Where is the middle ground of "Green"?

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that I try to live lightly on the earth, minimizing my carbon footprint, and by extension that of my family.

Yes, I know, I'm kind of a zealot.  

I hassle my parents about not composting ("You're gonna do WHAT with the corncobs? And kitchen scraps? That's awful!!"  Sure, that's the very best way to end a family dinner, no?).  I hassle my son when he puts something that is recyclable into the trash bin instead of the recycling bin.  I'm the weirdo at work who, at an afternoon birthday cake, runs away from the styrofoam coffee cups; I bring my own mug.  I even pause when I think about ski season because despite the fact that I LOVE IT, it means a lot more driving to and from the local mountains, and the ski lifts and snowmaking machines use a lot of power, whereas the rest of the year our family tends to aspire toward non-fossil-fuel-consuming leisure activities.

There's always more that I could do.  There's always a way that I could make less trash.  But I still need to find some middle ground here, because I know I'm a little bit irritating.  So, two recent books are helping me find that balance.

Nathanael Johnson: All Natural: A Skeptic's Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet Childbirth, Healing, and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier

and

Amy Korst, The Zero-Waste Lifestyle: Live Well by Throwing Away Less

The Dude and the Zen Master

The Dude Abides.

One September day, I read The Dude and the Zen Master in one sitting, about two hours, in the sun, in my back yard.  Seems like The Dude deserved the sunshine-y, high-quality treatment!

True confessions: I don't know much about Zen Buddhism, or even Buddhism in general. And this book isn't going to make you an expert either.  It might whet your appetite to know more, though, as it has for me.  What I do know seems to make excellent sense on how to be a decent human being.  How to live with yourself and others in a healthy way.

Little did I know that Jeff Bridges is a real perfectionist and pretty hard on himself.  I just always imagine him being just as "chill" as The Dude in The Big Lebowski.  Not so.  He worries a lot.  He worries about his performances as an actor, or as a public speaker.  Zen seems to help him escape some of this anxiety, that Zen is just "being" - just "showing up".  Kind of "don't sweat the small stuff."  I know that I can benefit being reminded of this!

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland
(accompanied by my "tools of the trade")

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland is a magnificent novel, under consideration for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. I am honored to read it as part of the "very-long" list of the Maine Readers' Choice Award.  I finished it more than a month ago, but I haven't been able to write about it, mainly because I want so much to do it justice.

As much as I insisted that I like a book that has a very compact time frame (in my post about The Dinner), I have to say that Lahiri can achieve the opposite - a book that spans an entire human lifetime. 

The End of the Suburbs

What do you think of when you think of "Suburbs"?

This?

A streetcar suburb
(image courtesy Paul Sableman, Flickr Creative Commons)

Or this?

Ugh.
(courtesy "MyBiggestFan" Flickr Creative Commons)

The Dinner

Herman Koch's The Dinner is an ethically conflicted novel.

How far would you go to protect your child?  

How far into "we just want the best for our son"?

It actually makes me a little ill (indigestion?) to contemplate my reaction, my horror, if my son committed a senseless act of violence.... the source of the discord in The Dinner.

Quitter

It's rare for me to quit a book.  My dear husband notes this with a certain amount of awe and puzzlement.  I will hate and gripe my way through a book for weeks (or put it down for a year, only to pick it up again) out of a compulsion to finish.  Maybe it's guilt. Maybe it's that I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

But recently, I've become less patient.  I've become.... a quitter.

You may already know I own too many books.  Too many?  How is that possible?  

Because they are threatening to crush us.

This doesn't even account for all the books in the house.
Yikes.

I need to read my way down.

So I am hereby announcing that I have renounced two books: S. Shoenbaum's Shakespeare: His Life, His Language, His Theater, and Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent.

A tasty spelling error

You'd think that the USA Today Books staff would be made up of absolute spelling fanatics.  They probably are.  Well, none of us are immune..... I received this in their weekly book newsletter: