It does make the times I pretend to gnaw on the baby seem a little more sinister

“Some animal mothers? Eat. Their. Young,” I told Adriana one day last week when she was being obnoxious about something.

“Lucky for me you’re a vegetarian,” she snarked right back.*

So yesterday when I was browsing the children’s section at Books Inc., I couldn’t resist picking up a copy of Monsters Eat Whiny Children by Bruce Eric Kaplan. Lyra was getting antsy at that point (and starting to whine for a Thomas board book that I didn’t even have to glance at to know I wouldn’t like), so I bought it without reading it. Adriana found it in my room just before her bedtime, so I got into bed with her and read it.

Immediately I recognized the artwork from the author’s cartoons in The New Yorker. Henry and Eve are whiny children who disregard their father’s warning that monsters eat small children, and then are abducted by indecisive monster gourmands who spend the book debating the best way to eat the children. The drawings are simple and amusing, and it’s full of lines I am sure to be annoying the kids with. I mean, I don’t think I’ll be able to resist suggesting “Perhaps a whiny-child vindaloo” next time we are wondering what we should make for dinner. Adriana and I both giggled throughout the story.

The humor in the book is definitely aimed at adults, but it’s in the way there are jokes in animated films that are for the grown ups that go right over the kids’ heads, rather than something akin to Go The Fuck To Sleep. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that book. In fact, I found it quite amusing, especially the audiobook version read by Samuel L. Jackson). I wouldn’t share Monsters Eat Whiny Children with some of Adriana’s friends. Adriana, though, loves all things scary, and can handle the idea of monsters eating children. On the other hand, I also picked up a copy of Outside Over There. Perhaps my girls will start to take these books as warnings.

*I love this kid so much.

Book review: The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming

Lemony Snicket's The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story is awesome. It made me laugh a lot. You should read it.

The Music of the Universe

From Isabel Allende's Paula:

Celia was walking back and forth, leaning on Nicolás, never losing her calm, taking short breaths when she doubled over with pain, and resting when the small being in her womb gave her a brief respite. My daughter-in-law carries in her veins secret songs that mark the rhythm of her steps as she walks; during the contractions, she panted and rocked back and forth as if listening to an irresistible, internal Venezuelan drumbeat. Toward the end, I thought that occasionally she made fists of her hands and a flash of terror passed through her eyes, but immediately her husband make her look straight at him, and whispered something in the private code of husband and wife, and her tension eased. . . .

By midafternoon, Celia made a sign; Nicolás helped her climb onto the bed and in less than a minute the apparatus and instruments the midwife carried in her station wagon materialized in the room. That girl in shorts seemed suddenly to mature; her tone of voice changed and millennia of female experience were reflected in her freckled face. "Wash your hands and be ready," she told me with a wink. "Now it's your turn to work." Celia put her arms around her husband, gritted her teeth, and pushed. And then, on a surging wave of blood, emerged a flattened, purplish face and a head covered with dark hair, which I held like a chalice with one hand while with the other I quickly unlooped the bluish cord wrapped around the baby's neck. With another brutal push from the mother, the rest of my granddaughter's body appeared, a blood-washed, fragile package: a most extraordinary gift. With a primeval sob, I felt in the core of my being the sacred experience of birth--the effort, the pain, the panic--and, gratefully, I marveled at my daughter-in-law's heroic courage and the prodigy of her solid body and noble spirit, designed for motherhood. Through a veil, I seemed to see a rapturous Nicolás, who took the baby from my hands and placed her on her mother's belly. Celia rose up from among her pillows, panting, dripping with sweat, transformed by inner light and, completely indifferent to the remainder of her body, which continued contracting and bleeding, she folded her arms about her daughter and welcomed her with a waterfall of words in a newly coined language, kissing and nuzzling her as every mammalian mother does, then offered the baby her breast in the most ancient gesture of humankind. Time congealed in the room, and the sun stopped above the roses on the terrace; the world was holding its breath to celebrate the miracle of that new life.

Of course

1. As I was sleepily trying to finish Ines of My Soul before going to bed on Saturday, I came to a line that said one of the character's "soul escaped his body, captured among slim, moss-covered tree trunks as soft as velvet." I thought, "He died? And I missed it?" I'd known the story was building towards this death, and I was rather tired, but I didn't think I'd miss such an important event. But the next lines revealed that the character was still alive. I guess I'd forgotten whose work I was reading. This was an Isabel Allende novel: of course souls can go flitting about while their owners still live.

2. I decided it was a sign I'd been reading a lot of Allende over the past week when, as I read the opening pages of My Invented Country yesterday and came to the legend that the Arakis of Easter Island levitated the moais, I merely thought, "Oh, well, I'd never heard that theory before, but of course that's how they managed it."

Book review: Pregnancy books

I had been reading online articles for months when I got pregnant, but I am a reader and a researcher and once I really was pregnant, I started building something of a library of pregnancy books. I never picked up a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting, as I was told that a lot of the book would just terrify me. Instead I asked friends for recommendations and ended up with a half dozen books to occupy me over the past nine months (and one week!).


Your Pregnancy Week by Week (5th Edition)
Glade B Curtis, and Judith Schuler

This was one of the first pregnancy books I bought. A friend had it during her pregnancy a few years ago, and I began calling it "the fruit book" at that time, because when I would call her to ask how she was doing, she would always tell me "This week the baby is the size of a grape" (or a strawberry, or a plum, or a peach), because each week the book gives you something to compare the size of your baby to. My favorite thing about this book is explained in its title: "week by week." This book gives you something new to read with each week of your pregnancy. Most other books only give you an update every month, which I found frustrating, especially early in pregnancy, when I knew things were changing constantly. Not that reading about it really makes a difference--I was still anxious no matter how much I read--but at least it gave me something to do.

My least favorite thing about this book is that it takes a very medical view of pregnancy and childbirth. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised by that. After all, the cover does bill it as "the only best-selling guide written by a doctor." But other books I've read (including the Mayo Clinic guide listed below) take a more balanced view of out-of-hospital births. Is home birth safe? the authors ask in a text box on the subject. "By any doctor's standards, the answer is a resounding "No!" I am planning birth center birth, attending by a midwife, rather than a home birth, but I was still put off by this. The authors don't offer specific citations for the studies they mention that found home births risky. They also point out that risk of serious complications increases when a woman suffers from gestational diabetes or high blood pressure. They do not, in this section, mention that these women are at higher risk of complications in any birth setting, nor do they discuss whether home birth or birth center midwives will refer their clients to back-up physicians because of these higher risks. I do hope that in a future edition of the book, the authors will consider other research, including a 2005 study of low-risk women with planned home births, that found that the women had fewer interventions than similar women birthing in hospital settings and experienced similar outcomes.

Maybe it's strange of me to spend so much time thinking about half a page in a book, but this particular half page really stood out to me. Still, I found the book helpful overall, and I have recommended it to other pregnant women.


The Pregnancy Book
William Sears and Martha Sears

I confess that I have drunk the Dr. Sears Kool-Aid. And while I haven't yet had my baby, so I can't attest to his parenting advice, I have enjoyed the Kool-Aid so far. The Sears' philosophy of attachment parenting appeals to me, and I found their pregnancy book offered a more balanced perspective on pregnancy and birth options. I did not feel that they were pushing readers toward natural childbirth or judging those who opt for other alternatives. This book does only offer monthly snapshots, which I found frustrating at times. I do think it has a good index and makes a good reference book, though, so that even if you're experiencing something that's not discussed in your current month, it is easy to find what you're looking for.

This is another book that cites studies without actually citing the studies. The authors offer some numbers from studies to offer support for some of their claims, but they don't tell me where to go find the studies to read them for myself. As someone who really likes research and numbers, it hurts my heart to not have access to some of the details of the statistics they are quoting. I mean, at least give me the z-scores or something.


The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy
Vicki Iovine

This book was perhaps the least practical, in most senses, of all the books I read, but I did find it helpful. It's not helpful if you are having some concerns about something medical going on. It's great, though, if you want to laugh about pregnancy and hear some practical advice about what other women have experienced. And I didn't have the issue with wanting something more of a bibliography, because it's not the kind of book to offer up many studies to begin with.


The Expectant Father
Armin A. Brott and Jennifer Ash

I bought this book for Brian after reading some reviews on Amazon. He had been asking our midwife about books on becoming a father. He apparently meant actual parenting books, but I was unclear on what he was talking about at the time. Both of us did end up reading and liking this book. It doesn't go into a lot of detail on more medical aspects of pregnancy, but that was fine. They begin each chapter (one for each month) with lists of what your partner is experiencing physically and emotionally, a section on what's happening with the baby, and then a discussion on what's going on for the father. I found the sections on what the partner (that's me!) is experience to be fairly accurate, and what it listed for what the father was experiencing seemed reasonable to me. But the book also included more practical advice that isn't in the books targeted to women, such as a discussion of different types of life insurance and some information on various college savings accounts. I suppose these sections are in this book because it is aimed at men, and these are traditionally things that men deal with. Plus, it could give expectant fathers something to do while their partners gestate (that's a fancy word for nap and eat). But in our house I'm the one that generally handles that, so I found the information helpful in getting me thinking about what we needed to do (once I got over my momentary outrage that these people seemed to think it was my husband's responsiblity to deal with these things). And it got my mind of the gestating for a while.

As for the book's balance between "medical" and "alternative" practices during pregnancy and childbirth, I felt the authors did a fairly good job. Their discussion of issues such as out-of-hospital birth and natural childbirth methods didn't strike me as at all judgemental. It's also not a book that's heavy on the statistics and research, so I don't think it would help anyone make a decision about this sort of thing, but it does offer a way to start thinking about what you want to do.


Complete Book of Pregnancy and Baby's First Year
Mayo Clinic

A friend sent me a link to a State Farm website where you could send in your name and address and get a free copy of this book (unfortunately, I have lost the link), so I think it was totally worth what I paid for it. And I think if I'd paid actual money for it, it would have been worth it too. I would weigh this heavy book on my kitchen scale, but that only goes up to five pounds, and I think this book is heavier than that. When the book arrived, I did start to read it through, but I found some sections too difficult to read--in the early days of pregnancy, I really was not emotionally prepared to read about birth defects and chromosomal abnormalities. But it was my reference book for any concerns I had about medical aspects of pregnancy, and when we were weighing whether to go ahead with theAFP (triple screen), this book had the best discussion of what the test would actually be able to tell us.


Husband-Coached Childbirth
Robert A. Bradley

Bradley's book isn't a traditional pregnancy book as the ones above are, but it's on my shelf and I thought I would include it here, since I washed down my Dr. SearsKool-Aid with a glass of Dr. Bradley's Kool -Aid. Not having been through birth yet, I can't attest to his method of childbirth, although I can say that I feel more confident going into this because of reading his book and taking his class. Bradley was one of the first doctors to advocate for the presence of fathers in the delivery room, something that I take for granted at this point. His book isn't really balanced. While he does recognize that some women really need an epidural or other interventions during birth, his goal is to have women get through birth drug-free. The book offers helpful tips for parents-to-be on exercises to help prepare the body for labor and details at what to expect during labor.

I would also like to note here that the workbook that you are given when you sign up for a Bradley course could use some serious editing. The typos in there made me twitch.

A sad day

The Cody's on Telegraph is closing. I don't even live in the bay area anymore, and that still makes me sad. I was enthralled by Cody's when I was a high school student--the sheer size and the number of books sent me into bookworm heaven. I remember a day when I was 15 or 16, wandering with a friend along Telegraph Avenue, where we bought little necklaces that said "peace" in different languages, browsing stores like Cody's and Amoeba. Finally we walked up to a coffee house, I think Cafe Strada, where I ordered a coffee drink that I didn't really like (and that probably made me sick later, as I've never coped well with caffeine) and hoped that people would mistake us for Cal students.

I'm sad to see that Cody's go, but in a way I also feel guilty. I want to support independent bookstores, but honestly, I do most of my book buying in used book shops or on Amazon. When I lived in Santa Cruz, I never entered the Borders that opened on Pacific Avenue, but continued to shop at Bookshop Santa Cruz and Logos. Now that I'm in DC, I love Politics and Prose, and I even like Kramerbooks, although it's really just not a good venue for browsing. When holidays come around, though, or there is a specific book that I decide I need, I order from Amazon.

But when I'm at home in the bay area, visiting friends in Berkeley, I love to stop in to browse and maybe pick something up at Cody's or Moe's on Telegraph, or the Cody's down on Fourth Street. I'll miss the main Cody's. Let's cross our fingers that the other shops are able to stay open.

There was that time that the man with the Southern accent was talking loudly about how no one else was talking

On my first day of orientation at Georgetown, I met another woman who had just moved to Washington from California. “Have you noticed how much less friendly everyone here is?” she asked in a low voice. I shook my head. So far everyone had seemed very pleasant. A few of my neighbors had introduced themselves the night that we were moving things into our new apartment from our U-haul trailer. The bus driver on the route that went by my house had been helpful in explaining how to get various places. The majority of the people I knew so far I had met that day in orientation, and of course they had all be very outgoing and friendly. Earlier in the summer, when I’d visited to find a place to live, I’d had a grand time with some women I’d met in the hostel where I’d stayed, and several of the prospective landlords had been friendly and helpful when they learned I was new to the area. Basically, everyone seemed great to me.

But eventually I did begin to see the difference. It wasn’t necessarily a difference between being in a big city and being in a beach/college town. The friend who had pointed out the difference had been living in Los Angeles. The place where I really started to notice the difference was on the Metro.

The summer after college, I worked for The Husband’s aunt at a law firm in Oakland (we call that “nephew-tism”), commuting on BART from Martinez. I always had a newspaper or book with me, but most days I had at least one conversation either on a train or in a station, with someone I didn’t know. People would comment on the banana slug on my sweatshirt (um, it was a rather casual law office) or the book I was reading. They would sit down on the bench where I was waiting with a big sigh, and I could ask them, “Long day?” One day, on a crowded Pittsburg-Bay Point train, a seat near me opened up. A man in a business suit gestured for me to take it. I smiled at him and sat down. A few minutes later, as the train pulled into the Walnut Creek station, I felt someone lightly touch my shoulder. The man who had let me sit down was looking down at me. I met his gaze, and he winked at me, handed me a business card, and made his way toward the door. (I tossed the card when I got to North Concord-Martinez, but I made sure to tell The Husband about it when I called him that night.)

On Metro, there aren’t the same casual conversations. Occasionally some tourists will ask me for directions and I may chat with them for a bit about getting around, the museums they want to visit, or places to eat near their hotel. But the casual conversations with other commuters are few and far between—they pretty much only happen when buses are running late or the weather is doing something extreme . Mostly it’s not something I notice, and I don’t mind having quiet commutes.

I’ve noticed it this week, because people seem to be breaking the rules. They are talking to me. I picked up a copy of Isabel Allende’s most recent novel, Zorro. People notice the cover and say something. They want to know about the book. Is it really about that Zorro? Is it the traditional story? Is it good? On Thursday and Friday, every time I got on a train and once when I got on a bus, someone had something to say. And while their questions and comments do take me away from the book (which, like every other story I’ve read by Allende, has me totally captivated), I enjoy this chance to talk with random people. It’s occurred to me that if I want to meet new people, I should just continue to carry this book around with me, tucking whatever I’m really reading inside. But that might be weird.

March miscellany

A few unconnected items:

It did not actually snow yesterday. I treated myself to a peppermint hot chocolate anyhow. And although it was cold, I was not horribly uncomfortable waiting for a bus after work last night, in spite of the fact that I forgot to wear a hat, a scarf, or gloves. (Look, I got out of the house with a coat, my lunch, my house keys, and my Metro card. I think that's pretty good.) It didn’t even begin to rain until I was curled up in bed with my book.


The Husband and I decided to try Indique after getting recommendations from several friends. Now I only regret that we waited so long to try it. Our curries were wonderfully spicy—the chickpeas in the aloo chole cooked to creamy perfection, the eggplant in the baingan bhartha rich and smoky. And the restaurant’s variation on samosas was almost too good to be true. Also? Spell check thinks I’m doing a crappy job on this paragraph.


Ohio State Senator Robert Hagan rocks my socks.


I finally finished Parting the Waters. It was a wonderful book, but after reading exciting chapters on the Freedom Rides, the movements in Albany and Birmingham, and the March on Washington, the last few pages of tying up loose ends was sort of a let down. I suppose it’s the nature of that sort of book, though. I’m taking a break to read some fiction, and then I’ll move on to Pillar of Fire. I figure that by the time I’m done with that At Canaan’s Edge will be out in soft cover.


I am listening to Gillian Welch right now, and quite enjoying her. When Joan Baez included to Gillian Welch songs on Dark Chords on a Big Guitar I thought I should probably get an album. Then El Jefe recommended her to me. Finally I got Hell Among the Yearlings and Time (The Relevator). Both are excellent, although The Husband finds her "too twangy" for his tastes.


I love that the days are getting longer and that the sun is coming up earlier. It makes it so much easier to get up. But I still get funny looks at work for saying things like “I was surprised by how cloudy it turned out to be today. The sky was so clear and red this morning as the sun was coming up.”


I didn’t grow up watching basketball, but I have somehow been liking the college basketball tournament this year. Maybe I just like tournaments: I enjoy the NBA finals, as well. Maybe it's that, in spite of defending the pace of baseball to non-fans, I do enjoy the quicker pace of basketball. Or maybe as a vertically-challenged individual I am just amazed by the size of basketball players. Anyhow, I didn’t fill out a bracket, but I do have teams I’m cheering for. I’m not telling who they are, though. Don’t want to jinx anything.


Speaking of baseball: two weeks until opening day!


I got a call this afternoon from a man from some catering place about bagels for a meeting. He kept asking for Nadia. I kept telling him he had the wrong number. He kept asking if he had the right university. And I would say yes, but I'm not the person you need to talk to. He would ask me to connect him to Nadia. But he didn't know Nadia who or what department she was with. He just needed to talk to someone named Nadia and worked at the university. He told me that he thought she was Muslim. I didn’t find that information very helpful. I asked him what number he was calling. He read me off a number that wasn't mine. I said that wasn't my number, that he must have dialed wrong (but it was way off, so I didn't know how he got to me). Finally he told me that that number was busy, so he had tried my number instead. What the hell? I told him he needed to call back the other number. He asked me how many bagels I needed. I hung up.

Book review: Freshwater Road

Freshwater Road is the story of Celeste Tyree, a young African-American woman from Detroit, who goes to Mississippi in 1964 as a Freedom Summer volunteer. Denise Nichols draws on her own experiences from that summer as she tells of Celeste’s work in Pineyville, a small town where blacks live in homes without indoor plumbing and step off the sidewalks to let whites pass. Celeste spends the divides her days during the hot, humid summer, teaching children about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman in Freedom School in the mornings, and adults how to read and interpret the Mississippi Constitution in voter education classes in the evenings. She sees the church where she teaches burned to the ground and a little girl she loves die. She struggles with her motivations for volunteering, her questions about her family, learns to appreciate the community than is learning to accept her.

Several of the chapters take the reader back to Detroit, following the experience of Shuck, Celeste’s father, as he struggles with the knowledge of the danger his daughter could be in and his lack of knowledge of what’s really happening to her. While Shuck’s chapters aren’t as captivating as Celeste’s story, they don’t take away from the book. Instead, they give depth to Celeste’s story—showing her background, so different from what she experiences in Mississippi—and offer a larger picture of race relations in the country in 1964. The joy of three blacks who finally register to vote in Pineyville contrasts sharply with the decline Shuck observes in the black neighborhoods in Detroit.

Both Celeste and Shuck have incredible depth, as do several of the other characters. Nichols’ Celeste becomes a real person very quickly, from her first questions about why she decided to go to Mississippi and her struggles with how to relate to white volunteers, to considering whether she can remain engaged in non-violence and learning how to relate to the blacks she is helping prepare to register to vote. The black minister, who helps Celeste lead the movement in Pineyville, has chosen to take on the white establishment, but he treads carefully when it comes to issues within his church. Mrs. Owens, who provides room and board to Celeste, is a wonderful character, and it is interesting to observe how her relationship with Celeste transforms. While the Freedom School students are mostly minor characters in the story, they are artfully drawn, as are several of the Pineyville citizens who fight to register to vote.

Only one character did not ring true. While there are other Pineyville blacks that do not participate in Celeste’s Freedom School activities, Nichols chooses to highlight one character who responds with hatred toward Celeste and refuses to let his daughter attend Freedom School. While the character, Mr. Tucker, could be created with sympathy (even while remaining something of a bully) and seem realistic as someone who feared the danger that the movement could bring to the little town, Nichols casts Mr. Tucker in an almost consistently negatively light. He does act as a protective figure to several single black women neighbors, but portraying him as a potential child molester takes something away from his character, making him seem flat.

One of the most important elements of the book for me was reading about the Celeste’s motivation. In everything I’ve learned about the Civil Rights movement and Freedom Summer, I’ve been amazed by the strength of the volunteers. I imagined their pure motives, their desire to see justice in the South, their bravery. And so as I read the first pages of the book, I was surprised to see Celeste’s ambivalence and fear. I was interested to see her questioning her own motives. I had idealized the volunteers, and in the first chapter of the book I was drawn in to the reality of the experience, which only made my admiration for them stronger.

There are images in our culture of the Civil Rights movement—young men sitting at a lunch counter, Rosa Parks arrested on the bus, marchers knocked over by fire hoses. Freshwater Road gives readers a deeper look that goes beyond those images, to the small town where the struggle wasn’t captured by the media. The movement brought changes on a grand scale, but Nichols lets us see that it was made up of individual volunteers who were afraid and brave, of three people who registered to vote, and of little girls drawing pictures of Frederick Douglass and the North Star.

Bookworms like me can ramble about books forever

I like books. Not only do I like books, I like to buy books. Part of me feels guilty, thinks that I should save my money, go to the library more often. But I like to own books, to read them, keep them, put them on my own bookshelf so I can reread them later—I do read most novels at least twice. My love of book shopping can be something of a problem. When The Husband and I moved across the country we boxed up our books and mailed them to our new address, so they wouldn’t take up room in the trailer we had hitched to the back of the car. Eight Kinko’s boxes (my sister worked there at the time) arrived at the new apartment a couple of days after we did. Since then, we have bought two more six-foot book cases. I bought a lot of books during grad school, most of which I didn’t sell back at the end of each semester, and once I graduated I began spending money on novels. Mostly I would spend time browsing around used bookstores, where I always seem to spend $20, no matter how many books I buy. But I also purchase from Amazon. Spend $9.48 more and get free shipping? Sure, why not. So during our most recent move, we packed up even more boxes of books, and moved them down the street to our new apartment.

On Sunday, I bought a new book. I was in the Seattle airport, browsing around Borders even though I had two unread books in my bag, because I had a lot of time to kill before my flight, because I knew I would be sitting long enough during the course of the day, and because I can’t resist even an airport bookstore. As I had wandered through Elliott Bay Book Company on Friday afternoon, I had resisted the impulse to buy several interesting books, telling myself that I didn’t need the extra weight in my backpack, that I could easily get the books when I returned to Washington. But now, with the prospect of 8 hours of travel ahead of me, my defenses were down. I tried to recall the books I’d been interested in. The last name of one of the authors had started Ch, I thought, and wandered down to the Cs.

I didn’t find the book, but one name jumped out at me on the third shelf from the floor: Justin Cronin. I knew his name. I had read something by him before. I picked up the book, The Summer Guest. The cover declared him the author of Mary and O’Neill. I looked back down at the shelf, but that book wasn’t there. But that was the book I’d read. I had seen it recommended somewhere, probably the Booksense newsletter, back when I lived in California. I had checked in out of the UCSC library, read it, loved it, and forgotten the name. But I hadn’t forgotten the book. It is a novel told in stories that could stand alone. I remember some of the stories clearly, and I remember a description of snow that seemed perfect to me. I’ve thought about the book several times in the four years or so since I read it, but I always got stuck trying to remember the title or the author.

And so I bought the book and headed back to my gate. I stood in line to board the plane, reading the first few pages, totally hooked. I read the book all the way from Seattle to Phoenix. I read as my second flight took off from Phoenix and as the pilot turned the plane around half an hour later due to mechanical difficulties that were sending us back to the airport to board a different plane. I finished the book sometime just after we passed over Kansas City. I teared up a little, as I often due at the end of books, sad or not, and hoped the man beside me wouldn’t notice.

It was the perfect way to read a book. Well almost—I could have done without the mechanical difficulties, the turbulence that left my tummy upset, the leg cramps, and the lousy customer service of the airline I had chosen. The perfect way would have been to spend an entire day snuggled up with my cat, with good orange juice or ice cream available when I needed a snack, reading the book straight through (which is actually how I read the most recent Harry Potter book). Still, to sit down and read a book all at once, even on a plane, is one of my favorite things. Most of my reading is done on public transit as I travel to and from work. I am happy for the time to read, but the reading isn’t as pleasurable that way—too much stopping and starting, too many distractions. Sometimes I want to stretch a book out, put off finishing it so that I can enjoy it longer, but patience is not one of my virtues, and I find it much more satisfying to read a book from cover to cover. To finish it in a public place isn’t ideal, but it was an airplane at least. I hate reaching the last pages of a book on the bus or train on my way home from work is so much less fun, and I try to race through the pages so I can finish before I read my stop, or interrupt myself every paragraph to glance up to see where I am, which takes away from the pleasure of reading.

I started Isabel Allende’s Portrait in Sepia on Monday, and I haven’t gotten very far at all, because I’ve been reading on public transit, and since it’s cooled off a bit here in DC, I’ve been walking from the metro to the office, rather than taking the bus. I gain exercise, but lose some valuable reading time.

Judging books by their covers

Who was it that decided one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover? I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday, and I find judging a book by its cover very useful. A certain kind of small, thick book with block letters on the cover and little art is clearly a mystery novel. Add a little art and it’s some kind of popular fiction. Some cover art just says “I am literature, not just fiction.” Pink covers with curly fonts with pictures of high heels and martini glasses scream “chick-lit.” I recognize the covers of books from certain publishers—the orange spines of Penguin books, for instance, or the small Signet Classics—and treat them with varying levels of trust.

Other books are less clear. Most science fiction is easy to recognize—by the title, the font, the cover art. Yesterday I picked up a copy of Flowers for Algernon. It didn’t look like science fiction, but the back cover proclaimed that it was a winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, which I thought had something to do with sci-fi. I took it over to Brian, who knows more about that genre than I do. He confirmed that it was science fiction, but the kind that I like—I’m resistant to strange names and different planets, but I can handle time travel and futuristic laboratory science. When I was reading The Time Traveler’s Wife and described it to Brian, he said, “You’re reading science fiction?” I was reluctant to describe it as such. “No,” I told him, “it’s just sort of…magic. But treated as real.”

I should admit that I am a book snob. Where a book is in the store and what its cover looks like matters to me. Flowers for Algernon looked interesting. I don’t read much sci-fi, but since it wasn’t in that section (although maybe it was just misfiled, since it didn’t have a black cover with futuristic looking people or creatures on it), I thought it might be worth my attention. But those books with the bright pink or green covers? The one where a cartoonish woman with a high ponytail and high heels holds a martini glass or a shopping bag? That’s chick-lit, and I’m not even going to pick it up to read the back cover. But if a book has a blurry, artsy photo, that’s my book. Blurb from the New Yorker? I’ll take it. A sticker indicating that it’s got Oprah’s approval? Oohh, that’s tough. Some of those books are a little too…Oprah, for my tastes. But then she goes and picks Anna Karenina or The Corrections. What then? And of this is to say that I only read books that are (or aspire to be) “literary fiction.” I look forward to new Patricia Cornwell mysteries. I buy some of those small, fat popular novels. But somehow those aren’t the same for me as the classic books or the new authors I read.

I’m such a snob, that I’m even a bit embarrassed to admit that I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday. I love to look through the books recommended by Booksense. I’d rather say I was in an independent bookstore—Kramerbooks or Chapters. It makes me miss Santa Cruz, where Bookshop Santa Cruz is as big and as comfortable for browsing as Barnes and Noble is. I go to Barnes and Noble, and I buy books on Amazon.com, but I would rather admit to lurking in few, long, narrow aisles of Kulturas, my favorite used book store. That is truly a store for people who love to read—it’s hard to find a specific title, as they don’t know precisely what they have in stock; alphabetical order in approximate (if you are looking for Toni Morrison, start when you first see authors whose names begin with K, and continue until you run into someone whose last name starts with R); and books are two or three deep on the shelves, with more on their sides, stacked on top of those that are lined up neatly. That even makes digging through the mysteries fun, although in my pretentiousness, I tend to wander through the genre-less fiction, picking out books that have been noted by Booksense, or that have those artsy, literary covers. I go there because I like picking up books I've never heard of and those I have, so I can touch them, read the covers or the first chapters, put them back on the shelf, and lose them among other classics and best sellers and obscure titles, while I move on to something else.