Category Archives: Books

About 3 Books

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Lately, all my conversations are interspersed with me saying: “On that great new podcast I discovered, I just listened to an interview with (fill in the blank with the name of a person who just discussed the very thing we are talking about.)” Or not. As a friend of ours says when she wants to change the topic at hand: “Speaking of something completely unrelated…”

You see, I get a lot of input from the outside world via podcasts these days. And not necessarily new ones either. I know some people who shake their head sadly at me when I demonstrate complete ignorance at what is going on in the world on a daily basis. But if I fall in love with a podcast, I will happily go back two, three, four years into the catalog and “catch up”.

I was thinking about my podcast history recently – basically trying to remember when I started downloading and binging. It was definitely over ten years ago when my sister-in-law and I discovered an iTunes show about – wait for it – scrapbooking. But I always listened to the shows on my computer and it was painful waiting week to week for the new episode, because there was “nothing to listen to” in between. It wasn’t until I got an iPhone that I figured out how to listen to more “iPod broadcasts” – hence podcasts – on the go and that’s when I discovered This American Life. And then the whole syncing with the car radio thing happened and voila! Here we are in 2021 with the serious problem of hundreds of podcasts and thousands of episodes to choose from. And I’m sure I’m being conservative.

That tidbit about where podcasts got their name? I just heard it on this great new podcast I discovered. It’s funny, because I’m actually kind resistant to adding new podcasts to my repertoire because I have my favorites and keeping up with all those episodes can be hard enough. Chances are you’ve heard of Neil Pasricha before – he started a blog counting down 1000 Awesome Things which then was turned into The Book of Awesome. And all that was to counteract some bad juju that happened in his life. I was intrigued by this approach which I first heard about when he was interviewed on another one of my favorite podcasts What Should I Read Next? which is “dedicated to the answer that plagues every reader” what they should read next. Which I was ALSO resistant to listening to until she was endorsed on yet ANOTHER one of my favorite podcasts – basically it’s the Faberge Organics Shampoo commercial for how I got here: “…and you tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on and so on and so on…”

What’s great about 3 Books with Neil Pasricha is 1. It’s about books. (Hello?) 2. He has really AWESOME guests (see what I did there?) and 3. He’s Canadian – which is just always a cool thing to be. The whole schtick that Neil promotes is to interview his guests about their three most formative books – in a somewhat personal quest for him to read the 1000 best books on the planet before his thousand months is up – the average lifespan for us humans. He touts it as “the world’s only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers… and librarians.”

I think what I like so much about this particular show is the conversations (not interviews). Neil flies in to wherever each guest is located (Key West to talk to Judy Blume, San Diego for Frank Warren, New York to meet up with Mitch Albom) and they have a real sit-down-and-chat with the actual three books in their hands. Listening to Angie Thomas talk about reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Tupac Shakur’s The Rose That Grew From Concrete demonstrates a pretty straight through-line to her novel The Hate You Give. And I love sitting in on conversations and getting writing advice from the likes of Dave Barry and Tim Urban. Awesome.

Occasionally, one of those great guests has a great podcast, too. Sigh. I still have a couple years worth of 3 Books to go. I know I don’t have to listen to ALL the pods or read ALL the books. But I can just enjoy one conversation at time about 3 Great Books.

About One Crazy Summer

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My love for children’s books began – wait for it – when I was a child myself. Of course, when I learned to read I reached for those books that I could easily enjoy at first and then I slowly climbed the ladder to “harder” books. But I never left the love of those “softer” books behind. After all, my basic criteria for what I want to read is a good story, one where I can maybe learn something about the human story, about history (or “her-story”) and about ways to use the language. And there are many picture, middle grade (MG) and young adult (YA) that fit that bill.

When I first read the book The Happiness Project, I felt vindicated in my unabashed love of children’s literature when Gretchen Rubin expressed her habit of returning again and again to the books of her childhood to re-read – for comfort, for enjoyment and to learn something new each time about the book, the writing or herself. She even started not one, but two book clubs, centered on reading such books because she discovered that, once confessed, she was not alone in in her quirky affection and therefore needed two groups to hold all those as secretly passionate as her.

During our homeschooling season, we once went to a conference where an educator discussed the merits of using children’s books, not just for children, but for adults, too, as launching pads into a new subject. If you want to learn about how airplanes work – because I sincerely don’t understand such magic, do you? – you should go to the library and find a children’s book about it. And maybe, that might be all you need. Oh sure, I could ask Wikipedia or the Google, but it often doesn’t engage me the same way. I can still picture the illustrations of Wilbur and Orville Wright from the Children’s Encyclopedia that I read from our basement library as a kid (Volume A: because that was the free incentive to buy the set). And while I may not remember the mechanics of flight, I know that the Orville Bros. of Kitty Hawk did and they were persistent enough to make it happen.

I didn’t pick up One Crazy Summer because I wanted to know more about the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California or about the Black Panthers or because it was a “black book”. I picked it because it was on the Newbery Medal and Honor List, which is awarded to exceptional MG and YA books and, again and again, I have learned that the Newbery Committee (usually) knows what they are doing. That being said, after visiting the King Center in Atlanta in the fall of 2016, I found my knowledge sorely lacking for what went on in the sixties with the Black Panthers and the other side of the coin, Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent protests.

Without context, we often assign judgement to acts of violence or protest. One Crazy Summer gives that context, with its story of the three Gaither sisters who travel from Brooklyn to Oakland one (crazy) summer to live with the mother who abandoned them when Delphine, the oldest, was five. Told in her voice, Delphine is a classic oldest child, a protective rule-keeper, a paradigm that Cecile, their mother does not fall into. Arriving in Oakland, it is not the happy reunion that the girls maybe hoped for, with Delphine resigning: “I was happy to be there and that had to be good enough.” In the way of their mother’s working routine, the girls are sent to a day camp run by the Black Panthers where they learn about Malcolm X and color protest posters that demanded “FREE HUEY”.

Over the course of the (crazy) summer and the course of the book, Delphine, Vonetta and Fern do learn more about their mother, a poet, and what she stands for, in the author’s masterful “show-don’t-tell” way. At the end of the summer, Delphine has a completely new paradigm in which to view her mother and a promise of a relationship going forward – which you can visit in the sequels P. S. Be Eleven and Gone Crazy in Alabama.

About Women Rowing North

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The whole premise of this blog when I started it two years ago(-ish) was that – even though I had crested the hill and had moved past the “50” milestone – I wanted to assert that I am not done yet. Though my tagline is that this is a chronicle of a journey through a century, I don’t really know when I got to the apex of my personal journey or if 50 is that magical number. If stats have anything to do with it, chances are it’s more like it happened in my forties. But if I follow in the footsteps of my 100+ grandmother and her father, then I’m at the top of that mountain right now.

All this preamble is to say: I think about aging a lot. Am I doing it well? Are my expectations of my body, my brain, my energy realistic? What can I do better? And to what do I need to say, “Fugget about it!” ?

It’s not like all of this messaging is coming from within, either. If I flip through any magazine targeting women or sit through the commercials on television, I find that I am regularly assaulted with admonitions to, “Look younger! Feel younger! BE YOUNGER!” My search through Instagram for #fabulousafterfifty and the like, relentlessly turns up accounts of women who focus on their looks, their clothes and – especially – their not-looking-fifty-ish. Sigh.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Body positivity is a good thing, but while the actually-younger-peoples have IG accounts that celebrate all sizes and shapes, I have yet to find an older woman who’s flaunting her rolls and her wrinkles. I’m sure they’re out there, it’s just harder to find. And why do I even care? At this point in my life, you would think that I had built up some sort of resilience to this emphasis on the preferred physical expression of a person. But, instead, years of being a girl, a woman, a human being have stockpiled a garbage dump of uncertainty, reticence and even surrender to the messaging. After all, I’m still coloring my hair and trying not to dress “older” than I am. And I still like to hear compliments on my looks or expressions of “You don’t look like you’re fifty(three)!” (Although, admittedly, I haven’t heard that for awhile.)

It’s into this milieu that Mary Pipher’s book Women Rowing North comes like a drink of fresh water. Pipher, a therapist and writer who previously made her mark with Reviving Ophelia, a book that helped the adults navigate the landscape of adolescent girls, has turned her attention to women in the last third of life. I fall in the first third of that third, but Women Rowing North, like her title suggests, reads like a traveler’s guidebook, letting you know what to expect and how to make the most of your journey. And unlike my searches on Instagram, Pipher includes the wide swathe of women who fall in this age bracket, addressing different socioeconomic and health realities for the women she case studies throughout. Although reviews on Goodreads suggest it may be a bit premature for the 50-something to “enjoy” this book, older women say that they wish they’d read it sooner. I suppose it’s the difference between knowing what to (maybe) expect and wishing you knew then what you know now.

What I love about Pipher is that she doesn’t see aging as a problem that needs to be solved, ignored or reversed with the usual admonitions of exercise, healthy food and a miracle wrinkle cream – although she doesn’t say that such balance isn’t important either. Mostly, Pipher – in the time-honored tradition of therapists – focuses on attitude, which she says in her introduction, “…isn’t everything, but it is almost everything.” Which means that it’s within all of our grasps to do better and for each of us to decide exactly what that “better” is.

About The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

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Christmas pageants and plays, populated with preschoolers and preteens, have perennially caused problems for pastors and play-directors. Well, maybe we can be a little more generous and just call them “memorable experiences”.

Unfortunately, this year, a.k.a. The Year That Covid Killed Christmas, there won’t be any opportunities to watch your kids have a live meltdown on stage at school or at church or at a recital or ANYWHERE. Thankfully, we still have plenty of ways to recreate moments like your preschool daughter flashing her underpants (repeatedly) at the entire church congregation (because fancy skirts can be so much fun to flip up and down). Or like when your usually sunny son stands front and center on stage with his arms crossed, scowling at the crowd and refusing to sing in spite of every other rehearsal going as smoothly as possible.

Remember Kevin McAllister’s rotten brother Buzz? He expertly (and blatantly) antagonizes his little brother during an angelic solo and then absolves himself of all of the blame after the entire show’s scenery comes crashing down around Kevin’s lit-up ears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT7-T-pqCCs

And there was story I reviewed last Christmas on this blog, The Shepherd, The Angel and Walter the Christmas Dog, where (spoiler alert) the entire choir loft ceiling came crashing down. There’s just too many variables in a live performance with unpaid and underage amateurs amid poorly anchored scenery for Christmas plays to go exactly as planned.

[Side note: When I was a youngster, I went with my mom to a Christmas concert at Derwent School and watched while my big brother was “operated on” with a carpenter’s saw behind a backlit curtain after a scene where he ate too much pie. I bawled my eyes out thinking that something had gone horribly amiss. But no, the play went exactly as planned and it did look like they killed him. And that’s why you shouldn’t eat too much pie at Christmas, especially if someone wants to try out some new tools.]

The title of Barbara Robinson’s classic book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever appears, at first blush, to be ironic. The Herdman kids, notorious for wrecking everything in their path, bully their way into all the lead parts for the church’s nativity play which were (in this story) traditionally held by the milder and meek of the Sunday School crowd. The initial attraction for the un-herded Herdmans, whose mother works double-shifts and has essentially given-up, is a rumored abundance of food at the church. Much to the chagrin of the kids who previously enjoyed a Herdman-Free-Zone at their Sunday School classes, the hungry Herdmans decide their omnipresence is called for, even here in the church where the oldest Herdman, Imogene, mutters unhappily that apparently “everything” is about Jesus. You can imagine how it all plays out: near disaster, followed by unforgettable redemption. That’s my kind of Christmas story. You can download it to your Kindle or listen to it on Audible or even watch the movie on YouTube featuring Loretta “Hotlips Houlihan” Swit of M.A.S.H. fame. You’re welcome.

And finally, for who those of you who agree with me that this is the best Christmas play ending ever (even if it is animated, Charlie Brown and Snoopy will always be real people to me), heeeeeeeeere’s Linus!

About Hatchet

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One of the good things about homeschooling my kids was that I sort of taught myself how to become a teacher. I never wanted to teach other people’s kids but I loved mine enough to give it a shot. Lucky for me, there were a lot of people who paved the way ahead of me and freely passed out the keys to providing kids with a decent education.

Of course, I have always thought that books were pretty foundational. Not necessarily textbooks, which while providing a framework for progressivity, could also be like eating dry toast for breakfast. Every. Day. How happy was I to learn that much of what we had to cover in Social Studies or Language Arts or Science could be found in Living Books. Meaning real stories written by real people. Even Math could be dissected by picture books and History plumbed with a great novel.

My love of literature started a long time ago in the basement of our farmhouse where an odd assortment of books had collected on the shelves. There were outdated textbooks, some Pulitzer Prize winners, MAD magazine digests, and the first kid’s books I knew. I suspected that The Cat in the Hat Comes Back was a sequel by its title, but as it was the only one we had, it was the only Dr. Suess that I knew. Homer Price, The House at Pooh Corner, The Middle Sister, The Big Wave, The Magic Tunnel populated the shelves, as well as a few of the Thornton W. Burgess, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Hardy Boys and Donna Parker series.

The only library in our little town was in the Derwent school and because I showed so much enthusiasm for reading, the librarian soon let me look at the book catalogs that came across her desk and asked for my suggestions when it came to spending your hard-earned tax dollars for our little library collection. How cool was that?

What I didn’t realized was that some of the best descriptions, especially for books that graced the covers of the catalogs and the tops of the pages, were for award winning books. I never paid attention when I was in school to the gold stickers that were on the front of Really Good Books: the Caldecott Award and the John Newbery. Fast forward to the early 2000s, when I started reading How to Homeschool books in earnest, I discovered that there were many more of these magical lists, these Good Books that would not only entertain me my children, but teach them Very Good Things, too.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was one of those Good Books. Between the lines of a story of parents getting divorced, the protagonist Brian Robeson boards a plane at the beginning of summer break to go see his father who now lives in Canada, somewhere remote enough that a two-seater plane is the method of transport. As if just being a zit-spackled teenager caught in between your parents isn’t bad enough, Brian’s pilot suffers a heart attack and they plummet to the ground to their death. The End.

Just kidding. Brian (but not the pilot) survives the crash and he is pitted against the wilderness, desperately trying to stay alive until somebody can find him, like a needle in a stack of needles. All The Bad Wilderness Things happen to him: hunger, cold, rain, mosquitoes, moose attacks, nightmares about the dead pilot coming to get him, but somehow Brian uses his wits to figure out How to Do Everything With Only A Hatchet.

The Hatchet was a gift his mother gave him before he left which he luckily wore on his belt, surviving along with Brian when the plane, dead pilot and Everything Else That Would Have Been Useful wind up at the bottom of the lake. It turns out to be the key to everything in Brian’s survival.

Brian’s story – parts of which are based on the author’s real experiences living rugged in the bush – was so “enchanting” to Paulsen’s readers that they wrote to him and demanded: More Brian! And so Paulsen gave his adoring public more. The Hatchet series includes The River, Brian’s Winter, Brian’s Hunt, and Brian’s Return, all nice neat little books that you could read in a few hours or find as an audiobook at your local library read by Peter Coyote.

With the Brian books, I can vicariously survive with him in the woods because I have no intention of EVER getting stranded in the wilderness, in Vermilion Provincial Park or even in my backyard. I’m not exactly what you would call a gamer when it comes to the Great Outdoors. I prefer My Outdoors to be 20 above and wind-less, with a cooler of hot dogs and coolers on the deck and a warm bed awaiting me inside four walls. With electricity. And bug spray. No moose.

But.

The Brian Books remind me that with a little bit of ingenuity, we humans can survive a lot, almost anything really. We only need to look back at the last few months when we were first tossed into the COVID-a-tron to know that we can put up with a lot. And sometimes the way to get through the next unknown is to remember what you have already done. Brian, via Paulsen, returned to the woods again and again, because he knew he COULD do it again. And the last time, he did take bug spray.

About Shel Silverstein and His Unexpected Art

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Shel Silverstein, barefoot, grinning and playing rhythm guitar
Shel Silverstein: Poet, Songwriter, Author, Illustrator

A few years ago, Rick and I took a trip to Nashville. We did all the important stuff: we went to the Grand Ole Opry for some truly toe-tapping entertainment, toured Sun Studio and stood on the Singer’s Sweet Spot, and walked Broadway and listened to live music pour out of every single bar and restaurant. And, of course, we went to the Country Music Hall of Fame, a gargantuan 3-storey repository of all things that twang and yodel.

On the top floor, we lucked out: one of the rotating exhibits then featured Johnny Cash’s creative and friendly relationship that he had with Bob Dylan. The display educated us about Johnny’s prowess in the musical world, his love for all genres and his openness to collaboration with oh, so many other artists. All the pictures, stories, music, movies and artifacts led us to a new appreciation of how country, folk and rock ‘n’ roll music were in each other’s back pockets all the time.

Of course, the usual suspects were there: Waylon and Willie and the boys. And then I rounded the corner and found Shel Silverstein.

Shel Silverstein? Of Where the Sidewalk Ends and Falling Up fame? The creator of children’s books Runny Babbit and The Giving Tree? Yup. It was the one and same. This was one of those times when my awareness of an author’s gifts barely scratched the surface of the sum total of his artistic contributions.

Silverstein didn’t look like your typical country music lyricist. Indeed, his roots were Jewish and he hailed from Chicago, far north of the Mason-Dixon line. But his words read whimsical and wise, not completely unlike a Jewish rabbi’s. They were also often quirky and dark.

The Giving Tree (also illustrated by Silverstein – yes, more talent) tells of the relationship between a young boy and a favorite tree – a tree that throughout the boy’s life keeps giving and giving and meeting all the boy’s needs until it makes the ultimate sacrifice. And then it still has more to give. (Read the book!) Its message is so poignant it can make you cry. It can also quite possibly make you mad – the book has been banned because it was interpreted as sexist: the tree exhibited some overexploited female qualities to some Colorado librarians in 1988. Read more about The Giving Tree here.

(Incidentally, you can find most classic children’s picture books on YouTube and have some gramma or grampa turn the virtual pages and read them out loud to you and spare you the embarrassment of checking out piles of picture books for yourself from the library. Like I do.)

Knowing Silverstein’s style, it all came together for me that day in Nashville as I read the huge placard that talked about his contributions to Country Music. And his connection to Cash? He wrote A Boy Named Sue. Well, duh.

As if there wasn’t enough for me to take in that day at the CMHOF, I whipped out my trusty portable encyclopedia – er, iPhone to you rookies – and found out even more lyrics he was famous for:

  • Loretta Lynn’s One’s on the Way – a cheeky tribute to exhausted motherhood
  • Sylvia’s Mother released in the same year by country singer Bobby Bare and, in the version I knew, by Dr. Hook and the Travelling Medicine Show
  • Put Another Log on the Fire, subtitled the Male Chauvinist National Anthem

The great thing about Silverstein’s songs? Like another Dr. Hook tune The Cover of the Rolling Stone? They were just so darn singable.

On the surface, Shel Silverstein’s lyrics and picture may have looked rudimentary and maybe even unsophisticated, but if you dig in you can see that “(they) sing about beauty and (they) sing about truth”. And it’s all told in a way to make you smile.

And really? What more could you ask?

About Clarence the TV Dog

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There are some books that were a part of my childhood that I just cannot shake. Perhaps it was because I read it a zillion (and a half) times or maybe it was because the name Clarence, for a dog, is kinda memorable. Especially because – spoiler alert! – Clarence turns out to be a girl, delivering a litter of puppies at the end of the book. At any rate, the story I most remember from this particular book – which, alas, I no longer own – isn’t about the dog or the TV or even about his (er, her) adoptive family which included tweens Brian and Sis.

No, the most memorable story (for me) had to do with a certain less-than-favorite spinster aunt who injected herself into the family for an extended visit. (And in all honesty, I’m not sure if this chapter is from this book or the end-of-your-seat sequel: Clarence Goes to Town.)

Aunt Spinster was a fifties stereotype of the unmarried, unattractive, unmarriageable woman: a bossy, angular know-it-all – at least, this was the kind of nemesis character that populated children’s books. And most definitely she did not approve of Clarence. Dogs, and children, were to be seen and not heard. Dogs should not watch television or act like humans. And most definitely, dogs (or children) should not mess with skunks.

Except Clarence does mess with a skunk. And you know what sort of havoc and misery that can cause.

Up until the skunk debacle, Brian and Sis have been harangued by their Aunt – not only is she always telling them what to do or what to think, she tells them how to do it or how to think it. Her accomplice in her mean knowledge is a mysterious Everything Book – some sort of mystical encyclopedia that Aunt S carries with her everywhere and consults constantly and religiously. The proper temperature to cook chicken? The capital city of Eritrea? The etymology of the word etymology? All of this seemed to be at her fingertips with a flip through her Everything Book. Sort of like Pre-Google.

For Brian and Sis, harangued to an inch of their lives, their collaborative solution seems like it would be obvious: Find the Book. Destroy the Book. But no, the siblings just want to get their hands on it so that they can get their own copy of said book and start beating their aunt at her game, looking up the answers and ringing in before she does. I’ll take ‘Famous Know-It-Alls and Their Comeuppance’ for $2000.00, Alex.

When they finally do manage to send their aunt on some urgent mission sans book, they page through only to find out that it’s not a book: it’s a scrapbook, a compendium of curiosities cobbled from newspapers and copied from books.

Oh, how I wanted a book like that.

Maybe that’s what sent me down the scrapbook-making quest I have been on since I was a tween myself. Partly a thirst for wanting to know All The Things and partly a love for pasting things into books, I have been creating my own Everything Books for years. Sometimes I call them Art Journals or Junk Journals or Just Journals with Extra Bits of Goodness Stuck Inside Them, but all of them are basically my attempt to save everything, know everything (at least the stuff I want to know) and remember everything.

This blog, I have realized has become a new kind of Art/Junk/Everything Journal for me. And bonus, it’s highly searchable, with a flick of my fingertips just as Aunt S would do when I want to look up something that I want to remember.

Of course, Bossy Aunt Saves the Day, consulting her book and instructing the kids in how to bathe Clarence in tomato juice to rid him of his/her skunky odor. And they decide (as she’s packing up to leave) that maybe she and her book have some value after all.

About The Big Wave

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Before I ever understood anything about Pulitzers or Nobel Prizes, I read the slim book The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck, who incidentally clocked in with both of those honors. So, it is no small thing when a writer of such caliber chooses to write for children, which, despite the heavy content, this book is written for. That being said, I think adults can always benefit from reading good children’s stories.

Kino, the son of a farmer, lives near a Japanese fishing village where his best friend Jiya works with his fisherman father. Tragedy visits when a tsunami wipes out the village even though The Old Gentleman who lives in a castle up the mountain offers refuge at the first signs of danger. Jiya alone, sent by his father, manages to get up the mountain in time and then watches with Kino as the terrible ocean wipes the beach clean.

Years later, Jiya decides to return to the beach, to help rebuild the village and to become a fisherman like his father. Kino is baffled with Jiya’s decision and The Old Gentleman derides those who have started the rebuilding. He warns them that he will never again offer refuge in his castle, what he claims is the only safe place.

Jiya answers him:

“Your castle is not safe either…If the earth shakes hard enough, your castle will crumble, too. There is no refuge for us who live on these islands. We are brave because we must be.”

In some ways, this pandemic has felt like The Big Wave – sweeping, arbitrary and devastating. Many people have died and our way of life has changed in somewhat drastic ways. It’s easy to feel like it will never be the same again. It’s easy to be afraid of The Big Wave, of The Next Wave.

In a podcast I recently listened to, Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) talks with Jen Hatmaker about this feeling of shock that people have – like they’re suddenly out of control, when in fact they were never in control. As Liz puts it, “The world is doing what our world does. The world is just being itself…and it’s doing it perfectly. Because what the world does is change every second…And that’s what it’s always done.”

I take great comfort in those words, which to me paradoxically echo those in Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.” The world does what the world does – as it always has. We were never in control. But we can be brave because we must be.

And though it feels like things may never be the same, we won’t go backward. We aren’t meant for that. We are meant to go back to the beach and build again. And to treasure what we have, if only for this day.

About Me and Books

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There’s a lot of talk about minimalism and tiny houses these days. Generally, I figure that most people who choose to live in a tiny house probably don’t have much stuff to begin with. Or they’re just not that materialistic. They’re outdoorsy, probably, and live in warm climates. They entertain only small parties, if any, because they only own 2 plates and 2 forks and one knife. And they seem to have a romantic idea about sleeping on plywood beds in treehouse style loft bedrooms conducive to hitting your head if you suddenly sit up.

I’ve watched a few of those shows and frankly, it just looks too much like camping to me. Tiny bathrooms where you can sit on the toilet to shower (not a high-value efficiency for me), steps that hide dog dishes (because tiny house people always have room for the largest dogs), shoe storage that doubles as art installations – all these things look nice – in theory. For reals, I’d like to see the stats on how long before these tiny house owners put their digs up for sale on Kijiji.

Maybe the only ones that pique my interest are the tiny-house-book-lovers. You know, people who basically build themselves a self-sufficient closet to hold all their best friends – er, favorite books. Books as art installations? That I understand.

However, as a bookishly nerdy person whose favorite activities all center around words, I don’t have as many books as you might think. Oh sure, I have plenty, more than the average book-bear probably. But I actually don’t have a problem with getting rid of books if – IF – they no longer serve me.

I think my purging prowess started when we moved for the fourth time in the first seven years of being married and I lifted a box heavy with university textbooks that had not been unpacked from the previous move. What purpose did it serve me to save my Microbiology textbook from my ill-fated first year of nursing school? When would I need to urgently look up how a virus evolves the life span of a paramecium? And given constant scientific research and updating, how could I ever know if my textbook would stay “right”? And finally, I never really read it in the first place. Microbiology, Biology, Zoology – all the science-y textbooks – are long gone. And I never missed them.

I started my theory of decluttering before the internet became a THING – when copious amounts of unreliable information were available on the Google – in mere seconds. Way back then, my first criterion for letting go of a book was: Can I find this at the library? Oh, sure, it’s nice to have something around sometime just because you like a subject. Case in point: I never did let go of my Art History textbook from 1988 and I still look things up in it. Because I’m interested in art, especially old art, for which there’s not a lot of new research being dug up, archaeologically speaking. And, in my opinion, an art history textbook makes a nicer coffee table book than Physics, a textbook I also never read but which additionally gives me the heebie-jeebies.

This brings up my second criterion, which was to honestly ask myself: will I ever actually read this – again or for the first time? When I first started homeschooling my boys, I supplemented our bookshelves by haunting garage sales and second-hand stores. I bought anything and everything that looked educational, classic or fun. The result was bookshelves overflowing with many, many unread books. While it served us well to have lots to choose from, I was again confronted with this problem when staging a house to sell. Rather than box up the bulk and shove it under the stairs, I purged again – this time, asking myself the hard questions like: Will I ever read The Count of Monte Cristo or Mein Kampf or HTML for Dummies? Yeah, no.

But that’s me. Physics and HTML might be your perfect bookshelf fodder. And maybe at one time, it was for me, too. On a podcast that I listened to this morning about this subject, the guest talked about letting go of the things that are “no longer you” – which is sometimes hard to do. But she also said that she trusted herself to remember what was important. The result is a lot more room in your brain to focus on what’s here and now. And maybe a lot more room on your bookshelves.

These days, I try to “preview” books before I ever buy them – meaning I use the library again, a lot. There’s nothing worse than spending $30 on a book that you open up and say, “Oh no.” Of course, COVID-19 has made using the library a little different (hurry up, Phase Two!) but in the meantime, I’m shopping my own shelves for reading material. Because I still have books I have to read. And plenty more to give away.

About The Martian

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So I read another book last week. (Cue the horns.)

There’s actually a lot of book reading going on in my house these COVID-19 days. Gil reads regularly, like me, but Rick has definitely upped his game, probably due in part to hearing Gil and me talking about our books all the time.

Gil and I have been having an ongoing conversation about the merits of the Fantasy genre. He schools me about low fantasy (or “low-nerd”) and high fantasy (“high-nerd”, obviously). I insist I don’t like fantasy literature (remember my book club debacle?) and then he points out all the fantasy books I have read (and loved): Harry Potter, Narnia…ummm…yup, I think that’s it. There are only so many unicorns I can handle.

Those favorites would make me a low nerd.

But every once in a while, I up my nerd game and read some science fiction, like this week’s choice, The Martian. It’s actually pretty rare that I read an novel after I have already seen the movie, but my reading guru, Anne Bogel of Modern Mrs. Darcy, insisted it was a brilliant read whether you were a high nerd, low nerd or none of the above. I had really enjoyed the movie, so I had to wonder, what more could the book offer me?

As it turns out, plenty. Like how to survive single-handedly ON MARS – a good skill for anyone’s toolbox. Well, okay, maybe not applicable to most people. But the cool thing about author Andy Weir is that he makes it seem absolutely plausible that it could be done by an ordinary astronaut like Mark Watney (who looks exactly like Matt Damon, so that does tip the balance a little.) His title character is funny, irreverent, oddly optimistic, forgiving, intelligent and most important for being stranded on Mars, he can fix pretty much anything. And his problem-solving skills are killer.

What draws me to a book like this? Well, for one, the science is actually pretty interesting. Weir makes it read like a Reader’s Digest and not a Chilton’s car repair manual. And while I don’t actually like doing science, I do like knowing about it. Weir had real-live astronauts read his book and give it a thumbs up. If it’s good enough for Canadian Chris Hadfield, it’s good enough for me. I do like books that teach me something.

At times, I actually forgot that I was reading a novel. Hmm, interesting. That underscores another winning factor for me – a book that transports me. In this case, metaphorically to Mars. And, very convincingly, with its descriptions of freezing temperatures and lonely days eating freeze-dried snacks – not unlike COVID-19 until spring decided to show up. And also, whether it’s sci-fi or fantasy or whatever, it has to be believable – not in the “I-believe-in-unicorns” sense but in the “If someone got stranded on Mars, this is exactly how we would spend a couple billion dollars getting him back.” Sometimes, I actually believe Mark Watney lived. In the future. It’s THAT convincing.

A book gets bonus points if it can make me LOL, which this one did, several times. Author Andy is apparently pretty funny because the wisecracks are pretty much what he would say in the same situation, he demurs in the interview at the back of this book. I mean, if I want to not laugh, I can borrow a Chilton manual from my father-in-law.

One caveat: the f-bombs abound right from the first sentence. I find it makes the writing effective. But if it bothers you, you can pretend that Weir is British. Almost everything can be forgiven in the right accent.