The messes in our heads

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

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

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!

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...

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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!

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!