Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

I tend to gravitate toward books with PLOT, and although there's nothing wrong with a great narrative - in fact there's a lot RIGHT about it - it's healthy for me to enjoy a character-driven novel.

Enter Jill McCorkle's Life After Life. Although I finished it more than a month ago, and I'm just writing about it now, I actually read it very quickly. 

Imagine a set of concentric circles, or a web.  Or maybe a whole bunch of Venn diagrams. With six main characters (and a supporting cast of a couple dozen), their lives are very much intertwined, even though they don't realize it.  

Not just talking the talk, but walking the Useful Walk

I just passed my 2nd Anniversary of writing The Page Turner.  You know how I remember now?  I volunteered at the local library used book sale again!

Here's my VERY FIRST BLOG POST, about that book sale.

And I did shop the sale again... a little... not too much.  Maybe it was because I made the (pretty minimal) effort to walk to the library and back for my volunteer shift last night, rather than drive.  

I watched a Ted Talk this week featuring Jeff Speck.  Among the many interesting points in his talk, Speck, author of The Walkable City (haven't read it yet, but want to!), says, "We've talked a long time about diet and we know that diet impacts weight, and weight impacts health.  But we've only started talking about inactivity.  Inactivity, born of our [car-dependent] landscape.  Inactivity that comes from the fact that we live in a place where there's no longer any such thing as 'the useful walk.'  [This is what] is driving our weight up." (TedTalks, Oct 2013)

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.