The Book on the Bookshelf ~ by Henry Petroski, 1999

Question for my readers:

Do you align books at the front edge of your shelves? Or way back from the edge? Or an inch back? Why? Or do you stack your books, instead?

The Book on the Bookshelf ~ by Henry Petroski (1999, history) is about the shelves where we put our books. I'll start with a couple of quotes from the book:

"The recessed alignment of books on my bookshelves also gives me a narrow shelf space before the books where I can keep mementos like pencils and letter openers. It all seemed sensible to me until one day a writer visiting my office expressed surprise at my arrangement and remarked that he always pulled his books forward to the edge of the bookshelves and thought that was the proper way to display them. I did not have a definitive answer for him at the time, and I still do not, but I have learned that the literary critic Alfred Kazin kept his books well back from the edge of the shelf, giving him room to display photos of his grandchildren and to lay down books being read. Like so many questions of design and the human adaptation to and interface with technology, there are arguments that can be presented in support of either option. I was, however, pleased to have the visitor question my book arrangement, for it assured me that I was not alone in thinking about bookcases and how to use them" (p. 12).

"For centuries, the spine was shelved inward..." (p. 22).

Another question: Do any of you shelve your books with the spine toward the back of the bookshelf? Why? When I owned a bookstore, I was surprised at the number of people who inserted books "backwards" after browsing, so I'm really curious.

For the record, I shelve my books with the spine out and usually slightly back from the edge. In my bedroom, however, the top shelf of one bookcase has all the books pushed to the back. Why? Because that's where I empty my pockets each night -- I usually wear jeans and have pens, paper, and cell phone in my pockets, ever handy for making notes or inquiries.

What did I like about this book?
The author gives us a history of books, back to when they were scrolls, and the storage problems along the way. Scrolls were rolled up, so shelves like mine wouldn't work very well. Imagine, instead, storage racks similar to wine racks. But how would you ever find the one scroll you wanted? The earliest books didn't have titles on the spines, leaving readers with the same problem of finding what was wanted. I was happy to have the illustrations for what the author was talking about. But most of all I liked finding things I just had to write down:

"Is an empty bookshelf an oxymoron?" (p. 22).

"The more things change, the more they remain insane" (p. 222).

"When I travel, I find myself drawn into bookstores and to books I wonder if I will ever see again. Many of these volumes must be bought, of course, lest the opportunity to possess them be lost, and I have lugged inordinate numbers of titles through airports and squeezed overstuffed bags into undersized overhead bins (ill-formed bookshelves of a sort?)" (p. 230).

"It is a spectator sport to look at someone else's books, if not an act of voyeurism or armchair psychology" (p. 6).

"The use of electric lights in bookstacks became firmly established in the early part of the twentieth century" (p. 181).

Note to myself after the last quote: I was born at the right time!

How do I rate this book?
I give it 8 out of 10 because most of it was fun to read, but some parts were dry and tended to drag.

Dogsong ~ by Gary Paulsen, 1985

Title, author, copyright date, and genre?
Dogsong ~ by Gary Paulsen, 1985, YA fiction (YA designates young adults, but I frequently read this genre)

Summarize the book without giving away the ending.
From the back cover:

"Inspired by the Eskimo shaman Oogruk, Russel Suskitt takes a dog team and sled to escape the modern ways of his village and to find his own 'song' of himself. He travels across ice floes, tundra, and mountains, haunted along the way by a dream of a long-ago self whose adventures parallel his own."

What was the book's central question, and how was it answered?
Yesterday I told you about The Fiction Class by Susan Breen (and did you notice the author came by and commented on that post?), a novel with writing assignments that my friend Donna and I chose to do along with the fictional students. One of the assignments was to find the theme of the book:

"Choose a novel or short story that you like and try to discover its theme. How does the author get the theme across? Title? Plot? Names of characters?" (page 231 in The Fiction Class).

The theme is the book's central question, its dominant idea. Even though I have this question in my book review outline, I don't think I've ever used it here on my blog. Now that I know the importance of themes, I'll try to do this more often.

Okay, so what's the theme of Dogsong?
How to live an authentic life. Russel, the main character, is a 14-year-old who hates noisy snowmobiles and yearns for the life Eskimos used to live. His father understands his need and refers Russel to Oogruk, the only person in their village with dogs and a sled. Oogruk is blind, but has ways of "seeing" that Russel only slowly recognizes. Russel comes to trust that Oogruk will be able to teach him what he needs to know. At no point does the author use the word "authentic" that I wrote above; instead, the story is all about finding his song. Modern people no longer have their own songs, but it's what Russel needs for his life.

What did you think of the main character? How did the main character change during the novel?
Russel knows nothing about dogs or sledding at the beginning of the book, but he learns what he needs to know.

Was location important to the story?
The whole story is set in the far north, in weather colder than I have ever experienced. Yet I could feel the weather and the tiredness of Russel and the sled dogs. I got a feel for a place I can only imagine, and the author placed me there so that I felt the biting wind and ached from the bitter cold along with the characters.

Did you like the way the book ended?
I expected Russel to succeed in his quest, but I did not expect what happened to the people and animals he encountered.

How would you rate this book?
It held my attention throughout, and I highly recommend it. Rated 9 of 10.

The Fiction Class ~ by Susan Breen, 2008

Title, author, copyright date, and genre?
The Fiction Class ~ by Susan Breen, 2008, fiction

Why did you read the book?
I got a copy to give my best friend for her birthday. She taught English for over 20 years and it looked like her kind of book. Before I got out of the store, however, I looked through the book and discovered something that made me go back and get a copy for myself so she and I could ... (Are you ready for this?) ... do the writing assignments together. Okay, now you know I'm a nerd. I may be retired and long out of school, but I was excited about the fact that this novel had, on separate pages all laid out, the assignments the fictional teacher assigned her class. Yes! I was in luck. My friend Donna is as crazy as I am, and we did the assignments together. We didn't read (and write) at the same speed, so I still "owe" her some writing assignments, but I haven't given up on doing them.

Summarize the book without giving away the ending.
Arabella Hicks, whose mother named her after the heroine in a novel by Georgette Heyer, teaches a weekly fiction class and has been trying for seven years to find an ending for a novel she is writing. We watch her week after week, as she deals with her students, works on her own novel, and deals with her own mother -- who is driving her crazy. Every week she visits her mother in the nursing home and on one visit learns her mother wants to be a writer. Surprise, surprise!

What did you think of the main character?
As a former college adjunct teacher, I was cheering for her all the way. I also agreed with Arabella's assessment of what happens in classrooms. Here's an early example:

"Nothing disrupts the mood of a class more quickly than people whispering" (p. 4).

Here's a comparison of the writing classes, which I am still pondering:

"She can hear people laughing in the next classroom; that's the screenwriting class. They are always so cheerful in screenwriting; the memoir class is always in tears, and the fiction class seems to be confused" (p. 31).

What did you like most about the book?
The author made her settings come to life, as in this description of the library in her mother's nursing home:

"The library is surprisingly lovely. In the midst of so much pastel neutrality, the bright colors of the book jackets are a welcome explosion of color. Here is life; even a nursing home cannot deaden the joy of a book" (p. 104).

How would you rate this book?
I'll give it a 9 out of 10 because I'm still enjoying it. Yes, don't laugh -- I do believe writing assignments can be enjoyable.

For an example of one of the writing assignments, see my next post: theme

Netherland ~ by Joseph O'Neill, 2008

In an interview with President Barack Obama, Jon Meacham (Newsweek, May 16, 2009) asked: "What are you reading?"

I'm reading this book called Netherland by Joseph O'Neill ... It's about after 9/11, a guy — his family leaves him and he takes up cricket in New York. And it's fascinating. It's a wonderful book, although I know nothing about cricket.

When I read that, I knew two things: lots of people are going to run out and get that book, and I want to read it myself. When I put it on hold at my library, I was the third in line after the person now reading it. (Aha, I was correct about my first assumption.) Buying the book or borrowing it from a friend is faster. My review:

Title, author, copyright date, and genre?
Netherland ~ by Joseph O'Neill, 2008, fiction

Summarize the book without giving away the ending.
It's a book about cricket, on one level, but don't let that stop you from reading the book. I know nothing about the sport, other than what I read in this book, and it didn't matter at all. Halfway through the book -- maybe 3/4 of the way through the book -- I came across the name DAISY standing alone on the page and thought of another Daisy in literature: the Daisy in The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. That's when I realized reading this book was a lot like reading Gatsby, and I don't particularly like The Great Gatsby. It was funny to run across an interview with the author that's on Amazon.com where he is asked about the Gatsby connection. Here's what he replies:

Halfway through the book I realized with a slightly sinking feeling that the plot of Netherland was eerily reminiscent of the Gatsby plot: dreamer drowns, bystander remembers. But there are only about 5 plots in existence, so I didn't let it bother me too much. Fitzgerald thankfully steered clear of cricket.

Yep, this book and The Great Gatsby are a lot alike and I was bored enough (believe it or not) that I fell asleep last night with 1-1/2 pages to go before finishing Netherland. When I woke, I didn't bother to finish reading the book before turning out the light -- so I read that last little dab of it this morning. Um, back to the summary:

Hans is from the Netherlands and is in the United States after having lived (and married) in England. He moves to New York City because his wife Rachel accepts a great job, and he has to look for work. They have a son, Jake, born in NYC. When 9/11 disrupts their lives, they move into the Chelsea Hotel -- an interesting place with an assortment of people living there:

Over half the rooms were occupied by long-term residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I'd kept as a child, a murky tank in which cheap fish hesitated in weeds and an artificial starfish made a firmament of the gravel.

What did you think of the main character?
If I say Hans was boring, would this review sound repetitious?

Which character could you relate to best?
Rachel has pluck. She has backbone. What she says and does seems like what I might say and do under the same circumstances. Sort of.

Were there any other especially interesting characters?
Hans is fascinated by Chuck Ramkissoon, an immigrant from Trinidad with grandiose entrepreneurial delusions about cricket in America. Like Rachel, I couldn't figure out what Hans saw in the guy.

From whose point of view is the story told?
Hans, which is probably why it bored me most of the time.

What do you think will be your lasting impression of this book?
As I read the book, I wondered what Barack Obama might have been thinking as he read it. Hans and Chuck each had an outsider's view of the United States, and I wondered if Barack could relate, having been an outsider when he moved to Indonesia. One of the two parts of this book I'll probably long remember is about the bureaucratic nightmare Hans faced at the DMV:

After years of driving rental cars with a disintegrating and legally dubious international license issued in the United Kingdom, I had finally decided to buy and insure a car of my own -- which required me to get an American drivers license. But I couldn't trade my British license (itself derived from a Dutch one) for an American one: such an exchange was for some unexplainable reason only feasible during the first thirty days of an alien's permanent residence in the United States. I would have to get a learner permit and submit to a driving test all over again ...

When Hans arrives at the DMV, a woman exits, sobbing; a man asks if he has his social security card and ID, then says, "I don't want to see it"; and Hans notices a couple of DMV employees:

Two of them, women in their thirties, screamed with laughter by a photocopying machine; but as soon as they reached their positions at the counter they wore faces of sullen hostility. ... So I waited. ... I ... watched a television screen on which "Entertainment News," rather than actual entertainment, was broadcast. ... At last my number came up. ...

"I can't take the credit card. It's got somebody else's name on it."

I looked. My name, which by a miracle of typography was fully spelled out on my social security card, is Johannus Franciscus Hendrikus van den Broek. My credit card, for obvious reasons, identified me merely as Johannus F. H. van den Broek -- exactly as my green card did. ...

ALL FORMS OF IDENTIFICATION MUST SHOW THE SAME NAME. ... "I'm not a handwriting expert," he [the bureaucrat] said.

I looked: on the green card was typed "Johanus." I'd never noticed it before. ...

"Are you Johanus" -- he pronounced the last two syllables as an obscenity -- "or are you Johannus?"

"Come on, let's not play games," I said.

"You think I'm playing a game?" He was actually baring his teeth. ...

"You really want me to go down to the INS and get a new green card? That's what you want to get out of this?"

"I don't want you to go there," the supervisor said. Now he was pointing at my chest. "I'm forcing you to go there."

"What about my written test?" I said, pathetically showing him my twenty out of twenty.

He smiled. "You're going to have to take it again."

And so I was in a state of fuming helplessness when I stepped out into the inverted obscurity of the afternoon. As I stood there, thrown by Herald Square's flows of pedestrians and the crazed traffic diagonals and the gray, seemingly bottomless gutter pools, I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers.

His experience with the DMV is summarized in O'Neill's next sentence, one that shows his power with words:

The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between he road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.

It's easy to relate to Hans, who feels like "fresh slush" after a day with "foul" bureaucrats. (These quotes come from pages 63-68 of the paperback edition.)

Share a passage from the book.
Besides the day at the DMV, I'll also remember what his wife thought about the United States in the months after 9/11 (from pages 95-96):

It came as a reprieve [from the "solitary's vulnerability to insights"] to hear the infuriating cheep of my telephone.

It was Rachel. She told me first about the huge antiwar rally that had taken place in London two days before and how Jake had carried a NOT IN MY NAME placard. Next she told me, in the tone of a person discussing a grocery list, that she had definitely decided not to return to the United States, at least not before the end of the Bush administration or any successor administration similarly intent on a military and economic domination of the world. It was no longer a question of physical security, she said, although that of course remained a factor. It was a question, rather, of not exposing Jake to an upbringing in an "ideologically diseased" country, as she put it, a "mentally ill, sick, unreal" country whose masses and leaders suffered from extraordinary and self-righteous delusions about the United States, the world, and indeed, thanks to the influence of the fanatical evangelical Christian movement, the universe, delusions that had the effect of exempting the United States from the very rules of civilized and lawful and rational behavior it so mercilessly sought to enforce on others. She stated, growing more and more upset, that we were at a crossroads, that a great power had "drifted into wrongdoing," that her conscience permitted no other conclusion.

Ordinarily, I would have said nothing; but it seemed to me that my dealings with my son were at stake. So I said, "Rach, please let's try to keep things in perspective."

"Perspective? And what perspective would that be? The perspective of the free press of America? Is that where you get your perspective, Hans?" She made a harsh sound of mirth. "From TV networks funded by conservative advertisers? From the Wall Street Journal? From the Times, that establishment stooge? Why not Ari Fleischer, while you're at it?"

Not for the first time, I was finding it hard to believe this was the woman I'd married -- a corporate litigator, let's not forget, radicalized only in the service of her client and with not the smallest bone to pick about money and its doings.

"You want Jake to grow up with an American perspective? Is that it? You want him to not be able to point to Britain on a map? You want him to believe that Saddam Hussein sent those planes into the Towers?"

Specks of snow, small and dark as flies, swarmed before me. I said, "Of course he wouldn't grow up in ignorance. We wouldn't allow it."

She said, "Bush wants to attack Iraq as part of a right-wing plan to destroy international law and order as we know it and replace it with the global rule of American force. Tell me which part of that sentence is wrong, and why."

As usual, she was too quick for me.

I kind of think Obama may have noticed this section, too. Whadda ya think? This is exactly the kind of thing my friend in the Netherlands seemed to think about America when we talked about it a few years ago. I think the writing is spot on, in this case, showing what our erstwhile friends in Europe (and other places) thought about us during the Bush administration.

How would you rate this book?
I rate the book an 8 out of 10 because of the writing, even though I find the main character himself rather timid and uninteresting.

Ya gotta have heart

Have you missed me?

Remember that I told you I was moving? I was having trouble breathing during December, but attributed it to the exertion of moving boxes of stuff, many filled with books. You know how heavy books are. One day, while carrying an overweight cat in a kitty-kennel, I was so out of breath that I got the door of my new place open, set down the cat, and sprawled on the floor. I thought maybe I was breathless from bronchitis or pneumonia, but the doctors now say I have had one (or more) heart attacks. On the morning of January 31, after a night of being unable to sleep because I couldn't breathe, I called my friend Donna to take me to the emergency room. That's when I learned I had congestive heart failure. They kept me overnight and helped me breathe better, but with instructions to see my primary physician that week. I did, and she sent me to a cardiologist -- who did a stress test, which I failed. Heart catherization showed the three heart arteries were 100%, 100%, and 90% blocked.

To shorten this story, I had open-heart surgery on February 19th, with four bypasses. I was able to leave the hospital after six days but, being unable to do much if anything for myself, went home with a friend who volunteered her home and her time to take care of me. I was at her house for eleven days before moving back to the new home I had not fully gotten moved into. I joked after the surgery that I must have gotten blood transfusions from a non-reader, because I had no interest in reading for days and days.

Wanna know what I've learned from this experience? How important it is to have loving friends. Two old friends and three women in my writers critique group have been my faithful supporters, re-scheduling their time for overnights at my house, getting me to doctor's appointments, bringing me meals, running errands for me, and generally "babysitting" me. Friends are wonderful.

Physics of the Impossible, by Michio Kaku

(click to enlarge the image)
Today's "Shoe" cartoon shows the wizard owl in a bookstore. In the first two panels he's thinking, "Because I'm a wizard, people think I have the answers to all the riddles of the cosmos" and "But, no matter how hard I look, there's one thing that still has me stumped." So in the last panel, he asks the bird behind the counter, "Is there parallel parking in a parallel universe?"

What made you want to read this book?
If you understood the joke, this may be a book you'd enjoy. The subtitle caught my attention back in November when I was drafting my novel about time travel. And the subtitle is...?

Title, author, date of book, and genre?
Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel, by Michio Kaku, 2008, physics

Share a quote from the book.
I got the book specifically to find out what a major physicist thinks about time travel, but I really enjoyed most of the rest of the book as well, especially all the "impossible" things that now seem possible, at least eventually.

In our ordinary world we sometimes joke that it's impossible to be "a little bit pregnant." But in the quantum world, it's even worse. We exist simultaneously as the sum of all possible bodily states: unpregnant, pregnant, a child, an elderly woman, a teenager, a career woman, etc. (p. 242)

I have told people that, now that I'm elderly, I have come to see that I am still all those other ages in my life -- which in my case would include pregnant and unpregnant, career woman and retiree. Some days I am twelve and hanging upside down from the swinging bar on the swing set -- and I can feel it, that rush of blood to my head hanging down and my weight on the backs of my knees as the bar swings back and forth. Not that I would ever try to do such a thing at my age. I couldn't, and not because of its lack of dignity, either. I just plain can't do what used to seem so simple and easy. (And sometimes I think I'm 112, but that's another story!)

One minority point of view is that there must be a "cosmic consciousness" pervading the universe. Objects spring into being when measurements are made, and measurements are made by conscious beings. Hence there must be cosmic consciousness that pervades the universe determining which state we are in. Some, like Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, have argued that this proves the existence of God or some cosmic consciousness. (Wigner wrote, "It is not possible to formulate the laws [of the quantum theory] in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness." In fact, he even expressed an interest in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, in which the universe is pervaded by an all-embracing consciousness.) (pp. 243-244)

I took note of this quote because of the reference to Hinduism -- some of you know I taught Religions of the World as an adjunct at Chattanooga State for about a decade -- and I noticed an error in the book where Shiva, one of Hinduism's trinity of gods, was a "goddess" (p. 44). Nope, the dancing god may seem feminine, but he's a he.

What did you like most about the book?
I discovered something I didn't know (or at least don't remember hearing or reading before) -- that the moon stabilizes Earth's spin (p. 134). That fascinates me, though I can't really explain why. What if we didn't have the moon?

How would you rate this book?
Because it was slightly more difficult than I expected (Hey, it was written by a quantum physicist!), I give it a 9 out of 10.

What I've been reading

I woke up this morning thinking, "January 10th. It's the Day to Read." Oh, no! The Day to Read was on January 10th of 2008. Last year I was psyched up on January 9th and wrote a report of my reading on January 11th.

I took note when SMID (Soccer Mom in Denial) challenged us to do it again in 2009. I even posted about it on my blog.

But then something came along and got in the way of my thinking ~
I moved.

Yep, I haven't been thinking. Correction: I haven't been thinking in my normal channels. I've been moving, but I've been reading. Here's a list of the books I completed in the last half of December, during the time from signing the lease to getting moved into my new place:

Dec. 15 ~ Catherine Called Birdy, by Karen Cushman, young adult historical fiction, 1994
Dec. 16 ~ One True Thing, by Anna Quindlen, fiction, 1994
Dec. 17 ~ The Secret School, by Avi, young adult fiction, 2001
Dec. 19 ~ Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel, by Michio Kaku, physics, 2008
Dec. 21 ~ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really DO Make a Difference, by Lynne Truss, punctuation, 2006
Dec. 24 ~ The Alpine Christmas, by Mary Daheim, mystery, 1993
Dec. 25 ~ Maxine: Yelling It Like It Is, by John M. Wagner, humor, 2001
Dec. 26 ~ Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach, fiction, 1977
Dec. 27 ~ We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, by Maurice Sendak, children's (sort of), 1993
Dec. 28 ~ Too Bad, Ahab, by Marilyn Lashbrook, children's Bible story, 1990
Dec. 29 ~ The Reincarnationist, by M. J. Rose, fiction, 2007

I was reading a lot, as you can see. Eleven books in fourteen days. It was a good way to relax when I was tired from packing and lifting and transporting and lifting and unpacking at the new place. But it made me forget the correct 2009 Day to Read. Dang!

Nevertheless, I can write a report on what I read. Even if I failed to notify the world I'd be reading more than blogs. And even though I didn't take notes during the actual Day of Reading.

Report on my Day of Reading
While moving, I've been loading and unloading boxes. That means I found stacks of old newspapers and magazines. I seem to have the idea that I can't throw things away unread. Think about it -- "unread" is one of the worst words in the English language for readers. So I skimmed the old newspapers and read parts of old magazines. And at my new place (a gated community for seniors) we have a "library" of sorts -- people contribute books and magazines and others are welcome to borrow whatever they want to read. It's small, but I looked it over and found Avi's The Secret School (see above) that I completed it overnight on December 17th. So on Thursday, January 8th, I happen to know I was reading two copies of AARP: The Magazine that I borrowed from "the library" here.

I picked up the January/February issues of 2008 and 2009. Last year's issue had Caroline Kennedy on it, and this year's has Glenn Close -- because AARP begins the year by presenting ten people who make a difference. I read about those twenty people (ten twice) and all the other articles in each magazine.

What else did I read? The menu when I went out to eat with my two daughters and my youngest granddaughter that evening, and the signs all over the Creative Discovery Museum when I took my granddaughter there after we ate. (You remember Cady, don't you? Now you know we do more than swim together and review books.)