If you were going on vacation to Hawaii for nine days with no kids...

1) What would you consider must-see attractions in Maui and Oahu (staying on the North Shore)?

2) What would you bring to wear?

and most importantly....

3) Which books would you pack? I have a growing pile including Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed, Michael Pollan's Food Rules, Dispensation (edited by my good friend Angela Hallstrom), memoirs by Abraham Verghese, Sylvia Plath, and Isabel Allende, and the first three mysteries in Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series. Since I probably need to pack a second suitcase for my books, is there anything else you'd heartily recommend? We're leaving in three weeks so I have time to track down a must-read.

Book #13: What the Dog Saw

Title: What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

If you really, really like Malcolm Gladwell's articles from The New Yorker, you'd probably love the chapters of What the Dog Saw, because the chapters are Malcolm Gladwell's articles from The New Yorker. Maybe he's a recycling enthusiast, maybe he doesn't think he got paid enough for his work the first time around, maybe his book publishers were putting the screws on him to put out a new book, or maybe he just considers What the Dog Saw a kind of greatest hits album. Regardless, all of the material was previously published in The New Yorker. The book is 400+ pages (considerably longer than a typical Gladwell book), and even though I'm not a regular reader of the magazine anymore (I used to subscribe, but finally decided it wasn't doing much more than decorating my magazine basket), I'd read about 1/3 of the articles included in the book before I actually sat down with the book.

It's funny, because I don't necessarily think of Gladwell as having a genre as a writer, other than possibly "interesting people" but in the articles that ended up in What the Dog Saw, he tended to write a lot about the military and business subjects, particularly Enron (and after living in Houston, I'm awfully tired of hearing about Enron). I liked the book, but I picked it up (and gave it to my mother-in-law for Christmas) thinking it was original material, so I was a little bit disappointed to be getting used goods. I also missed the (often somewhat loose) narrative focus of books like Outliers and Blink. Still, Malcolm Gladwell's used goods are every bit as entertaining as most authors' new goods, so it's worth a read, especially if you're not a frequent reader of The New Yorker.

Book #12: Sea of Monsters

Title: Sea of Monsters: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 2
Author: Rick Riordan

Percy Jackson is a year older and a year tougher when we meet up with him at the beginning of Sea of Monsters. He's spent a whole year (a first!) at the same prep school in New York City, with his only friend, a homeless scholarship student named Tyson. On the last day of school, Tyson and Percy get involved in a dodge ball game against some big mean kids who turn out to be cannibals, and it soon becomes evident that Percy is off on another adventure with half-bloods and monsters.

Just like The Lightning Thief, Sea of Monsters is an enjoyable quick read. My nine-year-old loved the book and quickly jumped into the third after finishing the second. I think the characters are more fully-developed in this book than in the first, and Percy shows a greater range of emotions (he's growing up!) as he faces his enemies and tries to come to terms with the prophecies surrounding him, many of which suggest that he has less that three years left to live.

In this second book, Percy, Annabeth and Tyson (who turns out to be a cyclops and Percy's half-brother) travel to the Sea of Monsters (aka the Bermuda Triangle) to rescue their friend Grover and the golden fleece (which will restore Camp Half Blood, destroyed by monsters) from a hateful cyclops. They have many adventures along the way which set Percy up for his biggest battle, which I presume will take place in The Last Olympian.

As for me, I'm hooked too. I'll keep reading!

Book #11: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Title: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of  a Thief, a Detective and the True Story of a Literary Obsession
Author: Allison Hoover Bartlett

Last summer, I was a speaker on a couple of panels at the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium. I mostly just ran in for my own presentations and ran home to do kid duty, but I did attend one other session, a panel with speakers discussing the best Mormon books. Two or three of the presenters talked about what I expected them to talk about, books with interesting content for one reason or another. But the third presenter talked about bookbinding and deckle edges and clamshells and a whole bunch of stuff about the physical presentation of the books themselves. He said that he didn't actually read the books, he just collected them.

I didn't get it. And after reading The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, I'll admit that while Allison Hoover Bartlett did a great job talking about the obsession of John Gilkey, who loved books so much that he stole hundreds of them just to have in his possession, I still don't really "get" the whole idea of having books as for the pleasure of owning and looking at them (as one might a vase or a pretty plate) instead of actually reading them. But then again, I am a girl who would much rather borrow a book from the library than buy it, who feels no compunction about reading in the bathtub or dog-earing pages (yes, even of those library books), who wants to consume more than to hold on to. But why buy a book if you're never going to read it, if it's just going to sit on your bookshelf and be?

That said, Bartlett did a great job telling Gilkey's story, and trying to figure out why stealing books became such an obsession for him. Gilkey is, at best, an unreliable narrator, so Bartlett's job was tough-- recreating a narrative from the perspective of someone who wanted to tell a self-important version of his story, but whose best interests were in sharing as little as possible. Gilkey is complex, amoral, and striving, someone who is willing to spend time in prison to build his empire of stolen rare books. Pitted against Gilkey is Salt Lake City's own Ken Sanders, the crusader who organized rare book dealers around the country to track Gilkey down and put him back in jail. The story of the chase isn't really a nailbiter (it's a book thief we're talking about, after all) but Bartlett's own experience with books, along with those of Gilkey and Sanders, makes The Man Who Loved Books Too Much a worthwhile read for anyone who has ever wondered if they love books too much.

Four eyes, four eyes

If you've been reading my Facebook status updates over the last two weeks, you know I've been doing a lot of whining about my eyes. I've worn glasses for almost 30 years-- I got my first pair when I was six, and I remember feeling like the whole world came into focus when I put them on for the first time. I got my first pair of contacts when I was ten, and for the last twenty-five years, I've worn my glasses as little as possible, basically only to the bathroom first thing in the morning to put in my contacts. As a result, I hardly ever spend money on glasses, and my current pair is six years old and badly scratched. We thought about buying me a new pair last summer, but when I went in and picked out frames and priced them, they were going to be about $800. My eye doctor had suggested that I get LASIK, and for just a fraction more than two pairs of glasses (or a couple of years worth of contact lenses) I could be glasses free. So we decided that I'd go under the knife after the first of the year.

Well, tomorrow's the day. I've been wearing my glasses in preparation for the last two weeks, and if nothing else, wearing them has reminded me just how much I hate glasses. They're always smudged and dirty, and are a royal pain in the butt to wear while running. And doing yoga while wearing them is a total joke. Not to mention the fact that they're pretty much broken and none too fashionable anymore. And they make my nose break out. I look lovely these days, I tell you.

So tomorrow I'll get to experience my first surgical procedure in my 35 years (do wisdom teeth count?). I've heard the recovery isn't too bad, but I don't know what "not too bad means." Will I be back to running on Friday? Will I be able to drive the carpool without killing anyone? I don't much know what to expect. Except that life without glasses will be pretty darn sweet.

Book #10: The Year of the Flood

Title: The Year of the Flood
Author: Margaret Atwood


You can talk to me all you like about why I should like science fiction, but it's never going to be the genre that attracts me most. Maybe I'm unimaginative or something, I don't know. Anyway, The Year of the Flood is set in a North America of the future, after the world has seen the consequences of both global warming and rampant corporate scientific greed. This is a highly-fractured world, with well-educated corporate types living behind gates, corporate police keeping order, crime and gangs ruling cities, and religious cults reacting against the whole of it. Ren and Toby both end up living with the Gardeners, a group of religious vegetarians who live a simple life and revere Saints E.O. Wilson and Mahatma Gandhi. Both end up leaving the group, but come together again after a plague destroys most of the world's population.

There are some authors whose entire body of work deserves to be read, even when she writes in a genre that you're not really all that into. For me, reading Margaret Atwood's more straightforward fiction, like The Blind Assassin, is like a most delicious entree: it's substantial, it's filling, it's challenging, and when I put the book away, I'm fully sated and see the world differently. I see the world differently after reading The Year of the Flood too (in a scare-the-pants-off-me kind of way), but instead of feeling like I ate a delicious and complex entree, I feel more like I got a heaping portion of vegetables. Good for me, yes, and substantial too, but not as enjoyable as some of her other work.

Plates, revisited...

I've been doing more than just indulging in my serious Dexter addiction lately (although I have watched all of the first season and half of the second in the last week), I also screwed my courage to the sticking place and got back up on the ladder in the dining room to hang more plates. Leslie has been a lot more dedicated to the plate endeavor than I have, and I got another box fresh from the Central Massachusetts Salvation Army yesterday. This morning I headed out to get plate hangers and came home with a bunch more plates from Home Goods and Ross, so I've been up on the ladder, dutifully hanging, this afternoon. I'm almost done! One small wall left, and if I could find my kids' birth plates (where, oh where, could they be? I haven't found them in the moving boxes yet) then I think I'd be just a plate or two away from completion. Excuse the terrible pictures, they're from my phone (I can't find my memory card, and the house has turned into a disaster while I've been ten feet up on my ladder).

This is now what you see when you enter the house from the front door. The east wall was already hung.

A view of the north wall. Les found lots and lots of little plates, and most of them even survived the cross-country voyage.

Here's the little northwest corner.

A view of the south wall. I really want the aqua Star of David in my bedroom, so I may have to do some reshuffling once I get more plates. 

That's the only empty space. Too bad I'll have to pull the ladder out from the garage again to hang just four or five more! Thanks for indulging my need to show off, yet again. I'm sure I'll share a picture of that last corner once it's done too!

Book #9: The Lightning Thief

Title: The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)
Author: Rick Riordan

Last time I was in The King's English, I asked one of the employees what my reluctant-reading fourth-grader might be interested in. She recommended the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, and when Bryce finished the first book and asked for the second, I knew she was on the right track. When he saw that that book was being made into a movie (to be released next month), he told me that I needed to read the book before the movie came out (hey, I've used that tactic on him before!), I made sure that I got right on it.

I enjoyed The Lightning Thief. It's quick-paced and funny, with a likable protagonist in Percy Jackson, the boy who has gotten kicked out of six schools in six years and discovers at the beginning of the novel that he's a half-blood, the child of one human parent and one godly parent (in this case Poseidon is his father). He joins other half-bloods at a camp on Long Island, not too far removed from New York City, the seat of Western Civilization and the current home of the gods. Soon after his arrival, he's sent with two friends on a quest to retrieve Zeus's lost lightning bolt. If he fails, a world war of the scope we've never seen will start, so it's a pretty tall order for a twelve-year-old.

My main quibble with the book is that Percy's mom disappears and is presumed dead at the beginning of the book. In the first few chapters, Riordan does a good job demonstrating that Percy and his mom are unusually close. She disappears just as he arrives at Camp Half-Blood, and all of his surroundings are new and much different than he's used to, and he starts to realize his place in the world. But I'd like to think that maybe he would have been so broken up over his mother's disappearance that he wouldn't notice things like the leanness of the meat in the cafeteria Instead, he takes her "death" in stride. I know the book is fantasy, but that was one part where the difference between fiction and reality seemed a little bit too unbelievable.

Book #8: Hello, Goodbye

Title: Hello, Goodbye
Author: Emily Chenoweth

Helen Hansen is a counselor in her early forties, a mother and a wife, who comes in a from a jog on a wintry Saturday morning and collapses on the kitchen floor. She's quickly diagnosed with terminal brain cancer (but her husband Elliott chooses not to tell her about the dire nature of her fate), and the next summer the couple, along with their college-age daughter Abby travel to New Hampshire to get together with old friends for what will be their last reunion.

I read through this book pretty quickly, and the Hansens' fate moved me. Practically overnight, Helen went from being a young, vibrant woman, to someone who needed help getting dressed, couldn't spell, and often forgot words. Elliott watched the woman he loved turn old, and he knew she was going to die, but felt that the remainder of her life would be better if she didn't know quite so quickly. And Abby juggled being self-absorbed and going through a process of self-discovery with the very adult task of losing her mother.

The book reminded me of The Big Chill, or some other kind of "let's get together after a long time" kind of book, superimposed with "Beaches" or a tearjerker of that ilk. It was an interesting, quick read, and I liked the characterizations of both Elliott and Abby (flawed both), but I don't know that it's a book that's a must-read or something I'd recommend to others.

Book #7: A Short History of Women

Title: A Short History of Women
Author: Kate Walbert

A Short History of Women follows five generations of women, all from the same family, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century and ending about 100 years later. Dorothy Townsend, the woman whose story started it all, is a Cambridge-educated (though not degreed, because that wasn't allowed at the time) suffragist who starved herself to death to make a stand in the fight for the vote. The women who come after Townsend, her daughter the chemistry professor, her granddaughter the stay-at-home mom-turned activist, her granddaughters (a yuppie banker and a potter) and her great-granddaugher (a college student) all look to the original Dorothy as their symbol, their inspiration, and often their nemesis. They're a family of strong women, but not always sure what they want to stand strong for.

The book is written as about a dozen vignettes or short stories, each with one of the women in the family as the center. It jumps back and forth chronologically. While I thought the stories were interesting enough on their own, I didn't really see any kind of overarching "theme" that would have made the book qualify as a novel. I've read other books about families written in a similar way, Angela Hallstrom's Bound on Earth comes to mind as the best example, but after reading Angela's book, I saw how the stories came together and why she chose to profile people at different times and in different crises. After reading A Short History of Women, I wasn't so sure.