September 2011

Sellery, Bruce. Moolala. ; Why Smart People Do Dumb Things with Their Money – And What You Can Do about It. McClelland & Stewart, 2011. Print.

I heard of this book through Ramit Sethi, a blogger who writes about money, both saving it and making it.  Sethi is big on the psychology of money, and recommended this as a book that will actually help, since it addresses that side of money management.

I got the book out of the library, read it in a week, and asked my husband to read it too.  When I had to return it after 9 weeks, I promptly put it on hold again, and I’ll have to take it back again tomorrow.  I plan to put it right back on hold again!  We’re working our way through it, chapter by chapter, reading it together and doing the exercises.

I like the way Sellery starts with motivation and accountability, which as a teacher I know makes all the difference if you actually want to get people to learn something or change their behaviour.  If I tell you that Sellery wants you to talk to your “community” as part of your financial planning, I risk making you not want to read the book, but it will illustrate how the advice is outside of what you normally get in a financial planning book.  Don’t worry, he gets into the guts of dealing with a financial advisor and ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds), so it’s useful all around.  Highly recommended.

James, P. D. The Black Tower. New York: Scribner, 1975. Print.

This is one of those books that I read unintentionally, just because my mother happened to leave it sitting out at their house.  I’ve heard James’ name, of course, but never happened to have read any of her books.  I’m not usually a big reader of mysteries.  Although I occasionally pick one up and usually enjoy them, it often seems like I’m missing something by not being familiar with the genre – I will miss details that an experienced reader would notice.  Since I don’t like feeling like an outsider, it keeps me from picking up another one until a year or two has passed.

I did like this book, though, about a police inspector in the UK (Adam Dalgliesch, whose name never really settled into a pronunciation in my mind) who goes to visit an old friend and finds he has recently died.  The inhabitants and staff of the big house nearby, which has been turned into a rest home, are the only real possibilities for suspects.  As usual there were clues which I didn’t pick up on, but I sympathized with many of the characters and disliked the ones I was supposed to, so the ending was satisfying.

Hartley-Brewer, Elizabeth. Raising Confident Boys: 100 Tips for Parents and Teachers. Cambridge, MA: Fisher, 2001. Print.

I liked how this books was arranged, with two-page spreads for each of 100 tips.  They were arranged into logical blocks in the chapters, with an introductory explanation for each chapter.  The second page for each tip was divided into two columns, with one for specific ideas for parents and the other for teachers.  Of course some nuances suffer when you force each tip to fit into exactly two pages, but in general it gave good digestible chunks that could be easily read and thought about on the subway.  I made many little notes picking out quotes I liked (e.g. “claiming they know it already or have no need to know are self-protection strategies”.)

There wasn’t really anything in here that I didn’t know already, but a lot of it was perfect reading material for the time I picked up the book, when I was over-stressed by boys at school and boys at home.  This book gave me perspective and little things I could change immediately, which both repaired my confidence and helped ease my day-to-day burden.  I would recommend it for any parent who is worried about their boy(s), although I think I found it less helpful as a teacher.

Nisbett, Jean, and Alec Nisbett. The Modern Dolls’ House. Lewes: Guild of Master Craftsman, 2004. Print.
I got this off the library shelf, wondering as usual whether they meant “modern” or, less likely, “Modern”.  It’s awkward having a style of architecture with a common word as its name, and decidedly inconvenient that the style is getting to be a century old now, so that “Modern” architecture is no longer actually modern.

Anyway, if I have totally confused you, this book would help.  It covers dollhouses decorated in 20th and 21st century styles, including Modern, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, 80s and 90s.  Because she goes into detail about what makes each style recognizable, it’s a good resource for me just learning about these architectural and design styles.

The book covers not just houses, but offices, stores, hotels, restaurants, and even a museum (a good idea if you have a bunch of miniatures of one type).  Quite early on in the book she discusses Edwardian exteriors and interiors, useful for me with my 1913 farmhouse and 1914 city house.  When she points out that floors were usually bare wood with a carpet square in the middle, for instance, the little light bulb goes on in my head pointing out that that’s why the wall-to-wall carpeting in our hallway has never looked quite right to me.

Now that I know that the style I’m looking for is called “Edwardian”, I have lots more books on hold at the library, and I’m indebted to Nesbitt!

Gabaldon, Diana. Drums of Autumn. New York: Delacorte, 1997. Print.

Since this is the fourth in a series, I would have thought I would have reviewed at least one of these before.  Searching shows not, though, so I apologize for the disconnection in this record.

I was given Outlander as a gift quite some time ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I had not heard of it, but it seems to have quite a fanatical following.  As an example, Amazon.ca tells me it’s #30440 in books, but LibraryThing ranks it 229 in popularity.  That says to me it’s popular with people who like books and like to write about them (i.e., people like me, I guess).

I think I can best describe it as a sprawling mix of fantasy, historical fiction, and romance.  The books do seem to be impressively well researched and detailed.  The next three have followed that pattern, and if I’m not mistaken they keep getting longer each time – there is no risk of Gabaldon running out of material, I think!  In the first book, the main character Claire accidentally walks through a standing stone circle and ends up 200 years in the past.  She falls in love with Jamie Fraser, in that kind of grand passion that occasionally has me rolling my eyes, but leads to lots of great adventures.  I did get annoyed in this book at a plot device that had a communication mistake lead to a long, drawn-out disagreement that took a couple of hundred pages to resolve.  But in general it was a good read, especially for summer.

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.