The Thin Red Line

So I’ve been wanting to do a link love post for my top ten droppers.   I have ten "reject pile" books but by and large they are not a good fit for my top droppers.    I need architects and real estate fans,  parents and pre-schoolers, history buffs and green living types.   What I have, mostly, is techies, blogging help and fashionistas.   So rather than trying to do a list and dedicating a book to each of my top droppers,  I am simply posting the book covers below.  And just this once, rather than linking to the book’s Worldcat page,   each book cover is linked to a top droppers blog.     If the title or the cover catches your eye,  please do visit Worldcat to locate the nearest library copy or use the Powell’s search box to purchase it.    My sincerest thanks to my top droppers,  and please Do click on the book covers to find out who they are,  and look for a more substantive book review again tomorrow on The Thin Red Line.

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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 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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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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Busy Monday at work. Returns were very heavy and I worked my butt off. We had a new substitute working today and I was asked to show her the ropes and answer her questions. Katika was very nice and that made the busy day go by quicker.

No progress on the laptop front. Ron has not yet gotten the books he ordered from the library and honestly I haven’t the energy or enthusiasm to look for an answer online. My friend Brett says that SUSE Linux is extremely powerful but you have to know how to tell it exactly what to do. Unfortunately he is living over the mountains in Omak, WA with his hubby these days and thus not available to come try his hand at fixing it. He suggested we try instead Ubutnu, a more user-friendly version of Linux. Not only is this software a free download, they will even send it to you free on CD without even a shipping charge. I went ahead and ordered it. If we don’t come up with another solution before it arrives, I suppose I will try to install it and see if I can get it to work.

Today’s book theme is food. Back when we had cable Ron and I sometimes watched Alton Brown’s Good Eats on the Food Network. Sometimes he fixed wonderful stuff that made my mouth water, but I found his continual lecturing on the science of cooking a big turnoff, and the hokey sketches and gags he used to humorously demonstrate the scientific principles mega annoying. Ron brought home a copy of I’m Just Here For The Food the other day and I read it last night when I couldn’t sleep. The book was about the same as the tv show I think. Some of the dishes sound wonderful but the focus on science and the hokey graphics are very off-putting to me, as is his penchant for displaying recipes as a list of "software" (ingredients), "hardware" (tools and utensils) and "procedures". I am SO not open to computer metaphors just now. NOT recommended.

Yesterday I happened upon Taking Tea, and desirous of the serenity suggested by the cover photo brought it home. This one is a mixed bag. There is a bit of the history of tea drinking in various cultures around the world, a few recipes, some of which sound quite promising, and lots of photographs of tea services, pots, cozys, etc. I did make a cuppa to drink as I read it, but failed to find the sense of well being the photo made me crave. This one is not particularly recommended either.

Today I happened upon a copy of Milk Glass Moon, the third of the four Big Stone Gap books. I suspect I will read that during my days off. I also was surprised to find that Michael Tolliver Lives was on the shelf. Brought that home to re-read as well. Wednesday I finally have my first doctor appointment under my new insurance, which I am really looking forward to.

Happy Monday!

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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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