on what things we did when not watching television.

I’m pleased to say that this junior high school experiment largely saved me from being a slave to the boob tube the way so many of my generation are.  So I was initially quite sympathetic in my approach to Living Outside The Box—TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets.  Surprisingly author Barbara Brock managed to quite lose me, in spite of my general and long time support of turn off the tv and DO SOMETHING with your life initatives.

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I try to keep to a Monday–Friday posting schedule and for a time had been doing well with that, even if some posts were post-dated or pre-written to achieve that schedule.   The past few weeks my life off-line has been Very hectic and I have just not had the time and intellectual energy to update regularly. 

While the off-line crisis has not passed, I have found a bit of a extended time to get back to blogging about books and will try to keep up with posting each weekday going forward and as time permits, filling in the missed days with back-dated posts.   There will be lots of book reviews and new and interesting titles, so please check back frequently.

Today I decided to share with you a few of the books that did not make the cut.    Each title pictured represents a book I checked out and brought home, but decided Not to read and blog about.    How To Catch A Fairies  is a delicately illustrated compendium of myths surrounding various types of fairies.   The title certainly caught my eye but I am busy finishing Untapped–The Scramble For Africa’s Oil and am about 150 pages into Rhett Butler’s People and just am not going to get to this one.

I brought home How to Change Anybody but did not read it when my spouse helpfully pointed out I am already very good an manipulation and need no further training in that direction.

The Afterword caught my attention while shelving in Adult Fiction because it is such an oddly tiny hardcover book.   It is also a short and very odd little novel by Mike Bryan that takes the form of an "Afterword" and appendix written by the author of a mega-best selling novel that explains his process of  writing the novel.    It hooked me for about  50 Pages before I lost interest and could not continue.

Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press sparked an information revolution by making books widely avaialable as they previously had never been.    This biography caught my eye while shelving but I will not get around to reading it I’m afraid.

At Large and At Small is a book of "familiar essays" by Anne Fadiman.    I honestly can’t recall why I picked it up and didn’t read a single word of it.

And finally, the novel The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon caught my eye for it’s striking cover which is designed to look like an antique photo pasted to an old, leather bound book.   As with the essays,  I never cracked it at all.    As always,   the book covers are linked to Worldcat, which will guide you to getting a copy from your library if any of these catch your eye or strike your fancy.

Just a reminder– It’s Not Too Late to Enter to Win 3,000 Entrecard credits in the Chain Drop Writing Contest.   3,000 EC just for leaving a comment on the post.   But hurry,  contest ends at midnight, Pacific Time on 2/29/2008.

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A question that I have addressed before is "How Do You Pick All of These Books?". Simple really. I go about my job at the library, where I am literally, constantly handling books. Any and all books that catch my eye get set aside, checked out, brought home and piled up on my couch. Over time the best of them get read and blogged about here on The Thin Red Line. And every so often I realize that there are more books here than I will ever get around to writing about and I take a big stack of them back to the library.

Sometimes, after I get it home and examine it more closely I find that the book is not what I thought it would be from just glancing at the cover. Other times I simply come to a realization that I am just not going to get around to some of them. So I pile them up and drag them back to the library where undoubtedly other patrons will find these books more to their liking and will read them.

I really like cookbooks that provide me with ideas for dishes that are different from any that I have made and that offer simple preparations that are not overly complex. The cookbooks I reject generally end up being those that give overly labor intensive directions for dishes that will look better than they taste.

I love reading biographies but all too often these books are either puff pieces that read as though they author was on the payroll of the subject’s publicity firm (and who knows maybe he was?) or else they read like somebody had an axe to grind and I find myself thinking that either way the book would not be a good choice for someone who is a fan and wants to know more, but doesn’t want to spend the time or money on a book that is just a puff piece of a hatchet job.

Sometimes my reason for not featuring a book is even simpler. If the book cover image is not available, for instance, that is usually enough to eliminate it from my consideration.

As always on this blog, I have linked each book cover image to the book’s page on Worldcat, the international meta search engine for public libraries. If any of the titles catch your eye, just click on the cover image and Worldcat will guide you to the nearest library. So that you can add the book to the stack on your own couch. Since the mere fact that I have considered a book and then decided not to write about it hardly constitutes a glowing endorsement, I have spared myself the chore of typing in the the book titles and linking them to Powell’s. If the mere fact that I just couldn’t get around to it makes you want to buy one of these, please do use the Powell’s search box at the upper right of the page to place your order.

And please do give a holler and let me know if you should decide to add any of these to your own stack. I am working on a much more serious and in depth review of a Very important book for tomorrow, and hope very much to see you again then, here on The Thin Red Line.

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Awhile back I addressed a question I sometimes hear about “Do You Really Read All of These Books?!?!?” And today I thought I would address another one that comes up fairly often, how do you decide which ones to write about?

The answer is that I go about my job as a library page, which involves processing and shelving books pretty much constantly all day long. Think about that for a second. If I am work, the chances are I have a book in my hands or am reaching for one or have just set one down in a stack or on a shelf or a cart. And I just grab any and everything that catches my eye.

It All gets checked out and brought home and piled on my couch, which is Always covered in books. One of my cardinal rules, which I have only broken once when I wrote about titles suggested by my readers and made clear that I was conveying others suggestions and had not actually seen or read the book, is that I ONLY blog about books that I actually have in my hand.

The stack on my couch grows formidable at times. And sometimes, as now I have to just face the fact that some of these books just are Not gonna get read and blogged about and are going to have to go back to the library unread.

I have gone ahead and added Worldcat links for every book cover, each of which represents an actual book that I am removing from the big stack on the couch and moving them to the stack on the bookshelf where we gather anything going back to the library on the next trip. Worldcat can guide you to the nearest library copy if you want to add the book to the stack on your couch. And do let me know if you end up reading one of them.

Since I did not in fact choose to ever read these books, their appearance and inclusion here means that one, they caught my eye. And two, I sent them back without ever reading them even enough to do a good blurb about each. This hardly qualifies as an endorsement so I have saved myself the considerable chore of
providing you with the titles and Powells purchase links. If the fact that I just couldn’t get around to it makes you want to Buy one of them, please do use the Powell’s search box in the upper right sidebar to buy it from a reputable bookseller and support this blog.

I am to my mid-week weekend and will have some time to rest and read and talk more substantively about books again tomorrow. I hope that you have enjoyed this my second recent effort to
publish a post that looks like a book review, even though it is in fact merely an admission that I simply have not had the time to read any of these books and really isn’t a book review.

That of course was the real point of the Einstein’s Brain God Is Dead Meme, a truly challenging meme that I cooked up the last time I just hadn’t had time to read any books to write about.

I bow in homage and tip my hat to Her Royal Highness Jamie, The Suburbian Queen who today awesomely rose to the challenge of writing a blog post that appeared to be a review of two books with very provacative titles that I expect will deliver interesting search result visitors that featured the covers of the two books but was NOT in fact actually a book review.

On a lesser writer it would have been a mean trick to play but I knew that Queen Jamie was up to the challenge and she showed her stuff today. Do check out her blog and get to know a very clever woman who writes really well about a number of different things. I’m proud to add Suburbian Queen to my blog roll which remains mercifully short because these are all blogs I actually read and not just
links I hope will curry me favor with someone.

It will be interesting to see what Mitch does with it when he gets back from vacation later in the month. And that concludes today’s post that looks like a book review but is not in fact a book review. I am to my two day midweek weekend and will have time to catch up on sleep and reading and talk more substantively about books again tomorrow.

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Panning books is definitely not the fun part of making this blog and much of the time I follow the old adage ‘if you can’t say something nice…’ But having taken the time to read through today’s titles and not having anything else I am yet ready to write about I decided to go ahead and post a very rare Double Don’t Bother.

Who among us has not played Monopoly? I remember many, many Monopoly games from childhood, which sometimes became so heated and emotional that someone would take the board and run home. So naturally I was struck by Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game & How It Got That Way when I was shelving in games at 794. I read a bit about Elizabeth Magie Phillips who invented in 1904 a Landlords game, about the age of the great trusts and the Carnegies and Rockerfellers, about Teddy Roosevelt, trust-buster and the founding of Atlantic City. And finally about the development and marketing of the world’s most famous game, skimmed through much trivia and read a gripping account of life at a very high stakes Monopoly tournament. If you are a Hard Core Monopoly Freak, you will Love this one. For everyone else, it may be a bit much.

As a budding power blogger with two growing blogs, any blogging books that surface at the library catch my attention. This one isn’t worth bothering with unless you are someone who has never heard of or seen a blog before, run a business that could really benefit from having a business blog, and want an explanation of how technically to make such a blog that was neither detailed and specific enough to actually walk you through the job nor focused and tweaked towards guiding you to the resources to do the heavy lifting. I have absolute certainty that no one reading this post will fall into that narrow audience category and have thus lazily refrained from linking this title.

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Confessing that I have been re-reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and just haven’t felt like reading or blogging about other books. Meanwhile I am up to 168th on the hold list so I should get a copy within three weeks. I have been unable to avoid a couple of spoilers that mostly confirmed what I had surmised from perusing a couple of paragraphs at the beginning of the epilogue. And decided to get set up to Continue the story when I finally get the damned book.

Staci and Clint flew home to Boise Wed evening. We fed them lunch and took them to the airport. She is going to have to come back in October for yet Another operation so we will look forward to seeing her again. Never did make it to the museum, but I still have the pass and Ron and I are planning to go Tuesday. And we already miss Staci.

Today’s book caught my eye, but proved to be a dud. A hodge podge of information on a wide range of diverse topics from how to tie a knot, to how to hold a baby, how to change a flat tire to how to order sushi, the things John F. Hunt states that every guy needs to know struck me as arbitrary and less than helpful, as least to me. And the depth and helpfulness of the treatment of the various topics varies greatly. Ordering and eating sushi is covered in great detail (which I already know and don’t much care about) but the section on how to tie knots consisted of a list of 8 different tpyes of knots, a sentence describing each type of knot and an illustration of each knot with no instructions whatsoever for how to tie it. Don’t bother with this one.

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Feh. It seems disingenuous to keep on about how much I detest DDGFBFGF (Dan-David-GoodFag-BadFag-Gerrold-Friedman) and then keep blogging about his books every day. Though I can honestly say that I disliked this one.

Partly it’s that I heard him tell many of these stories on Compu$erve way back when (and was not much impressed then, either). Partly it’s that when removed from the constraints of a novel he tends to go on and on about himself like the pompous self-absorbed ass he is. Partly it’s the self-congratulatory tone that reeks from the pages (eau d’ego).

I found myself remembering some of the more vicious observations and speculations made at the time by people who (believe it or not) detested this man even more than I do. I found myself wishing I had stayed up late re-reading Metzger’s Dog or Crazy In Alabama instead of this. I find myself wanting not to remember my own history with this man and his story. And I find myself suggesting that this is a book you may want to skip.

The interview went well. The supervisor for the new position seemed to like me and I feel I made a good case. She promised to call Friday or Saturday to let me know one way or the other if I got the position. Time will tell.

Finally, on a much more upbeat note, today Bev has composed some delightfully hilarious limericks about her blog and a few others, including this one. Check it out on her blog, Funny The World.

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