Happiness is an e-reader!

I bought an e-reader for vacations (no more suitcase full of books for me!) and found it useful for travelling to work as well. The reader can be held in one hand if the train is crowded, and it's much lighter and smaller to cart around. My library offers e-books for download, so in keeping with this blog's theme, I searched for "happiness". Up popped The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin. I've seen this book in other people's laps and they were smiling, so I've put a hold on a copy for myself.

My library, Calgary Public Library, loans free electronic print books for downloading onto your e-reader. To get them, you need a suitable e-reader (more about that in a moment), a USB cable, a CPL library card, and a little time to download some software. The collection of e-books is called Overdrive, and you find it on our website at http://calgary.lib.overdrive.com/. You download software called Adobe Editions to manage the e-books, which is required by the publishers to protect copyright. Then you search for something to read. I often use the advanced search feature to limit to items that are checked in. Otherwise, you can place holds for a book just like in the regular library catalogue. The e-book is downloaded to your computer using a checkout system, and then transferred to your e-reader. (You can also download audio files to to listen to stories on your iPod or MP3 player.)

The first step is to pick which e-reader to buy ; there are pros and cons to each. The Amazon Kindle, though it offers the ease of wireless downloads, is proprietary and won't work with Overdrive. A list of supported devices can be found at http://www.overdrive.com/resources/drc/ Check with your own library to see what e-books they offer, and which devices are supported. And then have fun squeezing reading into more places in your life!

Wintery Swedish character study

Not happy, but interesting!

Been too busy in the kids' section- it was time to head back for some adult books.

We just read The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson at bookclub. Although not a "happy" book, it was enjoyed by 90% of the club. It's the story of two women Katri and Anna in wintery Sweden. Single minded Katri wants money from Anna to buy a boat for her brother. Anna is a well known illustrator of childrens' books, and not the easy mark she first appears to be. A quick read about how two interesting characters affect each other. Written in 1982 by the childrens' author of the Moomintrolls, this is a recent translation.

In the car, we're listening to Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris. It is short stories about animals who act like humans, which is a clever premise that makes the human foibles more apparent and droll. I recommend the bookcd because it's read by fine character voices.

Our Maverick

My city Calgary is planning to read Mavericks : The Incorrigible History of Alberta by Aritha Van Herk this fall during One Book One Calgary.

Every family has one. Our maverick is my great-grandmother Leta May Bailly. Born in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia in 1889, she was friends with local boy Robert Silver. He moved to Calgary. Her father, a strict Lutheran, told Leta she couldn't travel west on the train alone and unmarried to follow him. Leta did, and they married in Calgary on November 6, 1912. There they lived in a house at the corner of Memorial Drive and Edmonton Trail. They filled the house with their son Bert, a Boston Terrier named Buddy, and two Indian motorcycles.

When Leta came to Calgary she cut her Gibson Girl locks in favour of a short bob. She wore mens' trousers while she rode her Indian motorcycle into the mountains for picnics. Leta liked the trousers so much she had a dressmaker make pairs in all kinds of fabrics, including a pink satin pair for bridge parties.

By the time my Mom was born, her "Nana" had given up the Indian motorcycle. She ate her Pot of Gold chocolates and chainsmoked, while her budgie Joey sat on the rim of her glasses. She died in 1963 so I never met her. When I got married, though, my Uncle Al made us a poster size blowup of our favourite family photo- Nana sitting on her Indian motorcyle at the garage.

Who's your family maverick?

Stealing from the Young Adult section

Now my book club doesn't like fantasy much, so I wait until the summer to indulge. The best fantasy going these days is on the kids' side of the library. It's fun, imaginative, and fits the requirements for happy book choices in that the main characters survive to the end of the book intact!

My most anticipated summer novel is Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins due to be released August 24. I know people who have scheduled that day off work to read it! Personally, I stayed up all night to read the second in this series- Catching Fire. You need to start with the first of the trio- The Hunger Games.

Katniss lives in a future world in which the poor provinces serve the central city, including sending teenagers to fight to the death in a televised reality show. As Katniss struggles to survive, she is unwittingly pulled into a rebellion. This is edge of the chair exciting, so set aside a chunk of time for this book.

Another favourite young adult writer is Shannon Hale. She writes about teenage girls in fantasy worlds. They are like feminist fairy tales, and reading them makes me wish that I could have given them to myself long ago.

I'll recommend The Book of a Thousand Days. Dashti, a servant girl, is locked into a tower with her mistress because of the lady's refusal to marry an evil lord. The story is about how Dashti finds her strength to survive.

Hale also wrote the Princess Academy and The Goose Girl. They are engaging reads, and will help you remember being a teenager.

My third recommended book is Cornelia Funke's The Thief Lord. Two orphan brothers are threatened with separation. They run away to Venice, Italy because their late mother described it so lovingly. A thief lord gives them shelter in an abandoned movie theatre. But who is he?

The possibilities

This is what our book club considered for next year's reading list. I'm not guaranteeing happiness, but thought other clubs might be interested in our shortlist!

Happy summer reading


Beatrice & Virgil/ Yann Martel

Bonobo Handshake/ Vanessa Woods

Brahma's Dream/ Shree Ghatage

Butterfly /Sonya Hartnett

Death Comes for the Archbishop/ Willa Cather

Five Quarters of the Orange/ Joanne Harris

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel/ Jeannette Walls

Hitch-22: A Memoir/ Christopher Hitchens

Juliet, Naked/ Nick Hornby

Last Night in Twisted River/ John Irving

Love, Loss and What I Wore/ Ilene Beckerman

Native Son/ Richard Wright

People of the Book/ Geraldine Brooks

The Butcher and the Vegetarian/ Tara Austen Weaver

The Demon-Haunted World/ Carl Sagan

The Elegance of the Hedgehog/ Muriel Barbery

The Forgotten Garden/ Kate Morton

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet/ Jamie Ford

The Lacuna/ Barbara Kingsolver

The Slap/ Christos Tsiolkas

The True Deceiver/ Tove Jansson

The Unit/ Nini Holmqvist

Three Cups of Tea/ Greg Mortenson

Tweet tweet thou tortoise

And so in June another succesful year of book club wraps up, and we face the bleak prospect of no Velvet cake for 3 months. Our exploration of social media at work is also coming to an end with Twitter as the last topic. Twitter allows short blog posts of up to 140 characters. My main use is to keep up developments in the Harry Potter universe on Mugglenet. This points to it's main attraction- its currency- as opposed to the indexing delay on Google searches. Plus they have great graphics! Anyway, as a wrap up, here are some imagined Tweets:

• Come thou tortoise by Jessica Grant is a hilarious read, similar to A curious incident of the dog in the Night-time, 'tho a few found it quirky
• Flavia's back in The weed that strings the hangman's bag by Alan Bradley (sequel to Sweetness at the bottom of the pie)
• Excellent cake recipes in All cakes considered by Melissa Gray, which my son generously gifted Grandma
• Me talk pretty one day by David Sedaris, wonky true family stories about an American living in France,
• Bill Bryson is a sure thing with his humorous travel essays like Notes from a small island
• Carl Hiaasen is bizarrely funny if you're feeling cranky about the horrible things people do to our environment

Curious incident of the cloud atlas

This week we're looking at the book website LibraryThing, in which people list and discuss their favourite books. I was curious about the most discussed books. Harry Potter and the Twilight series led the pack. Then at #20 was an old bookclub favourite: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. It's about an autistic boy named Christopher who is logically trying to figure out the mystery of who killed a neighbour's poodle. The narrator has an distinct voice, and it was a compelling and universally enjoyed read.

One of the common tags applied to this book was humor, so I clicked that to find out what LibraryThing readers thought was funny. Douglas Adams, David Sedaris and Terry Pratchett topped the list.

LibraryThing can be useful for browsing and making unusual connections based on tags. However, I still like wandering the stacks and randomly picking up books. I like spying on what people are reading on the bus. I like picking up books left in hostels. My favourite chance read was when my husband found The cloud atlas by Liam Callanan by the side of the road as he was out biking. It's about the Japanese bomb balloons sent to North America during WW2, as seen through the eyes of three memorable characters. Since the book had dropped out of the sky to me, I dropped the author an email, to tell him I enjoyed his evocative tale. He wrote back- for which I am still delighted!

Organizing a book club online

My book club is getting ready for our year end dinner to pick the books for next year. We have an enthusiastic member who organizes us by email.

I've been looking at online productivity tools for work, like Google calendar and Google docs. It made me wonder if they would be useful for book clubs.

I love digital calendars, especially how you can get appointments to repeat without writing them over and over. I also love the colour coding- like using different markers. Really, it's all about the stationery!

If we were to post the reading list on a shared freeware calendar, we could access it from anywhere. Like a garage sale- hey, isn't that the book we're reading next spring? Or we could get the address and phone number as we're rushing to a meeting.

I think these tools will have great potential in the future, when more people have smart phones.

It also makes the possibility of digital book clubs possible. However, I'm all about the snacks.

Happy eating!

The girl with the nose ring

I'm not sure there are many people who haven't read The girl with the pearl earring by Tracy Chevalier. It's the story of Griet, a servant in the home of the painter Johannes Vermeer. She has an aesthetic sensibility, which is noticed by the 17th century Dutch painter. Griet is increasingly drawn into his artistic process. The book was inspired by a Vermeer painting of the same name.

At work, we are exploring Flickr, the photo sharing site, so I searched for the painting. Images of the painting, yes, but also all manner of strange homages. There are modern photographs of ladies posing, chalk artists drawing on the sidewalk, copy paintings both good and bad, and dolls and stuffies posed with wrapped hair. My favourite is the Lego mini figure version! What an excellent resource for a visual artist, both for finding images to draw and self promotion.

I headed over to Youtube, reluctantly, as I think the quality has declined since everyone's started to upload. I found the trailers for the Girl with the pearl earring movie with Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson. There were some self promoting artists and musicians' videos "inspired" by the painting, which were painful to watch. However, I found some interesting author interviews with Tracy Chevalier. She was talking about the research process for her latest novel, Remarkable creatures. Unfortunately the reviewers did not find that book very remarkable. Remembering how much we enjoyed Girl with the pearl earring, I read reviews of Chevalier's other novels. The lady and the unicorn was highly recommended for book clubs. It draws inspiration from the unicorn tapestries in the Cluny Museum in Paris.

When you look at the original Vermeer painting, your eye is drawn to the luminous pearl. It is the focal point of the image. I called this post The girl with the nose ring, because my husband is painting a portrait of a lady with a big shiny nose hoop! He took this before photo as he is very reluctant to paint in the jewelry!

Happy reading!

Thirteenth tale

I'm thinking about Diane Setterfield's mystery The Thirteenth Tale and RSSS feeds. The challenge is to tie these disparate things together! My angle is that they are both about collecting information to figure out what's going on.

The Thirteenth Tale is an old school gothic mystery about an English mansion full of eccentrics. If your book club hasn't done a mystery recently, it's a great page turner, similar to Daphne Du Maurier or the Bronte sisters' writings. The twist is clever, the characters are interesting, and the setting is evocative. A young writer Margaret tries to figure out the story of a famous old author named Vida Winter. What is the Thirteenth tale? Slowly you gather information and put it together to guess what happened.

RSSS feeds are a way of collecting information from your favourite websites. Instead of visiting your favourites to see what's new, you collect them into one place. In my case, I'm using Bloglines. I'm gathering information from book review sites like the New York Times book reviews and Publishers' Weekley bestsellers. I added a Bloglines option to this post, if you want to build one for yourself. Keeping up with it seems like a lot of work though, just another chore to add to my to do list. I'd rather be reading a happy book!

Ulaanbataar

I just like typing that word- Ulaanbataar... This blog's book is The Horse Boy by Rupert Isaacson. It is a true story about a father with an autistic son. He discovers that his son is more communicative when he is on a horse. Rowan also responds to a shaman healer. Rupert decides to take Roan to Mongolia to visit the "reindeer people" and see if the combination of horses and shamanism will help his son.

Although not the greatest writer in the world, Rupert has an interesting story to tell. Different people in book club responded to different parts of the story: parenting, the religious angle, travelling in Mongolia, even the "husbands with crazy ideas" part! We mostly talked about what it would be like to have an autistic child, and Kristen who works with autistic children joined the club to tell us what her job is like. (not Kristin the wife in the story)

Back to Ulaanbataar, which is the capital of Mongolia. This week I'm playing with Google Earth. I swoop wide over Mongolia, finding the tree line that they crossed as they entered the forest. I can't find the shaman Ghoste's teepee, for which I am grateful. I like the idea that some few people are invisible in the digital world. I also enjoy the street level views made by video cameras positioned on cars. It is fascinating to swoop over the countries depicted in the books we read.

Snoopiness... or empathy?!

Dreams of trespass : tales of a harem girlhood by Fatima Mernissi.

Now the word harem sounds titillating, but really is just refers to being sequestered from the world. In this autobiography, eight year old Fatima contrasts her cloistered life with that of her male cousin, who is allowed outside the house walls. The house is in Morocco in the 1940's. Tradition versus change, colonialism, and the difference among womens' lives are explored. There are vivid scenes that I remember six years after we read this in book club. Recommended if you like descriptions of childhood, developing feminism, and different cultures.

This curiosity about others' lives. My favourite poem, The Waste Land has this line:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only

The same impulse that has me imagining lives other than my own leads me to novels, and to Facebook! Over time, I get a sense of what is important in peoples' lives by what they post about. I stay connected with people I wouldn't normally talk with. I'm hearing their stories.

Sixteen pleasures

Many years ago our book club read the novel The sixteen pleasures by Robert Hellenga. Margot Harrington is a young American book conservator who goes to Florence, Italy as a "mud angel" to help with recovery after the 1966 flood of the Arno River. In a convent, she finds a rare 16th century book written by Pietro Aretino. All the known copies of the Sonetti lussuriosi (Lewd sonnets) were destroyed because of their pornographic nature. Margot restores the book and tries to decide what to do with her life. The travelers and art fans among us particularly enjoyed the novel. There are some memorable scenes of Margot's Italian love interest rescuing pieces of art. Refreshing to read about a man rushing to save a fresco instead of a damsel in distress!

I looked in Wikipedia to find out about the real Pietro Aretino. He is credited with inventing "modern literate pornography". I compared the articles about him in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia appears to have the facts right, and they included some portraits by his friend Titian. Britannica said, "Aretino lived in a grand and dissolute style for the rest of his life." A Venetian happily-ever-after!

Wikipedia had hotlinks, such as this promising one: "[Aretino] is said to have died of suffocation from "laughing too much". This promising link leads to an article on Death from laughter, which includes a list of historical and modern people who died while laughing. The modern people were watching TV and movies, not reading a book, or I would have continued to follow this diverting chain of ideas for more book club ideas.

Wikipedia also mentioned that the composer Michael Nyman, who wrote the Piano movie score, set some of the sonnets to music. This is the kind of pop culture content for which Wikipedia is so useful.

As you read The Sixteen Pleasures, it's interesting to look on the internet for maps of Florence, images of frescoes, and information about the floods. And if you really engage with this book, Robert Hellenga returns to his characters in later novels.

Delicious books

We're learning about Web 2.0 at work, so this blog will combine happy book suggestions AND information about new web technologies for a while. (Sounds serious- so I added a delicious donut to keep your attention!) This week, I'm looking at the website bookmarking program called Delicious. At Delicious.com you can search for websites with keywords, called tags, and organize lists of favourites URLs.

I'm curious about reducing a book to a list of single keywords. As a librarian, I'm used to a controlled list of hierarchical subjects. This site is organized by random keywords supplied by the users. (That's not a judgement- I'm a big fan of randomness!) I'm going to try to boil down some happy book club choices to keywords...

Here are some happy nonfiction books:

The City of Falling Angels / John Berendt
Venice Italy Fenice opera arson characters MidnightintheGardenofGoodandEvil glassblower

Dropped Threads: What we aren't told / edited by Carol Shields
Essays women Canada young old discussion personal popular accessible

Outliers : The Story of Success / Malcolm Gladwell
Tippingpoint Blink success practice 10,000hours thoughtprovoking easyread

The Perfection of the Morning : An Apprenticeship in Nature / Sharon Butala
meditative nature lyrical Saskatchewan mixedreaction ranching spiritual nonlinear

Eat, Pray, Love / Elizabeth Gilbert
travel Italy India Indonesia Bali spiritual funny diary anecdotal easyread


I'm having a hard time describing what these books are about! How do I describe the mixed love/hate reaction of our book club to Sharon Butala's Perfection of the Morning? I like that you can include different information than the usual subjects you find in the library catalogue, like tone and read alikes. But, for my book reviews, I think I'll stick to sentences!


It makes me wonder about group think. If many people like a website, will I like it too? Do the tagging decisions of millions of people cause the best content to rise to the top? That's how I pick videos to watch on Youtube. Can I trust strangers, or might they have a business interest in what they're promoting? Sometimes word of mouth causes a book to expolode, and everyone reads it. Will digital word of mouth explode?

Delicious is a good place to keep track of your personal or work websites, but not the place to search for book reviews. At least not yet! Happy reading.

Blogging and food and time- oh my!

For work, I'm to write about blogging. That makes me think of reading Julie and Julia for bookclub. It's a blog turned into a book about a New York secretary who vows to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We all liked it, although as in the subsequent movie with Meryl Streep, we preferred the bits about Julia Child.

What I didn't like was cooking pastries for the snacks, although now I rather enjoy the anecdote about the two days it took me to prepare one single item, a cheese pastry. That pastry wasn't to be cooked all at once, no, it had to take regular vacations in the fridge to chill out.

A much luckier host landed Miriam Toew's A Complicated Kindness. Since it is set in a small Mennonite town our hostess served us Spam. Yes, she really made an effort. Actually no one would touch it. However, we did touch another Toew's novel, The Flying Troutmans because we enjoy her wacky fictional families. Plus it's our Canadian content, since most Canadians don't write happy, funny stories.

Really, the food is half the draw in bookclub. I am trying to think of a book to host which would feature some jello salads. We have some phenomenal cooks who lay on a spread. Which leads me to the topic of the time needed to prepare all that food, which leads me to what I am supposed to be doing with my time right now, which is to write about blogging for work.

I'm to write about what intrigues me about social media. It intrigues me how anyone has the ability to keep up with their email, their Facebook and Twitter accounts, their blog, and still cook fabulous spreads for bookclub. Oh right, I remember, it's because we don't always finish the books!

It's "happy" if I'm not responsible for the characters!

I am struggling with my definition of a happy book, because my book club is reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire. Now this is definitely not a happy book, but somehow I don't feel it so deeply because it is set in another world, a world that I don't feel any responsibility toward! So perhaps my definition of a happy book merely means one which I can truly escape into without a sense of guilt at my own good fortune.



I promised the book title that everyone in the club enjoyed, and that is the most surefire recommendation you can ever make.... It's Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. It's the story of a vet travelling with a circus during the Great Depression. If you listed the plot outline, a great many unhappy things happen, but it all turns out alright in the end.



On a related vein, I have been trying to think of adult fiction books that are truly funny. Aside from reliable Nick Hornby I am coming up dry. Why am I only finding humour in my son's bedtime stories? Captain Underpants, Greg Heffley, Fred and George Weasley: all the humourists are to be found in the kids' section. I thought the Twilight series was a hilarious spin on teenage angst, but I'm looking for something intentionally amusing that's aimed at adults. I challenge my readers to think of some novels that are laugh out loud funny.

What the librarians saw

Now I could be accused of a non continuous plot here, because I was about to tell you what the librarians recommended, and then I jumped over to an old favourite from the bookclub. Let's call that a cliffhanger to get your attention, and not an inability to stay on track!




So here are the books the librarians recommended:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows needs little introduction because everyone else discovered it at the same time we did! A cast of amusing characters discuss the bookclub that formed on the occupied Guernsey island (between England and France) during WW II. It sounds like a heavy topic, but the treatment was light, and anything about a bookclub is bound to be a hit. If you Google search "guernsey shell church" you will find pictures of the lovely church mentioned in the book. This book was universally liked, but generated little discussion.


2. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley has also hit fame on the bestseller lists. We didn't end up picking this one, but I read it myself, so I can report it is a solid, traditional mystery with an unusual heroine, 11 year old Flavia, who loves chemistry and lives in the usual English mansion. What makes it fresh is the heroine, whose sisters lock her in the closet, but she gets her revenge.


3. Come thou tortoise by Jessica Grant is alternately written by childlike Audrey and her pet tortoise Winnifred, the latter who lets you know what's really going on. I've only started, and bookclub is scheduled to read this in the spring, so you will have to wait for the word on this one. See, more suspense generated!


4. The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and a Son by David Gilmour. This non fiction book, a slight collections of essays about the relationship between a father and son as they watched movies together, was successful because it resulted in heated debate. We argued over whether it was a good parenting choice for the father to offer the film club as an alternative to high school. It is often the books that we disagree on that are the most memorable.

Next blog: our all time favourite book...

West with the night

I was forced to stage a Happiness Coup in my bookclub. The sad facts follow. It started out innocently with Rohinton Mistry's A fine balance, which broke our hearts. On it's heels came Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, Karen Connelly's The lizard cage and The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. When a selection was unavailable, and Dave Egger's The What is the what looked like the replacement, I snapped. I couldn't bear any more unhappy characters running around in my head. That's when I staged the Happiness Coup.

It sounds easier than it was. The rub was actually finding some happy alternatives. Unable to find anything on the net, I turned to some collections librarians in our moment of need. And thus this story has a happy ending.

In this blog, I will post titles that my book club has enjoyed. (Except when there hasn't been enough plot, and the resident Plot Queen of the club starts grumbling. But that's another blog!)

Favourite 1: West with the night by Beryl Markham

This autobiography of an African childhood was universally liked (and we usually only agree on the food) Beryl Markham, who knew Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton in what is now Kenya, writes about her life as a child in Africa and how she learned to fly. There are memorable stories of pet lions stalking her, and horses that she trained. The amount of freedom she had as a child is astounding compared to the playdates and chaperoned trips to buy candy common today. Some members were so intrigued by Beryl they read one of the more complete biographies written about her. Not "happy" in the happy ending kind of way, but happy in the excite the imagination, want to travel to Africa and lead an adventurous life kind of way.