Dinner Blogging With Daughter
Wheel of books
Redbones Barbaque in Davis Square, (Somerville, MA) had a wheel of fortune style wheel over their bar. Each piece of the pie was a different beer they had on tap and adventurous (or merely indecisive) patrons like myself would tell the bartender to spin the wheel and let the beer gods decide which tap to pour from. In my many years of stopping in after work or for late night beers with friends, only once did I end up with what I considered an undrinkable beer.
Across the river in Brookline, there isn’t a wheel of beer, but there is the best “staff recommended” book shelf that I’ve come across in my travels. I thought about that shelf recently, thanks to Mortar Bend’s post on big box stores. It’s been a while since I’ve been into Brookline Booksmith (or its sister store, the Wellesley Booksmith) and I notice I’ve been dissatisfied with my own reading habits of late. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could teleport myself to Brookline, and somehow the most interesting of the picks on Redbone’s beer wheel and take a spin? What would the book gods think I should be reading?
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to line up the most recent recommendations across the top of my browser.
My first pick was:
Love’s Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Yalom, Irvin D. ,
Description
The collection of ten absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. In recounting his patients’ dilemmas, Yalom not only gives us a rare and enthralling glimpse into their personal desires and motivations but also tells us his own story as he struggles to reconcile his all-too human responses with his sensibility as a psychiatrist. Not since Freud has an author done so much to clarify what goes on between a psychotherapist and a patient.
I first encountered Yalom when a staffer picked his “Lying On The Couch” over 10 years ago and have been impressed by his writings ever since. I’ve only read his fiction, but I’d be willing to throw this up on the wheel.
Next:
Ten Little Indians by Alexie, Sherman
Description
Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians, a massively acclaimed national best-seller, “serves up nine seamless stories formed in the gut and delivered from the heart, depicting Native Americans caught in contemporary cultural crosshairs” (Elle). In Alexie’s first story, “The Search Engine,” Corliss is a rugged and resourceful student who finds in books the magic she was denied while growing up poor. When she discovers the poetry of a fellow Native who vanished thirty years earlier after winning the Pulitzer Prize, she makes it her mission to find him. Although he does not prove to be the man Corliss needs him to be, his devastating story will help her in her own struggle to belong. In “The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above,” an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her to the bewilderment of her only child, now a grown man who looks back at his life with equal parts fondness, amusement, and regret. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” starts off with a homeless man recognizing in a pawn shop window the fancy-dance regalia that was stolen fifty years earlier from his late grandmother. As he tries to raise $1,000 in twenty-four hours to buy back the outfit, the man’s misadventure combines bittersweet wit and touching earnestness as only this author can. Even as they often make us laugh, Sherman Alexie’s stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candor that cut to the heart of the human experience. The result is a short-story collection that has been hailed as Alexie’s “best in years” (Austin American-Statesman) and “proves once again that he is a fearless writer” (Rocky Mountain News).
I really liked his first collection of stories, and the movie was fantastic, so I’d gamble on this one.
Then I’d pick:
Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Collins, Paul
Description
Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside-to move, in fact, to the village of Hay-on-Wye, the “Town of Books” that boasts fifteen hundred inhabitants-and forty bookstores. Taking readers into a secluded sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through the creation of the author’s own first book, “Sixpence House” becomes a heartfelt and often hilarious meditation on what books mean to us.
Judging the book soley on the back cover - sounds interesting.
I’d throw this on the wheel, not because I’m a huge mystery fan (although I did go through a phase where all I read were lesbian detective novels) or that into Chinese history, but because a staff member recommended it.
The Skull Mantra by Pattison, Eliot
Description
The corpse is missing its head and is dressed in American clothes. Found by a Tibetan prison work gang on a windy cliff, the grisly remains clearly belong to someone too important for Chinese authorities to bury and forget. So the case is handed to veteran police inspector Shan Tao Yun. Methodical, clever Shan is the best man for the job, but he too is a prisoner, deported to Tibet for offending Beijing. Granted a temporary release, Shan is soon pulled into the Tibetan people’s desperate fight for its sacred mountain and the Chinese regime’s blood-soaked policies. Then, a Buddhist priest is arrested, a man Shan knows is innocent. Now time is running out for Shan to find the real killer…in an astonishing, emotionally charged story that will change the way you think about Tibet– and freedom– forever.
and finally, I’d add
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Solnit, Rebecca
Description
Written as a series of autobiographical essays, this volume draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit’s life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place.
Take a spin and pick a book for me, will ya?
Payola?
Christopher Penn has a fantastic take on proposed bailout for homeowners facing foreclosure. Good job Chris!
Bitch, Ph.D.
Bitch, Ph.D. wrote an open letter to Markos of the Daily Kos, on his recent comments about the proposed blogger code of conduct. And while Bitch agreed with Kos that they were in fact asinine, she called him out on his failure to recognize the fact that women face a different kind of harassment online.
I clicked over to her site just moments after calming myself down after a reading a series of comments in a thread I’d been participating in. A regular, well known, pain in the ass, responded to my benign post about time stamping a document, with a several very personal, very sexist & homophobic remarks that made me feel threatened.
I can’t respond, I did once and rather than silencing him, he came back with more venom, and I know that responding to him again makes it worse. I know that people who read his comments will know that he is the asshole.
And yet, I still want some man to come in and defend my honor. I feel like I need someone with more “authority” to call him on it. That desire pisses me off just as much as his comments did.
MCLA Summer School
Movable Conversation
Last week, Wes posted about housing prices in Williamstown, which generated into a rather long conversation in his comments. At one point I felt like Southview and I were just commenting back and forth so I proposed we continue the conversation at my blog. Jack took me up on that offer and left a couple of comments and my husband even chimed in.
I’ve had varying forms of this conversation online for years, and I know I’m in the minority on this. I’m opposed to rent controlled apartments, generally against government subsidized housing for all but the elderly and infirm, and am against a town tax policy that artificially caps property taxes for retired people on fixed incomes. I think it is bad for towns and cities in generally, because it discourages growth and renewal, and undercuts its tax system. Schools are hot topics, but isn’t just schools that need to be competitive and have sufficient funding. We need firefighters who can drive working trucks, and ambulance drivers and EMTs who are competent and professional. We need police who won’t be trying to make up for low salaries by taking bribes and streets that aren’t filled with potholes. It seems to me that we need all property owners to pay their share in today’s dollars, not 1966 dollars or 1980 dollars or whatever they paid for their home when they bought it.
But the bottom line, for me anyway, is that it seems incredibly un-democratic, to write a tax code that favors one group of home owners over another.
Content is still king
or in this case, queen. This may be one of the most innovative websites I’ve run across in a while. The author is trying to sell something, something I didn’t even know I wanted before I clicked on to her page, and at the end, I couldn’t wait to have it.
Click on over, I dare you.
Another day, another template.
I think this one looked better on the rack. I landed on this template as I was searching for Google Adsense Friendly templates, but I think this is over the top, even for me. I’m going to give it a day or two and see if Google can figure out who my audience is and what you are interested in and I’ll let you know how it goes. Just last week, Greg pointed out some odd advertising on The Blazer Blog.