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!

Reading about reading and how we use language

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.