The First Apartment Book: Cool Designs for Small Spaces, by Kyle Schuneman with Heather Summerville, photographs by Joe Schmelzer (2012)

Apologies for the lack of posts lately –I just moved!

I’m still living in the same city as before. I’m actually still on most of the same bus routes. According to GoogleMaps, I only moved 540 m, or just over half a kilometre (which is about a third of a mile, for any Americans reading).

But it’s my first-ever apartment all to myself! I’m sans roommate, and all the decorating choices are up to me. This is fun and exciting but also kind of overwhelming. It didn’t help that my previous roommates were actually the owners of most of the furniture, so I had to make a lot of decisions and purchases pretty quickly when I moved in — basically all I owned in terms of furniture was my bedroom set. No couch, no chairs, no tables, no dining room furniture, none of it.

Family members donated a few lamps and bookshelves, along with some other odds and ends. I scavenged a few more items off kijiji, and made some brand-new big-ticket purchases (a couch! a chaise!). Starting to feel like an adult. Well, I’ll feel like more of an adult when my couch is actually delivered and in my living room.

But then there’s still all the other decisions — what colour to paint? How to arrange the furniture? What to do with all my tchotchkes? I borrowed a number of decorating books from the library, particularly focusing on “small space decorating”, and this book was one of the best.

I found that a lot of the books should have been categorized as “small space decorating for people who just built their own house” or “small space decorating for people currently designing their own house”, or just “small space decorating for rich people”. This book was one of the few that really focused on the reality of moving into a 600 sq. foot apartment in a 30-unit building built in the concrete-crazy ’60s where everything is beige and you’re not allowed to knock down any walls or change the light fixtures or do anything permanent. Ahem.

The First Apartment Book had some really novel decorating ideas, and it illustrated them with essentially a bunch of case studies — different people in different size apartments, in different cities, on different budgets, with wildly different senses of style. There were instructions on how to paint patterns on the walls, how to slipcover your boring couch or dye your own fancy curtains, creating your own artwork or art installations with your own collections or a series of found objects. There were lessons on thrifting furniture and decor pieces, refinishing furniture, arranging the furniture in a room, arranging flowers, what to do with odd corners or strange spaces in your apartment. Plus lots of very nice pictures.

I haven’t actually done a lot of decorating yet; I’m waiting for my couch and chaise to show up before painting, which seems counter-intuitive — why not paint when the whole room is empty? — but I want to get a handle on how the colours are going to influence everything around it before I decide what I’m going to paint. (The couch and chaise are bright yellow, by the way.)

But I’m getting there! And it’s all in my little home of my own.

The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun (2005)

At work, I’ve recently been… “promoted” isn’t quite the right word, but… assigned some different tasks from what I had been doing previously. This has, for the most part, been a nice change because the day-to-day labour can sometimes be pretty damn boring. Some of the new tasks I’ve been working on are starting to look a little nearer to project management. The funny thing is, I first picked this book up from the library back in the summer, and this not-promotion happened later in the fall. Prescient!

I’m only a few years out of school, so frankly I wouldn’t expect anybody to trust me with a full project. But last week I was the team lead for a group that rolled out a major new process that affected our whole company (which is more than 500 people). And I think it went pretty well! There were a few hiccups, as there always will be with any new process, but I think it turned out as well as it did for our group because I busted my ass to get us as prepared as possible.

In the months and weeks leading up to the go-live date — this started pre-not-promotion, by the way, so I wasn’t even the leader of our team at this point! We were hierarchy-less — we found we weren’t really getting the support we needed, and we felt our input wasn’t very highly valued. We were making suggestions and asking for templates and posing questions and pointing out issues and and and… About a week or so before launch, our group got together and I sent an email on everyone’s behalf to the project manager with our list of needs/questions/issues. In our heads, this was sort of our final offer — take it or leave it.

And… a lot of it got left, which we expected it would. But we knew that those were things we needed, so we went ahead and did them/found them/built them anyway. In the end, I built the templates for our team. I set up the email structure such that it made sense for our workflow. I renamed and reorganized shared electronic folders in a way that was logical and useful for us. Without these things, we would’ve been toast at launch.

This is not to say that the rest of our little team didn’t also have great ideas: one member came up with a great system for dealing with all our pending items — an issue we didn’t realize we’d have until we actually launched; another suggested we set our phones on mute and that we all start at 8 a.m. on launch day to sort through any last minute kinks together — normally we work staggered hours. Another person brought Valentine’s lollipops, because sugar is vitally important.

And I think that’s the thing about being a good leader. It’s not just about bossing people around, and taking credit or blame when things go right or wrong. It’s about making yourself heard, but it’s also about listening. It’s about getting people what they need. It’s about being supportive and standing up for each other. It’s about figuring out how and why people do their best work, and to help them to achieve that. It’s about figuring out how and why people don’t do their best work, and to help them tear down whatever obstacles are in their way. It’s about seeing problems when they’re still on the horizon, and doing what you can to prevent them. It’s about making people feel appreciated. If you do it right, you’ll truly appreciate each other.

(And the lollipops. Holy fuck, did we appreciate those lollipops.)

Keeping track

Early in 2013 (I think it was in February), I decided to keep track of all the books I read. I wrote them all in a list in the Notes app on my phone. When 2014 started, I wanted to see how many books I could read over the course of the entire year. I didn’t exactly set a goal for myself, and I didn’t go out of my way to read more than I usually do, but I was super excited when I hit 100 books in early December!

I ended up with a total of 108 books. And that’s just books! That doesn’t count magazines, newspapers, long-form essays, anything online. No audiobooks. No fan fiction. No backs of cereal boxes. And that’s also not counting however many books I started but didn’t finish.

I wanted to capture some more information on the books I’m going to read in 2015, so I came up with a spreadsheet… yes, I’ve hit that level of nerdiness. That way I can see, at a glance, how much fiction vs. non-fiction I’m reading. (I think I’m skewing towards non-fiction, but this way I can be sure!) How many male authors am I reading vs. female authors? Am I spending more time reading new books, or re-reading old favourites? How many pages will I read in 2015, in total?

I would make a goal for number of pages, except that I have no idea where to start. I’m aiming to beat 2014’s total number of books, at least. I think 109 is doable.

I’m setting a goal too (and I’m setting it publicly!) to post more often about more of the books I read, whether I like them or not. And to update my Goodreads queue at least occasionally, both for my own benefit and anyone else who’s looking at it.

What about you? Do you keep track of what you read? Do you think the spreadsheet is a good idea, or do you think I’m perhaps a little OCD? Have you made a New Year’s Resolution to read more books, or have you made a goal of reading a specific number of books? Leave a comment and let me know!

Welcome to Halifax’s new library!

The brand-spanking new Halifax Central Library opened its doors to the public for the first time this morning. This building has been about five years (and 57 million dollars) in the making. I’m so excited that it’s finally here! And so were the many, many people (hundreds? thousands?) who turned out for the grand opening this morning.

You may recognize this library from such features as CNN’s 10 buildings to pay attention to in 2014, and now you can see just how awesome it is in real life.

The doors finally opened at 10 a.m. after music, speeches, and a community ribbon-cutting (with 300 pairs of safety scissors). There were also jugglers, balloon-twirlers, and hot fresh donuts leading up to this moment.

Look how many people there are! Nope, that’s not a mall on the second-to-last Saturday before Christmas — it’s our new library. Apparently it was busy all day long.

Honestly, it was so busy and I was so focused on taking in the big picture — 129,000 square feet, five storeys, a 300-seat auditorium, two cafés, umpteen meeting rooms and multimedia spaces and kids’ areas and spots to curl up with a book, plus a rooftop patio and green space — that I forgot to take any pictures of the books.

However! I know I’ll be back to the new library in the next few days, and I’ll post more pictures then.

Us Conductors: A Novel by Sean Michaels (2014)

Photo via the Globe and Mail

This book won the Giller Prize! Which is pretty much the biggest award for fiction in Canada. I had already read (and reviewed) All My Puny Sorrows and I was sure it was going to win. So did a lot of other people, according to this pic (from the Globe and Mail). So an upset is always fun! Plus it bumped Us Conductors to the top of my to-read list.

This is a story about the inventor of the theremin, which is a sort of instrument you play by manipulating the electrical fields created by the antennae. The characters in the book are based on real people, and although parts of the plot really did happen, it’s still a work of fiction. (The notes section states the lack of evidence that our protagonist ever learned kung fu, for instance.) (Do other people actually read the notes sections in books? Or the acknowledgements section? Because I feel like most people don’t and I feel like they’re missing out. Anyway.)

The rest of these books on the list above are on my to-read list as well, except for one that I started and actually gave up on about halfway through, which I almost never do. But I just didn’t care about the characters, so I couldn’t be bothered to find out what happened to them. I’m not going to tell you which book this was, because I don’t want to ruin it for you — that would just be mean and unCanadian. And I’ve heard from a number of other people who really liked it.

Here, a video of Leon Theremin playing his own instrument:

NaNoWriMo

So sorry for the lack of posts lately — ostensibly I’ve been focusing on NaNoWriMo, but I’m falling behind there, too. (For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, where amateur authors — and some actual, published authors! — attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, over the month of November. It’s doable, but only just. I’m waaaaay below where I should be, considering there’s only a week left to go.) I’ve been dealing with a very sick kitty, and obviously he’s more important than either reading or writing. But he’s been doing much better these last few days, so: goal #1 is to complete NaNoWriMo, and goal #2 is to get some more posts up here. Wish me luck!

Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she’s “learned” by Lena Dunham (2014)

Lena Dunham was only born in 1986. If you’re not so good at math, that means she’s still in her twenties. She’s already written a memoir. Holy hell.

Good thing she’s written it now, though — she’s done so much already that waiting too long would’ve made this book too big to fit in my backpack. Essay titles include: “Platonic Bed-Sharing: A Great Idea (for People Who Hate Themselves)”, “Who Moved My Uterus”, “Emails I Would Send If I Were One Ounce Crazier/Angrier/Braver”, and “Girl Crush: That Time I Was Almost a Lesbian, Then Vomited”.

She’s funny, she’s real, she’s awkward, she’s brilliant. I realize this sounds creepy, but I’d like to be her friend. I realize this sounds even creepier, but I recently got a haircut that was semi-inspired by her current look. (In reality, it’s probably a little closer to Kaley Cuoco’s starting-to-grow-out pixie, with sleek, wavy, or tousled options.)

Not That Kind of Girl has lately been lumped in with Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, which I realize I’m also guilty of doing by virtue of having linked to it, but both totally stand on their own. If they hadn’t been published so close to one another, I’m not sure I or anyone else would make that comparison. They’re very different books, except for having been written by ladies, so, duhhhh of course they’re exactly alike. /sarcasm

Still, it was interesting to read them both within such a short time. It kinda feels like (maybe I’m stretching here) it could be a new era of feminist literature and pop culture. I am probably overly optimistic in this regard, but a girl can dream, no?

This book has gotten a lot of media attention, and for good reason, I think. It’s very good. I already want to re-read it. Lena’s got nice quotes on the back of the book from David Sedaris and Judy Blume, for crying out loud!

I think this is a must-read for anyone who identifies as female, anyone in their twenties or thirties, anyone who pays even the slightest attention to pop culture and Lena’s TV show. Or, frankly, even if you’ve never seen her show, don’t care about pop culture, and aren’t in the correct demographic — as her dad also writes in review on the back cover,

“This book should be required reading for anyone who thinks they understand the experience of being a young woman in our culture. I thought I knew the author rather well, and I found many (not altogether welcome) surprises.”

Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay (2014)

If you haven’t already read Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, I highly recommend it. I read it just last week, and I incurred a $0.25 library fine so I could keep it for an extra day to re-read the best bits. I believe I fist-pumped in response to at least three different sections. There are even T-shirts!

Roost: A Novel by Ali Bryan (2013)

The thing about reading books published by a small, local press is that it’s sometimes very obvious that a particular book has been published by a small, local press. This is disappointing. I’ll give two particular examples that stuck out to me in this book:

• One of the main characters has a skin condition. This information is introduced at the very beginning of the novel in such a way as to seem like a major plot point. The skin condition is never mentioned again.
• The main character flies on a plane. When the flight attendant comes around with the drinks cart, the main character orders ginger ale. (Fun fact: I always drink ginger ale on airplanes.) LITERALLY ON THE NEXT PAGE, maybe three paragraphs later, it says “she downed all her orange juice in one gulp”. Gahhhh

She ordered ginger ale.

Stuff like this drives me absolutely nuts. Independent publishers do good work, don’t get me wrong — they’re the first to support local authors and they work hard to get their authors’ books out in the world. (How else would I have seen/heard of this book?) I know indie presses aren’t exactly made of money, but you cannot skimp on editing. You just can’t.

The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir who got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe by Romain Puértolas (2013); English translation by Sam Taylor (2014)

This book is all over the best-seller shelves at every bookstore right now. It was originally published in French last year, and the English translation just came out recently. This was such a fun book to read, and I was hugely impressed by the amount of wordplay, especially considering that it is a translation. I wonder how the punnery holds up if you’re comparing directly to the original? Makes you wonder which bits are creditable to the author, and which to the translator.