Real Simple Solutions: Tricks, Wisdom, and Easy Ideas to Simplify Every Day by the eds. of Real Simple Magazine

This is a pretty book by the editors of a pretty website , and it’s got lots of pretty pictures and pretty fonts and pretty layouts. The premise is exactly what the (sub-)title states: tricks, wisdom, and easy ideas. Includes such helpful hints as:

• how to wash your face (apparently it’s possible to do it wrong?) (pg.24)
• use Velcro to stick things to other things (pgs. 90-91)
• use a mug to hold stuff that’s not tea/coffee (pg. 152)
• use scissors to cut things (pg. 62)
• how to set a table (pg.156-157)
• how to “jazz up old standby beverages”: rim a margarita glass with sea salt and lime, or a Bloody Mary with celery salt (pg. 146). No shit. I will say, as a Canadian, that a Caesar will beat a Blood Mary any day.

In summary: if you can already read, you’re probably too smart for this book.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)

This book confused me a bit — I’m not used to my fiction having footnotes. I was also a little confused because there’s a lot of Spanish slang going on here, and my Spanish is at the absolute most basic level. Google translate was less helpful than I had hoped, just because the narration was so slangy.

However, I can imagine other readers being even more lost than I was, because the narrator is such a huge nerd and kept dropping references to the classics: LOTR, Star Trek, Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, old-school comics.

Here’s a picture of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. This isn’t my picture. I refuse to fold books this way. (Photo credit: flickr)

That was actually one of the reasons I picked this book up in the first place; I’d heard (actually read) about the extreme nerdiness of the narrator, which — being a big nerd myself — appealed to me. It’s a good way into the story before you figure out who the narrator is or how he fits into the plot. There’s a lot of Dominican history for him to fill in, and luckily he does so with style.

I liked the protagonist, Oscar. He was an extremely sympathetic character (shy, fat, nerdy, a writer, a dreamer), and I found myself hoping that his life was more “wondrous” than “brief”… alas, I was disappointed.

I liked “The Brief Wondrous Life” and I was interested in it while I was reading it, but it still took me a while to get through.  It just didn’t hook me like some books do, so I didn’t experience that ‘can’t put it down, have to finish it right now’ feeling. You know the one — it’s like an adrenaline rush, but for the sort of people who like armchairs and that new book smell. No? Just me? Okay.

Sweater Girls: 20 Patterns for Starlet Sweaters, Retro Wraps & Glamour Knits by Madeline Weston and Rita Taylor (2012)

Me knitting… or trying to. The cat on my lap is kind of in the way. (Photo credit: Kathryn Walsh)

Yes, I am that girl who knits. And yes, I read books of knitting patterns. I was excited about this one too — ’30s/’40s/’50s styles are often right up my alley. But when I actually opened it up, I was super disappointed. So many of the pieces were straight-up ugly, and the few pretty ones had unnecessarily complicated patterns. There’s one I might try to attempt after I finish what I’m currently working on, but we’ll see.

Pocket

Everyone has that one app they can’t live without — it’s become so integral to their life they can’t imagine how they ever lived without it. Mine is called Pocket.

This blog, as its title suggests, focuses on books, even though I read all kinds of other stuff. Magazines, pamphlets, takeout menus… I’ll read anything if it sits still long enough! But besides books, I mainly read online articles.

I stumble across new articles all the time, mainly when I’m supposed to be doing something else (cough: working). Since I don’t always have time to read it right away, this great app called Pocket lets me read it later.

When you install it, it sets up a little button in your internet browser that you can click on when reading an article, and it’ll load that article into the ‘cloud’, where it syncs on your computer, phone, and any other devices you’re using.

It’s brilliant! I can use it to read stuff later when I’m not connected to the internet, and I can also use it as a convenient list of ‘important stuff I should read eventually’.
So yes, Pocket is my ‘desert island’ app, and no, I’m not getting paid to write this.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (2011)

Amy Chua, the “Tiger Mom”, and her daughters at the 2011 Time 100 gala. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This book created a lot of fuss when it came out back in 2011. The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt, and there are now nearly 9,000 comments on that post. A lot of people were very upset, suffice to say. It’s a book about what Chua calls the Chinese method of parenting — it’s very strict; there’s a major focus on school and music; not so much focus on friends/sports/games/TV/”fun”, essentially. Really, read that excerpt and read some of the comments on it.

I’m neither Chinese nor a parent, and I have to say I actually agreed with a lot of Chua says in her book. Perhaps her methods are extreme (threatening to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she refuses to practice her instrument, for example), but I also think school and music are very important. Fun isn’t unimportant, don’t get me wrong, but it shouldn’t come at the detriment of learning. Learning can be fun!

Amy Chua doesn’t like the idea of self-esteem very much. She says in her book, “Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches. Chinese parents aren’t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently. […] Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them.”

I had a chat with my own mama last night about “self-esteem”. My parents always expected the best of me, so I expected (expect!) the best of me, too. Telling a child she’s “good enough” (whether it’s at math, soccer, violin, …) when she’s not is just setting her up for failure later in life, or at least mediocrity. Why bother trying to improve when you’re already “good enough”?

On an almost completely unrelated note, this is the second book in a row I’ve read where the protagonist is a lawyer and law professor who went into that career because she felt like she “should”. As someone who works with (read: for) lawyers and was half-thinking about law school, it makes you stop and re-consider.

Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight by M.E. Thomas (2013)

I actually finished this book last week, but it’s been stewing in my brain for a while… I described it to a friend as “more interesting than good”, but now I think maybe I was just being judgemental.

I always like reading get-inside-my-head type stories, but I was uncomfortable inside this person’s head. (M.E. Thomas is a pseudonym; she gave a lot of details about herself without any of them being too specific. I wonder if anyone who read this knew her and figured out who she was?) I like to think I’m a nice person, but some of the things the author said and did were not so dissimilar from myself. And since sociopaths or psychopaths are supposed to be the worst of the worst (rapists, murderers, liars, thieves, …) this was unnerving.

But I think this is exactly M.E.’s point — how different are we all, really? I mean, the first chapter is called “I’m a Sociopath and So Are You”. Everything and everyone is on a spectrum; it’s just that most of us think we’re on the ‘good’ end, while people like her are on the bad end. But then she describes her life as a powerful lawyer and a law professor, and tells stories that illustrate how much she really does love her nieces and nephews, and you think, huh. Maybe she’s not so bad, and maybe I’m not so good.

This is the forum for sociopaths on M.E. Thomas’s blog that she started back in 2008, before she wrote this book.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modern Bestiary by David Sedaris, illustrated by Ian Falconer (2010)

I feel like I have to start by saying that David Sedaris is one of my favourite essayists. Normally I think he’s absolutely hilarious. But I didn’t like this book.

I think it’s because I was waiting for the ‘and the moral of the story is…’ at the end, since it felt kind of like a children’s book, seeing as it’s short stories about animals. And to be fair, I never much liked children’s books, or books about animals even when I was a child. So me not liking this is almost definitely not Sedaris’s fault.

It’s not a children’s book in terms of the actual content of the stories at all, but I guess maybe you could get away with reading it to your kid before she’s old enough to understand the sex jokes, since it has pictures! And the illustrations are by the guy who did the Olivia series of books, so now you’ve got a whole new perspective on kid lit, I guess.

Fun fact: I have a teacher friend who first introduced me to Olivia (she’s a big fan), and she’s the BEST for reading it out loud.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2001)

The version I read had a “Pulitzer Prize nominee” sticker on the cover. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This book — you’ll notice I’ve categorized it as both fiction and non — is a memoir-ish account of the few years in the author’s life after both his parents die of cancer and he’s left to take care of his younger brother. Not something I could imagine dealing with in my early twenties, but he handles it as well as he can.

The writing is almost like poetry. Some sections are basically stream-of-consciousness, and others juxtapose different events in his life by jumping back and forth between scenes. Sometimes these two styles are combined for effect: as, for example, he’s making out with an old high school friend, he’s also describing how he visited the anatomy department of a med school to try to find out what happened to his father’s donated corpse. Unsettling, but effective.

The author is very self-aware (or self-conscious), and much of the book is describing what he’s thinking, or what he thinks about what he’s thinking. It gets a bit ‘meta’ that way, but that’s kind of fun, since you get to be in the author’s head. Sometimes it’s meta to the point of being funny, like when his brother (in his early teens at the time) delivers a huge, sophisticated, philosophical monologue, mostly for narrative purposes, and Dave responds “Careful. You’re breaking character.”

For a book about an orphan taking care of another orphan, I didn’t find it sad. It actually had some funny parts. At the same time, I could feel how angry Dave was, how lost, how frustrated. I could picture him and his brother at the beach, showing off their frisbee skills, or Dave bringing a tiny teddy bear to his friend, who was in a coma. It was a vivid and well-written story.

And it has a prologue! What’s not to like?