The Thin Red Line

Today’s architectural books are a far cry from my usual eye candy selections.  Both The Concrete House by Pieter A VanderWerf and The Rammed Earth House by David Easton are detailed and practical manuals for those interested in pursuing either of these very earth-friendly and efficient building types.   While the writing style of each book is a bit different with The Concrete House taking on a questions and answers style that definitely lends readability and provides answers to all sorts of questions.  

This "conversational" style works very effectively for VanderWerf who does a great job of selling "Insulating Concrete Forms" which are highly insulating foam bricks designed to have concrete pored into them, thus creating a highly energy efficient home which can be finished in almost any architectural style.  These homes are highly resistant to weather related disasters highly energy efficient.  The only drawback seems to be that it is somewhat more expensive than conventional building at this time  (though this may change if the construction method becomes more commonly used).    A useful and important book for anyone contemplating a new home building project.   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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First off today,  a sincerest Thank You to Cromley over at Cromley’s World who a few days ago bestowed on me my  very own Arte Y Pico award,  which as I understand it is intended to recognize bloggers who are an "inspiration to others" in terms of   "creativity, design, interesting content, and contributions to the larger blogging community".     Long-time readers of this blog will certainly recall my fuming against "memes"  and probably will not be surprised to learn that I have decidedly mixed feelings about this award.

While I don’t in any way doubt the sincerity with which it was given and would like to believe that in my own small way I have done my bit to bring creativity, design and interesting content to the larger blogging community,   I can’t quite shake the feeling that these awards are something of a distraction, and one intended by their creators to serve a number of purposes quite apart from promoting design, creativity et als.

It would seem that William McCamment over at the Dead Rooster blog would agree.    McCamment,  another recent recipient of the Arte Y Pico award did a bit of digging around and announced on his blog that over Sixty-Five Thousand  of these Arte Y Pico awards have already been given out,  and assuming that most recipients followed the instructions,   created over 65,000 incoming links to the original site,   which as it happens is in Spanish,  making it difficult for me to even know if it is a site I would want to be associated with.  So rather than follow the instructions and post a copy of the rules and tag five more lucky recipients  I decided instead to tag my long lost blogging buddy Saphrym  (who just recently did an amazing post in response to my  The Why We Want To Kill You For Not Understanding Iraq Meme) with the Dead Rooster Award For Diabolical Greatness.   Again,  my sincerest thanks to Cromley along with my sincerest hopes that the memes and awards will disppear again, at least for awhile.

And finally today,  the actual book review.   I have to confess that I have never seen Ed Begley Jr.’s  cable television show or come across his Begley’s Best all natural cleaning products so his recently released book Living Like Ed was in fact my first acquaintance with Begley as a spokesman for "Eco-Friendly" Living.   The book is well written and offers a range of things one can do to be more "eco-friendly",  from the easiest things like replacing light bulbs with compact florescents and participating in curb-side recycling programs.   Begley also goes into considerable detail about more intensive greening activities, like solar power and even organic clothing.     I can’t honestly say that the book made me rush out to start living greener,  but it does provide a lot of information and will at the very least provide food for thought and guidance towards greener choices as time goes by.   Recommended.

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Part of me feels guilty for posting about a second memoir by a second Los Angeles area librarian within less than three months, but Quiet Please   Dispatches from a Public Librarian was just barely too good to pass up.  Scott Douglas’ memoir of his career with the Anaheim library lacks some of the pizazz of Don Borchert’s Free For All  (reviewed here)  but the crisp writing and the creatively Dewey-numbered chapters go a long way with me, though to be perfectly honest at times I found this young man’s outlook and worldview a bit appalling.  

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I had thought that  I was burned out on reading about hurricane Katrina but when I happened upon Michael Tisserand’s Sugarcane Academy the other day I stayed up until after 2 a.m. reading it.    I found myself fascinated by the story of Paul Reynaud– a New Orleans first grade teacher who was the driving force behind the creation of Sugarcane Academy, a school for evacuee children that was created in New Iberia Louisiana in the weeks immediately following the storm and then continued in borrowed space at Loyola University in New Orleans once people were allowed back into the city.

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First off a hat’s off  to Cecilia Sherrard’s Cleveland Ohio Real Estate Blog,  which every day provides great advice for home buyers and sellers alike.  Today’s book, Buying A Home by the Better Business Bureau is a well-written  and down-to-earth "must read" for the first time home buyer.  Covering all the details from getting pre-qualified for a mortgage (an often overlooked, "must-do" first step) to the potentially confusing details of escrow and closing, Buying A Home offers detailed and specific step by step advice for the home buyer.   I was especially impressed by all of the detailed advice for things the buyer needs to do before beginning to look at homes,  not only pre-qualifying for a mortgage but also zeroing in on a neighborhood, learning about the current economic environment ("buyer’s market" vs "seller’s market") and finding the right real estate agent to work with.

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Awhile back I was tagged with the Six Word Memoir meme and I wish at the time I had had this just recently release trade paperback from the editors of Smith Magazine.   Subtitled  "six word memoirs by writers famous and obscure", Not Quite What I Was Planning is a collection of over 1,000 stories, told six words at a time.  Some of the celebrity contributions were quite funny:  "Liars, hysterectomy didn’t improve sex life"– Joan Rivers while others seemed a bit odd: "Revenge is living well without you"– Joyce Carol Oates or merely lame:  "Brought it to a boil, often"– Mario Batali.

For the most part the obscure contributors were more clever:  "Without ideas intelligence couldn’t exist"–Ornette Coleman or witty:  "Aspiring lady pirate, disillusioned sells boat"– Diana White and sometimes even wise:  "Lived in moment until moment sucked".   And my favorite as a blogger:  "Blogging is easy.  Writing is hard"–Jennifer Shreve.

I doubt anyone will mistake this for great literature but it is a very amusing book,  the perfect thing to be kept in a bathroom or waiting room for those times when you want to read a bit but not get involved in a story that will keep you there.   Not Quite What I Was Planning   Recommended.

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Lately Ron and I have become regular viewers of a show on HGTV where two rather pompous designers visit with the owners of homes that have been on the market for awhile and haven’t sold and advise them on changes they should make in order to get their homes sold.   What I find most striking is that in the episodes we’ve seen so far all but one of the hapless home owners has followed the advice (neutralize, Neutralize, NEUTRALIZE!!) and still not found a buyer.  The one exception is a home owner who was still contemplating whether or not to follow the designer’s advice when she received an offer and sold the house Without  "neutralizing" it.   And therein perhaps lies an object lesson for the designers preaching the gospel of Neutrality.

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When I first started this blog I remember hanging out on Blog Catalog and it always seemed I was talking to people who were facing writers block or unable to think of topics to post about and generally struggling to regularly publish a blog.    And I would look at the huge stack of books on my couch and think to myself, ‘at least I don’t have _that_ problem.

And let me say right off that my stack of books is as tall as ever,  so I can’t really use that as an excuse for my recent lack of posts.   Honestly I don’t know why I have been spending my time lately playing games and watching television and even reading books rather than posting and promoting my blog.   Sometimes, I suspect, you just need a mental break.  Having recharged my inner batteries I hope to on Monday resume my five posts per week and thought I would ease back into things by posting today about three great books I’ve read during my hiatus.

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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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Welcome!   If this is your first visit please note that you can click on any book cover to get the book from your local library or click on any book title to purchase it.    Browse recent book reviews on the front page or browse by category in the sidebar.    I welcome your comments and will try to reply as soon as possible.

One Sunday afternoon I was working at the check in desk.   One of the reference librarians handed me her return materials, including Free For All, which she heartily recommended.   ‘It’s a hoot’, she said.

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While I posted an Easy Books roundup just yesterday  I felt this Easy Non-Fiction title I stumbled upon last week rated a post of its own.    The Librarian of Basra is a true story about Alia Muhammad Baker who is the librarian in Basra, Iraq.   When war comes Alia fears that her library and its 30,000 books may be destroyed.   She begins taking the books home and storing them safely and arranges for other library staff members to do the same.    While the library does end up getting burned and destroyed Alia and her colleagues are able to save fully seventy percent of the library’s collection.

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First, my thanks to Techfun for suggesting this one to me.   It’s taken me an awful long time to read it but I have and I’m glad I did.   In Friday’s post I pointed out that art can be much more effective than traditional in conveying complex realities.   I believe that A Thousand Splendid Suns is an excellent example of a novel that conveys the complex and messy truths of the real life story through novels that, imho, do a better job than history books sometimes in educating a mind about a particular place and peoples.    I previously posted about Gary Geddes’  Kingdom Of Ten Thousand Things which touches briefly on the plight of present day Afghanistan before rushing off to pursue a very different main theme.

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I don’t have regular recurring features tied to specific days of the week, like the very popular Wordless Wednesday that many of my blog friends unfailingly participate in.   I do, however, have a number of regularly recurring features, but you never know what day of the week they’ll pop up on. 

My partner, Ron, has very different tastes in books and reading and I am truly grateful for his occasional "Ron Reviews" wherein Ron writes about books of his own choosing, giving the blog a wider variety of books and a nice change of perspective from time to time.   Today’s book is not one I would ever have selected myself.    I hope you will enjoy reading Ron’s review of A Short History of the American Stomach.

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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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It almost feels like a cheat to blog about a book I first read more than twenty years ago, but the fact is the past few days I have been ignoring three new novels awaiting my attention (including Water For Elephants, which I really want to read) in order to re-read for the bazzillionth time John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces.   So rather than attempt to write what would be yet another paean to what is already a well-known and well-loved novel  OR tease out three paragraphs of  on the stories of having met Toole’s mother at a speech and reading she gave at Dominican College in New Orleans (where Toole himself had been on the faculty prior to his suicide) and the errrrr unforgettable experience of seeing the work produced as a MUSICAL at LSU in Baton Rouge.  

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Happy Monday! We are Way overdue for an Easy Picture Book roundup and I have four great ones today!

Using only five words, artist/illustrator Emily Gravett’s Orange Pear Apple Bear is a unique and charming book that will delight children and grown ups alike. The books varying ordering of the title’s four words and Gravett’s highly creative illustrations of each are truly remarkable. There. Highly Recommended.

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…to Miss New Orleans.   And after reading City Adrift, I fear that the day is coming that New Orleans exists only as a memory, not just for me but for everyone.    Released by Louisiana State University Press and the Center For Public Integrity, City Adrift is a very carefully reasoned and balanced review of eight serious aspects of the problems facing New Orleans before and after Katrina.

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I have to confess that I have been a fan of The Price Is Right since   a small child.   I remember when there used to be "four numbers in the price of the car".   (I feel SO old.)  When I recently came across a copy of Come On Down!  I knew immediately I would have to bring it home and write it up.   Sad to Stan Blits is a better game show producer than he is a book author.   Moderately to Very Interested fans of the show will appreciate the first third or so of the book when Blits shares information about the shows history and reveals some of the details of just how it is produced.    The latter two thirds of the book come across as filler not worth the relatively high grade of paper its printed on.    Not Recommended.

I’ve recently been tagged by bookcalendar with the Six Word Memoir meme.  You can read the meme instructions here.

My Six Word Memoir:

Library Guy That Writes About Books

Since this is a writng meme I feel I have to tag  Tiffany, Dawn, Jamie, Claire and Vienne.

Thanks again to bookcalendar for the tag.

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Happy Friday!   Just a Short Take Today on a very funny book  that is sure to brighten your day.   Leo Cullum is a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine and this 2003 collection of his dog cartoons is a real treat.   Cullum’s dogs engaged in very human conversations are both genuinely witty and laugh out loud funny.    Go ahead and click the cover image and request it from your library.   A guaranteed day brightener,  Highly Recommended to dog lovers and fans of witty cartooning.

LAST CHANCE!    The Chain Drop contest for 3,000 Entrecard credits ends at midnight Pacific time tonight.    Since this blog is actually hosted and time-stamps in Eastern time,   all entries timestamped before 3:01 am on March 1, 2009  will be counted.    The winner will be announced on Chain Drop next week.    All you have to do is leave a comment here with a few sentences about how you use social networking.     If you haven’t already, click  here and leave your comment before time runs out.

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