eating animals

by jonathan safran foer

I declined to read this book when it first came out because I knew it would make me more inclined to be a vegetarian. Since we already crossed that bridge, I read the book.

The book is his exploitation of the topic of food, precipitated by the birth of his son. For years he flirted with vegetarianism, but realized he needed to decide, firmly and finally. As a friend wrote to JSF after the birth of his son, "Everything is possible again." Yes, having a child allows you to reconsider all aspects of your life, in light of your acting as a guide to a new human as they grow and learn.

Suffice to say, as many have said before JSF is an amazing writer. His 10,000 hours are in the hopper. He has mastered the sentence. And the well thought out format of the book urges the reader onward, even if you are not sure you want to read what is coming next.

Of note:
"Animal agriculture makes a 40% GREATER contribution to global warming than ALL transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change."

So now that you know that, what does it mean? How can you change your behavior? How hard will it be? How hard will you try? Does my behavior matter?

We are vegetarians but had planned to eat meat every so often. More plant based eaters than strict veggies. So I had a steak the other night. It was my last steak. I sounded like an episode of Portlandia asking about the meat's origins, and whether the animals were happy. But I know the answer. They weren't.

I have never eaten fish, but apparently no fish meets a demise that anyone can consider humane. And they have feelings, which was interesting.

* Thanksgiving used to be a day of fasting. pg. 259.
* Hitler was most likely NOT a vegetarian. notes to pg. 260.

Read the book. Consider your actions.

Book Review: The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband

by David Finch

This book does not come out until January 2012, but I got a copy from our bookstore. Even with a newborn I read this book in a day! The author finds out when he is in his 30’s married with 2 kids that he has Aspergers Syndrome. Actually his wife figured it out. He wrote a Modern Love column about it in the New York Times, and as often happens with many New York Times Modern Love columns, he got a book deal out of the column. (Read the column here.)

Needless to say, I think Finch pulled a great book off. He explains what life is like with Aspergers and how he uses his newly found knowledge to change his behavior. He starts keeping a journal to detail how needs to change his behavior. This book will appeal to the masses is because his faults are the same faults we all have, but his are more, well, concentrated. He seems to have them all.

But he truly loves his wife and family and has a great sense of humor. I wondered actually if someone helped him afterwards inserting humor. And I wonder if he still has his old job.

Check it out when it comes out. Good book.

a few book reviews...mini style

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, by Marc Weissbluth

This book was recommended by my friend Marika and it has been pretty helpful. One question Brent keeps asking is when the baby is supposed to do X. This book spells out the when for sleeping nicely. He uses month my month examples to help parents know what is normal and what to do if things are abnormal. We are really trying to keep Oskar on a schedule.

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson

Great book about how science can go stray when people become attached to an idea dogmatically. Johnson explains how a doctor (the same doctor who invented the whole field of anesthesiology, by the way) sussed out that cholera was a water born illness rather than in the air. The reader learns all about life in London in the 1800's. Bacteria really rule our world. Oh and you can cure cholera by drinking LOTS and LOTS of water, because cholera just removes water from your system. Oh and did you know beer has antibacterial qualities? Great book.

The Case for Make Believe, by Susan Linn

This author really believes that kids need time to use and develop their imagination. She also believes, with statistics and studies to back up her belief, that TV stifles children's abilities to play. She turned me into a believer. To the extent possible I would like to keep Oskar away from screens as much as possible for as long as possible. We will see how that works out.

mini book review: My Korean Deli

by Ben Ryder Howe

Cute book...Mr. Howe's wife decides that instead of buying a house she will repay her mother for all of her sacrifices with a deli in New York. The book chronicles their going about finding, running, and well, eventually, selling their Korean Deli.

What the back of the book does not mention is that the book is also about Mr. Howe working as an editor of the Paris Review. Super interesting, that part! He is basically living a double life: working at the review by day and the deli by night.

book review: the art of eating in

The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove
by Cathy Erway

Operation prepare for the baby/learn to self motivate has had some competition from operation hotter than hell outside/TV calling. Some days I self motivate, some days I watch TV.

But after taking back all of the labor books to the library I happened upon this book in the new books section. Bringing new books home to read from the library is strictly prohibited right now. We need books going OUT.

But one thing I have wanted to work on is eating at home more, especially since I am not working. It is a good way to save money and I am a decent cook (queue comment from Brent.) As a child, we only went out to eat for special occasions. But somewhere along the line, eating out became something that was just a normal part of my life. Even when I am bored with the food options, I often don't get my act together to bring my lunch to work.

The author spent two years not eating out in New York city. In fact that is what her blog is called: Not Eating Out in New York.

I can imagine her blog and book could readily be compared to the blog that inspired Julie and Julia. But her book is better that that book. By far!

Erway chronicles all the different experiences she has while eating at home. She learns how to cook new things, although the title is a bit mis-leading, because she is already a great cook when she started the experiment. She hangs out with friends at home, she goes on picnics, she goes to food cook-offs.

Unfortunately, we don't have similar palates, so many of her recipes I would not try, but she has inspired me to be more creative with my cooking. And her blog is great too.

other books

Ok, so I have read some other books I don't feel like reviewing more than a little bit. This a cop out. I know that.

The Wild Life of our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We are Today
By Rob Dunn

Great, great book. Loved it. Go read it. It will change your life. Or call me, and I will tell you why I loved it.

Forget Sorrow
by Belle Yang

This book is a lot like Maus by Art Spiegelman. It chronicles her family's history and then plight in China before coming to America. If you like graphic novels, pick it up.

The Parrot Who Thought She Was A Dog
by Nancy Ellis-Bell

Cute book about a crazy animal woman. She adopts animals, even birds who threaten to bite her at every moment. Quick read. If you are into animals, this is a book for you.

book review: slow love

slow love: how I got knocked off the fast track and put my pajamas on for a year and found happiness.
by Dominique Browning

I read this awhile ago. It was, the opposite of a coming of age story, I suppose. It was more of a coming to terms with latter middle-age story. The author was the chief editor of House & Garden, until the magazine closed. Then she really did not know what to do with herself. She became depressed. She also had a rather un-fulfilling relationship with a married man for many years. (Reading about said relationship was one of the most annoying parts of the book.)

I now consider the need to learn how to self motivate again. Perhaps this is what she was really doing in the book: learning how to self motivate without the looming deadline of a magazine to produce.

So many people I work with say they just don't know what they would do with themselves if they did not have to work...I have lots to do...but I am still learning how exactly to self motivate myself. This week has gone well so far.

Anyway, the book. It was ok.

I did like her guiding piece of decorating advice: create as many lovely places in which to sit and read as possible in your home.

book review: the wave, in pursuit of the rogues, freaks, and giants of the ocean

The Wave
by Susan Casey

I read this book right away when it came out a few months ago...and LOVED it. So why have I not written the review yet? One word: jealousy. I had this idea to write a book about giant waves, from an article in the New York Times. Hundreds of ships go missing annually. For years they had no idea why...but now we know that the sailors stories of giant waves were not just tall tales.

But I did not write the book. Mrs. Casey did.

She took an interesting tact: she interwove the science of the waves with the stories of surfers trying to surf giant waves. It works well. You get the personal interest stories coupled with the scary science. (FYI: no cruises for me, ever, thank you very much.)

For example, there are landslide-induced tsunamis. These happen under water. 8,000 years ago a piece of shelf the size of Kentucky gave way off the coast of Norway. The slide might have been caused by methane hydrates, or spherical gas deposits frozen into the sea floor. Changes in the temperature of the ocean could trigger more of these spheres to explode. Changes as little as one degree will set them off, leading to giant waves and vast clouds of methane going into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas ten times more potent than carbon dioxide. Scary stuff.

Oh and the USGS conservatively estimates that twice the carbon found in all fossil fuels in the world is contained in these ice balls.

Bottom line is that the book is a great example of non-fiction done well.

book review: how my breasts saved the world: misadventures of a nursing mother

by Lisa Wood Shapiro

I ran across this book at our bookstore and took a chance on it. Baby books can be hit or miss. One I read was so bad I did not even want to review it. I liked how the book started: with this idealized version of how her mother and other female family members discussed breastfeeding as though they had all done it for years and it was so easy...

Years ago, I asked Linda if she had breastfed all of us. “Yes, all of you were breastfed.” Well, ok. Then later I thought to ask more.

“How long did you breastfeed Mt?”

“Oh, almost a year I suppose.”

“Erica?”

“Eight months.”

“John?”

“I quit work with John, so 6 months I think.”

“Me?”

“You were breast fed.”

“For how long?”

“You were breastfed.”

I finally got out of her that I was breastfed for almost a month before she went back to work.

This book turned out to be just wonderful and full of all kinds of interesting tidbits. The author wrote the story basically as an extension of her quest to explain to new mothers how difficult breastfeeding is and how important getting help is to your success. She walks all over Brooklyn telling new moms about her nursing group and breastfeeding pillows, and leaking boobs, and on and on. Her husband tries to shut her down a few times, but to no avail.

Her tips, scattered throughout, are lovely.

• Re-load the diaper bag as soon as you get home so it is ready to go when you are ready to leave again. Getting out of the house is 100% of the battle.
• When making homemade cupcakes, use the food processor and just put the batter into the cupcake papers directly on a cookie sheet rather than using a muffin tin.
• Get a lactation consultant early and often. It is worth the expense.
• The latch is the hardest part.

I keep thinking about the book and telling my friends who are expecting what Lisa said: it is hard, so get help. I haven’t even tried it yet...but I am leaking. (Is that TMI?)

book review: kraken: the curious, exciting, and slightly disturbing science of squid

Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid

by Wendy Williams

I love cephalopods: octopus, cuttlefish, squid. I don’t eat them because I love them so...I could never even try one. They are just too smart(see video above regarding their smarts). So when Brent surprised me with this book, I was excited. But the book disappointed, or rather the author did. I know she spent a lot of time working on the book, but she injected herself into the story too often. And I feel like she needed a better editor. She repeated herself a lot.

I did learn some fun things though.

For example, the star of The Aquarium of the Pacific, was an octopus which was found walking along the street several miles from the ocean! Can you imagine seeing that? A good Samaritan saved the little guy, named Lucky Sucker.

Cephalopods’ ink contains dopamine, so its prey might be feeling good while being eaten.

So, if you are really into the little guys like I am, read the book. Otherwise, skip it.

eels, by james prosek

What do you know about eels? Other than their skin can make great wallets that will demagnetize your credit cards...nothing really.

You all know about my interest in the stranger things of the world. Well, Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Mysterious Fish about eels was just fascinating and filled all of the requirements I have for a great read: 1. random topic, 2. well written, and 3. easily explained to others. An excellent read, even if you don't think you care about eels.

Eels, which are fish and not to be confused with electric eels, are born in the ocean and swim up the rivers to live, the opposite of other fish. The scientists think the eels from the eastern coast of the north and south American continents spawn in the Sargasso sea...but no one has ever seen them actually spawn. And eels can live outside of water for periods of time enabling them to move between ponds.

Prosek travels all over the world to learn more about eels...he spends 10 years of his life on eels, and we are the recipients of his massive amounts of knowledge. I would be interested in what got left on the editing floor, because I bet there were lots of interesting gems lying around.

Unfortunately, eels are not faring well. According to Prosek, eels once traveled up the Mississippi as far as Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois. Dams have been their downfall.

Prosek also travels to the island of Pohnpei where the eel is worshiped by some as their ancestors, and therefore not eaten. As an aside, the island also has a set of ruins from the city of Nan Madol, "a ruined city that lies off the eastern shore of the island of Pohnpei that was the capital of the Saudeleur dynasty until about AD 1500." You have to check out the pictures of this place (click this sentence.)

Here is a video about the last guy on the east coast who still uses a weir to collect eels in the same manner as the Native Americans did:

eel•water•rock•man from Orion Magazine on Vimeo.

book review: the sound of a wild snail

by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

A woman in my last writing class did a book review of this book, and it was possibly the most eloquent book review I have ever read. Instead you are left with my more pedestrian review.

This book was WONDERFUL. Really wonderful. Bailey took a topic I thought I had figured out, namely snails, and complicated them. My previous understanding about snails: dumb, slimy, easy to kill with salt, some people eat them. Now I know a lot more.

Bailey was struck with some kind of illness that left her bedridden for years. A friend brought her a snail, and watching the snail, at the snail’s pace was the only activity Bailey was capable of for many months. She would lie on her side watching the snail. Day after day she and the snail co-existed. If you listen very closely, snails even make noise.

Of note:
“Some [snail species] (sic) are so minute that they would not hide the letter o in this print.” REALLY? That is small people.

Here you can see how snails have sex:

Bottom line: this is truly a book to read, regardless of whether you care about snails or not.

book review: hector and the search for happiness

by Francois Lelord

On the fishing trip I got through two books. It was just glorious! One was this little book about Hector and his search for happiness. Hector is a French psychologist. He realizes that he is unhappy and decides to go on a trip to different places in the world in order to figure out rules to remember about happiness.

Hector has quite a few adventures and all the while he keeps a small notebook of the lessons he learns. I find the lessons to be incredibly accurate:

My favorite lessons from the book:

Happiness often comes when least expected.
Many people see happiness only in their future.
Happiness is being with people you love.
Happiness is a certain way of seeing things.

I am now reading a book about Stoicism and I really think this book and that other book compliment each other well. I will write about that book when I finish it. Until then, I would love to share these three excerpts from the Stoic book here.

Excerpt 1: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/27/twenty-first-century-2.html
Excerpt 2: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/29/twenty-first-century-3.html
Excerpt 3: http://boingboing.net/2010/11/01/twenty-first-century-4.html

book review: A Secret Gift

A few months ago Grammy called us late, really late, like 2 AM. It was before her heart surgery. She was all kinds of upset because of the economy. She had spoken to her son earlier that day and he had offhandedly said asked if she was ready for the second depression, since she had made it through the first.

Grammy's question to me and Brent really revolved around one major topic: food. During the depression she told us she had eaten beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She was not going to do it again.

Brent was able to talk her down. He explained that after the depression we, as a country, had enacted a series of programs to act as social safety-nets. Gram seemed to calm down.

I both believe and could not believe that she only had beans to eat. That is until I started reading A Secret Gift, How One Man's Kindness- and a Trove of Letters-Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression. When I think of the depression I think of it in aggregate: bad things happened all over the world. People were poor.

But tangibly that meant nothing. After reading this book, I have a much better sense of what happened.

For example, all of the banks failed. We have all seen It's a Wonderful Life but that does not really bring the failed banks idea home.

Since the recession started, 306 banks have failed, but no one has really felt it, because your savings are insured by the US government. What if they had not been? Can you imagine your life savings just going away? Not there anymore? Maybe Americans have such small savings accounts, that it would not be that big of a deal, but I can't really believe that.

I have numerous friends and family members who have lost their jobs, but because of unemployment insurance, their lives went on. They eventually found new jobs.

The book really brings home what life was like and could be like if we did not have the safety net in place we have to day. I wish more people who are so supportive of smaller government would read what the results of these types of policies can be in real life.

Oh and it is a super heartwarming tale that makes you want to give more away, because as we all know, the giver gets more than he gives.

(JOHN READ THIS) book review: The Art of Non-Conformity

(photo from this nice book website: http://readingbyeugene.com/.)

by Chris Guillebeau

“It is not the decision you make that is the most important; it is the degree of commitment with which you make the decision.” (Quoting Beau Bartlett.)

This book is very similar to the 4-hour Work Week guy’s book: instructions on how to start living the life you want to live. He admittedly takes his blog posts and rework/reorganizes the posts into a book, but it works. The book is good and offers a lot with respect to realizing your dreams.

“Whatever your dreams are, start taking them very, very seriously.” (Quoting Barbara Sher, in Wishcraft) I like this idea. Take your dreams seriously, no one else is going to do that.

Somewhere we developed a dichotomy between dreams and reality, making them mutuality exclusive. If you are in a dream, you are by definition not in reality. So how does someone go about starting to live in a dream world? One aspect that keeps me from living my dream is that it seems really selfish and self-centered. My dream is to be a writer, but how does that help anyone? How does that make the world a better place? Which then spirals into the rabbit hole of doom. Guillebeau acknowledges this problem and tackles it straight: just help people. It makes you feel better and the world a better place. Worry about the rest later. Ok.

One thing that drives me crazy is when they tell me they “wish” they could do something I have done. They can/could. I like what Guillebeau says when people say this to him: “They have chosen to prioritize other things above their stated desires.” Priorities. As my friend Maureen points out: life is just a bunch of choices. Make good choices, get good outcomes. Thus if you prioritize the things you really want, those are what you will get. (Naturally, bad luck and illness can get in the way. I don’t deny this.)

Towards the end of the book he advocates a “Top Stop Doing List” rather than a “To Do List.” The idea behind this is that here are lots of things that cut into our time. Cut those things out of your life to achieve the live you want. I would put commuting on our list of things we stopped doing. Of course we have to get to work, but instead of spending an hour in the car every day, we live where we work. Some of you will say this is impossible or impractical. I understand that is what that means is you have chosen to prioritize other things over not commuting. We have not. That is fine. ☺

The book concludes with travel tips. He likes to travel a lot.

One criticism I have of the book happens to be a constant topic of conversation in our home: being a non-conformist is hard. It takes a lot of energy to buck the culture you live in. I don't think he really give the difficulty enough discussion. More on this later though.

Even if it just a restatement of his blog posts, I really liked the book. Lots of life affirming tips to help you lead the life you want.

book review: The Magicians

by Lev Grossman

Everyone seems to love The Magicians. I did not. I read the whole thing, so I suppose I did not hate it. I did, however, take a large break in the middle of it. The book is basically a piece of fan-fiction based on The Chronicles of Narnia books (which I loved). The main character is a depressed kid in New York City (popular these days...). He loves the books and really wants to believe in magic. And then magic comes knocking at his door.

I am sure there will be a second novel. They set it up to be that way. There are some lose ends left hanging. Some things don’t match up. Maybe I felt the novel was a bit sloppy.

There were some great lines and thoughts:
“The problem with growing up is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grownup aren’t fun anymore.” pg. 199

On pgs. 216 and 217 we are told that the headmaster at Quentin’s school thinks they are all magicians because they are unhappy. “A magician is strong because he feels pain.”

I won’t read the next book. This one just did not suck me in enough.

book review: Some Day This Pain Will be Useful to You

by Peter Cameron

But for my professor assigning this book, and the fact that I respect her opinion, I would not have finished this book. Once you get past chapter 2, though, it really takes off. We finally get to the “conflict” in the book. I think this is the professor’s point: get to the conflict earlier. We will see if I was right as my class moves forward this week.

The book describes the fictional life of James Sveck, who I would describe as an over privileged, over thinking, brat from New York City. Oh and he is depressed. A lot of the book takes place in his brain. The way he analyzes and over thinks everything is excruciating and tiring. Do people really think like this? This thinking paralyzes him.

Ultimately, we only spend from July 24th to the 30th with him. A lot happens in this week, and we hear about some events that took place a few months earlier and his agonizing over going to college at Brown. There is also a postscript that I saw coming miles away. Before anything even happened I started crying.

I wonder now if the book was really as good as I think or if it just struck a cord with me, and now, I am not even sure what the difference would be? Does a great book have to speak to us to be considered great? Maybe that is why I still feel Crime and Punishment was just that; it did not speak to me.

brent and proust

Book Review: How Proust Can Change Your Life
Review by Brent
Book by Alain de Button

Having never read a word written by Marcel Proust, it may have seemed a strange choice to read a book about his book(s). What's more, there seems to be a cottage industry in writing books with the name Proust in the title. There's Proust & the Squid; Proust was a Neuroscientist and probably others. (Plus Steve Carrell as a Proust scholar in the movie Little Miss Sunshine.)

But this book by Alain de Botton seems to have been first out of the gate, and it's not a "Proust And Something" book, it's just about Marcel and his novel. I bought it impulsively after reading the opening in the bookstore because I thought it was so well written. And I stick by that judgment even though the rest of the book slowed down for me. De Botton writes engagingly and humorously about Proust's life and also illustrates life lessons using characters from In Search of Lost Time. But, unsurprisingly, I feel that I would have gotten more out of the book if I'd read the source material. The chapters claim to tell you "How to Love Life Today" or "How to Take Your Time" or "How to be Happy in Love." De Botton takes each of these themes and shows us what Proust had to say about it in his novel and how he succeeded or failed at doing the same in real life. It would all be rather tedious in the hands of a boring author, but de Botton is fun to read and you feel a bit like your sitting in his kitchen having a nice book club with him, except you haven't read the book so you're faking it a bit and nodding politely.

The opening chapter, "How to Love Life Today," is wonderful. It tells the story of a French newspaper that asked a number of famous authors what they would do if a meteor were headed to Earth that would soon end us all. Proust's response is that such a thing would be wonderful because we all delay and put off life with the sense that we have all this time. If we knew our end was imminent wouldn't we rush off to do all those things we mean to but haven't gotten around to. Take that trip, kiss that girl, do that one thing you always wanted. This isn't a surprising response, and de Botton points out that Proust wasn't a particularly adventurous fellow and didn't much take his own advice. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't. Here's what de Button has to say about it:

Feeling suddenly attached to life when we realize the imminence of death suggests that it was perhaps not life itself which we had lost the taste for so long as there was no end in sight, but our quotidian version of it, that our dissatisfactions were more the result of a certain way of living than anything irrevocably morose about human experience. Having surrendered the customary belief in our own immortality, we would then be reminded of a host of untried possibilities lurking beneath the surface of an apparently undesirable, apparently eternal existence.

However, if due acknowledgment of our mortality encourages us to re-evaluate our priorities, we may ask what these priorities should be. We might only have been living half a life before we faced up to the implications of death, but what exactly does a whole life consist of? Simple recognition of our inevitable demise does not guarantee that we will latch on to any sensible answers when it comes to filling in what remains of the diary. Panicked by the ticking of the clock, we may resort to some spectacular follies.

Of course, de Button's book is an attempt to draw lessons from Proust to help us avoid those follies and it's worth the read.

stuff: we are what we own

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
By Randy O. Frost and Gail Stehele

Stuff is an easy to read explanation of the author’s research in to hoarding, why it happens, the psychology behind hoarding, and stories about their attempts to treat people with hoarding problems. Hoarding happens in many cultures and has various causes. "Objects in a hoard may appear to be without value to an observer, but someone with a hoarding problem would hardly describe them as worthless."

Reading this book is a little voyeuristic, just as watching the shows about hoarding is voyeuristic. You look on with disgust and piqued interest. What you are thinking the whole time is: could this ever happen to me? Would I know it? How can these people live this way? Why?

What can you tell about a person based on what they own? Do you own your stuff or does it own you? Throughout the YOMD – year of making do – we have been trying to keep from acquiring new stuff but it is hard. The book describes three themes among ownership, found through research by Lita Furby. The possessions: 1. allows the owner to accomplish something; 2. provides a sense of security; or 3. become part of an individual’s sense of self. My possessions largely fall into number one, but some are outliers. While reading the book I kept thinking about what I hoard. Books and purses. I love them both. Maybe shoes too. These are the things that are hardest for me to get rid of. I love them. I love what they represent: a place to store other belongings when I am not at home. While thinking about the book and setting some purses "free" I focused on one purse. It is blue, a good size, and I have used it a total of 4-5 times. I have had it 10 years. I originally bought it for my mom before she died. She never used it as far as I know. But every time I look at the purse, I remember her. I think about her, so for that reason, I keep it. There types of thought processes are explored over and over in the book.

What all hoarders have problems doing, however, is making decisions. They can’t decide what to do with stuff and often do nothing. I have considered the purse often and decided to keep it.

While reading the book I was reminded of that book I read a few years ago: Collections of Nothing, where the author/professor collected lots of nothing: cereal boxes, wrappers, etc. His stuff was all organized and catalogued though…well he said it was. I did not actually see any pictures. Stuff states that the "boundary between normal collecting and hoarding" is the distress the hoard causes. The Collections of Nothing author did admit that his collecting/hoarding had caused problems in his family and led to his divorce.
That said all of the hoarders profiled in Stuff live in huge messes. They have small “goat trails” in their homes to move around, stuff piled high around them. One woman did not even recognize photos of her home! So did the Collections of Nothing author really have his collections organized? Or was he a hoarder too?

One book that helped me get rid of a lot of baggage, both internal and external, was 100 Ways to Simplify Your Life. I try to remind myself that someone else could use the items I don’t need. Keeping the items is wasteful. And our apartment is small!

I would recommend Stuff. It was very interesting and brought up a lot of things I had not considered before.

talent: can it be learned? writing notes

Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home: Life on the Page
by Lynn Freed

The author, Freed, hails from South Africa – and according to this memoir cum resume, that’s where she places all of her novels. Before my professor recommended the memoir, I had never heard of Freed. Also, according to this book Freed has lived her life on her own terms – which we hear over and over. She relied and continues to rely largely on her innate "talent" as a writer to get by after she divorced her husband. Lucky for her, since she tells the reader over and over how hard it is to read all of the poor writing found in the MFA courses she teaches to make ends meet. She also tell us she has problems not being brutally honest – yet she can’t bare to tell these mediocre writers the truth: they have no future.

Is that true? Is there really no future for the average or even poor writer? Brent and I recently came upon some dastardly lawyer-ing. A large part of being a good lawyer is anticipating the worst case scenario. This poor work made me realize there are lots of professionals out there who make a living not being the best. Freed puts so much emphasis on being the best writer. I would love to do some statistically analysis of her former students and see how they are all doing. Were they really that bad?

Freed does make some great points about writing though—one of which being that the writer must stay away from the cliché of making all parts of a book fall into a "good" or "bad" basket. In fact, because I remembered this idea from her book, I just edited myself and instead of telling you that I thought she should have cut all of the family crap from her book, I realized that some of it was quite interesting, and therefore, resides in the gray of life.

Seeking out the gray is akin got seeking trugh in your writing – another theme of the book. Writing the truth is hard. When I try I sometimes get worried that I will hurt people’s feelings – or worse yet my truth – which has a tendency to modify a bit to sometimes enhance the truth- might be completely different from someone else’s truth. But what can you do? Press on as Linda would have said to me.

The final tidbit that struck me was her guidance to "Ask your self what obsesses you and write about that."

Annoyingly, one long-term obsession of mine –gigantic waves—just got its book, so I would add to the tip: NOW. Go write about your obsession now.