The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein Box Set (Where the Sidewalk Ends / A Light in the Attic / Falling Up), $80+

This is out of print but you’ll probably find it in a good used bookstore. Amazon has a few in stock, too, from various used book sellers.

from Amazon.com

Baked, $20 and Salty Sweets, $14
I’m recommending these books together because I think the pair of them would make one great gift.

Baked is actually a store here in Brooklyn, and the guys who own it are a little younger and hipper than the average baker. They’ve taken traditional treats and spiced them up with modern twists.

Salty Sweets is devoted to the concept of salt and sugar is the greatest combo ever.  I heard the author, Christie Matheson, on the Faith Middleton Show and was drooling by the end of the episode.

Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities, $23
John M. Carrera gathered and restored over 1500 original engravings from 19th century Webster’s Dictionaries and put them all in this book. This is the perfect gift for tattooed art enthusiasts, middle aged professors of English, and lots of people in between.

Amazon, can barely keep this in stock, so move now if you want a copy.

Anna Jane was fun to interview, and it was great to have a woman on the show after a long string of manly guests. We giggled our way through a lot of it, and I imagined Rob on the other side of the booth wall getting really uncomfortable; we were talking about “body hair” and “waxing down there”. Good stuff.

Her new book, Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By is awesome. It’s a book of things that are becoming obsolete but we can still find and can definitely still remember. In the interview she says that she wrote it for herself – it’s not covered wagons or butter churns that she’s talking about, it’s stuff from our early 80′s childhood: answering machines, rotary phones, Polaroid pictures*, mini discs, and boomboxes. Since she and I are about the same age, it rang all the same bells for me, too.

Anna Jane has a contest going on on her Obsolete Blog:

Every day [until September 21], I’ll be accepting submissions…: photos, videos, short essays, audio clips, etc. Each day, the best submissions will be featured [the Obsolete Blog]; each day’s winning entrant will receive a free signed copy of OBSOLETE.

To enter, please email me your submission to ObsoleteTheBook@gmail.com or use the form [on the blog]. Make sure to include your email address so that I can contact you if you win.

But wait! There’s more! If you are a TUMBLR or FACEBOOK or TWITTER user and you reblog or mention this post, you will receive a little token of my appreciation. For free! Via mail! Old school, right? All you have to do is email me a link to the reblogged post, or a screen shot, and your mailing address.

*I can’t possibly the only person in the world who says “Polaroid picture” and then has to think, “Shake it, uh, uh, uh! Shake it! Hey ya! Shake it like a Polaroid picture!”

The problem with me and dystopic novels is that I can’t ever quite shake them off as “something that would never happen”. The level to which people become complacent, so long as they are well-fed and unruffled, un-nerves me (never more so than when I recognize it in myself). It’s really easy to pick on the white picket fence suburban dwelling home-owners to illustrate this point, but we’re all doing it: those that live in glamorous high-rises in Manhattan with loads of money and important, morally-bankrupt jobs, and those working on a farm taking government money to grow way too much corn. As long as the status-quo is maintained, we stay quiet, and chains can easily slip around us.

Anyway, I was sent a dystopic novel to review and I couldn’t talk about it for a while even though it was really, really good; it shook me up a bit. Then we moved, and and it got backburnered, but I’m pretty excited to share this one now. It’s kind of like the Giver meets Soylent Green.

The Unitby Ninni Holmqvist is set in the not so distant future, in Sweden. The people in society known as “dispensables” are sent to live in the Second Reserve Unit Bank where they are given comfortable one-bedroom apartments sealed in a huge facility that provides them everything they need to live out their last days rather luxuriously: swimming pools, a library, five-course meals, a museum, and fun social events are all provided at no cost to them. In the heart of the Unit is a winter garden perpetually blooming with flowers that becomes the favorite hangout of Dorrit Weger, the narrator, who was sent to live in the Unit shortly after her 50th birthday. (In a sexist plot twist we learn that one becomes a dispensable by failing to have children, contributing to the economy or being registered as “loved” by family or a lover by age 50 for women, while men have until age 60.)

In exchange for all of this, the dispensables are used for involuntary drug and scientific experiments, and donate organs, one at a time for a few years, to those outside the Unit who are “needed” by society. Eventually the time comes for all of them to give their “final donation”.

In striking contrast to a lot of dystopic stories, everyone in the Unit is completely aware of what is happening to them. Rather than be horrified, it is accepted simply as The Way Things Are.  Most  of the inhabitants are more focused on enjoying the close friendships and sense of belonging they’ve found in the Unit for the first time in their lives, and who is going to be donating what is a frequent topic of glib dinner conversation: “Next week, they’re giving my kidney to a mother of four!”

It sounds completely horrific, but the book is written so cleverly and in such a way that Ninni brings us to the point where even the most fundamentalist theist would start to think, “Ok, maybe…?”, and THEN she hits us with a plot twist so unexpected I literally said out loud, “SHUT! UP!” and dropped the book in shock (which was awkward because I was on the subway).

By the end of the novel it’s quite clear that this system has created a sort of hell outside of the Unit, with teens having babies as young as possible to ensure they won’t end up in the Unit, and kidnappings skyrocketing among those whose time is coming to go. Standards for dispensables change to become broader, so they can include more of the people who were formerly protected.

Despite the heavy topic this is an easy read, making it a good, cerebral alternative to the fluffy chick-lit beach books available to us women. It is an inspection of what it is to be a thinking female, a critical look at rampant ageism, and an examination of the struggle to find a worthwhile identity in society as an un-married, non-childbearing woman. In other words, it’s a look at a caricature of a society not entirely unlike our own.

To buy it:

Ever since the green paint incident* I’ve had a fear of painting the wrong color in a room, but I’ve done pretty well for myself, I think, with this current apartment. That’s a total attitude change from a few days ago, brought on by the elimination of the ugly blue-green trim color that permeated our new digs, the color I’ve been raging against since I first saw the place. (“What were they thinking?!”)

We painted every white wall first with “risky” colors that I hoped I would come to love, and having the ugly trim paired with my freshly painted walls that I wasn’t quite sure about threw me off into believing the entire place was a disaster. I was so upset thinking that I was going to live in the UGLIEST! APARTMENT! EVER! and that I spent money for paint and worked hard painting for that privilege. (It would be one thing if the apartment was ugly through no fault of my own, but to actually make it ugly? Unbearable.) Now, though, with a few coats of America’s favorite paint color, Navajo White, the ugly trim is gone, replaced by crispy colored trim that gives the entire apartment a fresh, modern feeling. It’s downright beautiful if I do say so myself!

We’re half-way there getting the trim done; the ugly color is so deep it requires two coats of Navajo White, and is so extensive – every room, every doorway – that I’m going to be super busy painting it all before moving day Thursday. I’m listening to Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk while I’m doing it, which helps pass the time better than music.

I’ll be back in a few days, posting from Park Slope!

_____

*Oh, it was bad. The worst was that my friends tried to talk me out of it, even as they were painting it, and I was all, “No, no! It’s gonna be great!” and I loved it for about three seconds, and then I was devastated and had to paint over it.

When I was asked to review this book by Charlotte Greig, I was excited because it was a novel. I don’t usually read them, and not because I don’t want to but because I have a hard time finding books that aren’t silly “chick lit” but still interesting and non-depressing.  (I do enjoy good literature geared towards women.)  I know, everyone says they can’t stomach the genre and yet it remains so popular, but I genuinely get bored and angry reading female characters who are totally vapid. (Trying to watch the Real Housewives of anything has me foaming at the mouth.)

Here, finally, is a lead female character that has a brain. Susannah is a philosophy student in Sussex, England in 1974, although the 70′s part didn’t play in so heavily that the book felt like it was telling a 35 year old story. There were concrete references to the era – a John Martyn concert in a student center for one, a note that the new, acceptable term for homosexuals is “gay” for another – but the story feels timeless and easy to relate to. Susannah, a sophomore, turns to the major European philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries to help determine major life decisions, and as a humanist thinker I appreciated reading a book where the first obvious answer was not turning to a higher power. The “crash course” on major philosophers was fascinating, too.

There is romance in the book, but it doesn’t dominate annoyingly, and it’s not all sweetness either.  There is no obvious happy ending looming all throughout the book, and Charlotte Greig does an excellent job of making things not just what I want them to be, but what they must be.  A major theme in the book only debuts in the second half, letting the reader get to know Susannah and her life’s circumstances first so we really feel it when the twisty party comes.

This novel is beautifully written, and I’m very excited to be sharing it with you.  It’s on Amazon here.

I left with plenty of time to get to my appointment today but I went to 8th Avenue, not 8th Street. With fifteen minutes to spare, I drove the few miles to the proper address and arrived at 3:04. Ok. Not bad. I dropped off my gear and dashed off to park, thinking it would take me no time at all.

I ended up driving about ten miles in a three-block radius. After about fifty swear words, several angst-filled poundings on the steering wheel, and a handful of prayers to gods I don’t actually believe in, I found a spot and arrived back at 3:45. This was a new personal low of mine, and I was ashamed. Also, we are nearly out of gas, and I’ve gnawed off several fingernails.

My interview went well; I get to meet the most interesting people and today was no exception. Lotta offered me water, I accepted, and it came sparkling, in a glass, with a lime. Classy! Note to self: buy limes and put them in guests’ drinks. It shows thoughtfulness.

Her newest book comes out today, and I flipped through it while we were interviewing. The projects really do seem simple, and there are several patterns included with the book. There are things to make for toddlers, too, including bibs, rattles, crib bumpers and quilts.

Order here

Rob hates driving in the city. HAAAATES. (For those not hip – “the city” is Manhattan. Brooklyn driving is cake.) He also hates paying parking garages. Still, I asked if he would consider driving me to Heather Armstrong’s book signing. I figured if I could sit in the car, slither out of it and into the bookstore and then slither back into it and be driven back to my bed, I could go for the hour or so. Taking the subway in this state of sickness is out of the question.

“No way!” he said. I figured.

But later: “If we leave now, we can be there on time.”

Yes! He is so awesome.

I put on pants (torture) for the first time in ages and dragged myself to the car.

It was so worth it.

I didn’t bring my camera because it would be a picture of Heather all dressed up pretty signing my book while I smiled pitiful and pale, with a bird’s nest on my head (I’ve got about half the knots combed out, by the way, but there are dreadlocks that are going to need a lot more time, attention, and possibly scissors if the universe decides to really stick it to me).

There’s a mini movement on Twitter to bump her book over Ann Coulter’s on Amazon. Go help.
Amazon.com, $16

I’ve noticed that medium-size life disappointments have a tendency to be mercifully bitter sweet, but this one… it’s just bitter. I am too sick to go see Heather Armstrong, one of my idols, as she kicks off her book tour in Manhattan tonight.  Also, this morning, I had to cancel a Hey Brooklyn interview with a husband and wife duo who own a bakery and make, among other things, butterscotch brownies.  BUTTERSCOTCH!  BROWNIES!  I’m missing out on butterscotch brownies and Heather Armstrong.  This is officially the worst day in the world.  Ever.  Total.  Infinity.

photo from dooce.com