Matilda reads

I've done software testing, so why not test patterns and readability with craft books...

2011-11-07T14:35:00.000-08:00

Cool variation on stripey socks

Sock Yarn One-Skein Wonders: 101 Patterns That Go Way Beyond Socks edited by Judith Durant

The About: Third in the series of One-Skein Wonders, this book makes use of stashes of sock yarn that knitters love to hoard. Patterns are divided into mittens and gloves, shrugs and scarves, socks, baby clothes and random accessories. Each pattern is designed to use just one skein of sock yarn specified.

Thoughts: Being one of them hoarders of sock yarn and a very... frugal person, nothing delights me more than the idea of completing a project with one skein only. The problem with many socks I have made is that most, if not all of them, require about 1.2 skeins of yarn, and then I'm left with just not enough for another pair of socks--grr!

This book has cute but easy patterns from straight-forward knitting to lacy creations. In contrast to some other knitting books, the instructions here are easy and leave no room for ambiguity.

I ended up making two pairs of socks using one of the sock patterns that was easy to memorize and looked great, and as I followed each step by the word, I managed to make a pair of socks without any problems or needing to stop to scratch my head.

The only downside to my eagerness in knitting these was that I did not check what size this one skein was supposed to be, and so my first pair ended up using again about 1.2 skeins of yarn--which is why the first pair has non-matching toes...

There are patterns in this book where I'm thinking, "OK, so you can make a skein as big as you want--can you still call it just one skein pattern?" Most of the sock yarn skeins I have are less than 300 yards each, whereas most of the patterns in this book require skeins in sizes somewhere between 300-500 yards. I wish the introduction already had stated that most of the yarns here are high-quality, indie-made hand-spun sock yarns and not the kind that you can buy off Jo-Ann shelves.

Despite that, this is an extremely useful book for learning quick projects to be made out of a fairly small amount of sock yarn. Because instructions are written extremely clearly and are accompanied by illustrations you can't go wrong buying this book. Next I'll try out some of the scarves...

Painful images

2011-11-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

36. In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman

The About: This collection is a set of one-page comics that deal with Art Spiegelman trying to come to terms with the destruction of the Twin Towers in his city, all the while growing angrier at how the then-administration took advantage of the raw feelings people felt after the attacks. His art goes from obsessive reproductions of the burning skeleton of the second tower to scathing political commentary, none of which leave the reader cold.

Thoughts: I was not in the country on 9/11. Yet I remember being incredibly shocked watching the live footage on TV. I cannot quite grasp the extent to which 9/11 affected people here personally, although intellectually I can understand it. Art Spiegelman's collection is a concise look into how people in New York, specifically Manhattan, felt during and after the Twin Tower attacks. The images burned into his brain are not the ones from newspaper front pages known all over the world; instead, he remembers kids high-fiving inappropriately, or someone painting the burning towers on a canvas on the street. And then there is the image that repeats and repeats: the glowing foundation structure of the tower, ready to collapse, which looms over everything Spiegelman is attempting to create.

This is Spiegelman's personal hurt and anger collected into one volume. Strangely enough, I can imagine this very personal account to ring true for many of his countrymen and women.

When the personal is public

2011-11-03T23:56:00.000-07:00

35. Warriors Don't Cry. The Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High by Melba Pattillo Beals

The About: Beals was one of the nine black children to first attempt integration at a white high chool after the integration ruling in 1958. In her memoir, Beals goes back in time to the shoes of her teenager self to reflect on how stupendously close she got to losing her life, almost daily, simply due to ignorance and hatred.

Thoughts: Some autobiographies written by non-writers can be absolutely terrible because they cannot let go of a single detail, but Warriors Don't Cry has a fresh outlook on an extremely historical event. Each sentence stresses that Melba is like any other teenager who worries about boys, doesn't quite understand why she can't go to the community center in the evening to hang out with her friends (because an angry white mob would kill her, that's why) or who accidentally has a big mouth and tells the reporters something she maybe shouldn't have.

Because of how incredibly normal she is, it is especially hard to grasp that grown white women would break through barriers and run after her, genuinely wanting to kill her just for attending the same school as their kids, or how a boy would throw acid in her eyes in the middle of the school halls, and the head master wouldn't do a thing because the only adult witnessing the situation was a soldier who was hired as Melba's bodyguard. Perhaps the most sickening part of the story is--if the constant physical abuse during each school day isn't enough for the reader--the conversation Melba overhears in the teachers' lounge when the protesting crowd outside is ready to break in to the school: they actually contemplate for a moment about sacrificing one of the black kids to the crowd (to be hanged!) in order to get the others out alive.

I don't even understand how she stayed mentally sane. Imagine going to school every day, where other kids would kick you, hit you and try to burn you alive--and the school staff thinks that you actually deserve this treatment. A year of that? Incredible.

This was 1958. Not that long ago. That's perhaps the scariest thought while reading this book.

Back to school, back to school...

2011-10-24T23:48:00.000-07:00

...to prove my clients that I ain't no fool...

Apologies for the lack of updates: in addition to my usual and unusual work, I started my certificate program a couple of weeks ago. Suddenly my reading material has become fairly limited in scope...

34. The Subversive Copyeditor by Carol Fisher Saller

The About: Inspired by questions sent to her about editing at Chicago Manual of Style, Saller wrote a book that addresses the most burning questions she receives from the point of view on how to do a good job as an editor. Sections include how to cover your tail but also how to own up to mistakes, how to build a good relationship with an author and how to recognize your skills and short comings.

Thoughts: Let me start by saying that this was not required reading for the class. I just happened upon it in the book store, and it looked interesting so I grabbed it. I'm glad I did, because for such a tiny book it's extremely valuable.

This Ms Manners for editors is about good business practices. Saller employs humor in her writing--and tells us why it's important in client-editor relationships. She also gives editors a talking-to when it's needed: stop making excuses for not replying to an email, stop trying to lay the blame somewhere else, grit your teeth and smile although you want to burn the manuscript.

The underlying and painfully true theme is that editing a manuscript is not about the editor; it's about the author and ultimately about the reader. The editor is there just to work as a conduit in making the reader's experience as rewarding as possible. This sometimes means throwing grammar books out the window and going with gut feeling, or giving in to the author's odd spelling preferences. Editors are not in it for the glory, but Saller does remind authors that it wouldn't hurt them to thank also their editors publicly once in a while...

Even if you're not planning on being an editor, I'd still recommend this book because it gives great (and fun!) insight to the world of publishing.

Just... bizarre

2011-10-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

33. Enon opetukset by Petri Tamminen ("My uncle's teachings")

The About: Jussi is a 12-year-old who has a good relationship with his uncle, who is a mere 10 years older than the boy. What is it about this uncle that makes him such a champion in life? He always has the answers. As Jussi goes from being in his twenties to a divorcee in the late 30s, he's still searching for the answer as he still cautiously looks up to his uncle.

Thoughts: What a strange book. On the one hand, it's trying to be very, very deep with uncle's drunken philosophies and Jussi struggling with his own depression, but then on the other I felt like I only had a chance to skim the surface of these life-altering events and thoughts while bouncing from one drunken event to another. Jussi thinks he is a loser when actually he's just a depressed, middle-class man who is moderately successful. He looks up to his uncle who seems to have a better grasp of life than Jussi does, although he's a complete drunkard, a flake and a womanizer who always gets burned. At first, it seems like the story is idolizing a certain aloofness in life style and not caring about what others think--because that's what the uncle espouses. But maybe it's just an illusion, and as a reader I'm only seeing through Jussi's eyes, which are veiled by depression and feelings of failure. Jussi actually has a better handle on life than his uncle, but his uncle is just much better at bullshitting than Jussi is, and that's why he has become the guru of the family. The older Jussi gets, the more he begins to see flaws in his uncle.

Still. A strange book.

More of the Southern vampire saga

2011-09-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

32. Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

The About:
In the fourth installment of the Sookie Stackhouse "Southern Vampire" novels, Bon Temps has unwittingly welcomed a couple of witches slightly more powerful than the local waitresses who dabble with Wicca practices during their free time and dye their hair black. When Eric the Vampire, sheriff of the area, appears in the middle of the night to Sookie not knowing who or what he exactly is, everyone is creeped out: necromancers are in town, and could with their powers kill all vampires by just sending them walking into the sunlight.

Thoughts:
I have enjoyed reading these books while watching the series, because the series creator Alan Ball takes a lot of liberties with the TV show and thus, the storylines are not exactly the same. Although this book deals with the current 4th season of the TV show, it is also very different. Which actually is a shame: I feel like the show jumped the shark this season with having so many characters and story lines that my head is spinning: there's Sam the Shifter and his brother, the Weres and the Vampires, and another story for Tara, leaving Sookie--the main character!--just to prance around, smiling cutely and having sex with vamps. Oh, and then there is the story line of the witches, and another story line with Lafayette and his boyfriend who both can become possessed by demons. And I forgot: we also have to stop by occasionally to see how Andy Bellefleur is doing with his V addiction. Can't forget Sookie's brother, Jason, either and how he was mangled by the were-panthers. That's quite a lot to follow in one series, and hardly any of that is in the book!

The fourth book simply focuses on the witch story line and Sookie trying to figure herself out while trying to solve yet another mystery with the help of both living and the undead of all shapes. There is no Sam's asshole brother who has absolutely no redeeming qualities (why did they make him up for the TV show as such a big deal?), no V addiction issues, no being possessed by demons. And that's perhaps why the story in the book is so much smoother and easier to follow than the TV series at this point.

What's more, the books consistently have the same sense of humor and style, which have so far made the stories gel together really well. Unlike the books, the more the TV show creates its own characters and story lines, the more it makes Sookie a vapid, blonde side character. I really liked her in the first season, where she and the story were closest to the books: she was the sassy, stereotype-breaking Southern waitress who was quite quick on her feet. A lot of laughs. Now she's just... bleh. During first season, I also liked the differences: I liked that the show kept Lafayette around, and I thought the civil rights point of view brought to the vampire story was a smart move. But the further the seasons go, the more spread out the stories get with a dozen of story lines to follow and gratuitous nakedness thrown into the mix to distract the viewers from there not being anything else exciting going on.

So I'm happy to be reading the books, because although they do spoil the main events in the TV series for me, at least I get to have a glimpse of what the "real" Sookie would be doing in the TV series if the creators gave her the chance.

2011-09-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

30. The Glamour of Grammar. A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English by Roy Peter Clark

The About:
Clark's guide is aimed at anyone looking to improve their written language skills in English. It's divided into four parts: Words for tips on how to build vocabulary, including inventing words and reading dictionaries for fun; Points for how to deal with punctuation; Standards for reminders on good writing standards, such as how to avoid sexism in writing easily and how to steer clear from "hypergrammar" (I personally would have called this "how to avoid using Strunk and White as your Bible..."); and finally, Meaning that focuses on meanings behind grammatical structures and what they convey to the reader.

Thoughts:
Although it's all about grammar, this book is a quick read. Clark really is at home with words, and most of his phrases and headings are a delight to read. Yet, his style never resorts to the jokey and snarky style of many modern grammar books. I have enjoyed them as well, but Clark's book follows his own rules of writing in a manner that is based on good grammar effortlessly with a very friendly tone.

31. Isänpäivä by Pirjo Hassinen ("Father's Day")

The About:
Olli Penger is a successful detective novel writer who loves to dwell on the gory details of his victims' murders but who is unable to write a believable kissing scene. To him, all of the victims in his novels still bear the face of his ex-wife Marja and instead of reacting in real life to their separation, he kills her again and again in his novels. But when a family member commits a horrifying crime, Penger decides to take responsibility by killing the detective genre and his detective character--whom Penger has always tried to become in his personal life.

Thoughts:
This novel that seems on the surface extremely simple due to its easy readability and subject matter (gory crime!) is actually quite complex, so please keep on reading after the very first pages that are nothing but a brutal rape and murder scene (a few pages out of Penger's novel).

Because Penger has created the detective character Tähtö partly in his own image, partly as a man Penger desires to be, the journey into completely revamping the detective is unseltting because of Penger's pain and urgency to deal with the actual gory details in his personal life. It is heartbreaking to watch this character work on dealing with his pain in the only way he can--by resurrecting his dead characters and in effect apologizing to them instead of dealing with what is going on around him in living rooms and on the streets.

His act is a counter-reaction to a culture that wants to read about disgusting murders as long as we the readers know more about the people solving the crimes than the victims. And through this, author Hassinen jabs at novelists who are caught in the trap of mass-producing the ever-popular Scandinavian crime novel: they use violence as a backdrop for their often silent and stoic main characters that we look up to, but actually we would never read about those characters if they were not dealing with violence

The final question posed to Penger by media is, How much he and his novels are responsible for violence in his family, or in society in general. And there is nothing Penger can say in reply. Another question underlying in the final pages is what are we justified to sell in the name of entertainment, because people will devour violent stories whether they were published as fictional detective stories or as unconfirmed rumors on tabloid pages. Can we draw a line somewhere? Is there even a line to be drawn?

The book gave me a lot to think about, but at the same time there was so much subtle criticism crammed into the book that it was difficult to sometimes focus on each issue to recognize its real-life partner. I'll happily read this book again to be able to pay better attention to the subtleties.

Unfinished book of the month:
Conundrum. An Extraordinary Personal Narrative of Transsexualism by Jan Morris

This was one of the two books recommended by Nancy Pearl that discuss the experience of going through a sex change from a personal point of view. Jan Morris wrote this book in 1974, making her one of the first ones to give a loud, resounding voice to transsexualism. So it was not the topic that made my interest go away: it was just the way the book was written. The time when Jan was still James is all about stories of upper middle class British school and choir experiences, and... you know me. You know my reaction to any British school house stuff, and I'm sorry to say that Ms. Morris became a victim of my violent dislike to reading about rich kids at a boarding school (and then the army!). So, when the notification from the library came to return the book, I did not renew it.

I'll be getting the other recommended book soon, though!

Of grownups and children

2011-09-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

29. Karkkipäivä by Markus Nummi ("Candy Day")

(Candy day is a very Finnish concept: kids have one day in the week when they can eat candy, and thus candy is only a special treat--not an everyday indulgence. Attitudes toward this practice vary from support in teaching children that they should not have access to unhealthy food constantly, whereas the opposing view is that candy day practice makes candy a prohibited item, and might create later adults who console themselves with candy--or any prohibited items from their youth.)

The About:

Tomi is a small child with vivid imagination. His alter ego, a superhero-like character, wants to save the princess in the window across from his home. Sometimes the princess appears, sometimes the room remains dark. All Tomi knows is that princess Mirabella is bound by an evil witch and only he can save her now that he is all alone.

Paula is a store layout planner, which is a perfect job for her as her entire life is completely controlled and planned: she needs everything to be filmed for evidence, so she keeps a personal video blog while her daughter is grounded for shoplifting. Or maybe it was Paula who shoplifted? Small details!

Author and screenwriter Ari lives in the same block. He tries to pull a story together for TV executives but his characters remain flat. While his wife and children are on holiday, Ari is followed home by a small, dirty boy. Ari has reasons to suspect that this boy is a victim of abuse, but when he calls the social workers he manages to make himself sound like the prime suspect with his story about a boy with a superhero name and a captive princess.

Social worker Katri is working on her presentation on the past and future of social services for children, even when she is not at the computer. Ari's phone call makes her go back in time to a case that was especially painful for her. Should her presentation include notes on personal regrets and recurring nightmares?

Thoughts:

In the first chapter, Ari asks his wife to read his new book, which is about the events of that fateful day when Tomi followed him home. Leena agrees that the story is great, and so we begin to read the novel. It's meta-fiction time!

It is obvious that Nummi has, as he points out in the notes, researched child welfare services for his novel--some cases mentioned in the novel have even been borrowed from actual reports. Still, the story's criticism is not, as one would expect, aimed at child social services and its inadequate handling of cases, but more to the responsibility of individuals in a given community. Some are too eager to report anything they consider even slightly suspicious, thus diverting social worker energies from genuine cases, whereas others shut their eyes and ears from even the most horrifying events. How to find the perfect balance between these two extremes in order to help children on time?

In the novel, wheels begin to roll because of one child, who himself has been abused. Adults around seem clueless but well-intentioned, yet they are not doing much until warning signs are flashing bright red.

And then there is the princess. As the story progressed and I begun to understand the depth of horror behind her fairy tale it was impossible to stop reading. I needed to find out how the only character who makes no appearance except when others mention her will turn out.

This story seems to have a happy ending, but just as I let out a sigh of relief I remembered the first chapter where Ari and his wife talk about his novel. I had to leaf back to confirm my suspicions and thus, the book become even more horrifying than it seemed at first glance. A wonderfully crafted story that does not let the reader go, even after the book covers have been closed shut.

Dystopia and... Dystopia?

2011-08-02T17:07:00.000-07:00

26. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The About:
Kathy H., a carer, reminisces her life in a secluded boarding school called Hailsham, somewhere not too far from Norfolk, where she met perhaps the only important people in her life, Tommy and Ruth. They wouldn't really know their location or about anyone else, really, as their knowledge of the outside world comes only from their guardians, who bit by bit tell the children about their futures as donors. Through her memories Kathy tries to piece together the reality of what Hailsham meant for the children--a school for special children who needed to produce art and stay extremely healthy--and the reality when it dawns on her, and on all of the students eventually as they grow older, that their main purpose in life is to provide organs for other people. Although they learn about this at an early age, coming to terms with it is an entirely different process altogether.

Thoughts:
It's almost impossible to write about this book without revealing some twists and turns. Early on, the reader will realize that when Kathy is a carer for donors and some of the donors are from her old school, we are really talking about people who are prepped to be donors. Then slowly, just as for the children growing in Hailsham, the truth about their lives is revealed. The reading experience is surprisingly similar to the children's growing experience: we know what is going to happen, but we still don't know enough. But maybe just enough to think we have been informed all along. Maybe that is why the ending does not come at all as a surprise, but is more like a depressing, expected end to the story although it is still slightly eyebrow-raising.

I have never before read anything by Ishiguro (for shame!), and I enjoyed his writing style very much. It's very straight-forward and lacking in flowery prose, yet it manages to create a dream-like haze around the story so it felt like I was reading the novel inside a cloud. And although I usually would roll my eyes at some of the stylistic choices*, somehow they did not bother me enough to stop reading this time.

Never Let Me Go is actually a very odd book: I can't tell whether I really liked it and that it deserves all the praise it's been getting, or whether it's a really mediocre book that does not have a single original thought in it. It's not like novels very much like this in style and topic haven't been written before (Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake comes to mind, and people better versed in sci-fi than I could name probably dozens of examples), so what made this one so special? It's even a boarding school story, which I usually can't stand with all the concentration on clicks and mindless teaching sessions. The book is an easy read, and a bit of a puzzler--which is why some have called it a sci-fi thriller--so it's basically like reading a whodunnit with less blood, gore and guns. But the suspense is still there.

The characters may be the carrying force in the novel: they all seem very real. Ruth is absolutely terrible in her two-facedness, and probably all of us have met someone like her; someone who kisses up to people she likes and makes up lies to cover her ignorance. Kathy, the narrator, is almost a tabula rasa: she attempts to understand everyone's motivations for bad or good behavior, and is ready to forgive everything. We readers just have to remember that this is how she tells how she is, but often in the story her behavior is everything but angelic: she also can be catty and a terrible friend--and we're just supposed to feel bad for her because she herself feels bad for her behavior. And then there is poor Tommy, whose temper tantrums, occasional idiocy and lack in artistic talent leave him on the lower rungs in Hailsham's hierarchy and possibly on the express lane to become a donor. Just like often in real life, I don't understand why these three even hang out with each other if they have so much trouble getting along.

Then there is the issue of what is this story about. Well. It could be about the horrors of science gone too far. The more I read it, I felt like there also was an analogy to animal rights' movement hiding somewhere under there. Free-ranged is better than cage-raised, right? And although I would be tempted to say that the book is about friendship, the more I think about it the less it seems so. It's more about settling for friends because you don't know anybody else due to circumstances. Quite depressing. So... just enjoy it and take the book as you wish: a cautionary tale or a sappy romantic story akin to The Love Story.

(*He does this magazine-serial thing constantly, where he'll refer to an incident that has not yet been talked about in the most cliffhangerish way possible. You know what I'm talking about (I made up the following examples): "We all were great friends that summer but looking back, I should have known on the day we found the small rat that it would all fall apart..." *que chapter about the small rat incident* "Now the small rat buried, and us standing there with awkward smiles, there was something odd in the air. But we would remain great friends until the day our teacher saw what she shouldn't have." *que the scene with the teacher*. "That event definitely put a wedge into our friendship, and I suppose I had suspected that the teacher was going to be behaving oddly already earlier that summer, but I just didn't put the pieces together back then.*que scene about what happened earlier that summer* And so on. You can almost hear the Dun-dun-DUUUUN! play in the background each time. )

27. Ruuhkavuosi by Pauliina Susi ("The Entire Year Booked", perhaps)

The About: Minna is a 30-something woman attempting to manage her life: within the upcoming year, she only needs to finish translating about 5 formulaic romance novels, pop out a baby and help build a house from scratch with his boyfriend, who is reluctant to marry, all the while finishing her master's thesis (for which she doesn't even have a topic yet...). Her calendar triumphantly already announces all the finished products in the future, but the further the pregnancy and the house building project go awry, the further Minna seems to slip into depression and get lost in her lack of control. Although the story on the surface is absolutely depressing, Susi manages to squeeze out multiple laugh-out-loud moments from both Minna's irrational thought processes and her sharp tongue without ever ending up belittling the protagonist.

Thoughts: Written slightly tongue in cheek, this story manages to take a realistic look into the head of a control freak who ends up suffering from post-partum depression big time while still keeping an upbeat mode. In the beginning Minna simply seems like a drama queen, and I had a good laugh at some of the word choices and thought-processes she had because they were so recognizable to me. When the mood of the book takes a turn to the darker and we find out that Minna's drama queen behavior has all along been a seed for depression, we can still laugh with her as she's attempting to understand why the other mothers in the adults-and-children group are such homicidal husband-haters while she herself is slowly coming to terms with her own personality. It's all in the style of writing, really, and I thought the story balances a difficult topic and humor together very well.

How to screw a family over, Norwegian style

2011-07-21T16:25:00.000-07:00

25. The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad

The About:
Norwegian journalist Seierstad was accepted into an Afghan family to observe everyday life. The family knew that she was going to write a book about them, so she has protected the family with made-up names. The family's life centers around the father, Sultan, who is a bookseller in Kabul and a fervent defender of right to free speech. At the same time, his teenage bride, elder wife, and the rest of the family, really, lives under fear of him: are they able to go to school depends on what Sultan thinks; whether they are allowed to communicate with people with whom Sultan has broken ties with depends on him; and ultimately, who is allowed to continue living under his roof depends on him and his quickly shifting moods as well.

This nonfictional account written in a novel form depicts the life of all family members from the 3rd point of view. As Seierstad explains, all descriptions are based on what people told her about their encounters with other family members and their feelings toward politics and the law and thus she was able to tell their stories even when she was not present. Seierstad has completely removed herself from the story, and any reactions the family may have had of her.

Thoughts:
First of all: Seierstad got sued by Rais, "Sultan", because it would have been obvious who he was even under anonymity. He was, after all, a famous bookseller in Kabul! And he got pissed off by Seierstad's portrail of him and his family members, who in the book seem to all more or less hate him. She was found guilty of defamation and had to pay damages to "Sultan's" wife.

I don't know. I wish Seierstad had either gone all the way nonfiction and included herself in the story and called it "The Bookseller of Kabul and I" or then just used her information to create a completely fictional account. I think that's why she got into trouble: in the introduction she says that she portrays everyone fair and square, just as they had presented themselves to her, but... It feels weird that she'd think that she'd be able to give a just account of this family's experiences just because people told her how they felt. She didn't think that they'd filter and exaggerate their opinions because she was a white woman who was not following cultural rules (she was the only woman in the household allowed to dine with men, or walk alone on the streets!) and she'd told them she would write a book about them? That that wouldn't affect how people would communicate with her? Seriously? Occasionally, the passages where Sultan--the patriarch--rants and raves to his friends about politics in a very candid manner I thought... Is this what Sultan told Seierstad happened when he talked about politics with his friend, or is this what really happened? Because he seems like a heck of a brave person to be so opinionated. (And of course his friend had stupid opinions. Isn't that how we tell stories that involve ourselves: we are in the right and others behave silly?)

The women of the family are different, because it sounds like they did not talk to Seierstad as much as Sultan did--most likely because they didn't speak English like the men of the family did, and this Seierstad tells us in the introduction to the story. In the sections about what the women think of their lives it really feels as if she's merely projecting her feelings onto them and she crafts this narrative of what these people must think when they live in such oppressive situations.

Combine these questionable passages with just random stylistic changes: Seierstad goes from very floral and metaphorical writing jarringly quickly into reporter mode, where she begins to list pure facts from the history of Afghanistan devoid of any emotion, before embarking again on reflecting on how disappointed Sultan's son is because he cannot leave the bookstore to do what he wants. This can happen within easily within a few paragraphs. It's just... bizarre. I really feel like the book would have been much better had she been in the journalist mode all throughout it, without trying her hand in creative writing. The two styles are just too different.

In addition, either her writing style is not that great or the translation was not that great. Occasionally I had to stop and think, "What on Earth does this sentence mean?" Or then you get things such as, "...there are many things one can think of when one needs someone to vent one's wrath on." Is the family member suddenly mimicking a sarcastic tone a la the British royal family, or what is this stuff? My guess: a passive sentence gone wrong in translation.

I don't know Norwegian, but it sounds like the sentence structure is often like in Finnish: you first say where something happens/is and then the subject of the sentence--the existential sentence. But in English, this sounds often odd, especially when it's repeatedly used. I mean things like (and now I'm making this up), "On the windowsill there was a bar of soap" and "under the chair there was a cat sitting." From the book, from a randomly picked page: "On a concrete block of flats in Mikrorayon no. 4, big signs have been hung with the word 'Courses'." By the time the reader comes to the end of the sentence, the place where the word Courses appears has already been forgotten. What's wrong with writing something like "Big signs saying 'Courses' are hung on a concrete block of flats in Mikrorayon no. 4"? I probably would not have thought of this structure much had it not been used incredibly often.

With all that said, I still enjoyed reading through the story when I kept on reminding myself that this is a real Afghanistan family Seierstad is writing about, so I tried to take it as interesting nonfiction. I probably would have enjoyed it more had I not read that Hosseini book which was amazingly written. I could not help but compare this to it, because the subject matter ended up being fairly similar. The difference in execution was just like night and day.

"Sultan" has written his own book, called There once was a bookseller in Kabul where he tells his side of the story, but it has yet to be translated into English. This should be done asap! The story is pretty interesting, as "Sultan" is now seeking asylum in Scandinavia because his and his family's safety is threatened by Seierstad's book--something that definitely breaks all sorts of journalistic ethics.

Metapost

2011-07-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

Hey, someone found my blog by Googling "geoff nicholson quotes the onion art of walking armstrong." High five, dude/dudette!

If you have no idea what this is, click on Geoff Nicholson on my tag list on the right-hand side of this page.

Old fogies

2011-07-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

24. Mielensäpahoittaja by Tuomas Kyrö ("Upset")

The About:
The protagonist is a WW2 vet who lives in a small village in Finland. After his wife had to be taken to a nursing home because of her worsening Alzheimer's, our brave protagonist decided to have a meaning to his life: writing letters to the editor! Each chapter is a little letter to an editor of whichever magazine or newspaper strikes his fancy, and each begins with "I got so upset the other day, when..." Reasons to get upset range from discovering a sun beam in his living room to breaking his hip when he falls down the stairs (and on the second day of lying on the steps wonders if it's time to yell for help). He thinks that Valentine's Day should be replaced by "Mind your own business" day--and this he tells the world happily. After all, his friend had advised him that it's no use bottling feelings up, so he has decided to go ahead and complain. Sometimes personal details slip into his complaints, mainly about his relationship with his very modern son. Should he just face it that he's an old git who just doesn't get it?

Thoughts:

I laughed out loud multiple times reading this, because Kyrö's usage of language is often simply delicious. He really has hopped into the boots of an old, groggy and angry man who thinks that the newer generations know nothing about music, food, movies or how to dress up. Just some of the words he uses made me giggle. And lest the book would get too formulaic, Kyrö sometimes slips in sentiments that I found myself agreeing with. Uh oh, am I getting old now, too, or are this old man's demands not so crazy after all? At the end, the protagonist turns out to be much more sympathetic than you'd think, and the reader finds that there always is a reason for people behaving the way they do. The reasons are not always necessarily great, widely-approved of reasons, but they are reasons nevertheless.

Quick and fun reads

2011-07-15T15:16:00.000-07:00

21. Kätketyt by Johanna Sinisalo ("The Hidden")

This is a teeny tiny book from one of Finland's leading sci-fi authors, but I guess it counts as one...

The About:
Anna has just recently gotten a new job in a new town, and is having a hard time finding friends. After one especially depressing day she heads out to the bar. When she gets back from the restroom, a handsome man is sitting at her booth. Tired of her lonely life, Anna begins to pour her heart out to the man and is pleasantly surprised when he leaves a string of numbers for her--except that they are not his phone number! When a colleague clues Anna in on what geocaching is, Anna realizes that the numbers the man left behind are coordinates. Anna begins to trail the man who plays so very hard to get.

Thoughts:
Shortly about a short book. If you start reading this, please read it all the way through. Apparently, it was written for a commission for a women's magazine, and the style really shows: unlike Sinisalo's sci-fi books, this is not filled with details and smart beings, but with gossipy characters and whenever make-up is applied, it's done with a lot of detail... Honestly, up until the two last pages I was rolling my eyes at this story, because I thought it was a ridiculously stereotypical, uninteresting romantic story involving a trendy hobby.

I was wrong. So, so wrong.

When I read those last two pages, I had to reread them a couple of times. Then I didn't want to put the booklet down. Then I wanted to read the whole thing again. I can't tell you what made me do that because it would be awfully spoilery, but if you ever run into this book, READ IT!

22. and 23. Book Lust and More Book Lust by Nancy Pearl

Seattle's superstar librarian inspiring people to read!

The About:
Recommending books is tough business. Should your recommendations be based on what kind of genres your readers usually read, their favorite authors, their favorite subjects? Nancy Pearl has a new method for expanding your reading experience beyond comfort zones: she has simply invented her own little genres, and bunches up very different kinds of books together. Are you interested in reading books about Oklahoma? Well, here are the best ones! Do you like books where an animal is the main protagonist? Here are some great ones! In addition, each book has recommendations for teenagers and young readers. Sometimes, authors are lifted out of the crowd for a "Don't miss this author" chapter.

The beauty of these books is that each recommendation is based on Nancy Pearl's personal opinions. She wouldn't just recommend a best seller; if the book didn't move her or make her think, it's not on the list. This is also why she doesn't have many books that might be your, your or your Very Favorite Books: maybe she didn't like them, or maybe she has never heard of them. Maybe she simply forgot about them and remembered right after the book got published (hence, More Book Lust). These books are wonderfully opinionated and make even the more uninteresting books seem like they're worth a try.

Thoughts:
Nancy Pearl has this amazing skill of condensing a story into just a couple of sentences that make the story sound absolutely fascinating--without ever resorting to spoilers! Although I am not at all interested in books about, say, Oklahoma, I still managed to read the very short synopses and Pearl's reasons for why the books should be on everyone's reading list. I ended up getting acquainted with authors and books that I would never have dreamt of picking up at the library upon just seeing them. I'm thinking that if Pearl had some of my absolute favorite authors among her "Don't miss this author" sections of the book, I might enjoy the other authors she recommended as well.

I began to write down titles that sounded interesting but I had to stop when my library wish list grew unmanageable...

If you ever wonder, Which book should I read next? pick up one of these Book Lust books: they'll give you plenty to think about.

On curing myself of ignorance, step by step

2011-07-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes there are books that make me feel in awe of the writer: the skill of using sounds, connotations and flow that grasps the reader to follow every single word immediately. Then there are times when I do not quite know what I am feeling, when the awe is mixed with being subtly humbled by the content, or by having interestingly egotistical sides of my thinking revealed.

These are definitely that kind of books.

19. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

The About sans Spoilers: Mariam is an Afghani girl born out of wedlock, a shame to everyone. She dreams of a day when she can escape her oppressing, bitter and vile-mouthed, traditionalist mother and go live with her father, who brings Mariam lavish gifts and shows unconditional love to her. When one day she decides to reach for something more than her life as an unwanted young woman living in a small hut, her world collapses and she ends up in a situation even more oppressing than before.

Laila is also a young woman, albeit born 20 years after Mariam. Her family is liberal and educated, and they want to make sure that Laila will also become an independent woman who marries for love--after she has gained an education. But as war descends on Afghanistan, all the ethics and morals she is familiar with are swept away, and she suddenly finds herself relying on Mariam.

The Thoughts (spoilers within):

When I read the back of the book--which read very close to what I wrote above--I was not sure whether the story would be my cup of tea. Two women finding solace in each other during hard times? Is this going to be Steel Magnolias, Afghanistan edition? After reading the book, I understand why the back sleeve needed to tip-toe around the topic: there is no way one could condense into one paragraph the terrifying cruelty these women each face merely because of law based on religion. There is no short way of describing what it feels like to watch a relatively liberal, reasonable country fall apart and begin to treat half of its population like cattle, almost overnight. Although the situation has now changed once more, old habits die hard.

This is where I felt shame. Of course I had already known before that in places like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, women were not always required to hide their painted nails or they'd get a beating from any man on the street from cops to brothers to strangers. As recently as in the 1970s women still went to college, dressed up in Western garb, and did not need chaperons. It is incredibly hard for me to even imagine what it must have been to be a young woman at that time, and then see the revolution come and sweep all the rights from her. Walk alone during day time without a male family member? Get a beating. Wear pink socks? What a whore, get a beating.

The shame came from not knowing this early enough. I am embarrassed to admit that whatever little I learned from school of the Middle East countries never looked at their recent history from a regular citizen's point of view, and having lived so far away I never thought that everyday life had changed so recently, and so incredibly drastically there in a span of only a few years.

Hosseini's book, although fiction, seems* to give an accurate account of these events. It's gut-and-heart-wrenchingly sad, and the story just does not let the reader to catch any relief. This reality is there for you to look into the eye and face it. And doing just that makes me want to learn more of the realities in countries I might not be able to safely visit in my lifetime. (That, by the way, was that egotistical thought of mine, and it made me blush almost as much as my ignorance on the topic).

Content aside, the book was a delight to read. Hosseini uses delightful language, and he can write action scenes really well. I could feel my heart start to race toward the end, where a horrifying sequence of events unfolds. Marvelous writing, indeed.

(*As I have not ever experienced Afghanistan, I can only rely on reviews.)

20. Parvekejumalat by Anja Snellman ("The Gods on the Balcony")

The About:

Anis is the teenage daughter of a Somali refugee family in Finland. The life within her family's small apartment and the one inside her school, the shopping malls and the community college classes clash, and Anis is torn by the re-evaluation of morals that her family imposes on her. After all, the morals of her friends and classmates seem drastically different. The more Anis looks at her quiet mother and the brothers who hypocritically gamble and drink while tailing Anis on the town to squeal on her doings, the more she is convinced that she needs to break away from her family's traditions--even literally, when she is locked away into the family washing room.

Zahra is not Zahra's real name. She had a Finnish name, but after converting to Islam she threw that away along with all her other earthly possessions. She has started a Finnish group for people who are interested in Islam to educate ignorant Finns on what Islam and being a Muslim really is, in hopes that ignorant crap about how oppressed women really are within Islam will be unlearned by meeting cool Muslim women, all of whom are fairly recent converts. Zahra's reasons for converting to Islam are complicated (not made any easier by her liberal, artistic and frivolous mother), and these reasons keep her still bitter and grounded to her past life. She needs a way to prove herself that she is a good Muslim, beyond just educating people about Islam.

The About:

I swear, I did not plan on reading these books back-to-back. I just happened to have them unread on my desk, and read one after the other. Only while reading the second book did I realize how similar this and A Thousand Splendid Suns actually were topic-wise, although the execution of the story of two women whose lives will collide was different.

Whereas Hosseini's book gives only a slight sliver of hope only to grab it immediately away, Snellman's story has more of a positive, expectant tone. Anis is, after all, living in a liberal society, so it feels inevitable that she should want to assimilate to that and the transfer should be easier than that of any woman living in Afghanistan. This time, it is Zahra who is considered a weirdo for wanting to cover herself in a veil. Although the cultures in these two books are different, the cultural heritage is not. Zahra wants to feverishly believe in the literal version of Koran, where nobody has to wear a veil, and nobody gets beaten with a cane if dinner is not adequately warm. Anis, on the other hand, lives the reality of how some people interpret and live by the very same text, and to her Islam is not the comforting blanket Zahra experiences it as.

This novel, despite its hopeful undertones, is also a tearjerker. I wanted to throw the book in the corner after finishing it, just because I was so angry. Don't take this the wrong way: the book is great, the writing is good... It's just that the story was so unfair. It's a fault of mine: I have a hard time coping with unfairness, even in fiction. You can imagine how I was squirming in my seat in pain while watching The Dancer in the Dark...

I'm curious about how this book was read in the immigrant and refugee communities of Finland, as it certainly does not paint a very lovely picture of Somali Muslims. The author does thank a variety of people who has helped her while writing the story, including people within immigrant communities. But I still wonder: how accurate (and respectful) a portrayal can a non-Muslim, very liberal woman who has never lived in a Muslim country really tell? Wouldn't the story always end up being filtered by prejudice and the author's personal view on what is morally right and wrong? I imagine that she'd have to tread very carefully.

After a quick Google search I found a Finnish message board for all issues Islamic, where a user attacks not only Snellman but also Hosseini as a liar and an agitator. Although Snellman's book, title and all, gives a nod to a tragic event in Sweden where Kurd girls were pushed off a balcony, the message board user claims that Snellman is doing nothing but generalizing and stereotyping: after all, Somali culture behaves very differently from other Islamic cultures, and not every family is an extremist one.

And therein lies the dilemma: when one wants to write about the seedy side of any religious organization because it is obviously bothering the author and she has an agenda about it, what's the best way of doing it? After all, violence and oppression is a fact in many religions, although not everyone practices their religion that way. Surely not every single Somalian in Finland is a Muslim extremist, so perhaps Snellman would have been better off to explain in her novel why the family was so extreme. The positive side of Islam is only told through Zahra, who is painted as a naive young woman escaping hardships into the arms of religion. You could compare her to a blue-eyed girl who wants to become a Christian because she likes Jesus's peaceful message, but then she has to deal with a family who is all about the Old Testament: stoning women, getting kids killed who dare to talk back to old people, taking multiple wives, owning slaves... you name it. And that family would be portrayed as the norm among Christians. At the same time, I think it's absolutely fair to also talk about how horrific some movements may be. Why should we always try to paint the most positive picture there is?

Although I did enjoy reading this novel a lot, I felt slightly uncomfortable about it. Maybe that's good; at least it made me think a lot.

On language: technicalities and execution

2011-07-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

17. Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. A Polemic in Seven Fits by David Denby

This entry was written months before the downfall of News of the World, but I just didn't get around to posting it. How appropriate it seems now...

The about

Denby details snark clearly: it requires the writer to have an audience that will not only laugh along, but which will also tut-tut along to some usually imaginary/gossip-based moral outrage while thinking that the writer is a particularly clever individual. And nobody need to check any facts. The snarky writer can use hyperbole and lambast his object with scary imagery, while nudging and winking at his readers. You know what I'm talking about, right? Britney is a total slut, amirite? Then, if a reader or the object of snark actually dares to talk back, they are told to lighten up and not take things so seriously because it was all just a jest. What a perfect shield to hide behind!

Denby traces the origins of snark back to the Ancient Romans, explains what differences there are between satire, irony and snark and finally, takes a few people by name to task for being lazy snark writers. One small chapter is dedicated entirely to Maureen Dowd, the columnist of the New York Times whose political commentary consists of commenting on how effeminate male politicians are and how ball-busting the females are, without ever revealing what political stance Dowd herself stands by. It would be impossible to say, as her opinions on who is up and who is down seemingly change based on whether she has come up with a sharp jab worthy of posting, regardless of its factual basis.

Snark often revels in homophobia, racism and misogyny, which Denby includes in his rules on how to write effective snark: find the lowest common denominator amongst your crowd that you think gets laughs or enraged approval. Other rules include dismissing journalistic integrity for cheap laughs and feeding the reader's inner Peeping Tom.

Thoughts

Denby manages to put into words what I have found slightly unsettling in various magazines and newspapers I read: I did not recognize this writing style as snark, just as writing personas bringing more attention to themselves than to the issues they were writing about. I canceled a subscription to a Finnish magazine years back when I would find that I'd never learn anything from the articles, save for what supposedly witty remarks the authors spouted. It was a young magazine, and since then I have read individual issues that actually have interesting journalistic content and less focus on snark and the writers' personalities.

Snark was very informative and at the same time very well written, so it was a joy to read. I had to chuckle at the few instances of snark that the author commits within the writing, probably to illustrate the point he makes in the introduction that nobody is above using snark every now and then. Denby's annoyance with snark stems from writing that solely relies on this particular style that he sees as lazy, locker-room gossip that is hurtful these days because these writings and manufactured facts remain on the Internet. He mentions the website Juicy Campus, where men can rate/denigrate the women they have slept with on campus completely anonymously, while posting the women's full names and even pictures. Some individuals feel the need to out gay guys on the same site, and post about their suspected drug habits, who knows why. Some might say that this is harmless, but maybe the potential employer of a woman or a man whose info is posted on that site thinks twice about hiring these people, if they have been labeled as sluts and drug addicts--even if the writing is based on some anonymous guy's hurt feelings. The reader doesn't know the truth, because the accused are not there to reply with their side of the story, and nobody can talk face-to-face with the accuser, who is hiding behind anonymity.

18. The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier: How to Solve the Mysteries of Weak Writing by Bonnie Trenga

The About:
Trenga takes the reader on a copy editing adventure through a series of mysteries. Each one is about a page long and is riddled with authors' stumbling blocks like clichés, mixed metaphors, punctuation that's all over the place--you name it. After each mystery, Trenga explains why the mystery sucks and what you should do to fix it. Rewriting is encouraged!

Thoughts:
This is a very silly book, and thus a good approach to a topic that people without any interest in grammar or style might not touch with a ten foot pole. Each short mystery is so filled with laughably bad style that it's clear what's wrong with them, and if the reader can't quite put into words why the story is terrible, Trenga will break it down.

As a teacher I'm also fond of the sort of teaching approach this book uses, which is where students have to figure stuff (grammar or facts) out themselves, instead of being given lists of rules to memorize. There are plenty of style guides and editors' handbooks that list comma rules and how to spot run-on sentences, but rarely do they begin by showing a text with unclear writing and having readers first figure out what's wrong before they get to see the rule.

I'd recommend this book for any middle or high school teacher (why not even more advanced students?) who want to show their kids that being careful about what they write can be fun.

The messes in our heads

2011-05-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

15. Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain by Portia de Rossi

Trigger warning: You might not want to read this book if you are recovering from an eating disorder or have an unhealthy relationship with food.

I was a teenager when Ally McBeal, a quirky show about a duck-face making, man-hunting lawyer become hugely popular, and I was among the people watching it. I was probably also one of many who was wondering whether the show required all of its female cast members to be anorexic. My friends and I compared notes on the cast's clothes: who this time wore a scarf to hide their sinewy neck, and who never showed their arms. I especially remember one picture of Portia de Rossi partying outside filming the show, and her limbs were just bone and looked oddly mangled.

That picture can be found in this book, and its effect is well executed in the context. Heartbreaking.

If you excuse the cliché, Unbearable Lightness is a remarkably brave look into the brain of a person with a severe eating disorder. de Rossi lets the readers know how exactly she felt about her relatives crying because she was so thin, or her best friends pointing out anorexic-looking women at the gym with disdain: she thought that people were simply exaggerating when they worried over her, and she felt happy that she had finally become so thin that people actually had to remark about it. To her, her weight falling to a fragile 82 pounds was a sign of discipline that others were incapable of and besides, in her mind she did not do anything that everyone else around her seemed to be doing. Since the age of 12 she had been modeling and been told to lose weight, and ever since then she would binge on food until she was sick, and then she'd starve herself for the next photoshoot. It was normal to her, and she tells in the book how she was flabbergasted when her nutritionist was absolutely shocked upon hearing about de Rossi's binge eating habits that de Rossi herself considered reasonable.

The book is at the same time amazing in its candidness and how well written it is, but it's also scary. Because of the details that helps the reader to step into the mind of an anorexic, the book also reads as a "Becoming Anorexic for Dummies" book: how many minutes does one need to run before and after going to bed, how many lunges to do while walking normally in your own home, how little to eat and how to obsessively measure each morsel of food... This is not a book for anyone who is recovering from an eating disorder, because although the de Rossi does not glorify her eating disorder, I couldn't help but think, "Oh, she lost 20 pounds that easily?" before coming back to the notion that wait, that easy route is extremely unhealthy!

It's weird at the same time to want to tell everyone about this remarkable book, and yet at the same time not want people to read it, lest they get any ideas...

16. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks became familiar to me through Radiolab podcasts, where he would be a guest on shows that dealt with neurological disorders, such as prosopagnosia or obsessive compulsive behavior. The way he talks and has his own little neuroses was quite charming (and he has a wooden box filled with vials containing the elements from the periodic table... how cool is that?), so I started to look into his books. This was the first one to become available at the library.

It's a collection of clinical cases Sacks encountered before the 1990s, all dealing with neurological disorders that go from absolutely fascinating to terrifying. There is a man who had stopped recognizing objects and people, and would only recognize people if they had something on their face or the way they moved that nobody else had; there's a lady who lost control of her limbs if she was not looking at them; an old man thought he was still in his early 20s because he could not remember anything new that happened to him, and so on.

Sacks doesn't just recount these cases and puzzles, but also talks in depth about the hormonal imbalances, medications or any other reasons that may have triggered what he calls neurological deficits, and often he goes back to referring his best-selling memoir Awakenings, which was later made into a movie--simply because the drug L-Dopa used with the patients in Awakenings was helpful in so many of these cases where people got stuck in time, had Tourette's or other compulsive behaviors.

Often humorous, yet sad, these short essays reveal how scary our brains can be.

The negative side of being positive

2011-05-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

14. Brightsided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich

What could be wrong with being positive? Always look on the bright side of life, right? Well, yes and no. This book is about movements within the United States that stress being positive over anything else, which then may lead to unpredictably bad results. As an example of this are motivational speakers and consultants, who shamelessly tell big CEOs to get rid of any employees who express negative feelings and do not contribute to a very positive environment. Unfortunately this also means, that these CEOs will get then rid of anyone who says, "But um... looks like if we purchase this company, we are going to lose a lot of money and we'll be bankrupt in a year." And this is what Ehrenreich looks into: when forced positivity takes over looking at the world realistically, which may even lead to large issues such as the financial bank crisis or a war.

The other issue that positive thinking movement promotes is ignorance: many motivational speakers with whom Ehrenreich spoke said that one of their pieces of advice for people is to not watch the news, because it will have a negative effect on their lives. Could it also be that seeing in the news that those starving people all around the world are not able to change their lives simply through positive thinking might not get motivational speakers those desperately needed audiences and money?

The book focuses largely on motivational speakers and the prosper movement of evangelical churches, and how much influence these have within political parties, which in turn may make quick decisions without taking negative feedback into account. The only difference between the motivational speakers and the prosper movement is that the churches will not kick a negative person out of their company, but still the idea is the same: if you have a positive attitude toward life, life/God/higher powers/CEOs will reward you. The churches have even removed crosses from them because they upset people too much...

I have never read The Secret because it has sounded like bull from the get-go to me, and this book pretty much confirmed my prejudice: the book tells people to just "want" things enough, and the items come to them. Nothing is impossible. This has lead to people maxing out their credit cards and getting into debt, because they wanted a Gucci bag. Some people have even stolen goods because they felt like they deserved these items, thanks to The Secret.

It's an odd concept that through wanting something hard enough you will get it, because it focuses almost solely on material goods. What makes a person think that they are entitled to everything on Earth? Also, this kind of thinking puts a lot of pressure on people: what if you are a member of a minority in a minimum wage job with 5 kids, and you can barely feed them and now the youngest needs glasses and you can't afford them? Obviously, you are thinking too negatively about your life and you just need to think positively and want that money in your life, and you shall get it. Then if you don't get what you wanted, I guess it just means that you did not try hard enough. It's your own fault for failing.

It also creeps me out that the concept of prosperity and happiness in the US is, according to Ehrenreich's findings, very much tied to money. Can't people be happy without money and material? Again, no wonder people are maxing out their credit cards. If I just buy this expensive piece of furniture I'll be a better person...

This prosperity/positive thinking stuff sounds to me like something sold to middle-class, fairly affluent people who are not dealing with major setbacks in life and not surprisingly, the prosper evangelists or motivational speakers don't exactly stop at street corners to tell homeless people that if they just changed their attitude they'd get a job and a house.

There's nothing wrong in looking at the bright side of life. It only becomes problematic when one is allowed to think only happy thoughts and disregard all warning signs.

Animal training

2011-04-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

12. Clicker Training for Cats by Karen Pryor

Yes, our household has officially gone clicker training crazy; from "I didn't know cats can be trained" to "OMG she's learning all these tricks!" in just a few weeks. If you want to learn more about clicker training, go to this Karen Pryor website, which has a bunch of links and resources.

After having watched a couple of low-quality YouTube videos and reading Pryor's wonderful Don't Shoot the Dog, a book about positive reinforcement, behavior shaping and operant conditioning, I got very intrigued by clicker training. Once we adopted our cat, we began to train her as soon as she was over her shelter bugs. She learned a "Come" command very quickly, and I was simply amazed. Still, I wasn't doing something exactly right because she would "forget" her command if she was at all distracted.

So I bought two books on the topic, with step-by-step instructions.

This Pryor book is a great introduction for clicker training for cats (and well, why not other animals, too?): the book explains shortly how operant conditioning works and when it works: not only does the trainer need to know when to give the positive reinforcement, he or she also needs to know whether something in the environment is hindering the cat from learning. In addition, the book talks about positive side effects of clicker training, which include the cat being more interested in you, the human, as a companion. And as a kitten owner, I can attest to one of Pryor's assertions: that the cat will spend a little bit less time tearing around the house and clawing at furniture when her energy is spent on trying to figure out how to get that positive reaction from the trainer.

The only issue this book (or the one below) does not cover is how the cat may accidentally become conditioned to the sight of the clicker. In our case, our cat immediately begins to purr and perks up when I take the clicker out, and she's really into being a working cat during training. As soon as the clicker goes away, only the most reinforced stuff stays in her mind. She's a completely different cat, based on whether I have the clicker in my hand or not. So, as a word of warning: try to hide that clicker.

I was also hoping to see more step-by-step instructions for the trainer instead of success stories.

13. Cat Training in 10 Minutes a Day by Miriam Fields-Babineau

Whereas the Pryor book focused more on the hows and whys of positive reinforcement in operant conditioning, this book focuses on certain tricks or behaviors, and shows via images and step-by-step instructions how to train your cat to do certain things (and how to correct her if you have taught her wrong).

This is an amazingly useful book, and I taught our cat within 10 minutes to sit upon command and a finger movement by just following the instructions. Each photo comes with an explanation of why the cat will do what you want her to do. This proved to be handier than I expected: as I was attempting to teach our cat how to lie down, the first step is to teach the cat to paw at your hand--which then makes the cat want to reach from the sitting position and eventually paw so low and far as you move your hand further that she will need to lie down. I thought, "If I can teach her to paw my hand, I can teach her to high five me!" She's now learning the high five. Yesterday, I tried to take a short film of her practicing, and I was reviewing the video while sitting on the floor. When I said on the video "high five!" she came to me and lifted her paw up. Haha, cute.

I don't think all the tricks in the book are that useful. For one, I would rather not have my cat learn twirling, but I guess it makes a cute trick. With that said, the author does stress that training should begin with teaching the cat commands that might end up keeping her safe; things such as "come," "sit." These are also needed before learning other tricks such as twining between legs (the cat needs to know the command "come" and how to follow a target) or standing up on command (from sitting position). Then you can go for the sillier ones such as "play dead." And like I said in our high-five case, even the sillier tricks can give the trainer hints for training something completely different.

The other part that was not very useful to me was the talk about Hollywood cats, but the inclusion of those stories is understandable: the author trains cats for commercials and movies, so these starlets are obviously a testament to the training really working.

This teeny tiny book is extremely useful with its simple instructions and illustrations, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has had enough of their cat jumping on tables or behaving badly due to boredom.

- Look, kid! Tulips! - No, Dad, it's three lips!

2011-04-06T20:41:00.000-07:00

11. The Infinite Gift--How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World by Charles Yang

What do you get when a linguist has a child? Plenty of fun research material!
Charles Yang's incredibly accessible, yet not at all dumbed-down book on language acquisition and learning talks about the ways in which the concept of a universal grammar seems very plausible considering how children learn to speak languages that surround them: most of the time, the so-called errors children make would actually be perfectly grammatical in some other language. And this is what the title refers to: an entertaining notion that children need to unlearn all other grammars first before they stick to the one they hear in the language spoken by their caretakers.

Because the groundwork for perfect grammar skills is laid out in the brain by the age of four or five, the book talks about various developmental stages where certain grammatical aspects are learned. Yang discusses not only the common errors that English-speaking children make when they are testing out their grammatical abilities and vocabulary skills, but also in which ways children always get grammar right, from the get-go.

The most intriguing bits for me personally were the segments where Yang explains how certain grammatical aspects are tested on children to see, what is the age when that aspect is acquired in grammatical knowledge. You cannot give a three-year-old a multiple choice sheet, asking to identify the correctly formed sentence, nor you can really ask a small children whether a sentence is correct or not because they are prone to say "yes" to any authority (or the other option: spout out nonsense and laugh hysterically). Lots of tests included Jabba the Hut and Kermit the Frog puppets.

Toward the end, Yang quickly throws some criticism toward educators and therapists: apparently, language acquisition linguists have not been consulted among when a child's language skills have been assessed by schools until fairly recently, which means that often, when a child seems to have language-related problems, the therapists have not been equipped with enough information about regional varieties in spoken language, or the ways in which usually children acquire languages. Their template is usually to look at what is the desired produced language form, and if the child is not using that by an age determined by whichever authority, then there's a problem. In Yang's opinion, all children deviate from the norm when they are learning a grammar--at one point or another. Also, because a "dominant" grammar of a language is used as the bench mark, this sort of testing makes children from "certain social and economic strata particularly susceptible to misdiagnosis" (173), mostly because of the regional variety or dialect issue.

Not only is the book extremely informative, Yang's writing style was entertaining and occasionally tongue in cheek, which made reading this book a breeze.

If you're ever concerned about your kid's odd sentences, check this book out. Maybe your child just needs to unlearn some German grammar before tackling English.

Check the publishing dates on your nonfiction books...

2011-03-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

9. The Complete Guide to Understanding and Caring for Your Cat by Carole Wilbourn

This book taught me a valuable lesson: when picking out a nonfiction book, always--always--check when the book was written. I did not do that.

This book clears up a lot of concerns cat owners may have, such as whether a cat will suffocate you if she sleeps on your chest when you sleep. I had not even heard of this urban legend, but apparently in the 1980s it was an issue that needed addressing. Sheesh.

Reading an outdated book is also just awkward: I squirmed in my seat in embarrassment when the author spouted out truths such as cats cannot be trained at all (I have some YouTube videos that contradict that).

The book is not only outdated, it has a bizarre structure. At one point I read an interesting tidbit and wanted to find it again, but it was nearly impossible because of the format: questions and answers. The entire book is basically a huge FAQ, except that each answer is then followed by a follow-up question or an enthusiastic rewording of the answer, and it's next to impossible to find any valuable information amidst all the asinine questions (such as the myth about cats suffocating you). This is just a made up example of the format because I already returned the book and can't quote it, but bear with me:

I don't understand why my cat whisks her tail back and forth when she's playing. Is she being aggressive toward me?

Don't fear: this is just regular cat excitement. Sometimes cats wag their tails when they are annoyed, sometimes they do it when they are overly excited.

Oh, I get it! So what you're saying is that she's just really excited about playing with me!

That's right! Cats have all sorts of interesting tail displays: when the tail points up, it usually means that the cat is happy and curious. When the tail is down, the cat is content but maybe cautious, and so on.

What other ways are there to tell what my cat's mood is like?

etc. for a couple of hundred pages. Let's say I wanted to find what the author said about cat's tail movements and how they reflect the animal's mood. It would be almost impossible by just browsing the questions written in bold: you need to read all the answers again to find that one paragraph that gives you the answer, and it might be under a question that is simply a statement/recap of the previous answer and has seemingly nothing to do with the issue you are trying to look up.

I don't understand the Amazon reviewers who say that this is an easy book to read. I guess if you're into tangents...

10. Um--Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean by Michael Erard

An entertaining look into the physio- and psychological reasons that are behind verbal blunders, and why we detest them so. I have much love for this book already because it shows how stupid Freud was with his analyses of slips of the tongue and consequently, how silly the notion of Freudian slips is.

All slips follow very rigorous rules of the grammar from the language we speak these blunders in: we're more likely to switch consonants around in our blundered word in a meaningful way than just blurt out xqrtbak. In fact, the latter would never happen.

Interesting, and now blindingly obvious, were the reasons for substituting opposite words in a sentence. One example Erard gives is how a person might say, "Could you open--I mean close the door?" The reason for this is simple, because the speaker's thought process goes something like this:
- Man, it's cold...
- Oh, no wonder! It's because that door next to Doris is open.
- "Doris, could you open--I mean close the door."

Our brain makes connections that our mouths do not always catch and correct before they come out, but we almost always notice these errors and correct ourselves.

Another classic example is word plays, where you trick people into saying the wrong thing. Erard gives the example of "poke:" ask a friend say the word poke many times over, and then say, "Quick, what color is egg white?" and they'll probably say "yellow"-- just because their brain predicted that whatever is going to come next will have to do with -oke, and the rhyming word dealing with eggs will be "yolk". When I was a kid, our version was this:
- What's the color of egg white?
- White.
- What's the color of this piece of paper?
- White.
- What's the color of snow?
- White.
etc.
- Quick: what does a cow drink?
and invariably, the person would say "milk" and cause an uproar of laughter.

All in all an informative book, especially in the sections that discuss the usage of "um" and other fillers ("like"), who are more likely to use them and why. One example is from academia, where professors from various disciplines were recorded. The recordings showed that professors from so-called hard sciences ummed far less than the humanities professors. This, however, does not reflect intellectual capabilities, but rather how much the discipline allows for individual thoughts. Umming was often seen as a marker for the listener to know that personal opinions might be thrown in to the lecture, or that the professor was contemplating about other ways in which the issue at hand could be interpreted before proceeding. In hard science lectures, one deals (stereotypically) with more facts and in less conversational tones.

Metafiction attack!

2011-03-04T16:17:00.000-08:00

7. Peter-Peter by Aila Meriluoto

Peter-Peter is an epistolary novel, where a story of two immigrants in Sweden unfolds through Finnish librarian's, Sanna's, letters. The first letter approaches Peter to request his presence in a literature event, him being a well-known author in addition to his daytime job as a doctor. Sanna, a widow and a mother of two teenagers, takes a leap and begins a very personal correspondence with Peter, whose letters the reader never sees.

Whenever the two meet, the missing letters are filled in from Sanna's personal journal entries and her attempts at novelizing her affair with this married doctor.

Although the premise may not seem that earth-shattering, bear in mind that this is based on a true story of the author's experiences. The further we get into the story, the more reality begins to intervene, combined with possible law suits if "Sanna" would ever publish Peter's letters. The book ends with about 10 pages of Sanna's stream of consciousness written in dialect, her trying to rationalize to her therapist what happened between her and Peter, and how she could go about publishing their story without fears of retribution.

What an odd read! This will definitely go under the "social porn" tag in my Goodreads account...

8. 27 eli kuolema tekee taiteilijan by Alexandra Salmela ("27, or, Death Makes an Artist")

This book garnered a lot of attention last year as it was a Finlandia Prize candidate. Thing is, usually only Finnish citizens can become candidates for this prestigious award and oops--Alexandra Salmela is not a citizen. After much debate, the jury decided to let her stay in the competition and while she did not win this particular prize, her acceptance into it is a great testament to immigrant, non-native Finnish speaker writers (and Finnish learners!).

I'm very glad that her novel gained all this attention, because it's great. It's hilarious, ironic, self-deprecating and stylistically adventurous. There's something fresh in this book that I cannot pinpoint. It really is like nothing I have read in a long while.

The story goes like this: Angie, a student majoring in Finnish in Prague, wants to do something remarkable before she turns 28, which is the gateway age to boredom according to her. She painstakingly lists all legendary musicians who have died at age 27, and records what she is doing at the same age as them. She attempts writing a screenplay for a TV show, a radio play and finally settles on a novel about Finns. She goes to live on her professor's relatives' cabin in Middle of Nowhere, Finland, where the same yard is shared by a Finnish family: three children, an unemployed, ass-crack showing dad and an eco-maniac, tote-bag making mother.

The story gently mocks Finns, but it also mocks people who have stereotypical views of Finns. Sometimes it's hard to tell which form is being employed in the novel, because the stereotypes come way too close to reality.

If you've been reading this blog, you know that I'm a sucker for unreliable narrators (like the one in Monika Fagerholm's American Girl) and guess what--this one has its share of them, too! They are not unreliable in the sense that they want to explicitly lie to the reader: it's just that their view on other people is affected by their cultural background and their own, personal problems. The only completely reliable narrator is the family's car, who records only what people sitting in the car are saying without adding any emotions to them. In addition, the car painstakingly records all the actions from looking through the rearview mirror and turning the lights on to how a typical Finn parks a car (Step on clutch, change gear to one, roll forward while keeping the clutch down and braking. Brake to a stop and pull the handbrake up. Switch off engine).

Besides Angie and the car, other narrators include the family toddler's toy pig (who is ridiculously positive and naive) and the stray cat who roams around in the yard.

As with Peter-Peter, sometimes events can be interpreted only from Angie's exaggerated novelized versions of them, and the reader is left to decide what the underlying truth is.

A fun story that I want to read again at some point, because I feel like I missed a lot of subtleties during the first read.

Inventors of ideas and machines

2011-02-14T14:41:00.000-08:00

6. The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Many are familiar with Vowell from her radio reporting, but unless you have read her books, you may not know that she's totally smitten with American history! And she's one of those wonderful people who are so into a certain topic that they can immediately adjust their tone and the information they give you based on how much you already know, without never seeming condescending. I can imagine Vowell discussing Puritans with grade schoolers and with historians alike, with the same excitement in her voice.

Well, I'm imagining the excitement, but I read the book with Vowell's voice in my head, giddy with the chance of someone lending an ear to her favorite.topic.ever.

The Wordy Shipmates is about the origins of America, and what the heck the Puritans were up to in the first years of settling. Although a fluffy and funny read on the surface, it's easy to tell that Vowell has studied this subject a lot, from all the letters and journals of the shakers and movers of the era that she has so kindly condensed to the most important bits for us not-so-educated-on-matters-Puritanical readers--and then she throws in some comparisons to modern day America or her personal life to really drive the points home.

The book is about manifest destiny, the idea of God-given right to get lands and liberate people (who may not necessary require any liberating), and about the Puritan values in general and how they shaped the United States of today. The Puritan era has never interested me enough for me to go and read more about it than what I have had to, but Vowell makes it all a breeze. The highlight for me in her books are her road trips with her sister (because Vowell can't drive) and young nephew. In this one, they visit a Puritan museum where the nephew finds out to his horror that a couple of years after the supposed Thanksgiving, Puritans happily burned hundreds of Native Americans alive. The scene is hilarious, if it also wasn't quite so horrifying.

Still, despite all the atrocious events in the Puritan history, Vowell cannot but love them (she qualifies this with her not liking the people, but she utterly loves them as characters). Her book gives a much more meatier treatment to these people than any history textbook. Here, Puritans are presented with their all their marvel and all their flaws, and you can decide for yourself what you think of them.

Pints and Purls: Portable Projects for the Social Knitter by Karinda Collins and Libby Bruce
Saw this at the library and could not resist. The patterns in the book are not exactly inventive, but the premise for the book is a lot of fun. Not only does the book give you a rating for the projects based on how many sheets to the wind you can be and still knit a fine product (the hardest projects are for designated drivers only!), it also gives tips on how to set up a knitting corner at your favorite bar and how to choose a project based on the type of socializing you're doing.

The best pattern in this book is a six-pack carrier made out of yarn that can be felted easily. Quoth the authors from my memory: "You know how those cardboard carriers can get wet, bend and break? Knit and felt your own carrier and you need not worry about it!"

"Life-Line" by Robert A. Heinlein
An early short story (1939!) about what the dangers in finding out details about our future are. Excuse the fuzzy description, but I had a bit of fever and I was very tired while reading this (I read it in one sitting), so my memory of it is not so good when it comes to details. Anyway, a man invents this machine that can tell when a person is going to have his or her last day. The city goes wild: can this be allowed? And how do we even prove that this is not just a clairvoyant's hoax dressed up in science talk and machinery?

Very Heinleinian and to the point, with a dose of ominous "you don't need to mess with EVERYTHING, scientists" in it.

Animal behavior

2011-02-01T18:30:00.000-08:00

4. Selvästi juovuksissa by Juhani Seppänen (the title is a play on words, and can be interpreted either as "Clearly drunk" or "Soberly drunk.")

Doctor Juhani Seppänen's drinking has gotten out of hand: a six-pack an evening, of course a couple of bottles of wine during weekends, and then all that drinking that needs to be done at movie and book release parties, the one beer right after work at the usual bar for social reasons. And so on. He sits down with his publisher and proposes an idea: What if I won't take a sip of alcohol for a year and I'll write about that?

Seppänen chronicles his non-drinking for a year. None of the information is exactly surprising: if you're in Finland (or pretty much anywhere), it's fairly difficult to not drink alcohol. This pasta dish simply isn't as good without wine! Seppänen wonders why on Earth we have convinced ourselves that putting copious amounts of poison into our bodies is a good idea. Then he remembers that alcohol sales support the economy, at least in Finland. That's why there has not been a serious crackdown on under-aged drinking, who make up a very large percentage of active alcohol buyers and consumers.

Seppänen makes the decision not to tell his friends about his new resolution for fears that it might be seen as a challenge: by God, we'll get this man to drink alcohol, even if we have to fool him into drinking. He goes from party to party, sneakily pretending to raise toasts, ordering non-alcoholic beer so that he wouldn't be ousted immediately.

His personal journal entries are divided by facts about alcohol, alcoholism and alcohol marketing. His writing style is not the most engaging: his supposedly witty jokes and rhetorical questions that are meant to be insightful often just feel like the jokes one's uncle might tell at a wedding and everyone has to 'heh heh' to amuse him. The title is actually a fairly good example of this style: the word play makes no sense in the context of the book, but I guess he really needed to call the book that because it's such a fun pun!

Then again, his writing style is very accessible when it is not (personally to me) grating. It's a pretty good book on Finnish drinking habits, all in all.

5. 50 Games to Play with Your Cat by Jackie Strachan

One of those absolutely ridiculous-seeming books that I just grabbed from the library on my way out. Still, upon actually reading this book I was charmed by it: the games are actually designed with cat socialization and hunting skills in mind, and only a few of the "games" are questionable (building a Hacienda for your cat is not a game).

The book gives good instructions on how to make toys for your cat from everyday household items--yes, mostly from cat-beloved cardboard boxes--instead of spending a ridiculous amount of money on mass manufactured toys that the cat will cast aside as soon as she sees a piece of ribbon somewhere.

On treating animals as if they were humans

2011-01-24T10:14:00.000-08:00

2. Your Cat: Simple New Secrets to a Longer, Stronger Life by Elizabeth M. Hodgkins, D.V.M., Esq.

This book was recommended to me as we adopted our kitten (Hi, Johanna!). It's less of a how-to book on all aspects cat, and more of a book on nutrition and WTF is wrong with the pet food industry. The author draws her material from her background in formerly working in the pet food industry and being a vet as well as a cat breeder. She finds it unbelievable that cats, obligate carnivores, are fed crazy amounts of carbohydrates over protein in cans that come emblazoned with fear-assuaging phrases such as "proven balanced meal." Except that the proof has been drawn from feeding healthy and active young cats a food for only mere months. In Hodgkins's view, this equals feeding only hamburgers to teenage athletes for a few months, and then declaring that a hamburger-only diet is a balanced diet for all human beings.

Reading this book, it seems as if the pet food industry puts stuff in cat food that people would eat themselves, and thus think it's good for the cat. As an example, a lot of dry food has cranberries in it to fight urinary tract infections. Hodgkins's opinion on this? Utter bollocks: cranberries don't do anything to cats. Why does cat food have so much corn and potatoes in them; starch that they would never, ever eat in the wild? Hodgkins gets exasperated: no wonder cats are obese and are more prone to feline diabetes than ever if you just feed them carbs and sugars they are not used to processing. When more and more obese cats began to appear in vet offices, the pet food industry's reaction was to cut down on fat content in the food and call it diet food. Again, sounds like this was more aimed for humans than at cats, who need fat.

Same with dry food that is supposedly good for the cat's teeth, but again this has not been proven clinically. Would your doctor recommend frosted flakes for your kid to fight tartar in her teeth? asks Hodgkins.

Although this book is inundated with useful and often surprising information, the most valuable bits are probably the appendices, where Hodgkins lets the reader in on how to read cat food labels (and how to count the carbohydrate content, because it will not be listed), and does a comparison of a variety of foods from dry kibble to rat carcasses to compare the protein levels in the foods. The appendices also address common myths about cats and cat health.

This would be a great handbook to have in the house if you have a cat. Although it leans heavily on nutrition (which is important!), it also addresses the most common causes of illness in today's indoor cats, and overall cat health including exercise.

3. Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems by Cesar Millan

I know, we did not adopt a dog, but this book happened to be right next to the cat book at the library, and as I'm interested in animal behavior in general and I enjoy watching The Dog Whisperer, I figured, why not.

Before I go any further, this essay about body language and Cesar Millan, written by Malcolm Gladwell, is amazing. Read it! One reason why I enjoy watching The Dog Whisperer is to see how Millan so subtly employs his methods on the humans he's training to be with their dogs. In one episode I saw, an owner was obviously nervous and scared of the dog, and at the right moment Millan put a hand over the man's shoulder and said something encouraging--and you could just see how the "energy" transferred from him to the owner.

This book is part biography, part a guide to Millan's training techniques. Although I'm not too keen on his New Agey vocabulary about 'energy' (nor the celebrity name dropping in the book, although... it's kind of endearing because he's so honest about it), Millan seems to know his stuff. Reading this book also made me like him as a personality even more: he acknowledges all the criticism he has received from other schools of animal behaviorists, but not once does he get defensive about it. He says that some other methods work better for other dogs, and he also goes on to explain what in his world words like correction or assertive or discipline mean in case people are misinterpreting him.

Often he explains these terms in ways understandable in the human world: as an example, discipline is explained through his marriage. If he had not learned to be a disciplined human being and behave according to set boundaries, his marriage would have failed. If he was not disciplined, he would lose his business for not meeting appointment times or feeding and taking care of the dogs. There's no yelling or violence involved with the term.

It's sad that he needs to explain these terms using the human world, because throughout his book the biggest piece of criticism he has toward dog owners is, you treat your animal like a four-legged human, and that's why he's not happy. Millan explains how dogs behave in dog packs, and how humans often interpret their behavior as human behavior. "He's jumping on me--he must be happy to see me!" (Among dogs, jumping is often an act of asserting dominance).

Although my family has always had dogs, a lot of the information was new to me. I have met dogs who obsess over objects (which might get dangerous to people trying to approach the object), but I did not know that a dog fetching a baseball over and over again can also be redirected obsession and frustration contributing to bad mental health rather than just a dog having a good time.

The book is mainly about learning how to read dog cues instead of human cues in a dog. It's been proven that dogs don't feel guilt, although owners think they do (dogs just respond to humans tut-tutting them--even when they have not done anything!), nor do dogs seek revenge for something that happened the day before. A good example of this is a case where a dog has chewed his owner's shoes while she's been gone. Millan says this is not the dog paying back: it's just that the dog got stressed out, frustrated, and then smelled the owner somewhere; followed the scent, and the scent made the dog even more excited, so he started playing with the shoes. And soon, voila: a torn shoe. I suppose we project these human qualities onto dogs or any other pets because it's the easiest way to relate to them: I just told my cat I hope she won't hate me for giving her meds and I thought she was giving me the stink-eye until she curled up in my lap as usual.

Semi-autobiographical post-war time childhoods

2011-01-11T15:36:00.000-08:00

1. Maan päällä paikka yksi on by Tuula-Liina Varis ("There is a place on Earth")

The novel begins when Leena is called to take a final look at the house she was born in before it will be demolished. Her parents long dead, she remembers her childhood through the objects still found in the now dilapidated building that has been taken over by bums and graffiti. The memories soon get mixed with the historical account of her family, starting with the matriarch who was born in the late 1800s. Mostly the story deals with Leena's childhood and how her family struggled in the post-war Finland: her father's inability to find a job with the experience he has and the modernizations that have made him obsolete, and her mother's disappointment in her family and her life in general. It reminded me so much of Pirkko Saisio's Elämänmeno, where an embittered wife reigns the household with sarcasm, passive-aggressive tones and violence, that I often forgot that I was reading a novel by someone else this time. There were so many similar elements, including that dialog was often written in dialect.

The title refers to an old song, that translates roughly thus:

There is a place on Earth
so holy, without comparison
that offers you safety in love
and hides the most precious happiness.

You know it's true only a mother's heart
is so tender and so warm
It rejoices when you rejoice
and worries over your pain

And so on. Of course, in the novel the mother's heart is anything but what the lyrics describe.

Although I understand that giving a lot of details about furniture and everyday activities of people the author can easily create a sense of nostalgia. I often felt nostalgia, but just as often I was also frustrated with the endless, American Psycho-like fetishization of any and all items from before the 1950s; items that were always often just listed. Beyond the listology of the story, it is a heartbreaking look at how regular families lead their lives after the men came back home from war.

Why knitting books should require a technical writer's help

2011-01-11T13:29:00.000-08:00

Country weekend socks: 25 Classic Patterns to Knit by Madeline Weston

This book came home with me before the holidays in anticipation of welcomed knitting time. I grabbed it on a whim from a bookstore, simply because the patterns looked simple enough to learn and yet seemed to produce beautiful, finished items.

Sure enough, I have already found my favorite easy patterns from the book, and the socks are absolutely beautiful. I'm loving this!

The only problem with the book is the inconsistency and vagueness in some of the instructions, which I did not notice when I simply browsed through it in the store. This means that for a novice or a near-novice as myself, this book is going to give some head-scratching moments.

Sanquhar Pattern Socks
(work in progress)

As an example, when making a heel, the instructions read, "K10, pick up loop lying below next st and k it tog with next st, turn." (For non-knitters, this means that you should knit 10, pick up the loop lying below the next stitch and knit it together with the next stitch, turn).

Now. What do you interpret as "below?" There are quite many loops "below" the stitch. Is it a loop from the stitch that the "next stitch" was knitted with in the previous round, or is it a loop from the side of the stitch but still below, or is "below" actually a term used to describe the loop between the next stitch and the stitch after that?

I attempted to knit this part with two different interpretations of the word "below," and the outcome was still ugly and gap-py as hell. At that point I just gave up and decided that whenever there are instructions for a heel in this book, I'll just use my own, tried and true heel pattern.

Wellington Boot Socks

Also, the suggested sizes were often confusing. Instead of using typical sock-related instructions for the length of the instep or the leg, such as "knit until the work covers your little toe, then begin the decrease rounds," the author used inches and centimeters. That would not be a problem if our legs and feet were all the same size. Using the centimeters guide, though, my knee-length socks would have become thigh-high socks, and I had to skip a lot of rounds to keep them knee-length. At first I thought, Shoot, I should have measured my gauge before I began, but then I realized that if I have been given a certain length to match, my gauge does not matter at all. My ruler will be the same length as the author's.

Gansey Stitch Socks with
Buttons
(made without buttons)

One more gripe: instead of saying "continue in knit stitches" or by using any other, unambiguous vocabulary, she writes, "continue even." I found this out by comparing the picture in the book to the instructions and sure enough, "even" seemed to imply "knit." Except in some instructions, where the author tells you to continue even and then start decreasing at the beginning of every knit panel that is separated by purled stitches. Which means that you cannot have been using just knit stitches for "even" but instead, you should have been following the established pattern. Evenly, I suppose.

Maybe someone with more experience with knitting is not bothered by these terms, but for me they caused a lot of frogging and time spent trying to figure out what exactly I should be doing. Luckily, the patterns are so beautiful and the yarns that are used in the book so easily replaceable by other options that I will keep on plowing through!

Apologies for the quality of photos in this entry: even with all the lights on in the house, there's just not enough light. Will need to come up with a plan to get better-lit pictures.

Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T21:53:00.000-08:00

Another book year over, and a new one just begun...

2010 books...

1. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson.

2. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson.

3. Pienin yhteinen jaettava by Pirkko Saisio.

4. Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell.

5. Naïve. Super. by Erlend Loe

6. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

7. Doppler by Erlend Loe

8. Sopan syvin olemus by Anna-Leena Härkönen

9. Tatun ja Patun oudot aakkoset by Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen

10. No Impact Man by Colin Beavan

11. Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English by James Cochrane

12. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

13. Distress by Greg Egan

14. Maata meren alla by Riikka Ala-Harja

15. Semantic Antics by Sol Steinmetz

16. The Art of Compelling Fiction: How to Write a Page-Turner by Christopher T. Leland

17. The Grammar Devotional by Mignon Fogarty

18. When You See an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse by Ben Yagoda

19. The American Girl by Monika Fagerholm

20. Retail Anarchy: A Radical Shopper's Adventures in Consumption by Sam Pocker

21. The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson

22. The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing by Ben Yagoda

23. Bilingual: Life and Reality by François Grosjean

24. The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English from Shakespeare to South Park by Jack Lynch

25. Melua Mekossa by Leila and Annukka

26. Sen Pituinen Se by Leila and Annukka

27. Kutsuvat sitä rakkaudeksi by Arno Kotro

28. Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese

29. The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly by Charles Elster

30. Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

31. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

32. Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris

33. Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama by Tim Wise

34. Club Dead by Charlaine Harris

35. Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor

36. Colorblind by Tim Wise

37. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

38. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

39. Translation in Practice: a symposium edited by Gill Paul

40. Laulajan paperit by Anja Erämaa

41. How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning and Languages Live or Die by David Crystal

42. How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid T hem--A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman

43. Totta by Riikka Pulkkinen

44. Ant Farm and Other Desperate Situations by Simon Rich

45. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

...and then on to blather about them

I had set aside a pile of books to read during the holidays, but I ended up knitting more than reading. On the craziest knitting day I finished a pair of socks and two hats. Although I don't enjoy snowy conditions in Seattle, I do enjoy the ability to finally knit to my heart's content, and thus be dressed warmly when I go out. This just meant that I did not meet my on-and-off remembered goal of reading one book a week.

Looks like this year was spent reading nonfiction, and I know why: when I read one interesting nonfiction book, I have to check out all the other, interesting books that the author mentions. That's why I have a lot of books on language and writing style in the list this year. The authors just kept on mentioning other good books on the topic, so what could I do but get on the library website, place a hold on them and read them as soon as they became available? Besides, most of those books were simply smart (and smart-ass) and laugh-out-loud funny, so I wanted to keep on going back for that fun-high I got while reading them.

Other trends are equally visible: I got really into the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson, and somewhere along the way we began to watch True Blood and I consequently began to read the Sookie Stackhouse novels, which are ridiculously entertaining snack reading between any other books.

You can also tell when I have been at the library and just grabbed a very random book from the shelf just because of the cover or a funny title. Among these is the Elephants on Acid book.

Although I wrote about them, I did not list any of the editing text books or knitting and crocheting books that I read: I figured that I had to read the editing books, so they did not qualify as fun reading (although they were so much fun), and I never read any of the knitting books from cover to cover. I usually just read the little blurbs about the projects, and left the majority of the book--pages and pages of instructions--unread. I know, my listing rules are very arbitrary.

I see alarmingly little science fiction on this list! For this I have the wonderful Finnish book club to blame: I have probably read more Finnish books in these past two years than I ever did in Finland, which is great. Unfortunately science fiction is not a big genre in Finnish literature, and it's still looked down upon over there as a kind of a "Space aliens and intergalactic wars" type of a pulp genre.

The other culprit is my work: as I've begun to move more and more toward editing fiction, it's natural that I would have read a lot about fiction writing and writing styles.

I do have a Damien Knight collection waiting for me, now that I have no books checked out from the library and can focus on books that are on our bookshelves. Then again, I know that one book that I have been eager to read will soon become active in my Holds list at the library. Unfortunately, library books with their deadlines trump the books at home.

To keep up another tradition, I also messed up the numbering in the entries. The list above has them fixed.

I hope that Santa brought everyone something good to read for the winter chill/balmy Southern hemisphere days. Happy New Year!

On eating meat

2010-12-20T10:41:00.000-08:00

46. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

"Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about 'eating animals,' they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case. (What assumptions did you make upon seeing the title of this book?)"

The Omnivore's Dilemma discussed how the age-old dilemma has changed after the emergence of factory farming and big-time operations: instead of learning from past generations what's good and safe to eat, now we learn from big marketing campaigns. And they are not always so truthful. The Dilemma urged people to be more aware of what they eat.

Safran Foer goes one step further in addition to discussing the health effects of eating factory-farmed meat. As Pollan pointed out in Dilemma and Safran Foer hinted at in the quote above, people probably would not want to eat meat anymore once they'd see what happens in massive slaughterhouses. Safran Foer then poses a question of ethics and conscience: after you have read this book, and all these stories from farmers (both factory and small-time, and their workers), from him visiting a variety of farms, from researchers, are you still able to eat factory farmed meat with good conscience?

In Safran Foer's view, the acceptable answers to this are yes or no. If your conscience is fine with eating basically tortured animals, then that's cool. At least you have had that dialog with yourself, and you have decided that the rights of your taste buds go beyond the rights of those animals. If your conscience is not fine with that notion, then that's cool too: you might want to start figuring out what would be a more conscientious way of eating for you. However, if the book moves the reader enough to start buying small-farm meat in order to assuage further animal suffering and risks of promoting world-wide animal-borne illnesses, but the same reader still ends up sometimes buying factory-farmed meat because it's more convenient in certain situations... to these people Safran Foer says, You didn't get my point. (He actually does explicitly say this.)

After reading the book, I felt I could hear Safran Foer's voice in each chapter: When I show you this, how does it effect your view on what you eat? Think hard now, because I don't want you to look away and ignore this. Made up your mind? Don't tell me the answer! OK, let's move onto the next case.

Like he says in the early pages of the book, this is not a clear-cut case for vegetarianism (although he is a vegetarian). This is a case for people making conscious choices about what they eat, and to be content with the choices they have made.

What I found especially enjoyable in this book was that Safran Foer gave a clear voice to people on different sides of the isle. There are little vignettes--some pages long--from all the people he met that read like letters: there is a vegetarian slaughterhouse builder, who tells us why he has chosen this path; there is a vegetarian hog farmer, who battles between her choice of giving people a more humane option of consuming meat while still condoning some of the inhumane practices that come with the territory; there is a factory farmer who understands where small-time farmers are coming from, but not how they are going to feed the whole world cheaply, and so on. Just when you have read one of these letters and go "Yeah, that's a good point!" an opposing view is offered in the next letter. And not once is this used as a simple "good guys vs. bad guys" dialogue. The reader can relate to the concerns of everyone, even if he or she does not agree with everything they say.

I lived on a farm, so I have had to already negotiate with myself on eating meats. Then again, I lived on a tiny farm in a small country, where there are no feedlots or massive, massive slaughterhouses that employ illegal immigrants cheaply (at least there is no expose yet on that!). The negotiating I did was based on different factors than the ones I need to base my views on here in the United States. The book definitely made me feel uncomfortable about my eating habits, which is a strong case for pointing out that I am not entirely at ease with the choices I make.

A book I did not really read.

The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left by David Crystal

I can't really count this toward my read books, because I merely skimmed it. This was not because I did not enjoy the book: quite the contrary, I agreed with everything Crystal said, and I liked his often humorous style, too. I just already knew the arguments he was making (that often fall, unfortunately, to deaf ears), so I just ended up looking for bits that I was not familiar with yet.

This book is basically Crystal being puzzled at his friend and colleague Lynne Truss's surprisingly militarist view on language in Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The problem with being a prescriptivist like Truss is that other equally militant prescriptivists are going to tear you apart once they find even an itty-bitty error in your writing, and they will call your bluff for being any kind of an authority on language. And that's what happened to Truss in reviews: her book was ruthlessly taken apart by other militant linguists who pointed out that her comma usage was terrible, and that she often fell for the same mistakes that she accused others of. All that is left is people fighting about who is being most vigilant, instead of people fighting for clearly communicated language.

As Crystal points out, a lot of the times correct and incorrect English usage is based on simply arbitrary rules, created by someone who just harbored a personal grudge toward a certain writing style. As an example, Shakespeare often ended his sentences with a preposition and split his infinitives (because it makes sense in English, unlike in Latin from where this rule was adopted). Likewise a lot of other, great writers of the past. But if you bring this up to the language pundits, they have an answer ready for you: See, even the great writers make big mistakes. So really, you don't stand a chance to ever writing properly. Only if you read and read [the manual of my devising, nobody else's] will you become a better human being.

Humor time

2010-12-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

45. Ant Farm and Other Desperate Situations by Simon Rich

This is a collection of short, humorous vignettes. I read it in the Finnish translation Kusiaistarha, and I think I need to read the original before I can really say how good a humorist Rich is: I often found myself translating phrases back into English to see, if the voice was more fitting in the other language. Still, the translator did a heck of a job, because most of the time the vocabulary used in it was simply hilarious. I especially enjoyed the very first story, Abraham's awkward soliloquy to Iisac after having tried to murder him, beginning with "Would you like to have some ice cream, Iisac?"

Also, the short exchanges about old-timey measuring units were fun.
- I'd like a suit.
- Great. How tall are you?
- Well... about one king length.
- Could you specify that?
- Not really.
- God damn it.
- I also need gloves. My hand is... about one hand.
- Yeah I can tell.
(Apologies if this does not match the original text.)

The funny beginning soon turned to a mild disappointment, as some of the stories were just... blah. (Ooh, a little oblivious kid's point of view to the hockey players his slutty mom brings home... How predictable.)

Still, when the stories were not a rehash of an old theme they were fun.

There's one bone I have to pick with this book, though, and it has nothing to do with Rich or the translator. It's the publisher, Like. I have never in my life seen a published book that has its formatting so out of whack. I don't know what the hell happened, because Like books are usually good-quality stuff, although they come from a small publishing house.

I mean, look at this (red marks mine). And this is the least that happens in every single story where there is dialog: the first line is always fine, but then the rest are indented. It looks like someone could not turn off Word's auto-formatting, and just thought, Screw this. And it went through the publishing machine!

(I can envision only two situations where high school math would be helpful
Murderer: I'm insane. Solve this trigonometry puzzle or I'll kill you.
Me: Can I use a graphing calculator?
Murderer: Sure, of course. Oh yeah--and here's a list of all the formulas you need.
Me: Great, thanks. OK, let's see here... sin2x = 2cosxsinx?
Murderer: Correct. You may go.)

Sometimes, when bullets are used, it looks like this:
- Hi, how are you?
- Hi, I'm good.

Wow.

Of the narratives we create

2010-12-10T16:42:00.000-08:00

44. Totta by Riikka Pulkkinen ("True")

I often read because I find the story intriguing, or because the book makes me laugh, or because the characters are interesting. Then, once in a while, there are those gems that I end up reading because there are just so many sentences that taste good in my mouth, and I wish to write them all down somewhere. In their simple appearance and unpretentious word choices they still hold secrets about the world.

This is one of those books. I did not wish it to end, because I knew I'd regret that I did not write all those sentences down and they would run out soon.

Pulkkinen's story is simple on the surface: grandmother Elsa, a renowned psychologist, is dying of cancer, and the rest of the family attempts to come to terms with losing her. During a wine-induced dress-up game with her granddaughter Anna a dress belonging to mysterious Eeva is found in the closet. Elsa decides she is too close to death to be harboring any more secrets, and confesses first to Anna, who becomes burdened with information that even her mother does not know. What's more, it is evident that her and Eeva's stories are going to collide, one way or another.

What unfolds is a love story, a thriller, or a psychological journey into how we form images of other people in our heads, and how their stories intertwine with our own so much that we can't even tell our personalities apart anymore. By projecting our own fears and desires onto the lives of people we do not know we become familiar with them, although at the same time we wipe the real people out of the picture and insert ourselves there instead.

Elsa, the focal point of the novel, steps back and lets everyone else use their voice, to commiserate, to grieve, to love and to interpret what others think of them. The reader has access to Elsa's thoughts only through dialog, whereas everyone else's thoughts are visited. But who does the visiting? Toward the end, the narrator begins to slip and the story unravels.

A refreshing unreliable narrator and beautiful language demand reader's attention and a second read as soon as the book covers are closed, just to see all the subtle hints that he or she might have missed. Just as with Pulkkinen's first novel, Raja, I hope that someone buys the English speaking rights to this quickly and gets it out into the wider world.

I'm looking forward to Pulkkinen's third novel to see if her theme that has been now been very prevalent in both of the previous books surfaces again; namely, that of an affair between a female student and an older man of a higher status (in the arts, in both cases).

Giggles all around!

2010-12-07T18:54:00.000-08:00

43. How Not to Write a Novel. 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them--A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman

"...if you have perversely refused to use the lessons offered in this book as we inteded, and instead avoided each of the mistakes we describe, perhaps you now find yourself a published author. In that case, our follow-up book, How Not to Make a Living Wage, will be indispensable."

Let that quote act as a word of warning: this book is a total smart-ass. And I love it.

Especially in the world of fiction the ground rules for what is proper and what is not, both grammatically and topics-wise, keep on changing. Back in the early 1900s you could only refer to a sex scene by having the characters disappear for a while and then return again. Now, that kind of a treatment would seem awfully prudish. Style-wise, if you try to write a work of fiction by following Strunk&White, you'll soon be in trouble. This book thus earns a tip of my hat: it acknowledges that there is a multitude of ways to write good novels, but there are only a handful of ways that will definitely have your prospective editor throw your novel out the window in disgust.

Also note: the authors are actual editors who have gone through piles and piles of terrible writing (and chucked them out), so they know what they are talking about.

The book is written as a guide to how to never get published, ranging from examples of boring setups, flat or too perfect/too disgusting characters to airing out weird conspiracy theories with no connection to the plot or never doing any background work about the people or settings the author writes about. Each section begins with a brief description of the possible downfalls, and then introduces all of them via examples written by the authors. Which usually are, like I said, very smart-ass and full of bad writing beyond just the problem they illustrate. A beginning of one such example that made me almost spill my coffee:

Candida couldn't help but think that her condition was a mixed blessing...

Yup. You'll get a kick out of all the names and the misuse of foreign words in these examples. Their headings also gave me a chuckle. Some examples:
"Failing the Turing Test" (writing a character who shows no emotions)
"'And One Ring to Bind Them!', Said the Old Cowpoke" (about changing genre in midstream)
"The Gum on the Mantelpiece" (of course a reference to Chekhov's gun)

Also, there is a special section called "If There Must Be a Cat, Do Not for the Love of God Name It..."

I'd highly recommend this to any unpublished author for the insight it gives, any published author for double-checks and sighs of relief and finally, for everyone who just likes funny writing. Also, this should be required reading for anyone who tries their hand at the Bulwer-Lytton "It was a dark and stormy night... competition!

Reading about reading and how we use language

2010-11-27T11:31:00.000-08:00

42. How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning and Languages Live or Die by David Crystal.

This is a well-balanced and coherent look at all the elements that are included in the concept of language. Crystal discusses these language elements in short chapters, more to give an idea what the issues are about rather than to take an in-depth look at them. For a language teacher the sections about physiological elements such as where sounds are formed in our mouths is always intriguing and a good reminder that although our letters look the same, we might produce them differently. This is something I learned while trying to teach American English speakers to roll an R by telling them to first keep on repeating meaningless babble with /d/ in it, such as "dadadadaaa dididiii," just to train their tongue to go to the right place in the mouth for a rolled r. Soon I realized, though, that the Finnish /d/ is produced somewhere else than the English one although it sounds very similar. Unfortunately, you need the Finnish /d/ to know how to roll an R if you are having problems with it... So we had to go back to learn a Finnish /d/ although the learners had already been producing wonderful sounding Finnish words with /d/ in them.

As this book works as a handy guide to what language really is, I admit to just skimming the parts where there is nothing to be disputed anymore, really: how words are formed, how we hear sounds, and what kind of language groups there are in the world and what their histories are. I found the chapters on more debatable issues more intriguing, such as the status of sign language and how non-signing people often have misconceptions about it; how and why was language born; how we give meaning to words and how we mean something else than what we say; and of course my favorite, the issue of what is "good" language, which is of course largely dictated by prestige and not any universal value of the language. Although I did enjoy Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves and I'm a grammar nerd, I had to nod in agreement when Crystal points out that such demonization as shown by Truss of people who do not follow an arbitrarily constructed model chosen by a prestigious class would not fly if it was applied to gender or race, but apparently it's fine in the realm of language.

Yes, Crystal takes prescriptivist to task. There is nothing wrong in writing or speaking good, understandable language, and we all should strive for making ourselves understood--which is where grammar and punctuation comes in to help us. The problem with prescriptivists is, however, that they apply their very strict rules even to situations where everyone understands the message. As a descriptivist, I agree with Crystal--which is not a surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog. Clarity in communication is important, but when someone begins to moan about how people collectively use a word wrong*, it makes me wonder whether these people ever heard of such a phenomenon as constant changes in language and vocabulary. Nobody is up in arms about the word "hilarious" now being used to describe something knee-slappingly funny and saying that we should go back to the old, Latin-based meaning of simply someone being "cheerful." But I'm sure at the point where people began to use the word differently the Trusses of the time were predicting the downfall of civilization.

Another issue that is closely related to "good" language is how we view dialects, and how one dialect always rises above others to be used as the standard (and we promptly forget that it's a dialect, too, and start mocking people who speak in another dialect or with another accent...)

The other sections I enjoyed were focused on bi- and multilingualism and how to protect or revive languages.

All in all, the book is a wonderful guide to all the issues you might encounter when you think about language: the way speech is produced, the way language is heard, the way we give meanings to words and phrases, and what we do with language in general.

A special Tut-tut to the editor: the book refers to African American English Vernacular (AAEV) for two pages, and then later on the correct usage, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), pops up. How did this error manage to slip through the cracks?

(*I may moan about this, too, when I am editing a text that is supposed to follow certain writing conventions or a style sheet. Or worse, when the person thinks that the non-standard way is the only right way to do it...)

Two tiny books

2010-11-20T17:42:00.000-08:00

40. Translation in Practice: a symposium, edited by Gill Paul

A wonderful booklet created from a translation symposium. It details the best practices for a fiction translator. I was already familiar with most of this information, but it was nice to get all the pointers and discussions on problematic translation issues within one book.
The symposium discussed issues that translators often run into, such as how to translate puns and jokes (if the equivalent does not exist in your target language, you should rather leave them out rather than confuse the reader) to how to deal with novels where awkward phrasing has been used for an effect (don't translate it into awkward target language--everyone will think you're a bad translator. Explain the awkwardness somehow). In addition to these problems and some dos and don'ts bullet lists for translators, the book also discusses the business side of translation, namely how to deal with the author of the novel, the acquiring editor and the editor/proofreader.

41. Laulajan paperit by Anja Erämaa

Let me preface this by saying that I do enjoy poetry every now and then. When I was in high school, I went on a real Pablo Neruda binge--I just loved his style (or rather, the style of the Finnish translations).

This poetry book by a small Finnish publisher, though, did nothing for me. The poems are in paragraph form, so they read like very short, one-page long stories. Except that the author uses very free-form, "poem" punctuation. Now, I understand than in writing prose the author has much more leeway in punctuation and style than in writing nonfiction. And that's fine. But some of the punctuation was just so random that when I encountered a spacing error it read to me more as if nobody had proofread or edited the book (even the author herself) than the punctuation being an artistic choice.

Reviews have described the poems absurd and ironic. I found them very self-conscious, especially when some of the rhymes seem to have been thrown in not for their meaning, but just because they rhyme and may sound funny to the reader.

With that said, there were a couple of poems that I really liked, where the author seemed to stop thinking about how she's a Real Poet who Writes Poetry Really Seriously, and where she was just being honest. No gimmicky language, just wonderful descriptions and fresh metaphors.

Fictional psycopathy beyond Dexter

2010-11-18T22:38:00.000-08:00

39. We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

I'm a sucker for books that instantly reveal a horrifying event, and the rest of the story is dedicated to tracing the steps that lead to the event. The thrill of the read is to find out how and why the characters get into a situation. And yes, I have begun reading John Dies at the End, which seems at first glance to be the most extreme example of this kind of storytelling--it's all given away in the title, for heaven's sake! I love it!

This fiction offers the reader a chance to be an armchair psychologist. The mother of Kevin, a teenager who sits in jail for a school shooting, writes letters addressed to Dear Franklin, who is soon revealed to be Kevin's father. Eva, the mother, writes about her struggles in continuing with her life after the school shooting and about visiting Kevin in the prison, but the majority of any single letter focuses on retelling Eva and Franklin's history together, how they decided to have a child and then another, and how for Eva it was clear that Kevin was growing up to be a disturbed individual, whereas Franklin would dismiss Eva's concerns as exaggeration. In these letters Eva reveals secrets she kept from Franklin in order to either protect him, or to avoid confrontation. Or who knows why. For leverage, maybe. While it is obvious that Franklin is clueless and his behavior seems to worsen the situation with Kevin and only Eva sees Kevin as who he really is, Eva is unable to discuss her rearing methods and reactions to Kevin objectively--which leaves this job for the reader.

It is an absolutely thrilling a job to figure out what Eva thought the reasons behind Kevin's behavior were, and to also read between the unstressed, subtle and not-so-subtle cues of how Eva's behavior toward the child might have had an effect of some kind as well.

Also, I'm very much used to epistolary novels being used for romantic purposes (not their sole purpose, I just associate them thus), so the format of this novel was a great choice. It completely disagrees with the cold, calm, very unemotional tone of Eva's letters.

This novel is a real heart-pounder to the very end, where what we already know is going to happen happens. And yet the shooting is much more chilling than I had imagined. A wonderfully written book, if that adverb can be used for a book about multiple murders and other horrifying events perpetrated by a sociopath.

I'm bad at titles, so let's just say I've been reading nonfiction.

2010-11-06T18:27:00.000-07:00

36. Don't Shoot the Dog! The New art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor

I saw a friend read this book on a camping trip, and at first sighting I bought it from a second-hand store. It's a wonderful book on positive reinforcement, and how it has longer lasting results in training than punishment or negative feedback which, according to Pryor, often leads the person who gives negative feedback to intensify it even when it is not needed. A good example of this is the mother who whines when her children are visiting her, "Why won't you ever visit me?"

And yes, the book is not just about training dogs and other animals: it's about how positive reinforcement works on rowdy kids or on a messy roommate. Some have criticized positive reinforcement as manipulative (because you can't tell your target that you are trying to reinforce him or her--if you do, they'll probably start acting exactly the opposite way just to show you who's boss), but then again, isn't negative reinforcement also manipulative? Or heck, isn't any other way of trying to make a change in behavior manipulative unless the person whose behavior is going to change is in a complete vacuum and decides him- or herself to suddenly change?

The most delightful bits in the book are Pryor's anecdotes about training "untrainable" animals such as hermit crabs and chicken to do a variety of things, simply through positive reinforcement. Also, she explains why people think that cats are untrainable--it's because punishment doesn't work on cats. They just don't really get the point of punishment as dogs do. But if you use a clicker and do any of the positive reinforcement methods mentioned in the book, you'll soon have a cat who thinks she has the power to make you use the clicker with her behavior. Yes, the cat thinks she's training you.

Oh, and the bits about the reinforcement game are also hilarious. Anybody want to play it?

I also enjoyed the comparisons of a multitude of traditional training or conditioning methods compared to positive reinforcement. Pryor of course acknowledges that there are times and cases where positive reinforcement might not work as well as some other methods, so she lists a variety of scenarios and the outcomes of them when you use different conditioning methods.

I'd highly recommend this to anyone with animals and people around them. Now I really can't wait to get a cat and a clicker!

37. Colorblind by Tim Wise

Just like Between Barack and a Hard Place, Colorblind is a small book that is stripped of any tangents or rambling. There is nary a spot in the book where the opponents of its message could refute it. If they wanted to, they would have to refute all the scholarly work and statistics that accompany Wise's thesis.

And what is that message? It's that post-racial liberalism, which relies heavily on the flawed concept of colorblindness*, is not merely just short-sighted in its attempt to solve economical problems, but in the worst case scenario it ends up promoting racism. By saying that eventually people of color (POC) will also see improvements in their living standards if we remain colorblind and help all poor and low-income families, regardless of race, we will eventually create negative sentiments toward POC if and when they still are not doing as well as white people from working classes or poor backgrounds. The only reason for their challenges is then thus in their race: there's something wrong with POC if they can't succeed like the white people can.

One of the strongest arguments for why this thinking is faulty is the idea of privilege and inherited wealth.
The G.I.Bill is one of the examples Wise gives. This bill provided education and unemployment benefits as well as loans for houses or to start a business for veterans returning from WW2. Except that black veterans were disproportionally denied the benefits of the bill compared to their white veteran counterparts. So let's say your imaginary average white grandfather was in the war, came back, and got a good loan to buy a house. Now he owns property. In addition to that, he got his schooling (whether college or vocational) paid by the government. Compare this to your imaginary average black grandfather, who came back from the war, did not get a G.I. loan and could not buy a house; the same person also could not collect unemployment money or get a college education funded by the government. Now, whose kids are going to have an easier time getting college education and monetary support from their parents?

This book is not out to guilt trip white people--even if you disagree with Wise, there's still a lot of food for thought there. The book attempts to open a dialog about race, and how we cannot afford to be colorblind. Colorblindness is just paying lip service to structural, societal problems that POC face every day, and ignoring a person's race is not going to help them get past problems that have been created by racism.

Problems do continue to exist because of racism. Wise goes on to discuss a variety of research done on prejudices, varying from psychological testing on people's reactions to various races to finding out that hiring practices in companies are still benefiting white people much more than any people of color (even if your friend is now the president of the United States it doesn't mean that on average POC are doing great). All the research points out to this: people love to say that they don't think about race, and that race does not matter--but it does. And if race does matter, we should then have an honest dialog about it instead of hiding behind colorblindness.

This book was written after Between Barack... and I felt like Wise had probably gotten people attacking his book for not being clear enough on some issues, because he revisits quite many of them in Colorblind, but this time with a lot more details.

(*Colorblindness: not seeing the color of the applicant, your student, your employer while dealing with him or her. Ideally this would mean that everyone is treated equally. But this is not what happens because people are biased, even when they say they are not (and this has been proven through research). What happens is that you will treat everyone as you would treat a person of your own race, or of your own background--which is bound to fail because your experiences are not the same as that person's who does not share your background. And then you are left wondering why that other person just doesn't get ahead in life the same way as you have.)

38. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

We happily spend 2 dollars for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but if we have to pay more than 2 dollars for a dozen of eggs, we are suddenly up and arms about it. When did food, which is so essential to our well-being, become an item that we must get as cheaply as possible? How did we become consumers who do not have any idea of how and where our food is raised or grown?

Pollan goes from the macro to the micro in his search for good food: at first he attempts to follow the path of a steer he bought, and to find out how the steer will end up as beef in the huge cogs of the meat industry machine.

As that fails (because no large slaughterhouse lets outsiders to come in to view their practices--lest someone be appalled and/or gives their cows a disease of some kind in additional to whatever bacteria they are already carrying), he goes to a small farm where all animals are free-ranged, naturally fed and slaughtered, and where the farmer actually invites the meat buyers to see how their animals are raised and slaughtered. This they do partly so that the consumer can make an informed, ethical choice: do I approve of the way this animal was raised and slaughtered? We can postpone thinking about that when we see a vacuum-sealed, artificially tinted slab of meat at the grocery store.

Lastly, to minimize any middle man in the process of acquiring food, Pollan attempts foraging and hunting, and admits freely that he is pretty embarrassed by the flowery prose he comes up with for the imagery of hunting.

The title refers to the dilemma omnivores have: we can eat almost anything, but we have to find out by trial and error what it is that we can consume. The dilemma originally meant a simple choice between dying upon eating a mushroom or making a wonderful snack out of it, but now the dilemma is behind multiple turns in the road because we don't have direct contact with our food anymore. If I want to buy just cheap meat, am I willing to risk my health because feedlot cows spend their days ankle-deep in their own much, and are fed antibiotics so that they wouldn't get sick, which means that viruses might get more immune because of the amount of antibiotics that I unknowingly eat? By supporting the genetically modified corn industry, am I really willing to take the risk that the beef that was raised on purely corn and not grass (the food cows were evolved to eat) might be carrying E.Coli because its stomach's bacteria is all messed up?

These days the omnivore's dilemma also extends to the ethical treatment of animals (even if you didn't care about it much, you would care that the meat just doesn't taste as good and is not as healthy for you if the animal has been raised in terrible conditions), so in in addition to looking at the evolution of the American meat industry from small farms to humongous, mostly unregulated (health-wise) complexes Pollan also discusses the ethics of vegetarianism and veganism.

The book was a breeze to read, from all the historical insights to the food industry in the US to Pollan's personal experiences at feedlots, in killing chicken, and his mushroom hunting trips. The book does not promote a certain kind of a diet or a style of living: it promotes thinking about where your food comes from, and making eating decisions based on that.

When your texts control your register

2010-10-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

I've been playing around with predictive text input in various cell phones of late. In order to predict the word you want to create with just a couple of key strokes, the phone uses a frequency list of most common words in the language that the user has selected.

Most of these frequency lists come from written sources that are known to employ a wide variety of vocabulary: newspapers and magazines. And the top of the list usually reflects spoken language word frequency accurately as well.

Except in Finnish. The problem with Finnish is that it comes in at least three variants:

First is the so-called "book language," that only politicians and news anchors actually speak--otherwise, you'll see it only in written form in newspapers, magazines and novels.

Then, there is the "standard spoken language," which is fairly close to the book language, except for the variation in personal pronouns and the way verbs are conjugated. Also, some slangy expressions might be included. Listen to Finnish teachers speak: this is probably the diction they will use in a classroom. It's not as stiff sounding as the book language, yet it still retains an air of authority and a subtle indication about the speaker's level of education.

On top of that we have all the regional dialects.

In English, people might pronounce the word "I" differently, but it will be typed like that, regardless of where you are from. That's why predictive text works really well in English. In Finnish, the "I" can look like this: minä, mie, mää, or mä. All depending on the register the speaker is using. And in personal, written communication between friends and family members, people tend to use their dialects or some spoken variant of the language.

The problem with predictive text in Finnish is that there is not a single dictionary that is able to include all of these variants in it. If the dictionary memory was large enough and they could include all words, it would simply create a mess: instead of now giving you multiple alternatives of different words, the dictionary would offer you five different dialect versions of the same word--just because they might have only one letter difference in them. And as a South Karelian dialect speaker, I really don't need to see Savo dialect options pop up as my alternatives.

In the past I would never use predictive text: the words from either standard spoken language or from my dialect were not recognized by it, and even worse, the dictionary would throw me words that were not even close to what I wanted. I'd input, say, "Hello!" and the output would be "Closet!"

Why would anyone write in dialect, by the way? The answer is in being economical. Some Finnish words are damned long, so people simply cut the endings off when they speak. Also, in a country where most text messaging and phone calls are handled with a pay-as-you-go plan, you can save money on texts by cutting out as many characters from your text message as possible to keep your story within the character count of one text message. Dialects do this already for economical speaking.

A lot has changed in the past ten years, and the predictive outputs are really good these days. The dictionaries include standard spoken language pronouns, and even dialect pronouns in them. I actually enjoy using the predictive text now, as it gets me better than ten years ago.

There's however one but. As soon as I start using the predictive texting method, I stop using my dialect. There are two reasons for this. First, the frequency dictionary will most likely give me a "book language" version of anything else except some pronouns. Second, it will give me that word in a split second.

So, now I need to weigh typing shorter words which both saves me money and time (because I don't have to type for so long) against inputting only three characters and immediately getting the word that I want--except that it's just not in my dialect but instead in the standard that everyone understands. And this is because it comes from the frequency list that has been lifted from written language.

To save even more time, I may simply begin to write in the book language without even attempting my dialect version, just because I know that the dictionary will definitely get the book language form.

Everyone will understand me, but it's not anymore I who is writing the message; it's some very uptight person who is talking like a robot! Yet, because it is so much faster to compose the message by using a good, predictive method, I will most likely opt to using the frequency list dictionary, and lose my voice. It's just less of a hassle that way.

When authors began writing books in dialect and slang, people grew concerned: is this now the death of Finnish "book language?" Will dialects all take over and soon we will have no common language? As everyone above 7 years old has a cell phone in Finland (only a slight exaggeration, by the way...), and texting is a ridiculously cheap and a quick way of getting touch with everyone, I wonder if the opposite will eventually happen; that predictive texting will create a generation of kids who prefer using book language when they communicate with their friends or family in writing. How long would it take for book language then to seep into the spoken variants?

Will there be a time when, just out of being too lazy to type out words and we'll just accept whatever the dictionary gives us, Finns will begin to speak a very proper version of Finnish?

I suppose that would be a day when learners of Finnish would rejoice: finally, the language taught in the textbooks matches what they hear on the streets.

2010-10-10T22:47:00.000-07:00

34. Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama by Tim Wise

Tim Wise (a white American male) reframes the question heard often during the previous presidential elections, "Is America ready for a black president" as "Under what circumstances is America ready for a black president?" As the elections showed us, the black president needs to be someone who "transcends race" (read: does not behave black) and "moves beyond race" in his topics (read: does not bring up race because it would be unpatriotic, make people feel guilty or just annoyed). In other words, the black president should do his utmost to make people forget that he actually is black (and although he is biracial, he is still regarded as black and not white, nor biracial.)

This small and very to-the-point book is a perfect read for people who either think that we should stop discussing racism now that there is a black president, as if having one was evidence enough that minorities have an equal standing in America with the rest of the people, while also being the perfect read for people who might think that having a black president will somehow educate people more about tolerance and racial prejudice, and open the gates to a post-racial society--a word that was thrown around liberally during the presidential elections.

As Tim Wise describes it, Obama's presidency is problematic because he has had to be this "model black person." This might cause white people to hold all black people, regardless of their social status or background, to the same regard before they are given a time of day. It might make white people think that if Obama was able to become a president, then that black kid who can't even get a job interview because his name sounds black is just being lazy and should pull himself up by his boot straps. Obama did it--why don't these lazy bastards do it?

After these initial questions, Tim Wise takes the reader on a short trip to the black American experience, including plenty of research and statistical evidence to back up his stories. Black high school graduates are less likely to be selected for a job than a white high school drop-out, even if they are exactly the same in manner, dress and qualifications. In fact, a black person needs to have 8 years more of work experience than a white person with same qualifications before he or she is treated equally; black people are more likely told to get a sub-prime mortgage than their white counterparts, even when they have the same income; doctors are less likely to suggest heart surgery for black people than white people, although they complain of the same symptoms (one doctor said he didn't recommend the surgery because the "woman seemed lazy and would not have followed care instructions"--she was an actor who was instructed to act exactly the same way as the white patient).

It's like telling someone to pull themselves up by the bootstraps while handing the boots without any bootstraps on them.

Wise discusses two types of racism, which is the reason why we can easily say that we are now a post-racial society and still behave racist. There's Racism 1.0, which we all know: the Ku Klux Klan, school segregation, black people at the back of the bus, the openly-racist person who thinks minorities are worthless. That is a rarity, but that's what many think when they hear the word "racist." But then there is also Racism 2.0, which allows exceptional black people like Obama to succeed; it might even let people think they are not behaving in a racist manner. But whenever racism is brought up by minorities, white people are still eager to discredit another person's personal experience even when they do not have the experience themselves--"he probably didn't mean it… are you sure he's not just lazy… maybe he triggered that encounter somehow… aren't you being a bit racist yourself by suggesting that?" Racism 2.0 is thinking that now that cross-burning has ended and we all have the right to have schooling and jobs and a happy life, that the work of an anti-racist is done, and people really should just shut up about race already. Or even better, they think that black people have it too easy these days. They think it's hurtful for the national psyche to be reminded of the fact that the United States was built up by slave labor; an act that has left scars to all of its subsequent generations, either through using black people for medical experiments even until 1970s, to believing that a black person is not really as intelligent and hard-working as a white person with the same credentials. This triggers the bias effect, where if a person is told that they suck because they are X, they are not going to succeed in whatever they are doing as well as people who were told nothing like that (same experiments have been done with women, who performed better in math tests when they were not told "women are bad at math" before the test.)

I'd love to talk about this book more, but I'll let you read it yourselves. It's a quick read, and goes very quickly to the point. I have read Tim Wise's blog before, but none of his books. I should take a look at the other ones.

34. Club Dead by Charlaine Harris

Ya'll know already what I think of these book covers, so let's skip that rant.

The third installment of the Sookie Stackhouse novels deals with the disappearance of Bill the Vampire, Sookie's boyfriend. In her search for Bill's captor, Sookie needs to cooperate with the slick vampire Eric Northman, and a werewolf whose ex-girlfriend--a human--has gotten engaged to a really bad-ass werewolf and is obviously taking vampire blood as a drug. Somehow the vampire king of Louisiana is also messed up with the werewolves, and he might just be the key to Bill's disappearance.

It's hard for me to keep these books straight, because I keep on getting the stories of the TV show and the books mixed up. The most recent season of True Blood dealt exactly with the storyline from the third book, but it ended up with events and a cliffhanger that are coming up later in the books. Which is why I just bought novels 4 and 5...

These books are so much fun, and always quick reads. I guess Charlaine Harris is my Danielle Steele.

Books that I have worked on but never finished

The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations & a Variety of Helpful Indexes by Adam Thirlwell

I barely managed to read the title before I had to get it back to the library! I got it because I thought it would be an interesting look at how people translate books, and... in a way, it is. But at the same time, the book meanders from one story to another, from one author to another, and it takes a while before the first translators and their work is produced. The writing style is oddly dry compared to the promisingly witty title, and it just did not work for the current state of my attention span. Maybe another time!

The Watercooler Effect: A Psychologist Explores the Extraordinary Power of Rumors by Nicholas DiFonzo, Ph.D.

Again, a promising premise. I've been interested in rumors since I took a class on pragmatic linguistics, where we spent some time on Deborah Tannen's wonderfully pop-sciency books on communication between men and women, and especially on the topic of rumors. I was interested in reading more from a psychologist's point of view on why people believe even the bizarrest, sure-to-be-untrue rumors, and what is the function of telling rumors (Tannen: building rapport between people, in general.)

I did not get very far in the book as I got fairly tired to its pattern, which was this:

1. Author introduces a question about rumors, such as "But why do people believe crazy rumors?"

2. He gives an example of a crazy rumor, such as the "Paul is dead" rumor about the Beatles in the 60s.

3. The author says something akin to, "Isn't it crazy that people believe this??"

4. Does not really dedicate any space for answering or analyzing the question he has posed.

5. Asks another question, "But how do rumors begin?"

and the same cycle begins again.

Within the 30 or so pages I did learn many a rumor that has made the rounds in our inboxes, but no analysis on them. Even Tim Wise's tiny book gave a more analytical look at the crazy rumor about black people murdering and raping each other in New Orleans after Katrina (which turned out to be completely untrue, yet many people happily believed it, including news reporters--Wise discusses what allowed this to happen, DiFonzo just goes, "Crazy, huh?" Not a direct quote, by the way.)

I guess I'll just need to re-read that Tannen book.

EDIT: Ugh. This is the last time I compose these entries in a Word processing tool that Blogger apparently can't handle.

Jet lag to the power of 2

2010-09-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

32. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Lent to me by Wasabi Prime for a travel read, I had to occasionally lift up my head from the book and quietly chuckle at how appropriate the book was for traveling purposes: the mood of the book is hazy and often dreamlike, to reflect the protagonist's continuous and ever-worsening jet lag as she zips between Japan, Britain, the United States and Russia, both physically and mentally. So, to get the most of this book, try reading it while being jet-lagged yourself! It's quite a sensation.

The novel's protagonist, Cayce, makes a living by recognizing trends and evaluating how effective company logos are--a true 20th century occupation. Outside of her professional life she is literally allergic to logos and brands (breaking into sweats when even hearing the name Tommy Hilfiger), and she is obsessed with items that are clean of any branding. Which is probably why she is so wrapped up with mysterious, short clips of film of people barely in focus that are posted online. She and her fellow enthusiasts analyze and over-analyze these clips in an anonymous online message board, trying to figure out who the people in the clips are and who on Earth could be making them. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to the clips, which is what throws Cayce off and makes the clips even more intriguing to her.

Once a coder finds a watermark in one of the clips, she is hired to find out the maker of the clip. She suspects that the motivation of her employer is anything but noble: clips that have millions of people waiting for them with baited breath should surely be harnessed for viral marketing and branding. Still, Cayce herself and her compatriots are eager to find out the origins of the clips, so with the money given to her by her employer, she begins to travel the world to find out what kind of a genius has such power over people with only a few frames of film at a time.

Branding, logos and viral marketing--as well as the female protagonist--made me think of Popco, which is a really cool book about code-writing and breaking and marketing, among other things. While Popco was a breeze to read, Gibson's run-on sentences and his comma-comma-comma-comma-comma-chameleon writing style was often just exhausting to read. William, we won't think of you as any lesser a writer if you'll use full stops every now and then!

This was the first book I had read by Gibson, and I did enjoy it. It obviously was also a cathartic writing exercise for him, as the novel ties in the events of 9/11 in a manner that somehow just did not seem to meld with the rest of the story, although the ending tries to make the most of it. It seemed like a topic Gibson needed to get out onto the paper, and used Pattern Recognition as a vessel for it.

When K. heard that I was reading a Gibson book, he asked, "Is there a character who is a disgustingly loathsome social outcast, has some kind of a neurosis or an eccentric problem, and preferably is a real genius hiding from the government?" All I could say was, "Does Gibson get extra points if he's also Russian?"

33. Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris

(Ugh, the cover again. What's with this crap? When does Sookie even wear pants like that in this novel? Or ever?)

The second installment of the Sookie Stackhouse novels! Same old, same old--but in a good way. I could copy and paste my previous post about Harris here, because I had the exact same reactions to Living Dead in Dallas as I had to this one: the book has elements from the second season of the film version, but the film version completely took off with the manaead storyline, creating it an issue with Tara more than with Sookie, and leaving Sookie to deal with the case of the missing vampire that was most likely kidnapped by a church. A church that preaches peace and love, and getting rid of vampires by exposing them to the sun while they are strapped to a big cross. The cross-burning reference here is obvious.

It continues to amaze me how easily Harris intertwines the incredibly silly and the socially critical. This book was a very quick read partly because it is written in a fairly straight-forward manner, without any crazy bells and whistles, yet it still manages to make interesting points about prejudice, whether it is toward people or things we don't understand and fear, or toward people we deem of lower status than ourselves.

Unfinished business and detours into vampire land

2010-08-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

I'll be most likely not updating this blog for the next month, because I'll be traveling. My travel bag has been supplied with books and zines, so I should be good--I just might not have a chance to update until I get back.

30. Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Although I've read some Anne Rice and enjoyed The Little Vampire books as a kid, I was never a vampire-story fanatic. There are some genres that I will keep on reading even if I've had bad experiences with them, but vampires-as-a-genre was never my thing. Which is unfortunate, because my prejudice had kept me away from the Sookie Stackhouse novels.

Had we not started watching True Blood, series based on the Stackhouse books, I might have never given them a go. Especially after seeing that cover. My God, what is that supposed to be? A book about vampires for 12-year-old girls? Why is the vampire pictured as a stereotypical Bela Lugosi-creature wrapped up in a cape, when in the book Bill walks around in his Dockers khakis and is trying his best to "mainstream", to be like humans?

But to the book. I am completely hooked on the series, so it's hard for me to write about the book without comparing the two: although True Blood's Season 1 follows Dead Until Dark fairly faithfully plot-wise, Alan Ball went ahead and used some creative license in the screen version with the supporting characters and in leaving some issues from the first book to be handled in the second season. For once I feel like both of the versions work equally well. They both are still about Sookie Stackhouse, an ordinary waitress at Bon Temps, Louisiana. Except for that mind-reading part. Her town is one of the last places in the United States where vampires are now roaming around like any other human beings, which is not to say that they are tolerated. Although Harris draws comparisons between racial prejudice and the fear and hatred of vampires, the screen version is more heavy-handed in pointing out the parallels. And why not: while I read the book, I can stop and think of the words and implications more, whereas on screen the same treatment could be overlooked.

I was surprised to see that Tara is not in this book, and that some events that had a big effect on Sookie and Bill's relationship proved to be originally acts of other people, which meant that the story does not take us forward at the same speed as it does in the on-screen version. Also, Bill is much meaner and scarier in this book. I chuckled when the bookstore clerk told me I'd find the Harris books in the horror isle--now I know why! Although True Blood has plenty of blood and gore in it, Dead Until Dark was occasionally genuinely frightening when Bill seemed to be totally out of control. Alan Ball decided to save that for much, much later.

In both versions, Sookie Stackhouse's character is great. I've read so many portrayals of waitresses/barmaids that can fit only into two groups that it's getting tiresome: either she's an angelic girl who's just stuck at a waitressing job until something better comes along (because only uneducated, unambitious people are waitressing!), or she's the girl who's seen it all and slept with all, and who will either become the angelic girl at the end, or somehow get her comeuppance. So it's refreshing to read about Sookie, who is proud of being good at waitressing, of being able to flash a fake smile on for tips all the while reading people's minds and how they judge her as a piece of white trash and borderline retarded. She almost could fall into the first group of stereotypical waitresses, the angelic good girl who's just in bad company, if she just wasn't so horny all the time and prone to occasional temper tantrums. All of those features make her even more lovable--she seems like an actual human being! In her world, being modest and wanting to wear a sexy dress out on a date are not exclusive, and neither is being a good person and being someone who is ready to kick some butt.

Not only is the story fun, fast-paced and a refreshing look at the vampire mythology, the story is just written really well. Not once did I find myself rolling my eyes at word choices or storytelling (OK. Once, when Sookie makes the same Godfather joke twice within two pages). Which brings me to...

The book I did not finish this time. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
This was recommended to me by an acquaintance who loves this book. I got it from the library, and I will need to return it before I leave on my trip, and I doubt I'll get it again. I have heard people talk about Murakami in awed tones, so I figured I'd give it a try.

The story itself did not seem bad at all: your usual Bret Easton Ellis-style fair, focusing on a college kid who is stuck in a rut like all other college kids, with the exception that he's really insightful and smart and has to alleviate his weltschmertz by having sex with all the girls he can. Did I say "exception?" I meant, the same old story since Holden Caulfield. This story is just set in Japan, so what I found most interesting was when the narrative veered from the usual "omigod he's so torn and smart!" and became tangled with Japanese values and mores (such as when an almost 30-year-old woman laments how she cannot be married off to anyone at that age, especially after having been in a mental institution).

I was, unfortunately, unable to see past the horrible writing. Or maybe it was the English translation? I hoped I could read Japanese so I could see whether it really was Murakami who wrote like this, or whether it was the translator. There was a lot of this:

First page:
"Just feeling kind of blue." Kind of, huh? Well, that's forgiveable--it's a line the narrator says, and that sounds like something a person would actually say.
But by page 4, the things and the hedging words were killing me.
"It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky."
"Memory is a funny thing."
"I never stopped to think of it as something that would..."
"Scenery was the last thing in my mind. Now, though, the meadow scene is the first thing that comes back to me."
"...these are the first things that..."
"How could such a thing have happened?"
Page 5:
"I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
"...like all the other things she used to spin..."
Page 6:
"...the image of a thing I had never laid eyes on became..."
Naoko and the protagonist talk what it would be like to fall into a well and die:
"Things like that must actually happen."
"The best thing would be to break your neck, but you'd probably just break your leg and then you couldn't do a thing."
(from the first paragraph on page 7:) "Somebody should find the thing and build a wall around it."

AARGH. And it doesn't stop. Everything is a "thing." And once I started paying attention to "things", the "kind ofs" started popping up, too, although the line from the very first page should have warned me about it. He was kind of tall but kind of shy and kind of cute and the sky was kind of blue and the sex was kind of good but the alcohol was kind of better... Stylistically, this book is the hedgiest I have tried to read in a while. I don't oppose to using the word "thing" in general, and sure, people talk with "things" a lot, I just find it's very sloppy work to have one word be repeated so damned often that it can take a reader out of the story and wonder, "Do I know anyone who is as vague or 'thingy' in his or her speech as all these characters? No, I don't."

My bet is on a translator who went on a literal translation spree without thinking of how to rephrase the sentences. What kind of an author would not change The best thing would be to break your neck, but you'd probably just break your leg and then you couldn't do a thing into at least "It would be for the best if you broke your neck, but you'd probably just break your leg and then you wouldn't be able to do anything" to avoid repeating the same expression so many times on a single page? Even if this was a calculated move by the author (or the translator), it still does not sway me to finish this book because I was so bored by the style. Maybe someday I'll attempt to overlook it and find out what happens in the story itself.

The oddest experiments; attempting to define "bad" writing style again

2010-07-29T19:47:00.000-07:00

28. Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese

The cover and the title should give you an accurate feeling about the book: the experiments in the book are truly bizarre, they are often described fairly shortly so that you can use this as handy bathroom reading (chapter 8 is specifically designed for this), and headings are in a bubble-gum purple hue.I think the typesetter/designer wanted to really get the readers into the acid mood.

I was afraid the book would be way too quirky--or just stupid--for my tastes, but I found I was unable to put it down. The bizarre experiments drew me in, and Boese's writing style balanced well between the humorous and trying-too-much-to-be-witty. Although I ended up reading most of his final sentences in in my head in the puts on sunglasses -style, the punchlines were not annoying enough for me to give up this book.

The experiments range from the well-known ones (the terry cloth mom experiment with monkeys; the severed dog head that continued living; trying to raise a chimp as a human child to see if it would begin to behave like humans, etc.) to the more obscure (testing LSD on elephants, testing whether a tapeworm learns new stuff if it is fed a piece of another tapeworm with the knowledge, and so on).

My favorites were among the human psychology and sociological experiments. I heard of the Stanford prison experiment the first time when I saw Das Experiment (insert obligatory <3 Moritz Bleibtrau)which is loosely based on the real experiment. It freaked me out in a way that made me want to know more about the exam. By the way, I got that movie poster as a gift from a friend, and it was so depressing I could never put it up on my wall. Onward!

Originally, the experiment was to see what factors lead to prison abuse. Is it because people working in prisons are naturally violent and nasty, is it because the inmates are naturally violent and nasty, or could the environment affect their behavior? Completely normal and mentally stable men were chosen for the experiment, where half were given gowns to wear with no underwear (the prisoners) and the other half were given khakis (the guards). The only instructions for the guards were that they should not use violence and they should not let the prisoners escape. Although during the first day of testing the "prisoners" were simply sitting and playing cards, chatting about the experiment, within a couple of days the guards had put them in isolation chambers for punishment, made them pee in buckets and leave the buckets in their "cells" and forced them to do humiliating acts (such as sexual acts). The experiment that was supposed to last for two weeks was canceled after six days, because the "prisoners" were facing such abuse and psychological stress from their "guards." Even their yells, "This is just a simulation!" would not calm the guards the eff down.

I find this absolutely fascinating, just as the Milgram experiment where completely ordinary people ended up giving electric shocks they thought were deadly to people, all just because a man in an authoritarian position told them that he'd take the blame, and the subject was simply obeying his orders. When asked whether they could ever kill a person, they would probably have answered--as all of us non-psychopaths would--with a no. These experiments just show us that there is a lot about ourselves that we don't know or understand. These experiments--although the results are shocking and appalling--should help people in designing situations where people's behavior would not be allowed to escalate so easily into abusive situations. Unfortunately, the results also give an idea of how easy it is to manipulate a person to behave against his or her will.

The book is a fun read, but I did not say it was a light read!

Speaking of fun...

29. The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly by Charles Elster

If you want to read a book on style, please read any of the other ones I have written about. This mentions all the old hats of proper English usage as they do, but in addition, the author barely hides his loathing toward spoken varieties of English. He begins by stating that this book is for writers, whether you write for newspapers, blogs or you just write emails. But every now and then, he slips in snide comments about the bad ways people speak English (when the "bad" is actually just a vernacular of some type, or a shorthand). Elster, your agenda is showing.

Sometimes the author simply sounded like an old curmudgeon.He has a big chip on his shoulder (and he would slap me for that cliché) about blogging: the multitude of insulting terms he has come up with for bloggers is quite astounding, and he rarely forgets to mention that he came up with those terms all by himself! What a guy!

He takes swipes at Mignon Fogerty because whoever wrote her grammar book's dust jacket copy described the book as--wait for the dry heaves from Elster--a "fun book." (You can't use "fun" as a regular adjective, he mutters between his spew-covered teeth.) His disgust toward lexicographers is hard to avoid: Elster's descriptions make them seem like a bunch of namby-pambies who allow anything to be printed in dictionaries. I'm fairly sure I used the word "namby-pamby" wrong there, and he would make ruthless fun of me.

Elster seems to believe that dictionaries should act as teaching material on what proper language is like. I think that dictionaries should reflect language as it is used. Our views on language are fundamentally different. He is absolutely right with many of his examples, such as the ones where people don't get it that the idiom is toe the line, not tow the line (because the latter makes no sense--not that idioms are always sensible). But every now and then he seems to forget that language develops and evolves constantly, and if majority of people nowadays think it's OK to use "fun" as an adjective to describe objects, then protesting against it will only make you sound like someone who thinks that the English from a decade ago is something we should try to preserve, whatever the cost.

So, if you think that there is only one way to speak and read proper English (and that English must be from somewhere well post-U.S. colonization, pre-...now), then this book is for you!

Radio plays and poetry--yes, this is 2010.

2010-07-19T20:41:00.000-07:00

25. and 26. Melua mekossa and Sen pituinen se by Leila and Annukka.

Now a defunct radio station, Radiomafia was quite the anarchist in the Finnish world of broadcasting: they would assign a program devoted to heavy metal at prime time, or start your Sundays with a dose of progressive rock. The weirdest parts were the radio plays and sketch shows. You would not find any Prairie Home Companion here, that's for sure. One of my favorites back then was a show created by Johanna Reenkola and Tiina Siikasaari (who also gave voices to the characters) about two absolutely clueless women in their early 40s, Leila ja Annukka. Now, reading the books that are basically transcripts of the show revealed to me how much they actually played around with language, and how often they veered into Monty Python-esque absurdism.

Millionaire-heiress Leila Makkonen is a stick-figure of an egotist, for whom nothing is more important than looks and men, and status. She's also a horrifying lush. Annukka Ahlqvist is her well-meaning, but unfashionable friend whose parents still own a dairy farm and whose appetite in both food and men disgust Leila. So far, the premise sounds pretty predictable, doesn't it? Yet, the stories managed to be absolutely hilarious, and often the dialogues were peppered with poignant bits about homophobia, how advertising preys on the ones with low self-esteem, and even bigger political issues such as the European Union and Finland's role in it. Then they'd immediately get back to silly dialogue that would just escalate into worst possible scenarios. The characters are kind of like two female versions of David Brent. Unfortunately I can't translate the bits I like the best, because Leila uses very, very bad language in them... But here are a couple of tamer excerpts:

Leila and Annukka are at a neighborhood pizza place:
Leila: Well there you finally are! I already managed to down one drink, I was so thirsty. What would you have, the usual?
Annukka: Yeah, thanks.
Leila: Gianni! Una cerveza and eine kleine cocacola! Bitte hurry, chop chop!
Annukka: Wow, people can really tell you've traveled the world.
Leila: I like to keep up my language skills.
Annukka: And it's so nice for the Italians to hear their native language here in cold Finland.

Annukka is getting ready for her graduation ceremony from the aromatherapist course...
Leila: Move it! What are you going to wear?
Annukka: I'm already wearing it.
Leila: Oh my god. I thought that flower-patterned salsa dress was your home outfit.
Annukka: No, it's not. Just this Saturday I bought it from the second hand store for exactly this event. Imagine, it was only 20 marks! They asked for 25, but I haggled off a fiver, because there's a stain on the chest. But ta-daa, I put this butterfly brooch over it and you can't see the stain anymore.

It's one of those things that are probably funnier when you hear them or you hear the voices acting the play out in your head...

27. Kutsuvat sitä rakkaudeksi by Arno Kotro ("They call it love")
Arno Kotro. I vaguely remember a column he wrote for the major teachers' union paper (he is a teacher himself) that smacked of anti-feminism: it was one of those writings exploring the reasons why boys are not doing as well in schools as girls are, and instead of really looking at the reasons, he basically blamed it on feminism and women teachers emasculating and favoring girls (My school years were peppered with statements like "Women can't chew gum and walk at the same time" and even at college level, I had a teacher tell in front of a class full of women how she wished we'd stayed at home and made babies, and had given "boys a chance" to get into the university. So I wasn't exactly agreeing with Kotro's statements.) His odd arguments made me vow that I'd never read his stuff. I had totally forgotten my sentiments when I got this three-poem book from a friend of mine, and surprisingly ended up reading it in one sitting. Save for the strawmen arguments against feminism at the center of the book, I really enjoyed the poems.

The book is in three parts, each a poem of its own: first is about him falling in love, the second leads into the breakup, and the third is about post-breakup meetups, friendships and moving on (or the inability thereof). I often don't read poetry because majority of poetry just has not done much for me, but then sometimes there are poets who have these amazing sentences that make me think, "Huh, I never thought it that way--but that's the best way to describe it." Pablo Neruda is someone I could read endlessly, because his poems are so raw and delicious. I would read more of Kotro because of his word plays that instead of making me laugh and think how smart he is, they make me feel terrifyingly sad. Quite the opposite of the way puns and plays on words usually are used. Also, I felt like this was a brave book to write as it obviously is very autobiographical (or is it?), and it sounds very honest in its examination of feelings of love, betrayal and obsession.

On bilingualism and dictionaries

2010-07-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

My work stole me away from the Internets for a while, but I'm back! Unfortunately, work also slowed my reading down a bit, so here are the only books I have finished recently...

23. Bilingual: Life and Reality by François Grosjean

A great, great book for everyone who is interested in bilingualism, is bilingual, or is someone who is struggling to figure out a good way to raise their children bilingual or maintain their own bilingual abilities. The author refers to his more academically written book for more information, analysis and statistics while this book is kept very accessible on purpose.

It tackles all the most pervasive myths about bilingualism in both adults and children, such as that bilingual children will develop slower than monolingual children, or that being bilingual means you have to be a perfect speaker of two languages and anything else is not true bilingualism. For the author, bilingual is a person who uses every day (more or less) two languages. Because most people use different languages in different situations--such as one at home and one for official business--it automatically means that they cannot be perfect in both languages. Or rather, a person who is perfect in all the languages he or she is using is a rarity. As a personal example, I can talk about computers easily in English, but I was totally screwed back in Finland when we were trying to buy a motherboard. I had no idea what it would be called in Finnish--the language I had been primarily using up until my twenties!--and not only that, I had a hard time even explaining what I wanted to the shopkeeper without sounding like a dimwit (plus he tried to sell me a hard-drive when I knew for sure that's not what I wanted, so he didn't seem to know what was going on, either...). I realized that there was no Finn in my life with whom I would have talked about computers as extensively as I had done in English. The reverse happens when I try to talk in English about, say, building structures: not only are homes often built differently in the US and Finland and thus would require different vocab, I just had not had an opportunity to talk to anyone in English about building materials before someone asked me whether Finns sauter their pipes... The problem was not that I don't understand the concept of sautering--it's that I had never heard that word before in English.

I had never dared to call myself a bilingual before because of these myths: how could I be truly bilingual when I was not raised bilingual at home or in my living environment. I was told, even on college level, that if the language you have learned was learned at school, you can't call yourself bilingual. I can't be a true bilingual because there are situations where I don't know the vocabulary. I can't be a true bilingual because I have an accent. Reading this book was a huge relief for me and a revelation: duh, of course I am bilingual because I communicate in two languages on a daily basis. That's all you need. What a relief!

24. The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English from Shakespeare to South Park by Jack Lynch

After the fairly dry history of how the first English dictionaries came about (except the part that disses Samuel Johnson in very delicious terms!) the book dives straight into the debate of what is proper English and what is not, and who are to blame for some very nonsensical rules. The best parts of this book were the sections where Lynch discusses why English spelling reformation will never, ever happen although it should, and why criticism of non-standard Englishes like AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) usually is nothing more than attempts at trying to thinly veil one's classicism and racism in academic concerns on the status of "proper" language usage. Somehow when a black person says "I axed" it's an infuriating bastardization of language, but it's fine if Samuel Johnson has so said and written back in the day.

Also, Lynch takes on people who believe that English language is going to hell in an iPhone docking station because of the language kids use in text messages. Curiously enough, the much-advertised high school essay that was full of gr8ts and LOLs has never been found, and Lynch deems it nothing but a "a friend of a friend of mine once saw..." urban legend. It seems that kids still do understand that most of the time there is a time to use the standard English they learn at school, and that it's fine to play around with language in other venues. As an example of this, Lynch mentiones LOLcats, where you take a picture of a cat, and photoshop a caption onto the picture in ungrammatical English. Although some academics have gotten their ascots in a twist over this and see lolcats as definite proof of English's downfall, Lynch reminds people that lolcats creators know how English language works, and they write badly on purpose. If lolcats peeps really did not know how to write standard English, they would not be able to write hilarious captions where horrible sounding English has a logic (such as use an -s plural for irregular plurals, like in my favorite lolcat where a budgie stands in a plate of mac and cheese, saying "IM IN UR MACARONIS WARMING MY FEETS.")

Oh, and about the English spelling reformation. I did not know about this: apparently the reason why English spelling is so messed up is because the first printing presses used only letters found in Latin. People were too lazy to hew additional letters to match English sounds, and thus they ended up discarding letters like the thorn and frantically tried to come up with letter combinations that would reflect the same kind of a sound. Tut tut. Also, one of the reasons (and you should check out the book for the rest, because they are all fascinating!) for the spelling reform failing is that people are not aware of how they pronounce words, and thus they would not be able to produce in writing accurately what they say (reformers want English to be written the way it's pronounced.) Most people would think that to make plurals out of dog and house is the same: you just add an -s. But when you now pronounce the new words, the -s is pronounced differently in these words. For houses it's more like a z. So, I guess after spelling reform, people would be spelling house as haus or hauz. Additionally, there would be even more variety because spelling reformers seem to have forgotten that there is no one English in existence: there is a ton of variety. Even within the United States. So in order to start implementing a "one letter-one sound" rule for English, they would have to choose one lucky variety of English that everyone would need to learn to pronounce in order to communicate with each other in writing. Otherwise, writing would be nonsensical because every dialect would write words down differently (just think of a simple word like house: haus, hauz, aus, oos, haas...). Had the printing press boys just carved those extra letters and used them in printing English texts, we would not be in a mess where a kid is lauded nationally for being able to spell a word correctly upon hearing it...

Lynch has a very level-headed approach to English language, especially when it comes to varieties: we should not be talking about "bad" English if someone does not speak like we do. Instead, we should talk about appropriate English, because not all varieties of English--including standard English taught at schools--are appropriate at all times.

Let me have a fan-girl moment here. Lynch <3

2010-06-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

21. The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson
Geoff Nicholson ties his own interest and motivations for walking together with great and zany historical walks in this semi-autobiographical book about, well, walking. Although such a basic human activity, using your feet as a method of transportation or going out for a walk for fun might get you odd looks in the United States. Walking is often done on treadmills, or then while wearing spandex--and then the motivation is to look good. Whatever happened to just aimlessly wandering down streets, wonders Nicholson. If you are wondering whether this will be yet another curmudgeonly book about "things ain't what they used to be" lamentations, you are happy to find that this is not the case. Nicholson does not tell everyone should be walking--heck, he lives in L.A. and knows that sometimes it is impossible to walk without being accosted by the police who think you are up to no good, strolling about like that. Instead, he talks about what he finds so enjoyable about walking, and in the midst of this narrative he takes some side steps into psychogeography, into people who walk streets in patterns, and he also looks at the history of professional walking and odd bets, such as "bet I can walk around the world while pushing a baby stroller and while I wear an iron mask." That sort of a thing.

Walking is a wonderful activity; a cheap hobby that can be done at any age (providing that you have learned how to walk, or you are able to do it). Still, it should not be looked down upon: the author himself got his arm broken in a manner that puzzled surgeons, only because he fell over while walking. His mother's death was most likely also sped up by her insistent walk up a Sheffield hill during winter storm.

The book is a fun and clever read about a simple aspect of human life, and the meaning of it for people, from Hollywood stars to street photographers and speed walkers. The only thing that made me suspect the author's cleverness was the point where he refers to "evidence" about what "really" was said between Houston and Neil Armstrong--the exchange Nicholson reports sounds oddly similar to this satire by The Onion.... And no, Nicholson does not seem to be joking, as he also states that who knows, maybe the evidence will turn out to be a hoax. Considering his writing style, had he been joking he probably would have mentioned the article by its name, or the publication, but this was just an unquoted reference to it. So. That was kind of sad.

22. The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing by Ben Yagoda

Yagoda is trying to tackle an issue that is almost untackle-able: what is style in writing, how do we recognize good and bad style (is there objectively such?), and how do authors cultivate their styles. He knows that this is a crazy task, but still goes ahead with it, interviewing numerous authors from all walks of writing (journalists, novelists, even lawyers) and giving his personal opinion on all matters of style. Poor guy. He knows the answer already at the beginning: good style is whatever people appreciate. And different people probably don't appreciate the same styles.

The best thing about this book is the extensive interviews of writers, who talk about their personal writing styles, who they look up to, and how they have cultivated their styles. I once tried reading a Bill Bryson book, and I got so annoyed with the whininess, the all-knowingness and the stuff he presented as "facts" that I could not finish it, and I have not touched his books ever since. After reading this book, however, I might give him another go, because he sounded like a sane, non-whiny person in the interviews, and talked about how the "I" in his books is not really him, but a very exaggerated character of himself. I might be able to read his books again if I think of him as a character who is pompous and ethnocentric to get you riled up...

Adventures in swampy lands of Finland and consumerism

2010-06-15T17:29:00.000-07:00

19. The American Girl by Monika Fagerholm (read in Finnish, "Amerikkalainen tyttö")
Hazy and dream-like, the story takes place in a Swedish-speaking Finnish community in the 1960s, progressing all the way to the 2000s. Although the story starts off as a whodunnit when an American girl visiting the village disappears, and the murder suspects and accusers cannot handle the tragedy, it soon transforms into a coming-of-age story of two girls who meet through happenstance and begin to emulate this mysterious American Girl Eddie first through childhood games of dress-up and later, as the story of the missing American girl unfolds, in a more sinister manner and subconsciously.

All the people in the story are storytellers who are used to recounting their relationship with the missing girl to numerous strangers and friends throughout the years, up to a point where they are not even sure what is fiction and what is reality. I would love to talk about my reading experience on that more, but it would be spoilerish...

I especially enjoyed the anonymity of many people and places: many of the characters are referred to only as generic titles or nicknames (the Black Sheep), and some even have invented names for themselves (Inget Herrman, which is quite obvious to anyone who knows a lick of Swedish). Houses are called by their geographical locations or how they look like, such as the "Glass palace" and "The House on the Second Cape" and of course, "The House at the Sludge Edge" (I have no idea how these are actually translated into English). This works perfectly in the storyteller-framework: obviously, someone called a Swamp Mother would not be a nice person, and The Glass Palace would be something to envy by the people at the House at the Sludge Edge. They are not just places and people who exist in this story, but they are places and people in the lives of each of us readers--we can just fill in the blanks.

The story is terribly tragic, but also terrifyingly beautiful. At least the Finnish translation was so masterfully done that I could have read the story merely for the language used in it. I know someone who has read the English translation, and she said she did not enjoy the translation very much. I'd be interested in checking it out, because this book is just amazing.

20. Retail Anarchy: A Radical Shopper's Adventures in Consumption by Sam Pocker
How do dollar stores cheerfully charge a dollar for a 25-cent pack of gum? How do you get an entire car full of pudding for free?

Reading this made me think of this yuckily clichéd phrase: Sam Pocker is the modern-day Robin Hood! Except for the stealing part. In this book, he completely legally gets stuff for free from stores (or even makes money by buying items), and then he donates his carloads of cereal, shampoo and teriyaki sauce to the needy. His motivation is not all that altruistic, though: he is a consumer with a vengeance, and he is out to get the Big Box retailers. After getting gradually more frustrated with Big Boxes convincing the consumer that he or she is a part of their "family" and then offering nothing else in return except the privilege to buy their overpriced junk, Pocker goes out to the stores armed with the knowledge that most stores are so badly managed that they don't realize that combining a manufacturer's coupon and a store coupon AND a rebate would make the store actually pay the consumer to get the stuff off their shelves. In one week alone, Pocker makes $200 dollars by simply using coupons that are out there for everyone to grab.
Some have commented on this not being fair--you should pay something for merchandise and not cheat the stores. To this Pocker counters with stories of how big companies are more than happy to lie to their customers to get them pay more for products that are available for less next door. Why should the consumer act fair if the service provider doesn't? And constantly Pocker reminds the reader: not once has he broken the law by using these coupons and he gives the products away to people who need them. Which is something you can't say of the QFC's Thanksgiving program.

That made me sick. Have you seen those brown bags at QFC around Thanksgiving? You take one to the cashier, they ring it up for $10 and it's considered food that you have bought for homeless people. Except that the store keeps the money, and the value of goods inside those bags is nowhere near $10. Once Pocker opened one of these bags to see what was in them, and was appalled to see that the value of the goods (straight out of QFC shelves) was about $3. In his mind, we'd be better off buying $10 worth of stuff and donating it to a homeless shelter, rather than letting the store give the shelters crap and make a huge profit out of it. Gross. Again, this book came out in 2007 so I just hope that QFC has changed their policy since and stocks the bags better.

I enjoyed reading this book a lot, although Pocker's coupon enthusiasm goes a bit overboard for me sometimes (such as when he abandons a whole cartful of orange juice in the parking lot because he got them for free with coupons, and only then did he realize that he cannot donate it anywhere), as did his usage of "lame", "slut" and other supposedly hip but derogatory language. Still, I got a kick out of it, and I think this book would be useful not just for people who try to save a penny, but for everyone: we should be more aware of how we are manipulated by advertising, and people should learn to do more price comparison instead of being blindly brand-loyal. I especially enjoyed the section where Pocker asks teachers why they don't give parents the supply list for next school year at the end of the previous school year, when notebooks and pens are about third of the price compared to the first week of school. The teachers had not even realized that there is a price shift (July/August: old stock is sold for cheap out of the way of the new stuff, which is then sold during the first week of school for lots more). And these same teachers were teaching kids how to manage their money and save it!

A book I did not finish: Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping by Judith Levine
A really interesting title, isn't it? I was all antsy when I saw this at the library, especially after having read the Pocker book which was so much fun, and which had a really good point. So I was wondering, how on Earth did someone not shop for a year?

Meet my arch-nemesis, the bad thesis statement. On page seven, the author states what she is set out to do: "Starting January 1, 2004, Paul and I will purchase only necessities for sustenance, health, and business--groceries, insulin for our diabetic cat, toilet paper, Internet access." (Emphasis mine)

What? Are you planning on cutting out anything? Even the toilet paper option becomes a debate: do we really have to buy the store brand instead of the really nice kind?

Although it's probably supposed to be witty banter, the chapter that debates whether wine, hair gel (of course their hair will be professionally cut despite the project) and olives constitute a necessity only managed to piss me off. This couple is so privileged with their two homes (one a large farm house in Vermont) and three cars that they cannot even imagine a year without paying for a movie, so the rationalization begins immediately: it might be OK to go see movies if they are (a) organized by a non-profit, local cinema and (b) if paying a ticket would be a donation, which then means they did not actually buy anything. I get it. If we can redefine what "buying" means, then this project is eeeasy! How insulting is that to people who actually have to save to buy necessities? Ugh. And it did not take too long for the author to rationalize why they absolutely need three cars, either.

Essentially, they are not even going to plan on cutting back enough to be inconvenienced.

Ms. Levine: Please change the title of your book to My Year Without Shopping Every Single Thing I See and Can Afford, and I'll get back to you. Nothing, save crappy writing, annoys me more about books than false advertising. I wanted to read a book about someone trying to not buy anything; not a book about someone debating whether wine is a necessity just because her boyfriend is Italian.

I might give it a better go at some point, but right now this book fell to the bottom of my reading list. I might glance through to see what happens in it. The premise in general sounded fine, and it sounded like there was going to be some righteous rage on the pages about mindless consumerism. Unfortunately, the first pages just seem like the rantings of a person who has no idea what "living without" actually means.

ETA: Haha! Wish I had read the Amazon reviews of this book before I started reading it and wrote my entry. They are hilarious, and pretty much everyone calls the author a whiny, patronizing yuppie. I'm so glad I read Colin Beavan's No Impact Man earlier: not buying stuff is possible, and it can be done with less flailing and having temper tantrums.

Still on the language-and-style bender

2010-06-07T01:17:00.000-07:00

17. The Grammar Devotional by Mignon Fogarty
Isn't that the best author name ever? Mignon? Makes me think of these luxurious Easter eggs we used to have, made by Fazer: they were not merely chocolate eggs, but real egg shells filled to the brim with delicious chocolate, and sealed back up again. And they were called Mignon eggs.

Ahem.

Fogarty's idea is this: if there are so many devotional books, which encourage you to read one page per day to find some inspiration for your everyday life, why not have one for grammar? So, each teeny tiny entry (max. half a teeny page) is designed to be read on a certain week day. Most of the time Mondays are dedicated for punctuation, Tuesdays for vocab and spelling, and Wednesdays for word rock stars (such as the man who maintains the Language Log).

It's a really cute book, and the tiny entries are able to pack a lot of grammatical punch into them by explaining the rule in one or two memorable sentences (that usually have to do with the antics of an Aardvark and a snail called Squiggle...). Fogarty also takes style to task, and reminds the reader every now and then that although one usage of a word or grammatical issue is preferred or more prevalent, there are other options available that are not wrong--people are just told that they are. She suggests ways in which you may use a word without getting a lecture from either the prescriptivists or the descriptivists. Fun!

Apparently, she also has a podcast. I have to check it out.

18. When You See an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse by Ben Yagoda

"In the end, it came down to two potential titles. Number one, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. Number two, Pimp My Ride."

Already that had me in stitches, and the book had barely even started! Yagoda's wry humor and observations really carry this wonderful book on style. It tackles style of speech one part at a time (adjectives, nouns, interjections, adverbs--the whole lot is there), and tries--much like Fogarty--to build a bridge between descriptivists and prescriptivists. Yagoda just has a different approach: he rather likes to point out why both of the sides are wrong and way too extreme. I like it! Also, I have to like anyone who takes a stab at Dan Brown at every possible turn just in the name of giving examples on bad style*, and who refers to Buffy, the Vampire Slayer as a notable source for linguistic trickery.

Instead of going on lengthy lectures, Yagoda occasionally selects a punchier approach for bringing the point home. As an example, he counters the old "Thou shalt not end a sentence with a preposition" silliness with a couple of jokes (among the more obvious reasons for why this is a silly rule). Here's one:
"A guy from South Philadelphia, on vacation in London, asks a bowler-hatted gent, 'Where's the subway at?' The Londoner replies, 'Don't you Yanks realize that it's poor English to end a sentence with a preposition?' To which the South Philly guy says, 'Okay, where's the subway at, asshole?'"

The title is attributed to Mark Twain. Oftentimes, adjectives are not encouraged because they make a writer lazy: it's easier to say that a character is angry, instead of showing the signs of anger in the character. Or it's easier (and thus much more vague) to say that someone is old, instead of writing how the age shows in the character. Although Yagoda also has his criticism toward adverbs, he makes a case for why they and adjectives are sometimes needed. Additionally, he talks about a bunch of words that are adverbs but that are often used by the same people who abhor adverbs--they just don't happen to end in the classic -ly.

My favorite bits were in the interjections section, where Yagoda ponders about the versatility of those short utterances. He quotes a popular Internet meme among military folk on the Marine utterance "hoo-ah", whose meaning ranges from "Sir, yes Sir!" to "that is enough of your drivel." It's pretty amazing that one word (or rather, an utterance), can have such variety in meaning, and we all seem to be able to get those nuances. If "hoo-ah" is too foreign, think of the word "hey", and in how many ways it can be used.

I would love to quote this book here endlessly, but I'll just leave it at this vague, adjectival description: it's a really fun book to read, overall.

*The first of the at least four jabs I noticed: Yagoda writes about how great American novels often begin with the definite article, the, instead of the more British tradition of a.

He lists some great American novels, and ends the list with "...The Color Purple, The Corrections and The Da Vinci Code. (Just kidding about that last one.)"

Haha! This foreshadows the later chapters, where Dan Brown is taken to task more than once for his horrid writing style.

On writing

2010-06-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

I have read a few books on writing before. I think fondly of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, which is an absolutely wonderful guide for writing--not that I know anything of writing fiction. It was just a delightful read.
We were at Value Village the other day, and I grabbed this book just on a whim: I'm a translator, but I have never translated fiction. I would love to expand into fiction, but I also know that in order to be successful, I will need to know how to create fiction myself. How else is one able to either copy styles over into another language, or the feelings the original author is trying to convey? Creative writing is also recommended for editors, who would like to become fiction editors. So I figured, why not?

16. The Art of Compelling Fiction--How to Write a Page-Turner by Christopher T. Leland
This book is more than ten years old, but a fun read anyway. The chapters each deal with one issue, and the chapters end with a handful of exercises that the writer can do, from studying his or her favorite books and recognizing certain elements in them, to analyzing the writer's own material and choices and then writing a story about a character that never seems to appear in the stories. Leland gives an example of a man who always wrote stories about 20-something surfer dudes who had a lot of play in the world of women. Those characters were well-rounded, but whenever he tried writing female characters, he could only produce flat, stereotypical creatures. So, he ended up choosing a character as far away from his usual style as possible to practice: a retired, single woman named Gloria.
I also liked the bit about letting characters speak in their own voices, and become central figures if that feels right. I do believe this is what happened with the TV show House. Originally, it was supposed to be about Wilson, House's friend and colleague, but in the progress of writing the script, House was just too delicious a character to give only the occasional appearance. Luckily the writers listened to that nagging voice of giving House more space, et voila: success.
Because the author is a fiction author himself as well as a teacher of creative writing, he has a lot of anecdotal evidence on his personal failures and successes (and those of his students'), which all prove his points.

Also, I have to admit to liking anyone who thinks that Holden Caulfield is, although an iconic character, also "obnoxious." Hehe.

Finnish cultural ambivalency; history of words

2010-05-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

14. Maata meren alla by Riikka Ala-Harja ("Ground under water")

This is a glimpse into the life of Ida, a thirty-something Finnish woman who was adopted from Namibia--which was populated by Finnish missionaries at the time--by a staunch socialist factory worker, Kati. Scuba diving is her passion, and it is the only element in her life where she seems to welcome any excitement or fear. And who can blame her for desiring stability--as the only brown person living on the shores of Bothnian Bay, Northern Finland, raised as a Finn but never accepted as one, her daily routine consists of "stand out of the crowd today."
When long-time pen pal of Ida's mother--a fellow socialist--goes traveling and leaves her Berlin apartment in need of a house-sitter, Kati suggests that Ida go live in Berlin for a while. After fighting back, she gives in and goes, into an environment where she is out of her comfort zone.

The title of the book is a play on words. Although the movie version, from where the book's cover is taken, was translated as "Ground Under Water", the title literally means "Ground under the sea." It can also be read as "To lie under the sea." It reflects both Ida's desire to find her groundings, a place where she feels comfortable, and the almost-suicidal nature of scuba diving, where you consistently have to ask your diving buddy whether everything is OK by using hand signals.

The story has such great premise, but falls nevertheless flat. There is Ida, who has grown up in Finland but sticks out like a sore thumb because of her skin color but who is almost stereotypically Finnish: she hates talking about her feelings, hates conflicts and is scared of meeting her neighbors in Berlin and talking to them--except when she gets drunk at the bar.
Now, not many books have been written in Finland from the point of view of someone who experiences racism while being as Finnish as one can get, so it's great to read one. Although Ala-Harja's attempt was admirable, the end resulted in Ida being a character, who is constantly defining herself by her Namibian past; by a place, where she hasn't been since she was three years old. On the one hand I understand what the author is trying to say: when Ida does not feel at home in a country where she grew up in, where she got her education, and which is, well, her home, she might have the desire to define herself the same way others define her; the foreigner, the outsider. Yet, I could not help but think how many non-white Finns Ala-Harja interviewed for this book to really understand their experiences beyond having the usual racial epithets thrown at them. My guess would be: not that many.

Stylistically, the novel follows a stream-of-consciousness model, where conjunctions and full stops are the enemy and the comma rules the land. Ala-Harja underlines her analogies by marching them out time and again: you will get very familiar with the story of Zacchaeus from the Bible, as well as the thoughts of death combined with the lure of the sea, and the conflicts of socialism versus capitalism.

Although the story seems to be huge in scope and its underlying theme, I still felt as if nothing happened in it. Ida's time in Berlin is almost a secret to the reader, save for two notable events and name-dropping of some famous attractions. She has no more understanding of her life or her mother at the end of the story than she had in the beginning, although she decides to return to Berlin with her diving buddy after having an internal monologue about her mother. Although I feel that this should serve as criticism to the novel, it could be seen as praise, too: how much more life-like can a novel get?

15. Semantic Antics by Sol Steinmetz is a book that On the Dot wanted to be but instead, posed as something else (still bitter about that, yes). Semantic Antics goes alphabetically through the evolution of some choice words. The cover refers to the word 'meat', and how it used to simply mean 'food', but later evolved to mean, well, meat. The two most common ways a word evolves are amelioration, where people begin to use words with negative connotations in more positive contexts, thus making the word itself positive; and pejoration, where the opposite happens.

Although the writing gets a bit jarring after a while, what with most of the entries beginning with phrases such as "The word [repeat the word in the subheading] was first used as..." or "The word [repeat the word in the subheading] is nowadays known as X, but did you know that...", the history of these words is fascinating. Also, without explicitly meaning to do it, the book works as great teaching material for people who think they can use pejorative and insulting terms just because the words originally, about a hundred years ago, were neutral or had different connotations. And meat used to originally mean 'food', but nobody goes around saying that they should be allowed to call all food 'meat'. Sure, you're allowed to do that, but you'd sound stoopid, because that's not how the word is used any more.

To quote a reviewer on Amazon.com, it's true that this book is merely a "short short short version of Oxford English Dictionary" (just like On the Dot and The F word are as well), but I do welcome these short versions of it if it means that more people are able to access the OED *pines after her free OED-subscription*.

2010-05-20T15:43:00.000-07:00

13. Distress by Greg Egan

I just read someone describe genre fiction (of which science-fiction is one representative) as an opposite to literature that discusses philosophical issues. I see the suggested Toni Morrison book and raise Distress.
Let me digress for a bit. See, science fiction may be my favorite genre exactly because it often is so philosophical. I'm not a total nerd for gadgetry, so I don't read sci-fi because of the electronic inventions in them. After all, most of the time future and the inventions are used as a vehicle to discuss much larger issues. As an example, in my favorite book, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, gadgets are at the foreground: there are nanobots, and most importantly, the electronic book that teaches its reader interactively and in an age-appropriate manner. Yet, it's not about how awesome horse robots or guns attached to your head are, or how cool that interactive book is; instead, it deals primarily with social classes, and how a class predetermines one's life. Also, it's a celebration of literacy as a tool to overcome obstacles. It's bordering on metafiction, and it's just a genius novel.
Another reason why I love sci-fi is the social issues discussed in it. It sucks that you are reading a fantasy novel where people grow tails, do magic, ride dragons--and the only place a woman has in that story is to be some kind of a crutch for the male protagonist. Or, the characters are different "races": they share the same features and are basically one huge mass without any individualism. It's apparently easier to imagine flying dragons and elves than gender and race equality, you know? Not so with sci-fi. Say what you want about Robert Heinlein, but he basically wrote The Handmaid's Tale already in the 50s in Revolt in 2100. Not to mention that only toward the end of Starship Troopers does he reveal that the main character is actually Filipino (yet another indicator of why Paul Verhoeven just didn't get the book). It's at the same time wonderful and utterly sad that only in reading sci-fi I am not annoyed by stereotypical portrayals of gender and race.
As an example, in Distress the world is at a state where you can choose your biological sex. If you feel like you are a man trapped in a woman's body, you can change that very easily, and vice versa. Also, if you don't think sex is a big deal at all, you can wipe out all of your genitals and become asex. From a linguistic point of view this is also done amazingly throughout the book: Egan creates third person pronouns for all people who do not fall into traditional he-she groups, and uses them throughout the book without any raised eyebrows from the protagonists. It's like... damn. Wish it was that easy, instead of people getting their bow ties in a twist when a guy has a sex change operation. Toward the end of the book, the main protagonist, Andrew, and an asex accomplice of his have a big discussion about it. Andrew does not understand how someone can be asex, and Egan uses him as a conductor of all the readers' possible questions as to why these different genders would exist in the future.

Oh yeah, Distress...
Andrew Worth is a film maker, carrying his recording tools within himself. After an especially harrowing project where he set out to expose the perils of "frankenscience" (a derogatory term for science that meddles with human biology), he is ready to move on. When he hears about a gig to cover a conference focusing on the Theory of Everything (TOE), he convinces his boss to take the project away from his colleague and give it to him.
The project sends him to Stateless, an artificially built island where anarchists come to create their own destiny and rules. Stateless is the host of the year's conference, and Andrew has been advised to focus on Nobel Laureate, former child genius Violet Mosala, whose TOE everyone is waiting for with baited breath. Well, excluding groups such as the mysterious Anthrocosmologists, who believe that once the right TOE has been revealed, the universe will unravel itself and human kind will be destroyed, and the Mystical Renaissance movement who believes that life is such a mystery that it is better left uninvestigated. Their mouthpiece, Janet Walsh, is an expert in creating strawman arguments and bringing about irrelevant, knee-jerk reaction inducing "evidence" to undermine Mosala's intellect. Hmm, I wonder if we could find a modern equivalent to her in real life...
Soon Andrew is tipped off about a plot on Mosala's life, and the story takes a quick turn straight into action-movie alley. Andrew does not know who to trust, or even what he thinks of "frankenscience" or TOE--his feelings go from loathing to fear to utilizing science the best he can. Will science be used for good in TOE, or will science blow us into smithereens?
If that does not qualify as philosophical pondering, then I really don't know what would.

ETA: Apparently using Chrome to update this blog creates double line spaces where only a single space should be. Hence the formatting this time. I'll look into it.

More on language

2010-05-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

Substance and Style--Instruction and Practice in Copyediting by Mary Stoughton.
What the title says. It is an oldie, but a goodie, despite one or two issues that are not relevant anymore in copyediting. My teacher recommended this book because it has a lot of exercises. I've now done them all, and whooboy--what a task. Contrary to Einsohn's book, where the exercises gradually build up, here they drill one aspect over and over again in short paragraphs and at the end of the book, compile everything you have learned into one, gigantic exercise which needs you to perform multiple passes on it.

I think the two books complemented each other very well; whereas Einsohn's was fun to read and more up-to-date, Stoughton's offers a larger variety of brain puzzlers. I ended up skipping the short sections that describe the problem and just diving straight into the exercises. One reason for this was that Einsohn had unashamedly borrowed from Stoughton (which Einsohn admits readily in the foreword), so there would have been repetition anyway.

On the Dot--The Speck That Changed the World by Alexander and Nicholas Humez
This book has a big, whopping dot on the cover. Its preface states, "On the Dot, as the title promises, is a book about dots--mostly, though not exclusively, the sort we use in print."

This must be the worst thesis statement I have ever read--and I used to teach students how to compose academic papers!

I'm almost done with the book, but I'm not sure if it's worth my time to finish it. I'm very disappointed with how all over the place this book is. Often, it seems that the dot is used as a mere vehicle for a rant about the Patriot Act, or a long litany of an obscure word's etymology--and only because the word happened to remind the author of the word dealing with punctuation (although its meaning might be completely different). Let me illustrate:

The first chapter, "Time and Chance--punctuality and coin toss", begins with the idiomatic expression "on the dot", meaning that something happens exactly at the time predicted. Instead of discussing why the word "dot" has taken the meaning of punctuality (pun intended), we are immediately transported to a discussion about how Greenwich Mean Time became the official 0 hour for nagivation. The authors bring us back to "arriving on the dot" by making this bizarre claim, "You might think that the French expression for arriving on the dot would be arriver a point..." Who, except people who have no idea of how language works, would think that just because the word 'dot' is in French point, an idiomatic expression would be a literal translation? Ah, I see--this just worked as a nice lead into the history of coin toss, and how it has been described in various languages. At this point I am all question marks: sure, coin toss, and the history of "heads or tails" is fascinating, but... what does it have to do with the topic of this book, let alone this chapter?

We get further away from the dot when the authors introduce different types of die people use, and even what type of other materials can be used to throw stuff in games. They even detail the various possible scenarios in the game "Pass the Pigs", and end up talking about the fuzzy dice hanging from a young driver's rear view mirror. The chapter ends up with the etymology of the word 'pile'--with absolutely no connection to the beginning of the chapter. What?

The chapter on bullets, or raised dots to mark lists, begins promisingly: all of three pages are dedicated to the usage of bulleted points (but again, no visible reason as to why people began to use the raised dot...). Then, there is a sudden twist in the narration : "Of course, real bullets ... nowadays do have points on them." The ensuing paragraphs are all about the etymology of--not bullets, as you would expect--but balls. And just because the French word for a bullet (from a gun) is balle. We also learn that the Latin word bulla means "bubble." Guess will this chapter also talk about bowling and bowls?

If I had given a subtitle for this book, it would have been "Using punctuation to come up with whatever random crap words remind me of." How else can a chapter titled "...and a half--Musical dots" talk about feminism and its fight against simplifying the world into binary oppositions already in its third page? It has absolutely nothing to do with music, or using punctuation. It has something to do with the idea of a "half", but... the title is not "How world views the concept of halves." This chapter is horrible, anyway. It talks about how it's awesome that the Greek have a word for pairs (which, apparently is an indication of a binary world view) by giving words such as duo and binoculars as examples--and conveniently forgetting that there are also words such as a trio...

What the heck is this book about? Not only is it also really verbose to the point that I want to smack the authors in the head, it's hard to find any coherence in it. If they wanted to write a book about the etymology of words that literally mean points and dots but are now used in a variety of ways, they should've just said so.

On the Dot is not a "natural history" of the dot, although that's what the book claims it to be. I probably would've been absolutely fascinated by this book if it was framed differently. I picked it up to read about the dot, how it revolutionized communication, and so on. I did not need to know how abbreviations are formed.

Textbook--a rare guest

2010-05-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

So, I have been taking an editor's course, and a variety of books were recommended for further reading. As the lovely Elliot Bay Bookstore happened to have a copy of two of the recommendations in their shelves, I nabbed them. Here's the first one I have gone through.

The Copyeditor's Handbook by Amy Einsohn is organized well, from the most common problems such as comma placement and hyphenation to how to edit tables and the index in a nonfiction book. Each chapter ends with an editing exercise or two, and the answer key provides clearly stated reasons for the editing choices, along with most possible alternatives.

The exercises were great: not only did they practice the subject of the chapter, but they gradually built up in difficulty. As an example, the first exercises were fairly mechanical, only dealing with punctuation. By the end of the book, you would have to pay attention to everything else that had come before and the topic of the chapter. So, even if the instructions asked you to pay attention to wordiness and how numbers are treated while making sure that the author's personal style was not messed with too much, you also had to remember to check punctuation, dangling participles, and run some fact-checking ("Is the tennis player's name really spelled like that?") Pretty neat. Also, there are some silly jokes embedded into the example sentences. Kind of reminds me of my Finnish syntax classes back in the day, where the teacher would, with a totally deadpan expression, give example sentences such as "The meat is infested with maggots." I guess her method worked, because I still remember that sentence very, very vividly.

Also, I have been reading two other books within this same copy editing topic, and I gotta tell you.... There's no grammar book, or a style manual, that doesn't quote the famous Star Trek line as an example of the old, silly rule of thou shalt not split your infinitives. Don't make me write it out; you know what I mean. Nerd.

2010-05-06T10:19:00.000-07:00

12. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

So, Sofi Oksanen had to cancel her West coast book tour because of Eyfjallajökull. I still went to the reading, just because the two other authors making an appearance on behalf of the PEN World Voices festival, Tommy Wieringa and Christos Tsiolkas, were introduced by local celebrity, Sherman Alexie.

When I say "local celebrity", I do want to point out that for me, Alexie was mostly a familiar name from The Colbert Report where he has appeared as a guest, and from columns and poems people have been linking me to. After Avatar came to the theaters, people linked me to Alexie's poem How to Write the Great Indian Novel, which was published years before Avatar, but still seemed to ring oh so true. So, now that he was giving a reading and hosting the PEN panel a couple of blocks away from me, I figured I might as well go see him.

And I'm glad I did! His reading was hilarious, and the poems he had chosen were funny and poignant. I ended up picking up this book that night, as I had heard of it winning various awards. It is a Young Adult novel, which makes it a nicely quick read, but it does not mean it makes the subject matter any less complicated than ones in Old Adult's novels.

It's Junior's story, which is partly an autobiography: like Alexie, Junior is a hydrocephalic born in Wellpinit to a Spokane Indian reservation. And like Alexie, Junior decides to leave the reservation to attend an all-white high school, where the only other Indian is the horrifying "red skin" mascot. Instead of discussing the ensuing issues of marginalization of American Indians, white privilege and being poor as an academic brain exercise (which I would have also enjoyed), Alexie gives voice to his younger self, who comes to realize all of these issues through personal experiences--and often very viscerally.

It's a great novel for adults and kids alike, and it defies many stereotypical images of American Indians prevalent in books (often written by white people), while dealing with all the serious issues that American Indians face, such as alcoholism, poverty and early death; before Junior turns twelve, he has already been to forty-two funerals, and most of those deaths have been caused by alcoholism, directly or indirectly. How many white kids can say that? How does the prevalence of death affect a child?

One major issue is the title's part-time reference: by attending a white school, Junior enters a world of in-between. In a cartoon he draws two versions of himself, one hated by people on the reservation and the other loved by people at the white school, and both of his versions display a thought balloon: "Who am I?!" Although gradually people begin to like Junior at his new school, he is still not exactly one of them. At the same time, his best friend hates him for leaving the reservation--even if he returns every evening--and for being "a traitor".

A basketball game between the reservation school and the white school is the climax of this dissonance: Junior is first absolutely ecstatic that he has helped his team kick the reservation team's butt, especially after all the booing and violence displayed toward Junior during the game. He comes down from his high quickly when he realizes that most of those kids probably have not had anything to eat that day, and are going to return home where alcoholism and a pretty certain beating is waiting for them. He remembers how he wanted something, anything positive to happen to him. He has achieved that, as the celebrated member of his basketball team; when are those other kids going to get their break?

In short, the book is about navigating your way in life when you have been handed pretty bad cards and can't use money or fame to buy a new set; it's trying to come to terms at a young age with the idea that some are more privileged than others, yet it does not mean that they are intrinsically more deserving of their privilege.

"Is English capable of sustaining demagogery...?"

2010-05-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

11. Between You and I. A Little Book of Bad English by James Cochrane

Recently my days have just been filled with minute details of language, from reading The Chicago Manual of Style from cover to cover in an attempt of learning more about editing, to watching hilarious skits by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie about English language (hence, the title).

Saara recommended this book to me after hearing me rant about the million different ways people spell 'definitely', the worst being 'diffinantly'. Yet, this person probably can spell the word 'definite' just fine. Somehow, adding that little adverbial '-ly' at the end makes people lose any idea of correct spelling.

This book is not about the most common mistakes people make and making fun of them, har har har. This is about the mistakes people make because teachers, scholars and journalists have by example or more explicitly shown us what the correct version of writing is--even when it is totally wrong. The classic example is already on the book cover: "Between you and I." People are terrified of saying "between you and me", because for some reason it sounds... uneducated. As if the accusative case is somehow more uneducated than the infinitive. So, "between you and me" is actually grammatically more correct, but for some reason we have been scared into saying "between you and I", although we'd never say "they stood between you and he" (it would be "him"). Still, The Chicago Manual of Style states that both "you and me" and "you and I" are correct when used with "between". So... carry on! (Otherwise, a simple way to check this rule is to drop the first part and see, whether you would still say "I" or "me". Such as, "They told you and I a story" would be wrong, because you'd never say "They told I a story.")

The book is structured like a dictionary, going down the alphabet one offense at a time. Here are some choicest examples of Cochrane's writing:

Irregardless This clownish word is so well disguised as a sensible one that it quite often slips by unnoticed...

Literally Literally means... literally. If we [...] say, "They were literally glued to their television screens," then we are using the word in literally the opposite of its correct sense and committing a serious abuse of our language.

me, us him/her, them A strange disease is afflicting supposedly educated writers and speakers of English... It takes the form of extreme nervousness amounting almost to terror concerning the use of me, us, him/her and them...

moment in time, at this This is an example of what might be called "speaking on autopilot." The phrase this moment automatically triggers the follow-up, in time. But if a moment is not "in time", then what is it in? [...F]or ordinary mortals it is surely enough to say at this moment or even, simply, now.

Like I said, I'm reading through The Chicago Manual of Style, the editors' Bible, and I'm not even half-way down the book, but many of these issues from Cochrane's book have already appeared. Things have surely changed from when I was taught to compose an academic paper or any text in English, for that matter: no longer is split infinitives a bad thing--or rather, they never were. Somewhere along the lines teachers just adopted this rule, and thus generations of clumsy sentences were produced. Same with conjunctions--no longer is it considered bad writing to begin sentences with Ands and Buts (the latter is actually a preferred option for However).

As a descriptivist, I do think that written grammar rules should not completely dictate what is "right or wrong" in language. It is a mode of language that is preferred for writing, and the preference is highly influenced by the language of those who are in power, but as we hear every day, people get by communicating with each other without knowing how to use the gerund perfectly. Most of the time when people talk about "bad" English they don't mean cases where someone has written flaunt instead of flout (which is the kind of bad English this book is about)--most people think that bad English is whatever is non-standard, which then causes unreasonable prejudices against people who do not speak standard, textbook English. I think it would be better if kids were taught in school that there is a time and a place for all the language they use--but they just have to know that different registers work at different places. Text message language is gr8t 4 txt msgs, because it uses the precious 140 characters smartly. Still, it cannot be used to write your job application, because that requires a whole 'nother register. Likewise, you cannot talk to your grandmother as if you were talking to your academic peers (unless, of course, your grandmother is one!), and you probably should refrain from slangy expressions in front of a lecture audience, especially if you come from a different region. Not only would they maybe not understand what your slang expression means, they might chalk it down to you being an ignorant baffoon--when you most certainly are not that. It is unfortunate that mere word choices or sentence structures create such ideas, but that's how it is.

Here is, by the way, that skit I referred to. I love it!

Stories: on paper or electronically?

2010-04-25T18:48:00.000-07:00

I am drooling after a Kindle, a Nook, or whatever eReader. Me, of all people. I'm the person who absolutely loves books: the texture of the paper, the cover art, interesting binding. One reason I really like the Snicket series is that those books simply look amazing in hard cover. They even come with an Ex Libris.

When news of non-paper books first started to trickle in, I was alarmed. Would books go the way of newspapers? People don't subscribe to newspapers anymore like they used to, because you can get more up-to-date news online at your convenience. I'd hate it if books disappeared, as well.

This of course brings about the question: why do I hate that idea? Why is text in an electronic form somehow bad compared to being printed on a piece of paper? Books really should not be the thing itself; they are merely vessels for stories that people tell each other, whether fictional or nonfictional. The word is still in written form, even if it consists of bytes--it should not take away anyone's ability to read the story. It will not destroy literacy or make the next generation super dumb. The eInk used in these readers is amazing: it really looks like you are reading printed text. The experience is not at all like reading text from a computer screen.

From an environmental standpoint, wouldn't it be better not to print on paper? So far, there are not very many sustainable alternatives to paper pulp that is used for book pages: the unfortunate fact is that we destroy trees for reading purposes. Does not evoke quite as romantic an image as sitting down at the breakfast table with a glass of orange juice and the morning paper, now does it?

I'm also thinking of simpler benefits. I tend to read when I'm commuting, or traveling. I've even developed a system for selecting the Best Book to Take Aboard to optimize my traveling companion, which boils down to this: if it's a short book, the topic of it should make you think and pause so you'll spend more time with it, and thus you won't need to bring many books with you. If you opt for one big book, make sure it's not something that requires too much thinking, because the task of reading a huge book is anyway a bit daunting, and you don't want to be re-reading the first 30 pages over and over again, until you give up and just start watching the in-flight movie... (If you're going to say anything about me being a hypocrite for being concerned about trees and then flying... Yes, I'm aware of this.)

With an eReader, this whole dilemma of "I really want to bring LoTR with me but it won't fit in with my teaching material!" would be erased. I could have any damned book I wanted in there--multiple books, even! All in one, slim reader.

The authors would still get their money; so would the publishers, the editors and the designers. After all, they are producing a story and its accompanying art (typography included)--not the pulpy bits.

The downside to giving eReaders to all is that it would make libraries and bookstores obsolete. That would be a shame. Objectively I could say that bookstores are not any more needed than music stores when you can download music. But they are just such fun places to go to. I love browsing books. I've often bought a book that just somehow caught my eye on the shelf. Still, my selfishness should not be the reason to sustain bookstores.

I would regret the disappearance of libraries the most. I feel as if libraries are a true sign of democracy: anyone can go in there, get a library card, and borrow a book on any topic they are interested in. A poor person can learn mathematics on his or her own without needing to buy cable for Internet (or the computer, for that matter)--just go to the library. Heck, you don't even need a library card if you have the time to just go there, sit down, and read.

Libraries are also bastions of free speech: groups attempt to ban or sensor books that they think are inappropriate ("think of the children!" is the most common objection to, say, a children's book about two mommies), and libraries and their awesome librarians usually tell people to suck it. Even in Alaska.

I suppose if people preferred eReaders over books, library buildings would still exist: they would be the archive for a forgotten art form, printing. It would be fun to go in and touch books and leaf through pages. Also, I assume that they would still keep on hosting book club events, children's story times, and offering space for the community in the form of study areas and meeting rooms.

Maybe bookstores would transform the same way in a world without paper. They would be mostly used for the community to get together and read, or discuss reading. Maybe bookstores would work as hubs for downloading and buying your books onto your eReader. They would still host author events.

It's kind of sad that even such a simple thought as "I really want one of these eReaders!" makes me feel like a terrible human being. I suppose it's still good to think about these things. I pretty much have my mind set, though. I'll be getting an eReader at some point, but I doubt it will stop me from buying books also in printed form.

ETA: Forgot to mention one thing that is still making me a bit iffy about the eReaders: the biggest of them, and hence the ones with most flexibility in use and most titles, are created by gigantic booksellers. Kindle is Amazon's, and Nook is Barnes&Noble's. Which, as far as I know, means that when I buy books, I should be buying them from these places--I will not be able to support a local bookseller, and I would be at the whim of the pricing policies of these gigantic corporations. As soon as there is a good reader that can download library eBooks, and buy books from wherever the heck I want, I will definitely be on it. Right now, I'm being cautious about to whom I want to sell my book-loving soul.

A lot of text but not much of a plot.

2010-04-22T00:40:00.000-07:00

Time to take a look at a couple of knitting books I've had sitting around. I obviously don't read them word-by-word (I'm not that into reading), but I always do read the author's lovingly written blurbs about the patterns. You only need to read a paragraph from a knitting book to know whether the pattern will be something you'll like: if you find the style of writing suitable for you, the pattern will most likely fit your style as well.

Japanese inspired knits by Marianne Isager

This book has amazing patterns that are simple, yet very elegant. You won't believe how many knitting books I have browsed and left in the library shelves with a frown of disgust on my face because the knitted shirts, shawls and mini-shorts (brrrr!) seem more like the classic joke about horrid things your Grandma gives you for present rather than being actually something you can wear.
With that said... the "Japanese inspired" part was rubbing me the wrong way. First of all, the author begins telling the reader that she spent time in Japan and was inspired by whatever she saw there and thus created these items. "Most of the year" is her vague description, and yet she tells us she hopes the book will give us a picture of "how the seasons move through the year on the other side of the world." Lady, you were not there to see all the seasons, but whatever. Gives her apparently the authority to say things like "In Japan, we celebrate..." (emphasis added).

The blurbs about the patterns create this air of a mystical Japan, where everyone is guru-like and traditions are revered like in no other culture. Basically, it's exoticizing Japan. The patterns are "Japanese" mostly because there is some kanji and pretty pictures of koi and cherry blossoms splattered (tastefully and minimalistically, of course) all over the book. The exoticism is also evident in the selection of the book's only model: instead of actually getting a Japanese (or heck, even just an Asian) woman to pose, the model is a white woman who has been made up to look like a Japanese person. Take a look at any other, non-Japanese-produced knitting pattern books and you won't see white women with that hairdo in them - unless they're goths in a version of Stitch n Bitch. It's like a wet dream for Japan-o-philes: now's your chance to look like you're Japanese! Who's wearing Scandinavian knits that are Japan-inspired because we say they are!

One customer at Amazon.com made me giggle with this apt comment: "I understand that with so many knitting books coming out, it's not a bad idea for an author to have some kind of a hook. But these patterns are "Japanese-inspired" the way Ashton Kutcher is a Kabbalist." (The same reviewer actually makes a point about the white-girl-with-black-cropped-hair! High five!)

The author was invited to do an exhibit in Tokyo, of which she says: The reaction from the organizers of the Japanese exhibit surprised me - they didn't recognize much Japanese influence in my knitting; instead they exclaimed, "How very Scandinavian."

To Isager's credit, she does say that the garments in the book are not Japanese, but Japanese-inspired. Still, the inspiration seems to stem from only the most stereotypical traditions and customs that come to everyone's mind when hearing the name "Japan". Here are the pattern names:
- Stone Garden Jacket
- Winter in Tokyo
- the Fan
- flower buds
- the Carp
- the Umbrella
- the Sun
- Summer in Tokyo
- Rice fields
- Indigo
- Maple Leaves
- Sake and Soba (I guess cabled knitting can be called noodles...)
It's like someone going to Finland for half a year, and coming back wearing shoes made out of birch bark and talking about how people are in touch with nature over there, while singing joik - totally ignoring anything outside of folklore.

Still, with all that harsh criticism, the patterns are absolutely beautiful. I just wish there would have been less of the exoticism. I might even consider buying this book, if each of the projects did not require hours of work and tons of money put into the yarn... I mean, look at this cardigan: it's so cute!

Picture Perfect Knits by Laura Birek

This book is all about intarsia. If you're unfamiliar with that name, it's basically what you do when you want to create a picture by knitting. If you see a Che Guevara face knitted on a pillow - yup, that's intarsia (and yes, as inappropriate as that is, it is not the most inappropriate intarsia pattern in the book. That would be the face of Lenin).

Those two patterns already should give you the idea of the targeted audience: it will be the hipster-y kind, who do not really see the irony in wearing merchandise with Che's face on it. Or maybe it's so ironic that we squares don't get it!

The instructions and pattern descriptions are short, to-the-point, cutesy and loaded with puns and alliteration. The word "vintage" will make an appearance. There is a pattern for how to knit a cupcake on a pillow. It's that kind of a book.

I actually tried out a couple of the patterns, including a weird, but cute animal (turned out really nice), a butterfly, and a pair of children's cat paw mittens (so cool!). The full-on patterns are in a minority in this book, though: most of it is dedicated to intarsia patterns for images (kind of like pixellated art), and you can use them as a template for any project you want. Just use a basic pattern from any source, and add an image of your choice into it. It's very handy. I think I will be getting this book.

Soft + Simple Knits for Little Ones by Heidi Boyd

Grabbed this because it had two really adorable tops that looked simple enough for me to try. I did begin one for a 4-year old, but it turned out that had I finished it, I would've made a tunic big enough for me. So I had to scrap it. I was kind of surprised that the size would vary that greatly, although my needles were only 0.5mm larger than the suggested ones. I thought I'd try out some shorter projects, but a lot of them used fuzzy and sparkly yarn. Not really my favorite thing to knit, and I can't imagine children actually liking the fuzzy material tickling them all the time.

Still, there are a couple of toys in there that I want to try. If I ever finish one and it's not gigantic, I'll post a pic here.

Wrapped in Comfort by Alison Jeppson Hyde

I've been wanting to learn how to knit a lace shawl. I've just had trouble finding a pattern that's simple, yet pretty. I know there are plenty of patterns online, but I figured that if something is already printed on paper, I might as well get that. It's not fun trying to read patterns from your laptop screen. Especially on a bus.

Each pattern is accompanied by a personal anecdote from the author. Usually, the anecdote is about a woman she bonded with over knitting or admiring at shawls. Also: includes an anecdote about 9-11. Some call this heart-warming, some might call it sappy. I have to admit to not being able to read all of the anecdotes, especially as they are nonfiction written as fiction by possibly someone who is not very familiar with writing fiction. Zinnia's story is about going to San Francisco, and the one-page story begins and ends with a quote (one direct, one indirect) from that song that everyone always mentions when going to San Francisco. Then the author remembers that she might want to have it somehow connected to the shawl in question, so she ends the story with If your hair's too busy, here's my knitted version to wear or wrap around someone you love. It's that kind of prose.

The patterns are all quite wonderful, and I began one of the shawls that looked manageable. I also managed to read the pattern wrong, and wondered why my stitch count is not matching the pattern no matter what I do. Only later, reading another knitting book, did I find out what one abbreviation really meant (I misunderstood it as it was described in this book).

Reading what I just wrote I feel a bit bad about being so snarky and critical. But then again, there have been a bunch of knitting and crocheting books that I really like, so I don't think I'm being unreasonable. Knitting books, although without any plot, can also be well-written, or written with sloppy fact-checks and bad prose. Most people just skip the stories and go directly to the patterns. Which, I suppose, are ultimately what make or break a knitting book - not the writing.

You need what for this recipe? Adventures in typos and people who instead of apologizing just make it worse

2010-04-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

Usually writing about books is pretty tame: either the writing is reviews, or a news article on the content of the book in general. Or in the case of Sofi Oksanen, whether she's hot or not and how that sells/does not sell her books.

So you can imagine my delight this morning when I saw this bit of news: A Cook-Book Misprint Costs Australian Publishers Dear. The original linking text to it was something akin to "Cookbook turned into pulp because of a typing error", which caught my eye a wee bit more. Proofreaders and editors are important!

What I was not delighted with was the absolutely stupid comments by the head of publishing at Penguin Books, Bob Sessions.

"We're mortified that this has become an issue of any kind, and why anyone would be offended, we don't know," says Bob. See, he has no clue why on Earth anyone would be taken aback when a simple tagliatelle recipe asks you to use ground black people. Newsflash to Bob: if someone is offended, then there probably was a reason for that person to be offended - it doesn't matter if you personally were not, because I assure you, we can find something that offends you but doesn't offend others. Let's not play that game. You, Bob, are not there to make a judgment about whether there was anything to be offended about. Just acknowledge the mishap, apologize for causing distress, and move on. Simple as that.

But as a professional linguist I take extra beef with his reasoning for why this misprint should have been forgiveable:

When it comes to the proof-reader, of course they should have picked it up, but proof-reading a cookbook is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable.

Excuse me? Proofreading a cookbook is extremely difficult? What kind of an effed up excuse is that? If proofreading a cookbook is extremely difficult, what then is proofreading a novel with an ample amount of metaphors and run-on sentences? Is that then extremely-extremely difficult? What is easy to proofread? I would have imagined that cookbooks are easy to proofread as the text usually follows a pattern: first the recipe, then the instructions. Instructions use certain type of grammar, and you can expect certain words to be repeated a lot (bake, whisk, whip, mix etc.).

What I think happened was this: the proofreader did a bad job. End of discussion. Unfortunately, this time the mistake the proofreader made was just a pretty bad one. The last three books I have read have all had some kind of typos in there. It's annoying, but those get away with it because spelling "deity" with "diety" isn't going to make anyone think of the KKK (Alan Moore - I'm looking at you. Get that "diety" of yours checked).

God. I'm so annoyed by that shitty excuse you can't even believe it. It's like saying "Oh, teaching kids how to read is extremely difficult, so I find it forgivable that little Johnny never learned to distinguish his Hs from his Ns." Unless you have hired a completely incompetent proofreader to do the job who just decided to be lazy and skim over the text, the point of the text being difficult should not be it. How can it be difficult not to realize that "ground people" doesn't really fit in the text? You only do this if you are really tired/distracted and you are not focusing on your proofreading work. It's not like "OMG this text is so difficult... how on Earth do I know whether the author really wants to use ground up people or pepper??"

Bob Sessions's entire retort reads like "screw you, cry-babies - I'm having a tantrum because I lost all this money", and I don't think that's a very good idea from a marketing stand point.

2010-04-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

10. No Impact Man by Colin Beavan

Warning: I loved this book/the way ideas were presented in it, so this will mostly be overflowing praise. But not without criticism, I swear!

The About:

Beavan, a middle-class family man and an author who is vaguely discontent with his life decides to embark on an experiment, where he will consume as little new products in a year as possible, while also attempting to cut down the possible negative impact his life might have on our planet. This he decides to record in a blog and write into this book. He begins by baby steps: always selecting stairs instead of an elevator, and taking his own, reusable cup to a coffee shop. He struggles with the urge to consume with often hilarious results: when he decides to begin to take his own tote bags to the store, he gets obsessed about finding and buying a French fish net shopping bag, scavenging the entire New York in his attempt of finding one. Then he realizes that he has a house full of absolutely fine canvas bags to use as a tote - the idea of buying new stuff to accomplish something simple is just so ingrained in us that we can't even think about taking a walk without automatically thinking, 'Hey, I think I need new shoes that are specifically designed for walking!'.

This prompts him to question why we are so into Stuff, and how much happier we actually are with Stuff. According to surveys, Americans had less money and less Stuff in the 1950s than right now, but the rate of Happiness has not increased (see the book for more information on these "happiness rate" surveys). Basically, not only does he want to see whether a single person could (if enough single persons would join him) have a positive impact on the environment, he also wants to see whether learning not to get instant gratification from Things would make him happier.

Beavan begins the project by asking his family to not throw away any of their garbage, but instead collecting it in bags at home for a couple of weeks. This is just to get an idea of how much stuff they throw away. Besides the obvious food scraps and food wrapping, the shocker comes from items that are designed to be used for 5 seconds and then thrown away: paper napkins, paper towels, those little wooden sticks you stir your coffee with, plastic straws, plastic cups. It's easy not to pay attention to them because they are so small and so fleeting, but when you realize that you easily fill a garbage bag with them within a week, it makes you pause. An aside: this made me pay attention to such items that I used only today, and the tally so far is: 3 paper napkins along with food/drinks, paper napkins to blow my nose on. I was so horrified with this (and the idea that I waste at least that much probably every single day) that I refused to use a disposable, plastic spoon at a cafe to spoon up the milk froth from my cappuccino, and used a fork instead, probably puzzling the staff.

Before getting into the book, some reactions from other people:
Beavan's simple actions cause interesting reactions, and I'll get back to that in a second. This was evident in the documentary about the No Impact Man (which we watched yesterday - streaming on Netflix!) where the criticism went from "who is this bourgeoisie guy doing this only for a year - some do it all their lives! What a jerk" to "you can't call yourself a No Impact Man if your wife works for a company that promotes consumerism and trees are killed with every single magazine they print".

It's like a competition. Either you do it our way or you have failed. Either you do everything imaginable, or you are just a phony who nobody should listen to. And at the center of it all is Beavan, ready to admit that he is not perfect, and all he is promoting is to see how his family can reduce the garbage they create and hope that other people get inspired by it, too. He is not out to tell people who live miles away from the nearest grocery store to stop using their cars.

You may groan, but I'll say it nevertheless: he should be called a Huge impact man, because I can't look at plastic stuff the same way again, or the way I not only buy junk but use it.

This is, hands down, the best book I have read about the pros of environmentalism and what it actually means in a human being's everyday life. We all know what we should be doing, because we see those lists everywhere from Cosmo to CNN: change your light bulbs to be more energy efficient, drive less, eat locally produced foods - you know the drill. But people are kind of messed up: when others tell us what we should do, we usually find a ton of excuses not to do it or we get offended, because we feel that there is an underlying accusation there of "I am a better person for doing all these things, and you, let's face it, suck." So it's easier to find an excuse why not to use energy efficient light bulbs ("they give off an ugly light and don't go well with my decor!") rather than evaluate the information given objectively. Which, I know, is difficult, when there are also people who don't think we should be doing anything to improve our life on this planet, thinking that people are not to blame for disappearance of animal species, pollution, you name it.

But back to the book. What Beavan does is genius: he admits with a blush that he is one of those people who chastise Americans for driving too much while he himself drives to work/goes by subway. His experiment is for one full year to put his money where his mouth is. If he thinks that Americans should drive less, he should drive less. If he thinks that people use too much stuff made out of plastic he should stop buying stuff himself first and see, how easy it is to find alternative ways to create items that are sold in wrapping (soap, laundry detergent, washing liquids).

He is not doing this to prove himself as a better human being than the rest of us; he's doing it to see with how little he and his family can survive without endangering anyone's health or general well-being. He is willing to have it rough for a full year, and if something still feels rough after a year, they are willing to go back to their old ways. But not without trying.

My reading experience went from one extreme to another. It began with "awww, Americans are so endearing" when Beavan is marveling at how easy it is to bike to work and wondering why more people are not doing it, or coming to the miraculous conclusion that you can take your own bags to stores and fill one up instead of coming out of the store with 5 flimsy plastic bags that are barely reusable because they get holes punctured into them by a cucumber. It ended with "wow, are you serious???" when Beavan's family shuts off electricity at their Manhattan apartment, dreading the winter and long, dark days because the solar panel they have will not produce enough electricity to run his computer (for his work) and lights.

Of course, the premise is not without its problems: he is, after all, a fairly well-to-do person (with a wife who grew up in the world of yachts, country clubs and mink furs), so he can easily change some of his habits. It is no problem for him to start buying items that are only locally produced, or get his ingredients directly from the farmers - that's mainly a problem of directing your ample amount of cash somewhere else. He lives in the middle of Manhattan, which means that using anything else to get around is easier than using a car.

With that said, this book is not about whether he is the perfect example for environmentalism, or whether he WINS by doing things THE HARDEST WAY. It's all about how a single person changes from what he is used to to what he really needs. He is preaching to people like himself, who are most likely the people who also consume the most and create the most trash - which then affects the lives of everyone, regardless of their income levels.

On his blog he behaves almost guru-like: when people ask him, "what should I do first, where to begin?" he replies with "What would you like to do first?" And when the person responds, "Well, I'd like to start biking to work" he asks, "What's stopping you from doing that?" He does not want to be some almighty adviser, because we all have to pick our battles. He doesn't know how much money I have, where I live or how physically fit I am - he has no authority to tell me that I need to live my life exactly like he does. And that's what he acknowledges, which makes this project so beautiful. It makes you think about whether you could replicate what he does and if not, what are you able to do?
Even if the change you make is to never pick up a plastic bag from a store again, it is still a change, even if it feels small. As a result, you are still consuming and wasting less than what you did before.

11. Mariposa by Greg Bear

This is the latest installment from Greg Bear, the most charming and unintimidating sci-fi author of the Seattle area. I had the pleasure to hear him give a reading of his previous book, and I was delighted when the reading turned out to be more a lecture on why reading is important and how reading and stories affect our daily lives.

The Plot shortly before I start rambling about the reading experience
Something is horribly wrong with the future United States of America. The Vice President brutally murders his wife without apparently any remorse, and this scares the whole country poopless: were we about to have a homicidal psycho as president? How could this have happened? FBI agent Rebecca Rose is called in to investigate the connections of a CEO of a Talos corporation to a possible plot to bring down the government, only to find that the reality awaiting for them is more sinister than she has expected.

Then the rambles

Mariposa affected me with dread. I have to say that I have been reading this book on and off since late December, which is the result of owning a book and then pushing it further and further down the reading list because you still keep on getting library books, or borrowing books from friends... So Mariposa was definitely a victim of this, and I apologize, because it is a fine book. What mostly stayed with me after reading it was a feeling of dread. It's not a nice book. It's kind of like what might happen if the Baudelaire trio from Snicket books grew up to work in government jobs. Even a happily-ever-after ending would have a silent question at the end... "or did they?"

The book is a sequel to Quantico, which I have not read yet. I wonder if my understanding of Mariposa would have been easier if I had. With Mariposa, I had a terrible time with names: I simply could not remember which character was which, and I had to leaf back many a time to check who this person was now. There are two reasons for this: 1) me reading the book over a long period of time, and hence not really even remembering always what was happening, so I had to re-read bits anyway and b) because to me, the behavior of, say, Nathaniel, on the page did not seem all that different from the behavior of the Silent Man. They all kind of read like the same character to me after a certain point: determined and vaguely paranoid. Not only that, but there is not a single narrator: although Rebecca Rose is brought in as a prominent character, we have at least two others who speak with the authority of a person that the readers should be concerned about, and all of them are involved with the collapse of the United States in one way or another - and all in different operations, under cover or otherwise under the radar. Throw in a plot about imprisoning and giving a death sentence to a kid of an FBI operative to possibly tarnish the name of the institution, and there is a puzzler for ya!

I had a hard time following this book, so I might need to give it another go now that I know what's happening in it. I ended up reading the first 50 pages again because I had no clue of what was going on and who was doing what. Maybe my brain cells are dying from reading too much Cute Overload daily... Nah, Cute Overload, I still wuw ya! Still, this should not be held against Greg Bear, but rather my ability to read the book in my current state of mind. Will try it again!

12. The F-word by Jesse Sheidlower

As the name suggests to many people, this is about the word fuck. Yup, I just wrote it there. Does that mean I have to now put some kind of a disclaimer for my blog that this is not viewable for eyes under the age of 18?
Anyways! Or if you're me, you thought upon seeing the title "Oh, there's a second book out?"

Basically, The F-word is for you if you are interested in the etymology of the word fuck, but you don't have access to the OED. It lists the word as used in compound words, as a verb, adjective, adverb - you name it. Of course as with any slangy and/or expletive expressions, the usage changes quickly because people do get very inventive with language, and therefore this book probably needs an update every now and then. Sheidlower states, which phrases have been taken out because there has not been enough evidence for a wide-spread use, and which terms have included although they are still fairly new (guess whether MILF made it).

The preface to the book is interesting, as it tracks down the first instances of the word, the urban legends revolving around the word's origins, and then naturally, the legal cases that have involved the usage of the word in public places. Fuck is still a word that cannot be uttered in public radio, or basic cable - even if it's past kids' bed time.

I wish there would be an accompanying book that delves more into the arguments for and against letting "indecent" words to be published. The preface of the book already shows that both of the main arguments are wrong: "It's just a word - why are you so afraid of it?" and "It's indecent - we should never make our kids hear it!"

The first is of course absolutely stupid. If words were ever just words, I would not get into trouble if I told a friend that she has a big nose and she wears horrible clothes (and now I can imagine all of my friends going, "is she talking about me...?" NO! This is a fictional example, people). Words are never just words - they express our intent. And the intent of, say, the word fuck depends on the social context. If society at large has deemed that it is an improper word, I can shout the word till my head falls of and people will still think of me as an asshole - no matter how I say that it's "just a word".

The second argument is equally stupid. A word is indecent if we use it indecently or decide collectively that it is such. What is indecent depends on the cultural context, and apparently nowadays anything relating to sex is. Sure, it's right that nowadays the word fuck is censored, so in that sense the argument is right... But the whole "protect our children from seeing it in a dictionary" is quite stupid. First of all, most kids have heard it in one context or another, probably uttered by a family member of a younger age, by the time they turn 13. And the book gives a good argument for including the word in the dictionary: it is in wide usage, and nobody will ever accidentally find it - you have to know what you are looking for. Unless, of course, you are a freak who reads a dictionary like a novel, one entry at a time.

To me the most compelling reason to include the word fuck in dictionaries is that if we don't, later generations will not know how people actually spoke - whether we agree with their way of speaking or not. I find it sad that I might not ever find out how people really spoke in the Victorian era, because most of the curse words (and other, blood-pressure raising terminology) has been banned from written texts. That is, unless you were a clever chap and used puns or foreign languages to convey the meaning. I'm not saying that everyone should be saying the word fuck constantly, but as it is part of the nation's vocabulary, it should not be banned from institutions who keep track of our languages.

I'm not a frequent user of the word myself, which I find funny because I used to use similar curse words in Finnish quite a lot. In English, I hardly ever do. If I say fuck, I'm suddenly transported out of my body, and I see myself as an actor in an American sitcom, or in something like Beverly Hills 90210. I think this is because I personally relate the word to the language of youth, but I did not grow up using it although I knew of its existence - mainly through contacts to English-speaking cultures. If I say fuck or any variants thereof, I want to giggle because I feel like I'm acting American. Does this make any sense?

Next stop: a book about ESL speakers and how they use the dreaded F-word!
Thank you, Wasabi Prime, for the book! (And for the one below, too!)

13. F U Penguin by Matthew Gasteier

Appropriately, a second book whose idea revolves around the word fuck but who is unable to print it out full on the cover. Interesting!

This all started out as a web page called Fuck You Penguin, where this guy Matt insults cute animals who apparently act too pompous for their own good. Obviously, this is a reaction to Cute Overload, where pictures of cute animals are gushed over with cutesie-wutesie language.

Thing is... the website is pretty funny. Mostly because it gets updated often, and it doesn't matter if the insult of the day is just two words, because you probably have time to read only two words during your lunch break from work (because the rest of the time is spent on Facebook). If you don't find something terribly funny, you can always scroll to the next one.

As a book... it was funny, but a bit odd. There is one page that has a picture, and then the insult is either a caption to it or a paragraph on the next page. Then you are done with it and there will be no new picture or caption to replace it once you are done. So, the reading experience is not quite as pleasurable as on the web. Kind of like if The F-word was on the web - I wouldn't enjoy reading it from a glowing screen at all, but I like it as a book.

A good conversation starter for sure, though... That poor penguin!

Oh no. Why do I always end up, unintentionally, reading things in themes! I have Wetlands waiting for me, courtesy of my friend Saara... I'll try to read it on the bus on my way to work today, and hope no one notices, hehe.

Book side products

2010-04-05T18:17:00.000-07:00

Revisiting the cook book.

I did end up trying out a couple of recipes from this book. Surprisingly, one of the items praised as easy and delicious turned out to be just that: the dish took me all of 10 minutes to prepare, and it was really yummy. I have to admit that I was a bit suspicious with Feta Pasta Casserole including items such as red bell pepper - this sounded so much like random Finnish "exotic" foods. Man, although I loved my uni's cafeteria food (it was awesome!), they did have some crazy crap there that they called something foreign to give excuses to their odd choices of mixing ingredients that just shouldn't go together. I will never forget the time they served "Chinese wok casserole", which was rice with feta cheese and olives. I have yet to encounter any style Chinese cooking, let alone Asian cooking in general, that would use feta and olives. I have no idea what was going on there. And of course, the whole term "wok" to describe any pre-cooked pieces of frozen veggies mixed with noodles is questionable, too (slices of carrot? Seriously?)

But I digress big time. The Feta Pasta was a massive success. Encouraged by this, I tried the Lemon Zest Pasta Sauce, just because I love all things lemon. Fun fact: when you mix lemon zest with lemon juice and add some cream/cream cheese, the lemon begins to taste like lemon grass. I thought I was going nuts, so I asked hubby K. to try it. His taste buds are on a totally different level from mine, but he confirmed - you've made this sauce with lemongrass. So, in the end, the pasta sauce really just reminded me of Thai food. Good tip for the future, I suppose!

So, I'm happy to announce that the book really delivered what it promised, at least so far: really easy but yummy foods. I'll be testing out some of the other recipes as well.

Revisiting The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The movie for this novel finally came out in the US, with limited shows, and I was there the first evening in Seattle. With me were 3 others who had read the book, and two who had not. I was worried - what if the movie sucks? Then these people will never want to read the book, which is an awesome, awesome book. Like, actually awe-inspiring in the world of crime novels.

Apparently I fretted for nought: we all enjoyed the movie. Census was that it was nicely un-Hollywood, meaning that the characters looked like real people. Action was not explosions-and-blood-and-gore, but scarily realistic - which I think really drove the point home that this is not supposed to be a story that the viewer can distance him- or herself from. In my mind, it's a story of one or two of the Things Wrong with the World Today, and we should all learn from it. Interestingly enough, a lot of the reviews I saw for the movie said that the violence was too graphic and over the top, and that the viewers would be better off waiting for the American remake (which has already been assigned to a director, who, despite my pleas, will not be Quentin Tarantino - come on, man! He would totally get the whole vendetta-story!)

Things that we readers of the book did not like:
- Lisbeth Salander is less of an enigma in the movie. In the book, we don't even know what's going on in her head and whether she really is a mentally underdeveloped psycho of some kind until well into the story. I loved that about the book, because Larsson knew that had we learned Salander's personality from the get-go, we would condemn some of the people who viewed her strangely. But we are first shown how Salander seems through their eyes, so we get to understand both them and her. Genius.
- Mikael Blomqvist is so blah in the movie. Sure, he is pretty blah in the book, too, but he is damned smart. In the movie version, everything seems to just fall into his lap. He's supposed to be this wonderful, controversial and assertive investigative journalist, but we are not shown his investigative skills beyond him looking at some old pictures. It's Lisbeth who comes up with most of the answers, whereas in the book the pair works very equally.
- Some really important characters and storylines were completely left out or changed. I for one was surprised that the whole Wenneström deal made by Henrik Vanger was left out. If I had only seen the movie without reading the book, I'd wonder why on Earth would Mikael want to spend a year investigating something just because he "doesn't have anything better to do", as Henrik Vanger so says? I for one was fairly miffed at Erika, the head of the Millennium magazine, being written as a background character who barely has any spoken lines. Sure, if they had included her, they might have had to include the whole deal about open marriages, women in male-dominated work places etc, which just wouldn't have worked in the movie. In the book all of it is discussed really smartly, mostly because the characters involved are smart, but if the movie could have dedicated only 5 minutes to these issues it would have come out either as preachy or just too shallow a handling. Same with Dragan Armanski, the Croatia-hailing head of Milton Security, for whom Lisbeth works. Having read the books, though, these two characters must be included in the next movies. There just is no other option.

Although that is a lot of Not Likes, the movie still was very enjoyable. A movie can never be as good or better than the book, just because our imagination adds a lot to it. Although a picture is better than a 1,000 words, we do not view that picture the same way, or pick out the same things from it. The author has more of an influence that way. So, all in all, a very good movie, albeit the book's topic got a very soft treatment with the movie.

Now, back to reading.

My favorite new children's book series

2010-03-11T11:55:00.000-08:00

9. Tatun ja Patun oudot aakkoset (Tatu and Patu's Bizarre Alphabet) by Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen

Havukainen and Toivonen are a married couple, who both have a background in illustration: Aino primarily has worked with children's books, while Sami used to illustrate, for a while, one of my favorite comics ever, Kramppeja ja nyrjähdyksiä (Cramps and Strains - also available in English!). Together they began to work on a series about two weird boys, Tatu and Patu. These are more picture books than anything else, but the ones I have read have made me laugh out loud, and because each page is usually filled with a large picture with an incredible amount of detail, you never get tired of finding random references to Finnish (or pop culture) items. I have used their book Tatun ja Patun Suomi (also available in English as This is Finland) in teaching Finnish: the illustrations are great examples of typical (and even stereotypical) Finnish life, and topics from geography to Santa Claus are covered in a humorous manner. The premise is that Tatu and Patu have no idea what a Finn is, so based on the evidence they have found (the hilarious first page of the book) they firstly construct a typical Finn who is surrounded by a variety of typical Finnish knick-knacks and then embark on a mission to find out what is going on in Finland. This here is a sample (click to embiggen):

So when I heard that they have a book coming out about the alphabet, I thought: perfect! Even better for teaching Finnish as a second/foreign language! I first saw the book at my friend's place, and she wanted to show a sample of it. We ended up reading almost the entire book through while giggling, because it just is so silly. Basically, each page (or, with a more commonly used letter, a spread) is a picture not unlike "Where's Wally?" - you just have to find items beginning with the letter stated on the page. Not only that, but sentences are given, such as "Can you find the dog who is looking dour because he despises his Duck hoodie?" And sure enough, there is a really grumpy looking dog in the picture who is wearing a pink hoodie, covered in pictures of Donald Duck.

On the page with "foreign" letters C and D, you can spot, among others, Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Cousteau (be still my heart!!), Darth Vader and cheerleaders in a picture that is taking place at a Curling Club's disco... It's genius. I want to be a fly on the wall when Havukainen and Toivonen come up with these things!

The series kind of reminds me of The Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket in the sense that it does not patronize children, or make things simpler just because children are the main audience. Instead, the series fearlessly uses words and turns of phrases that make adults like me chuckle, while still remaining totally child-friendly in content.

I think I need to collect the rest of these books. They are super entertaining, and people of all ages seem to love them - there is always something new to find in the pictures or in the stories. One such example is from the Finland book, where Tatu thinks that Santas are elected like presidents. The story itself is pretty funny, and at the same time Patu tries to tell the reader who exactly is elected by votes in Finland and what the president (or Santa...) can do. Adults may find it hilarious that Tatu is dressed up in a Santa outfit, handing out pens, stickers and other swag with slogans printed onto them, especially as the slogans are references to old Christmas songs (that little kids might not even know).

It's a children's book, sure, but it's just so much fun.