So Many Books

Raw for Dessert

November 10, 2009 by Stefanie

About a month ago I received a copy of Raw for Dessert by Jennifer Cornbleet and agreed to participate in the Green Books Campaign sponsored by Eco-Libris, a company that promotes green book publishing and allows readers to plant trees in order to offset the trees cut down to make books. At the Green Books link you will find a list of 100 bloggers who all read environmentally friendly books and are posting reviews about them today. The intent is to raise environmental awareness and encourage publishers and readers to be greener.

Many of you know I am vegan and though I do not subscribe to a raw food diet or the raw food philosophy, I couldn’t pass up a chance to try some new vegan desserts. Raw for Dessert arrived promptly. It it a pretty book with some mouthwatering color photos and the whole thing is printed on 100% recycled paper.

As for the desserts themselves, it is mixed. There are several recipes for what look like delicious fruit sorbets but I couldn’t make any of them because they require an ice cream maker, and really who wants to eat sorbet when it is 50 degrees outside?

I didn’t really stop to think what raw meant until I got this book. No flour. Most of the recipes that would normally call for flour require that you make your own flour out of raw nuts, usually walnuts. And the delicious looking chocolate cake is made mostly from medjool dates.

Most of the recipes have very few ingredients but my Bookman who is my kitchen wizard wasn’t prepared to grind 3 cups of walnuts into flour. Nor were we prepared to pay the extortionist prices for three cups of raw organic walnuts at our food co-op.

Another thing I didn’t think about when it came to raw, most of the recipes are fruit based. And well, fruit in Minnesota is usually expensive but this time of year when it is off-season for everything but apples (and with my own apple tree I have had enough of apples for a few months thank you very much), fruit is even more expensive.

We ended up making only one recipe from the book, the freezer fudge. Made mostly of cashews (and here we cheated because we used cashew butter instead of buying raw cashews and creaming them ourselves), it is very rich and has a nice fudge consistency. It is so rich that anything more than one or two bites it too much. So even though the recipe makes what appears to be a small amount, it is more than enough.

I can’t say I was bowled over by the book, but there are several recipes in it I would like to try when the fruit it calls for is in season again. And maybe come spring we’ll invest in an ice cream maker. We have some other books that include recipes for soy ice cream. It would be fun to try them as well as the lighter sorbets in Raw for Dessert.

Posted in Books, Reviews | 7 Comments »

The Binge Pile Grows

November 9, 2009 by Stefanie

Wilkie Collins is going along quite nicely. I’ve got nothing else to say about it at the moment other than Wow! And I am on page 423 out of 569. I wish I could do nothing else at all until I was done with it.

I have managed to collect a tidy little pile in preparation for my two-week binge reading vacation at the end of December (It’s never too early to start planning!). The reading will get to start in earnest a little sooner than that however, as my last day of school is December 6th and the winter quarter doesn’t start until January 4th. Too bad I don’t get the whole month off from work! The pile is taking the binge vacation as well as my addition of free time starting on the 6th into consideration. Here it is so far:

The reading binge pile grows

Isn’t it lovely? I think you can read the titles pretty well, though the third from the top is a bit tricky–Moo Pak by Gabriel Josipovici–and the one on top is one I just brought home from the library today, Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal.

I’m sure there will be more added in the next couple of weeks. I’ll be sure to take an update picture around the end of November.

Now, off to do homework and hopefully to read a little Wilkie Collins too!

Posted in Books, TBR | 18 Comments »

On Following Instructions

November 8, 2009 by Stefanie

For my final project this quarter I have to work with a digital library or content management software and do something with it then write a paper about it. After my troubles with Greenstone, I did a careful review of all the acceptable to my professor software packages and decided that Drupal was the best candidate because it was the one most likely for me to be able to figure out how to run on my computer without a web server. It also is such a popular system it has books and an extensive website.

I won’t go into all the technical details, but I had to download a second software package called MAMP (Mac Apache Mysql PHP) that allows me to run Drupal locally. The Drupal site has step-by-step instructions on how to configure MAMP and how to set Drupal up to run with it.

I downloaded both packages on Thursday evening but didn’t have the mental fortitude to set to work on the installation just then. Friday evening I read through the instructions and my brain again said no. Saturday I could no longer put this off. I installed MAMP and everything went perfectly. Hurdle one jumped.

I installed Drupal and everything went perfectly. Hurdle two jumped.

I carefully followed the instructions on how to connect Drupal to my SQL database in MAMP and Drupal refused to find the database. Next comes the hours spent trying to jump hurdle three and smacking into it each and every time. I tried everything I could think of including starting over at the beginning. I read and re-read the instructions so many times that I could probably re-type them here from memory. I Googled. I looked at Drupal books. I stood looking at this third hurdle wondering what the heck I was going to do to get over it.

I decided that maybe if I turned my back on it something magical might happen, like maybe it would disappear. So I started in on the reading for class for this week and then eventually turned my computer off for the night.

Today I looked at a different Drupal book. It did not have any installation instructions, none of them do. It seems they all assume you have already figured that out or your IT people have. None of them take into consideration that you might be your own IT person. What this book did have, however, was a link to Drupal’s troubleshooting FAQ pages. I wasn’t hopeful as I typed the URL into my browser but maybe I would find something that would point me in the right direction at least.

The FAQ page had a list of different issues including one for installation. The installation page had a another list of issues and lo and behold, the one I was having was among them! I read my problem described to me perfectly and there, right there, was the simple answer. The person who wrote the answer was kind enough to say if this is what is happening to you, you have “misread” the directions. And in a few sentences it cleared up my misreading.

I made the fix and offered up a little prayer to the tech gods as I ran toward that third hurdle again. This time I sailed right over it and landed lightly on the other side. I shouted “woo-hoo!” and scared the cats. My happy dance sent them running from the room. I called my Bookman at work and left him a message with lots of “I did its” and “yays!”

Then I looked about me to see where I was to go from here and the last “yippy!” died on my lips as I gazed at a huge field of hurdles. But at least I made it to the field and now I should be able to find lots of help from various quarters because the field is where the books start and where all the fun stuff gets to happen. I hope.

Now during all of this I have been trying to also read Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. It is, perhaps, not a good idea to have a book that has you on the edge of your seat hovering about because the mind in stress is very good at rationalizing why it should be reading the book instead of trying to figure out the stupid software installation. Work on Drupal for an hour and then I can take a fifteen minute reading break. Right. That fifteen minutes ends up being half an hour because I can’t stop here! Oh I’ll just read to there and then stop. Just one more page. Only five more pages to the end of the chapter, I’ll stop then. You know how it works. But now that I have Drupal working, I think I can reward myself with an hour’s reading. The lines in Las Vegas are now open for you to place your bets on how many minutes over the alloted hour I will manage.

Posted in Library | 5 Comments »

Ready for the Weekend

November 6, 2009 by Stefanie

Woo! The weekend has arrived! I thought it would never get here. I am looking forward to a weekend of raking leaves, working on my final project for the quarter, and, of course, reading. I think what I will be reading most of is The Woman in White. Thus far I have only been reading it on the train to and from work and on my lunch breaks. But these last couple of days have brought me to the halfway point and oh-my-gosh! Things are getting tense and I need to keep reading. No waiting for Monday morning on the way to work. I have to know what happens!

Now that I have that out of the way, I thought I’d share some links with you that I got from my American Library Association newsletter that I could not keep to myself.

In the those-crazy-librarians category (you have to love them, I hope to be one myself someday), The Food Librarian for the lead up to National Bundt Day on November 15th (I had no idea there was a National Bundt Day) is baking a different bundt cake every day. She has a blog and photos to make your mouth water. And I love her theme tag line: I Like Big Bundts.

The holidays will be here before you know it and if you are looking for something unique for your favorite biblioholic or a little somethin’ somethin’ for yourself, you should check out the ten coolest bookends. They are pretty cool too.

But if bookends aren’t in the budget, maybe a t-shirt is? Novel-T has a literary “sports” t-shirt that may have your favorite author’s name on it (or character). Personally I am not sure if I’d want the Moby Dick shirt. Even though it has a big whale on the front walking around with “Dick” and a big number one on your back is just asking for trouble. I think I like the Bartleby one best, but Prynne comes in a close second. Thoreau is good too. And Poe, the one with the heart, not the raven. And…

Have a great weekend everyone!

Posted in Books, Links | 7 Comments »

Dipping In

November 5, 2009 by Stefanie

I began dipping into Mentors, Muses & Monsters the other day, and oh is it off to a good start! The editor, Elizabeth Benedict, has a lovely essay about Elizabeth Hardwick who she had as a teacher at Barnard in the 1970s. Hardwick has a reputation for being sort of a bitch (my choice of descriptor not Benedict’s), but Benedict’s experience of her was as a tactfully honest teacher who was also “very jolly.”

Of the few essays I have read thus far, the one sticking in my mind at the moment is by Robert Boyers called “Imagining Influence.” As a young man trying to make his way in the world as a writer he found that he was paralyzed at the thought of writing fiction. He knew he could not compare to one of the greats and he could not bring himself to produce something he knew was subpar in comparison. So he wrote nonfiction and made his success that way.

But his wife had an obsession with Natalia Ginzburg and worked on a project that took her to Italy several times to interview her. Boyers wasn’t interested in meeting Ginzburg at the time but eventually, because of his wife’s interest, read all of Ginzburg’s work. In Ginzburg he found a writer who was not great but who had a certain force and appeal nonetheless. Ginzburg’s secret was her honesty, she wrote with a fear of “cheating and being dishonest.”

Boyers claims he was not inspired by her work. But Ginzburg had a certain disdain for the notion of “LITERATURE,” and this allowed Boyers to finally begin to write fiction:

I knew that if I was to write fiction, I would have to proceed without worrying about this sort of stuff. Ginzburg herself had derided the notion that to be taken seriously, she would have to ask how she stacked up against Proust or Joyce or Kafka, and in some way her inveterate unconcern fueled my own and allowed me simply to write without noticing the shadows on the wall. When I was young and fresh out of college I wished to write sentences as intricate and original as Stendhal’s. But as I wrote in my fifties I felt free at last to proceed as if the word “masterpiece” had nothing whatever to do with the real, immediate, heart-stopping business of fiction.

Boyers never did meet Ginzburg but her influence is very real.

Nanowrimo is going on this month and all the people participating are attempting to write a novel in one month. It occurs to me that it is very much a device, a means as Ginzburg was to Boyers, to get past the notion of masterpiece and the comparing of oneself with the “biggies.” And isn’t the idea of what literature should be what gets in the way of many fledgling writers? So they write how they think they should write or they try to write like Virginia Woolf or Charles Dickens, or John Updike and end by making a real mess of things.

I’ve never read Ginzburg before, but it seems to me she is onto something. Honesty is a good thing to strive for in fiction. A reader knows when a writer is being dishonest. We will forgive small lies, but if the dishonesty persists, then we put the book down and do not return to it.

I hope the rest of the essays in the book are as good as the first. I’ll let you know!

Posted in Books, Essays | 7 Comments »

Library School Update

November 4, 2009 by Stefanie

I’m in week seven of the fall quarter of library school. Except for a few incidents–my week of vertigo, the digital library software uninstalling applications on my computer, and the same software giving me monumental headaches trying to get it to work on my non-Windows computer–the quarter is going along pretty well. I think. I have only received one grade so far and am waiting for two more so it is kind of hard to judge exactly where I am at. I think I’m doing pretty well.

This weekend I will be working out the details of what my final project will be. It will involve installing yet another piece of software on my poor computer. But at least I get to choose the software so I can make sure that it really will work on my Mac. While it has been a pain at times, most of class this quarter has been hands-on which is nice because it is always good to be familiar with the software that universities are using in case I find myself working with it one of these days.

I have already had to register for my next class that will start in January. Human-Computer Interaction. It is an entire field of study so this class will be more of an introduction. I hope it proves to be interesting.

That’s it on the school front. It keeps me busier than I’d like and unfortunately the reading for it isn’t anything that would be fun to share, unless, of course, you are curious about how to choose digital library software for your digitization project. If you’re looking for that kind of information I’ll gladly supply you, otherwise it’s best to remain in the dark.

Posted in Library | 6 Comments »

E-books and Online Reading

November 3, 2009 by Stefanie

Let’s talk e-books a bit. I still like my Kindle. I read the Emerson and Carlyle letters on it and I must say it has turned out to be very easy to read on the train with mittens on. I also find that reading while eating is much easier because the cover of my Kindle is also a stand I can use to prop it up. Underlining is easy and note taking is relatively easy. But when it comes time to review it all it gets a bit complicated. It is difficult to explain how and why it is complicated because it really shouldn’t be, so let’s just leave it with I find flipping through a paper book with my notes and underlining in it much more convenient.

Did anyone see the article in the New York Times, Does the Brain Like E-Books?. None of the experts really say anything that interesting except Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid. David Gelernter is interesting too but that is mostly because he is a professor of computer science at Yale and is pro-paper book and he has an interesting idea about how technology can be integrated into the book as we know and love it. Read the article, see what you think.

There is an interesting project mentioned in the article. The Transliteracies Project is a project of a group of scholars in the University of California system. They are studying online reading from different perspectives. They post the results of their research and their various ongoing studies online so be sure to check them out, it is fascinating stuff. I look forward to delving in to a few of the papers when library school work is done for the quarter (4 weeks!).

And since we are on the topic of e-books and online reading, here’s a little something in case you are wondering how things are going at Cushing Academy, the school that eliminated books from their library in favor of a $12,000 coffee maker and digital books only. Is it a surprise that the response of faculty and students is mixed?

Posted in Books, Kindle | 14 Comments »

Emerson and Carlyle Grow Old and Die

November 2, 2009 by Stefanie

After Emerson and Carlyle had a bit of a falling out and Carlyle asked Emerson to please continue the correspondence, Emerson put aside his differences with Carlyle and took up his pen again. The letters did not cross the Atlantic with as much frequency as previously. In fact six months to a year or more would pass between letters at times. In part this is due to both men being firmly established in their careers. They no longer had to write business letters accounting for books published on the other’s behalf or making arrangements for proofs and plates to be sent to such and such bookseller.

While their letters were never quite like they used to be, there was still a certain fondness between them and an appreciation of work and intellect. Carlyle wrote to Emerson in in April, 1854:

It remains true, and will remain, what I have often told you, that properly there is no voice in this world which is completely human to me, which fully understands all I say and with clear sympathy and sense answers to me, but your voice only. This is a curious fact, and not quite a joyful one to me.

Carlyle goes on to say that he is surrounded by two million bipeds but not one of them has any sense or understanding. A harsh criticism of his fellow English citizens and a high compliment to Emerson.

After Jane Carlyle’s death in 1866, Carlyle begins a real decline into old age. His hand eventually shakes so much he can no longer write legibly. His niece who lives with him must take dictation for him much to his unhappiness.

Emerson is no better off. Sometime around 1871/72 he begins losing his memory and suffering from aphasia. It is no surprise then that their letters cease in early 1872. Emerson actually went to England in November of that year while his house, which had been burnt down by a fire, was being rebuilt. He had a short stay with Carlyle and then continued on to the Continent, returning for a final visit with his friend in the spring of 1873.

Carlyle died at the age of 85 years in February 1881. Emerson died, aged 79, in April 1882. Both men believed in truth, honesty, integrity. Neither hesitated to say what good and what bad they found in the other’s writings or philosophy. Even though their friendship suffered a rift over the slavery issue, friends they remained until the end. I found following the arc of their friendship to be a moving experience, something I did not expect. And when I came to the end and the final note explaining why there were no further letters I felt a bit sad. I’m not sure what made me more sad, that the letters were done or that they lived another eight years without a direct word from the other.

I very much enjoyed reading these letters. They probably aren’t for everyone’s taste. It certainly helps knowing a bit about at least one or the other of them in order to have some context. Otherwise I’m not sure the letters would be that interesting.

Posted in Emerson, Letters | 5 Comments »

Sunday Notes

November 1, 2009 by Stefanie

Well, the Halloween costumes for the ballroom dance party Friday night never came together. My Bookman just wore all black and I wore black jeans, an orange t-shirt and a Halloween cardigan sweater of the kind you would likely see a grade school teacher wear or would be worn for the Halloween equivalent of an ugly Christmas sweater party. Our problem when it comes to costumes is that we always think they have to be elaborate, but while there were a few people wearing elaborate costumes–one couple were his and her scarecrows complete with straw and crows–it is clear that the ballroom dance crowd goes for clever.

There was a woman wearing a formal gown with a sash ala Miss America that said “I’m Sorry” on it. Know what she was? A formal apology. Another woman was rather skimpily clad and sported a big bow on her chest and a sticker on her butt that read “Stimulus Package.” A man wore an unusual combination of a Minnesota Wild hockey uniform and a knight. He was, therefore, a “Wild night out.” Another man wore a halo and dressed all in fluffy white cotton batting. He was “St. Cloud” (we have a city in Minnesota called St. Cloud). So we are going to have to start thinking now for next year. It will take us that long to come up with something clever.

On the book front, I started reading Mentors, Muses and Monsters and am enjoying it very much. It is quite fun reading about the people (mostly other writers) writers are/were influenced by.

I finished the second and final volume of Emerson and Carlyle’s letters and will be writing about the final years probably tomorrow. Since I finished the letters I have returned to Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White I am in the midst of Marian’s narrative and ever so suspicious of Sir Percival Glyde. Poor Laura in her passive womanly goodness is now married to him while her dear cousin and sister-friend Marian rages about the fate of women. I am having a hard time deciding whether Collins believed in women’s rights or if he was making a bit of fun. Does anyone know?

If you are a Collins fan you may be interested in following Wilkie’s blog tour. The Classics Circuit is a recent addition to book blog world. Bloggers who want to read more classics and promote the reading of more classics have joined together to create blog tours except in this case the author has to be dead. No doubt there will still be author interviews owing to the cleverness of book bloggers. I will not be participating in the Wilkie Collins tour but Elizabeth Gaskell will be making a visit to this blog in December as she makes her tour around the blogosphere.

In some really magnificent (for me) news, I had been planning to take a week’s vacation from work over Christmas week. We get Christmas Eve and Christmas day off as paid holidays and the same for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. I decided on Christmas week because Winter Solstice is at the beginning of the week and that is the holiday we celebrate at my house. So I was happily looking forward to a week off. Well, here comes the really fantastic part, the university president sent out an announcement late last week that everyone will be getting the entire week of New Year’s off as a paid holiday. This means that I will be having a two-week vacation to conclude 2009. Great vats of chocolate Batman! This is SWEET! I can’t remember the last time I had a two-week vacation. I will also be between quarters at library school.

Do you know what this means? Reading binge! I am already juggling books in my brain and will shortly be starting a little pile on the corner of my desk. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I will be adding to the little pile that is already on the corner of my desk. I’ll be sure to let you know closer to the time of the reading binge what ends up in the pile.

Posted in Books, Personal | 13 Comments »

The Woman in Black

October 29, 2009 by Stefanie

I had high expectations for The Woman in Black by Susan Hill because it seems so many blogging book people loved it. Well, I must say I was disappointed. There were three things that combined to make me not care for the book:

There is so much foreshadowing and foreboding for the first half of the book without anything happening that I began to wonder how the actuality could meet the build up. I grew skeptical instead of anticipatory and the more hints of doom that were tossed out the more I doubted so that something really spectacular was going to have to happen in order for things to turn around for me. When the woman in black finally made an appearance my response was, that’s it? I tried to rescue it by thinking how I would feel if I saw something unexplainable like that, but I just couldn’t manage it.

It also didn’t help that as soon as Arthur began reading Jennet’s letters I figured everything out except for one or two minor details. Thus any kind of surprise that could have been had in later revelations was nonexistent.

I could not shake the feeling that I had read this book before even though I am 99% sure I have not. Nor have I seen the movie. This distracted me throughout the book because part of my brain was off trying to figure out why the book was so darn familiar.

So let’s leave my dislike of it behind and look instead on an essential feature of all scary stories: curiosity. There was plenty of curiosity on display in Arthur, our intrepid narrator. If he hadn’t been curious about why everyone was so tightlipped about the Drablow estate he had come to deal with there would not have been a story. And what about the noises coming from the locked room? If he wasn’t curious we’d never know what was in there and the story would end. All horror stories need someone who is curious in order to move the plot ahead.

The curious, it seems to me, are generally the ones who are innocent, ignorant, or just plain stupid. In Arthur’s case it was a combination of innocence and ignorance. The townspeople of Crythin Gifford were neither ignorant nor innocent because the town had been so affected by what happened at the Drablow house. It therefore took an outsider to tell the story.

You and I sitting and reading (or watching a movie) in a safe and cozy place have it easy. We can call the character who dares walk into the haunted room crazy because we have the luxury of the events not happening to us. But guaranteed, as much as we may protest and say “I’d never go in that room,” if we ever found ourselves in a similar situation we very likely would find our curiosity overbalancing our fear. Because that’s the thing about people, we may be utterly terrified but at the same time we want to know what is behind that door or out in the fog. Our curiosity gets the best of us. That and, perhaps, a bit of disbelief or skepticism regarding what is happening. It could not be real. Could it? Even Arthur questions if the things he saw and heard were “real” and that leads him to doubt reality altogether. Once we begin to doubt reality we are done for.

I may not have enjoyed the story of The Woman in Black but it did get me thinking a little on what makes scary work or not work. So in that sense, the book isn’t a complete loss.

I read this for the Slaves of Golconda discussion group. Visit the Slaves blog to see what others thought of the book and feel free to join in the forum discussion.

Posted in Books, Reviews, Slaves of Golconda | 8 Comments »

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