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Smith, Dodie. The Girl from the Candle-lit Bath. London: W.H. Allen, 1978. Print.

Smith’s most famous book might be her 1956 The One Hundred and One Dalmations, thanks to the Disney movie adaptation.  Her best book, though, must certainly be I Capture the Castle.  I love it so much that I am trying to find the rest of her books and check to see if I’m right.

I read The Town in Bloom last year, according to my notes, but my mind is totally blank on it (more motivation for writing these records).  The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath turned out, much to my surprise, to be a mystery novel originally published in 1978.  I would say that it’s set in a slightly earlier England, with a young wife mystified by the machinations of her new husband.  It’s not really a thriller and not exactly a murder mystery, but there is certainly suspense and believable action.  I liked the main character and sympathized with her.  I’m not sure I’d recommend the book, but I enjoyed it.

The title, incidentally, comes from the main character’s fifteen minutes of fame as the young woman seen tastefully naked in a soap commercial.  Somewhat to her dismay, she is continually recognized in public, although that doesn’t seem to be related to the rest of the story much.

Messervy, Julie Moir. Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love. Newtown, CT: Taunton, 2009. Print.

I’m starting to wonder if I will ever find a Taunton publication that I don’t thoroughly approve of.  This was no exception; I came across it in the context of Sarah Susanka’s Not so Big House series, since Messervy was the co-author (or perhaps just author?) of Outside the Not-So-Big House, which I read in 2009 but can’t specifically recall (hence these “reviews”, or perhaps I should give up and just call them “records”).

In any case, this book had inspiring pictures, but augmented that with theory and explanations of just why it is that the pictures are so appealing.  I was raised with the somewhat-traditional method of foundation planting around a house, and although I knew I wasn’t keen on cutting a half-acre of grass at our new/old farmhouse, I didn’t have a clear vision of what options I might have.

This book showed me plenty of options, and how to create them.  In a neat coincidence (or are they all inter-related?), her thoughts about outdoor rooms echoed what I’d been recently reading in Patterns of Home, and it was easy for me to see how various patterns were expressed in gardens outside houses as well as inside them.  By thinking of my farmhouse surround as having “rooms” for activities like hanging out laundry, growing vegetables, and entertaining, I can start to shape one big, daunting space into a series of connected, comfortable hangouts.

This doesn’t come naturally to me, but this is why I love reading – to expand my skills and knowledge, and use them to create beauty in my life.

Hay, Elizabeth. Late Nights on Air. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. Print.

Unlike The Help, this is one where I’m coming late to the party.  It won the Giller Prize in 2007, which I think is when it came to prominence and everyone was reading it.  Often “everyone’s reading it” is enough to turn me off a book, and I’ll stubbornly wait until some later time.

Fortunately the time came for this book.  I think I just got sick of seeing it at the top of my LibraryThing recommendations, and I needed a novel to read, so I let my hold on it go active.  Predictably enough, once starting it I finished it in a couple of days.

I was pleasantly surprised partly because I’d read one of Hay’s later books, Alone in the Classroom, in May of this year (I see now that I missed reviewing that book.)  It was good but ultimately not very satisfying. I enjoyed Late Nights on Air much more.

It’s no mystery to me that I liked it partly because it was set in Yellowknife, but for some reason I also liked the fact that it was set in 1975.  Nothing seems quite so un-glamourous as 1975, especially any part of Canada in 1975.  But it was an enjoyable angle without having polyester suits mentioned at every turn.  Recommended.

De Lint, Charles. Jack of Kinrowan. New York: Tor, 1995. Print.

A dear friend brought me this to read in the hospital in August, when I found myself there for a few days longer than expected.  Hospital reading is tricky – although I thought it would be a great chance to catch up on some things, it turns out that between feeling unwell (after all, why would I be there?) and the natural commotion of a ward room, it’s pretty difficult to summon up the attention for most books.  She got it just right, saying that she didn’t think she needed to go as far as “chick lit”, but that something light would be appreciated.

I was immediately drawn in by this re-imagining of the Jack the Giant-Killer tale, with an Ottawa woman in the main character of Jack.  I also liked that her best friend drove a red VW Beetle, making it easy to imagine myself into the story!  My only complaint with the book was that it seemed over half-way through, and the second half to be unnecessary; this could have been avoided if I’d read the back cover more carefully and realized that it was two novellas collected together.  But like I say, I was not at my best.

I see now that this is listed as an ALA Popular Paperback for Young Adults; that makes sense to me, although I didn’t necessarily get the sense that De Lint was writing it specifically to be a YA book.  I recommend this if you’re open to reading about elves and related creatures, especially in the UK tradition.  Apparently it’s part of a genre of “urban fantasy” that is a new idea to me, so I can’t comment on whether it’s a particularly good representative of the genre, but I certainly enjoyed it as an introduction to it.

Hay, Louise L. You Can Heal Your Life. Santa Monica, CA: Hay House, 1987. Print.

I didn’t finish this book, but my rules of writing say that I have to post about it.  I know that someday I will be thinking “what was that stupid book that claimed that cancer was caused by repressed guilt?”  Although some of her thoughts on positive affirmations were useful, I really need a more scientific and less flaky way of presenting them.

It came to my notice through the Raising Small Souls website, but I would definitely not recommend the book.

I started “reviewing” books in my half-assed way on September 6, 2011, so it has been a year now.  In that time I have talked about 74 books.  It was my intention to at least record every book I read, but cross-referencing on LibraryThing I see I’ve missed at least a dozen books, and it’s quite possible that some are missing from LibraryThing as well.  Here are the ones I know about, and perhaps I’ll catch up on them later:

Empire Falls, Richard Russo.

Gourmet Rhapsody, Muriel Barbery.

House And Home: A Practical Book On Home Management, Mary Elizabeth Carter.

It’s All Too Much, Peter Walsh.

Never Work Harder than your Students, Robyn Jackson.

Schoolgirls, Peggy Orenstein.

Home Outside, Julie Moir Messervy.

Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay.

The Blythes are Quoted, L. M. Montgomery.

Jack of Kinrowan, Charles de Lint.

Treehouses: the art and craft of living out on a limb, Peter Nelson.

Sibling Rivalry, by Adele Faber.

There are also books waiting to go back to the library that are not reviewed yet, and not on this list either, since I’m in no danger (yet) of forgetting about them.  It’s safe to assume I read about 90 books this year, which is a little lower than some years, but not bad considering I was teaching at a new school.

Coloroso, Barbara. Kids Are worth It!: Raising Resilient, Responsible, Compassionate Kids. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2010. Print.

It seems to me that Barbara Coloroso’s name has been big in parenting from the time I was in University, and when I had the urge recently to go back to basics on that topic, hers was a name that came to mind immediately.

This is a 2010 edition of the book that was originally subtitled “giving your children the gift of inner discipline”.  The library says that book came out in 1994, so I wondered if the advice might seem at all dated.  Fortunately it did not, and I came away with a new appreciation for Coloroso and her work.  I recognized some of the terminology (specifically, “backbone”, “jellyfish”, and “brick wall” parents) from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families.  I recalled later that he mentions and credits her for those terms and examples.

This book is meaty enough that it deserves a chapter-by-chapter analysis.  There were a lot of good ideas, and a lot of points where it was painful to recognize things I’ve done or said in my years of parenting.  Unfortunately I read it too fast, and I’m not sure I absorbed enough of it, so this is a book I’ll have to revisit.  Highly recommended.

CMHC. Canadian Wood-Frame House Construction. 2005.

It’s difficult to know how to cite government publications!  Another odd thing is that Amazon says the best price for this book is $110.  I guess the library knows what it’s doing, letting this go out for circulation.

Anyway, I got it off the shelf at my local branch to solve a particular framing problem for a cross-gable roof I was designing.  It helped admirably, and although I feel a little guilty that I didn’t read the whole book, I was grateful that finding the information I needed was so easy.

My dad came to visit in the three weeks this was sitting on my desk, and he says he just bought the same book!

Stockett, Kathryn. The Help. New York: Amy Einhorn, 2009. Print.

What can I say about this book you don’t already know?  It’s #1 in books on Amazon.ca (as of today when I grabbed the link to left), and it has been turned into a top box office movie.

So, this is where I give up all pretense of “reviewing” a book and just record that I read it.  And loved it.  I started it one day and didn’t really get into it, but the next night I was up until midnight finishing it.  Then the following day I actually spoke to a woman in public – which I almost never do! – who I saw was reading the book on the GO train.

I even only read it by accident, because my Mom bought it on a whim at the Sudbury Coles (I’m not sure even realizes how popular it is right now) and left it at my house because she didn’t want to carry it on the cruise she was going on.  I’m glad I did, though – it was a perfect summer read, thrilling and thought-provoking.  It might not change the world, but I hope it spurs some nudges.

Jacobson, Max, Murray Silverstein, and Barbara Winslow. Patterns of Home: the Ten Essentials of Enduring Design. Newtown, CT: Taunton, 2002. Print.

I read Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (but not the first or third books in the series) many years ago, before I was seriously interested in houses and building.  It came up, interestingly, in the context of programming, which was my career at the time, because of the interest in patterns.

This book is written by some of the original contributors, and is intended to provide a more accessible look at the most important patterns.  Instead of 250, there are only 10, and they are heavily illustrated with gorgeous full-page pictures, as you would expect from the Taunton press.  (In contract, I recall A Pattern Language having only a few small diagrams).  I didn’t initially think it would be very useful to me, but the more I read, the more it made sense.  The pattern of “Creating Rooms” is more than putting up four walls; “Sheltering Roof” made me realize why some places seem so home-like to me.

This is a great book for anyone is thinking of building anything new, whether it’s a house or just a patio or outbuilding.  I will definitely revisit it in the future.