Sprouts: My New Favorite Bookmarks, Naturally

If you had asked me last year what my favorite bookmark was, the answer would have been easy: my Phoenix Suns bookmark circa 1994 from the Charles Barkley era of the Suns. I mean, the bookmark had Dan Majerle AND the Phoenix Suns gorilla, so how could it have not been my favorite? Used to mark my page in many a book, I had to retire the beloved place holder many years ago as it started to deteriorate, but without a doubt it remained my favorite because of sentimentally attached.

If you ask me now what my favorite bookmark is, I would have no choice but to tell you my favorite bookmark has changed, thanks to a gift I got from a dear friend. These bookmarks are adorable. They are little green silicone rubber sprouts that shoot out of the top of the book. Here is a shot of the bookmark in action.

How cute is that? The sprout bookmarks are from Fred & Friends. They come in a pack of six, so no worries if you read multiple books at a time and need a marker for each. Another bonus is that they are synthetic, and so I'll never have to worry about the wear and tear of a paper bookmark. They also give a little touch of nature to your book, which just makes me happy. 

In sum, if you are looking for a gift for a bookworm friend, or if you are in the market for some sturdy bookmarks to replace the random things you're using to mark your place now (I am guilty of using hair ties, receipts, even a Kleenex from time to time), then I would recommend these, my new favorite bookmarks, naturally.

Were You Raised in a Virtual Barn? Thoughts on Social Networking Etiquette

There is no Emily Post of social networking. Oftentimes, we are on our own when we find ourselves asking ourselves: Do we reject that person’s Facebook friend request, or just let it sit in our notifications queue so they can’t friend request us again? When should we follow someone back on Twitter? Do other people mind when we check them in on FourSquare, or do they only use it to lurk and prefer to keep their whereabouts private? What is a good rule of thumb for determining whether it is appropriate to post pictures of other people to Tumblr or Instagram? Social networking brings people closer together, and that is usually pretty awesome; however, it seems people forget that, like any other social situation, you should think before you speak (or post), mind your p’s and q’s, and give credit where credit is due (don’t steal people’s content and thank people for sharing yours).

There are innumerable things that people do on social networking sites that can be irksome, but there are some things that I consider to fall into the category of bad social networking etiquette.  Here are just a few:

• Don’t retweet people who have just retweeted you. If I follow you, I prefer to only see your message once; not every time you retweet any Joe Schmo who thought your tweet was funny or retweetable. I saw your tweet once; I don’t want to see it again.
• Consider carefully before you publicly correct someone or draw attention to someone’s error. I corrected someone who was very gracious in responding, but I later felt like a jackass even though I was correct. This was on Twitter, and a direct message may have been more appropriate. I also have been corrected. In a specific case, I was annoyed by the fact that the person simply didn’t get my pun. Unless you are sure that it is necessary to correct someone or that you haven’t misinterpreted their message, then think twice about it. It may result in you looking silly, and it will put the other person in an uncomfortable situation of wanting to defend him or herself.
• Everyone likes the life of the party, but don’t be an attention hog. Know your audience, notice what other people are doing, and post in accordance with that. While it isn’t that unusual for people to tweet several times a day, I don’t want to see what you are doing every hour on Facebook, and I’m not going to read your blog if it reads like text messages to a close friend. Be conscientious of your socially networked friends and their interests.
• Please don’t post something emotionally vague. This either tends to make people think you are on the verge of offing yourself or that you are trying to get attention, and sometimes both. If you have a situation you can’t be explicit about, then it is probably too private to post about. If something is truly wrong, think about picking up the phone and calling a friend or a self-help line instead.
•  Cyberbullying is a huge problem, especially among youth. As if kids needed one more way for the mean kids to make fun of them. Don’t use social networking to be a bully. Just don’t. In a virtual space that allows anyone with a Twitter handle to be a critic, I still try to heed the age-old advice, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

I’m sure there could be an entire blog devoted to social networking etiquette, and maybe there is. Maybe that person will someday be a household name just like Emily Post. Until that day comes, I hope people use some common sense and social grace when navigating their social networks.

It Seemed Like a Perfectly Good Weekend to Read Ender's Game

With the threat of 8 inches of snow coming to Champaign, Illinois, it seemed like a perfectly good weekend to read Ender's Game. Luckily, there was much less snow than anticipated, but that didn't stop me from hunkering down and getting cozy in some blankets to get through the first in the quartet of books by Orson Scott Card about Ender Wiggin. Admittedly, I don't read much science fiction, but this book has been on my shelf since about 2009 when a friend in grad school considered doing her master's thesis on Card's work. Instead, she took a medieval studies route, but still her consideration of doing such in-depth work on the author had me intrigued. Of course, with the release of the movie (which I did not see), I was reminded that this book sat gathering dust on my shelf, and it has been sitting at the top of a stack these last few months, just waiting for a weekend of crappy weather to present me with the opportunity to dive into the story.

Mildly familiar with the plot, it was easy to get absorbed quickly and finish the book in two sittings. On top of that, I find it easy to get drawn into stories about exceptional people--after all, don't we all wonder what it would be like to be exceptional? Yet another draw was the dystopian aspects of the book. I have always been keenly interested in dystopian fiction, and while this book was an interesting departure from other more typical dystopian plot lines, perhaps the differences helped to accentuate the politcal games that are given a different presentation in other dystopian books. So often, the political wag the dog is what characters in dystopian novels are trying to overcome; however, Ender's game is indeed him being instrumental in the wag the dog, though often unaware of the real effects of his actions. While Ender is endlessly called upon to simulate and strategize war games, that is only one, overt game within the book. The other  more covert (in more than one sense) game is how the official higher ups manipulate his social settings in order to create a person they believe will be the ultimate commander for what they consider a humanity-saving mission.

For as serious as I can take this book to be, it did get me pondering a more lighthearted notion involving another exceptional youth in literature. I found myself entertaining the thought of what it would be like to match the serious and often dark but well-meaning Ender with the equally powerful and well-intending but sometimes vengeful Matilda. After all, both effortlessly manipulate the realities around them with their minds. Matilda literally moves objects through space with the power of her telekinesis, which is so very similar to the way Ender masters reorientation within gravity-absent situations and can seemingly move himself through zero gravity with the power of his mind through logic and strategy. For both of these characters, their special abilities create problems for them, but in a way also create solutions and eventually afford them agency over their own futures. Mostly, though, I think it would be super cute for them to be boyfriend and girlfriend and hold hands on the playground; alas, for children who have been treated and have acted like adults for most of their lives, they would perhaps scold me for my childish wish for them.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. New York: Tor, 1994.

Midnite at the Library

The only thing that irks me more than seeing midnite spelled the way it is spelled on the sign in the picture is that it is spelled this way on a sign in a library parking lot. I feel strongly that the library should have the sign corrected, effective immediately.

We live in a world where so many things save us time. Instead of hunting and gathering, we can microwave pre-made meals, if we so choose. We can go to a big box store and get clothes, food, other miscellaneous supplies, and electronics all in one trip. We can send instant messages instead of writing a letter and sending it by post. With all this time saved, please just write words out the way they should be spelled. Luv should be love. Guac should be guacamole. Never send me a text that only includes the letter K. If it you feel compelled to confirm something, at least have the decency to write okay. Is it really worth spelling midnight as midnite to save one measly letter? I think not.

List o' Book Lists

I love list. And no, I'm not just looking at things and saying I love them. Lists make my life possible: grocery lists, To Get Done lists, I Do lists (what I call my wedding to do list), contact lists, and, of course, book lists. With the end of the year always comes a deluge of "best of" lists, and none are more enticing to me than the best books lists. It is a special sort of joy to read through a list of books that come highly recommended that you haven't already read so that you can, naturally, put them on your To Read list. I've collected here some of the Best Books of 2013 lists that I appreciate for one reason or another:

NPR's Book Concierge: Our Guide to 2013's Great Reads

This year, NPR decided to forego a list and has created an innovative, interactive site of tiled book covers that you can adapt to your reading preferences. I'm quite smitten with this design.

75 Notable Translations 2013 (World Literature Today)

Luckily, it seems like every year more and more contemporary fiction books get translated. This list is a real resource, in my opinion. Scroll to the very bottom to see WLT editors' picks for best translations of the year.

Riot Round-Up: The Best Books of 2013
Self-described as a list "as eclectic and indiosyncratic" as the Book Riot bloggers are, this list has a few books I just can't wait to read, and many more I hadn't even heard of this year. Who doesn't like hearing about new books?

The Overlooked Books of 2013 (Slate)
If you're interested in what Slate editors consider to be the books from 2013 that you haven't heard about but should have, then here you go.

Independents' View of 2013's Best Books (The Guardian)
We can't forget about our friends across the pond, and independent bookstores throughout the United Kingdom provided The Guardian with their picks for books of the year.  

Favorite 2013 Books of 50 Famous People (The Wall Street Journal)
I'm always intrigued by what famous people are reading--and in this case, who The Wall Street Journal thinks of as famous and noteworthy. There are some pretty interesting picks on this list.

River City Reading's Best Books (and Blogger Voices) of 2013
I appreciate this list because it features 10 books that are the compiler's favorites of the year along with the thoughts of her favorite reviewers and bloggers.

100 Notable Books of 2013 (The New York Times)

This list is on the lengthy side, including 50 non-fiction and 50 fiction titles, and has enough suggestions to perhaps keep you reading until the next decade.

The 10 Best Books of 2013 (The New York Times)

If 100 is too many titles to digest, NYT narrowed their list of 100 notable titles down to their picks for the 10 best books of the year.

2013 Puddly Awards (Powell's Books)

Okay, so technically this award was given in early 2013 to great 2012 books, and you'll have to stay tuned for the 2014 award nominees for the best of 2013 books (thus its position on the list). The webpage provides numerous great titles from the previous year from Powell's Books readers. Also, how cute is the name Puddly Awards?

Happy reading in 2014!

Christopher Lord’s The Edwin Drood Murders: Being the Second Dickens Junction Mystery

There is a special place in my heart for all things Charles Dickens. There was even a time in my life where I wanted to go to graduate school to become a Dickens scholar. To this day, my copies of my Dickens Norton Critical Editions are some of my most beloved texts. I am part Dickensian at heart, so when this book crossed my path, I could not resist it.

From the title, you may have guessed that there is a First Dickens Junction Mystery—The Christmas Carol Murders. Sometimes I am resistant to starting a series without reading the first book first, but in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I decided to dive in to Drood, and any concerns I had about missing out on backstory were assuaged before long. Lord has a way of referencing the previous story in an easygoing way when pertinent to the plot without it being tiresome. The premise of the story is that there is an annual conference of Dickens scholars, more specifically Droodists, who meet and primarily speculate on the ending of Dickens’ last, unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. During the course of the conference, some nefarious events unfold, including murder. Dickens Junction resident, conference coordinator, and Pip’s Pages bookstore owner Simon Alastair takes it upon himself to solve the mysteries at hand—all the while being impeccably polite and making sure to be courteous to the local law enforcement and not step on their toes. While Alastair is a great novice detective, I must admit that I beat him to the punch and solved the mystery fairly early on. From there, I raced through the pages so I could confirm my suspicions about the culprit and motives, and I soaked up every delightful Dickens reference and allusion along the way. While vastly different from a Dickens novel, there was one similarity: the numerous cast of characters in the book reminded me of the same feeling of trying to keep all the characters straight in Bleak House. Overall, this is an amusing, light read for the literary minded, especially during the holiday season.

Lord, Christopher. The Edwin Drood Murders: Being the Second Dickens Junction Mystery. Harrison Thurman Books, 2013.

Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior

To read a Barbara Kingsolver novel is to enter a well-described world with memorable and flawed characters rooted in a sense of place. Having read The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible, I knew I'd be in the hands of a capable storyteller whose narrative would masterfully evoke a deeper meaning. Flight Behavior is a book about so many things--environment, family, loss, dreams, and experience--but all those things seem to fall under one big thing: change.

I wanted to read Flight Behavior because of its plot about the environment, and the book was surely an elegant way to tell a literary story with an important message about nature, both in the sense of flora and fauna as well human nature. The main character, Dellarobia, really becomes quite the heroine as she works through her personal issues and changes that parallel the environmental change that occurs on their land. At first, when a monarch butterfly population uncharacteristically migrates to Dellarobia's hometown, it is seen as a blessing, and while in some ways the opportunities the butterflies create for Dellarobia and her family are a blessing, the more Dellarobia learns about the butterflies, the more she realizes this change in migratory direction puts the survival of the butterflies at risk. And so it goes that we see how one change in course, one variance in flight behavior, can gain problematic momentum if the course is not readjusted. This is true for Dellarobia, who struggles to find her true course and struggles to come to grips with the consequences (good and bad) that changes may have. The novel suggests that this, too, is true for the environment, for as the global community continues on its unnatural course, the realities and consequences of global warming only accumulate and the chance to correct the course becomes more difficult and the possibility of doing so less optimistic. However, I think what we are meant to learn from our heroine Dellarobia is that, no matter how difficult, it is not too late to try to correct where you went wrong and to try to make the world, and your own personal world, a more thriving place, and at the very least set an example for those around you.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. New York: Harper / HarperCollins, 2012.

Cathy Marie Buchanan’s The Day the Falls Stood Still

I’m always cautious of historical novels that have any form of the word “romance” anywhere in their descriptions, because things can turn real slutty real fast. I picked it up this summer because, like I mentioned about John Banville’s The Sea, I’m in what seems like a never-ending quest to read the books that are sitting unread on my bookshelf. Who could resist a World War I era story set at Niagara Falls? If nothing else, the book seemed like it would be a light, summer read.

Instead of a light summer read, though, I found a story with an overwhelming theme of loss. Our heroine, Bess, is seventeen when her father loses his well-paying job at a power company that generates power from the flow of the river racing over the falls. This sets in motion a series of unfortunate events and, as such, Bess needs to makes the standard choices regarding love and independence and deals with—you guessed it—loss. I’ve already covered the loss of employment and the loss of money, but there is loss of family members and dealing with death, loss of innocence as a generation of young men goes off to war, loss of friendship, loss of faith, and, the most unique element of the story, loss of the natural river flow as industrial companies siphon off water for their operations. This is where the romance comes in: as it happens, Bess marries the strong, hunky Riverman, who is the stuff of legends and whose grandfather was the original stuff of legends, because of their ability to read the river, sense shifts in the wind that causes ice bridges to melt, and knows just how to fish the dead bodies (loss again!) drowned in the falls and swirling around the whirlpools and eddies. See what I mean about being a little heavy for a summer read? In any case, Bess had just enough moxy to keep me picking up the book, and the story certainly got me thinking of my own family visits to Niagara Falls, and I can certainly say I’m glad the Falls still inspire a sense of wonder in us.

Buchanan, Cathy Marie. The Day the Falls Stood Still. New York: Voice / Hyperion, 2009.

Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Through a round aperture I saw appear,

Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,

Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.

                                                                      - Dante Alighieri's Inferno

In this story of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant to Washington DC, who owns a small convenient store, his friend declares these words from Dante’s Inferno to be the most perfect lines of poetry ever written. Stepha’s friend Joseph, who is an immigrant from Congo, considers Dante’s words as he’s coming out of hell as a parallel to the experience of an African whose life in his home country is hell with only glimpses of heaven. A third friend, Kenneth from Kenya, resents Joseph’s tendency to find metaphors in their American life for their former lives in African nations dealing with harsh corruption and oppression. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that each member of this trio represents a different perspective of coping with the change and sense of belonging that these immigrants encounter.

Sepha, our narrator, struggles with maintaining motivation to run his shop, and there is a sense in the story that he comes up as mediocre in the view of his family and friends. He wants to fit into a life in America, but at the same down is weighed down by wanting to go home and knowing that would be an act of simultaneously moving forward and going backward—a tension that he indicates can truly only be felt by an immigrant. Representing another perspective, Joseph not only admires Dante’s works, but also writes his own poetry in the style of the Commedia. The difference is that his work is without a heaven and traces the history of the Congo from King Leopold through Lumumba to Mobutu. He is constantly aware of the sense of history of the African continent and consistently initiates a trivia game with his friends where they name a dictator, coup, and its year, and this game showcases his function as the memory keeper, of sorts. Kenneth, on the other hand, has immersed himself in his American life as a businessman. While the struggles of Sepha and Joseph are strongest within themselves, Kenneth is fully accepting of his life and his work—it is the people around him who tend not to see him as the American businessman he wants to be viewed as. He has no sentimental attachment to the thought of returning to African where his illiterate father was oppressed and had nothing. His struggle for acceptance is demonstrated in the stories about his boss who is, perhaps unintentionally, demeaning and does things like ask Kenneth to take one of the team and come into the office alone on Christmas. Kenneth, while embracing the opportunities and sense of accomplishment he feels, urges the same in Sepha and Joseph, often finding their reluctance to cope the same way he has frustrating. 

To me, the African continent, its history, its present, and the ways it is perceived are fascinating. So often, this giant continent gets generalized in some extreme ways, seemingly forgetting that the prevailing effects of post-colonialism are different across nations, and often dependent on the practices of the colonizing nation. Despite its huge population, I think African-authored stories involving Africa are underrepresented in the literary canon—the two obvious canonical African texts being Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, of course, only one of which is written from an African's perspective (in fact, Chinue Achebe has a bit to say about Conrad in the essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”). As much as The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears takes place in Washington DC, what the stories of the three main characters demonstrate over and over again is how ever-present their past in Africa is in their present.

Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. London: Riverhead / Penguin, 2007. 

John Banville’s The Sea

In the never-ending quest to read the books that have sat unread on my bookshelf for several years, I picked up The Sea. Perhaps its soothing, green-toned cover drew me to it, or perhaps it was the fact it was on the top of the stack. In any case, I didn’t know quite know what to expect. The blurbs on the back cover raved about the writing, as blurbs tend to do, but they weren’t far off. When literary prose is
as captivating and intelligent as Banville’s, it hardly even matters what the storyline is. Take for example this line: “What are living beings, compared to the enduring intensity of mere things?” This is the kind of sentence that stops to make you think, and it captures the melancholia that pervades this story about a man coping with a death by trying to find comfort in an uncomfortable past.


Banville, John. The Sea. New York: Vintage International, 2005.