Review of Fat Is the New 30, by Jill Conner Browne

Humorous, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Fat Is the New 30

The Sweet Potato Queens’ Guide to Coping with (the crappy parts of) Life

by Jill Conner Browne

Amazon Publishing, 2012. 254 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #4 Other Nonfiction

I do so love The Sweet Potato Queens! This particular book adds some seriously good advice to the usual humor of Jill Conner Browne’s observations. Of course, keeping your sense of humor IS seriously good advice.

Jill Conner Browne sets the tone in the very first paragraph of the Acknowledgments:

The last few years have afforded me much experience in Coping with the Crappy Parts of Life referenced in the title of this book. However, it must be said that the Crap, plentiful as it has admittedly been, is overshadowed still by the Amazing, the Humbling, the Gratifying, and the Nifty. My prayer for us all is that we’re always able to pay more attention to those things in our lives and laugh our way around the Crap.

In the introduction, which is given the title “Fat Is the New 30!”, she says things like this:

Possibly the very best survival tool ever devised is the Concept of Complete Denial. My seester Judy and I have made this our Life’s Work. (Judy would like for it to be noted that she also has a minor in “Lolling.”) Someone once told me that if you study and practice something diligently for five years, you can become a bona fide expert at it. I shared this tidbit with Judy and we decided that we would commit ourselves to doing whatever it took to accomplish that in our chosen field, and I am happy to report that we were 100 percent successful, and also, it didn’t take us anywhere near five years. We are, as far as we can tell, the World’s Leading Authorities on Denial. No, we didn’t do much — OK, ANY — research into the possibility of the existence of other authorities and/or their potential superiority to us in this, our chosen field. We decided that we are the best, and if anybody says otherwise, well, we will just deny it. So, there. Done.

What I CAN offer you is some much-needed relief from the overwhelming stress we are all mired in (as a direct result of my not turning out to be the World-Saving Little Redheaded Singing Sensation), by making fun of all the messes and the people who made them — even if they are us, which, truth be told, they occasionally are. I will make you laugh even if you don’t want to — I can do that. It will feel good and you will feel better even though most everything will still suck. . . .

Daddy always said, “There are very few situations in life that we really and truly canNOT change, but when we do encounter one of those, then the task at hand is to figure out how to either make fun OUT of it — or to make fun OF it.” That advice has served me well in this life, so I offer it to you. But you don’t have my daddy to help you figure out how to actually DO it — and it does take practice. I got personal training from Daddy, plus I’ve had lots of experience at Spinning Crap Into Fun (also known as “Shit to Shinola” — similar in theory to the storied Spinning of Straw Into Gold — only, actually possible), so I think maybe I can help you with that.

We are fortunate to have many tools with which to fend off everything from boredom to disaster, but remember, no matter how bad it is, it’s much better to laugh than to cry — or to maim and kill, which will only make more trouble for yourself, so I discourage it, no matter how tempting it may be.

Here are some other random lovely bits of wisdom:

So, as you age, which I hope you will do sober — I truly cannot imagine trying to negotiate all these pitfalls drunk — and you find yourself starting a sentence but forgetting the targeted end before you even get to the middle, just keep talking, about anything, it doesn’t really matter what, just keep talking and nobody will notice that you’re lost. If you can REMEMBER to do this, it will serve you well.

How best to survive a spell in the spotlight that is not of our choosing? Laughing at ourownselfs, especially at our own extreme discomfort and/or embarrassment, is not the easiest thing in the world, but I reckon it’s a sight easier than spontaneous evaporation, which would, naturally, be our first choice.

“Money won’t solve all your problems.” That’s another one of those things that only ever gets said by people WITH money. It is true, of course, there are all manner of problems for which money is not the solution. However, it must also be said that if what you’ve got is a MONEY PROBLEM, well, then money is pretty much the only thing that will solve it. Yeppers, money is just the thing for fixing money problems.

And those erstwhile Wedding Vows? The ones where we promised to love, honor and cherish that Other Person (who, it should be noted, ALSO promised to do the same for US — and we see how well THAT worked out). What if we were to make and keep those vows — to OURSELVES?

Every coin has a flip side — well, except for those trick two-headed coins, but you have to pay extra and have those made special, so they don’t really count and are certainly not germane to this discussion. Suffice it to say that just about everything in this world that is making somebody wildly happy is, at the same time, prolly making somebody else equally miserable. it has become my job to identify those things and make fun of them, with the hope of relieving the suffering for even a moment and thereby furthering the cause of my Ultimate Mission in Life, which is, of course, World Peace.

Things happen that can’t be fixed. Relationships are ended by death, or maybe nobody’s dead, but the relationship might be ruined beyond repair. Sucks. Just make sure you don’t lose the LESSON, too — because there was one, every time.

Forgiveness — such a wonderful thing to give and to receive. We just have to remember to start that process in front of the mirror — you gotta give it to yourself and allow yourself to receive it before you can go any further with it.

If you keep one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, ALL you can DO is make a very unfortunate mess all over today. And today is all ANY-body has ever got. Let go of yesterday, quit worrying about tomorrow — grab hold of today and get your money’s worth out of it. See if you can make only NEW mistakes today and be grateful for the goodness of the moment.

And my personal favorite:

Life. It’s your birthday present. Open it up and play with it. Act like you like it. (The One who gave it to you is watching, after all. Don’t wanna hurt His feelings.) And if you don’t like your life, CHANGE IT. It is all yours.

That should give you the idea! If you like these tastes, be sure to check out the entire book. You will laugh, and you will be blessed.

sweetpotatoqueens.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/fat_is_the_new_30.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar, by Masaichiro and Mitsumasa Anno

Children's Nonfiction Review, Mathematical, Picture Book Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar

by Masaichiro and Mitsumasa Anno

Philomel Books, New York, 1983. 44 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Standout: #7 Children’s Nonfiction

How did I not know about this book?! How did I not know there is a picture book that explains factorials?! It was written before my boys were born — and I didn’t know to buy it for them! This is a crime!

I was at the library, refilling our display of children’s nonfiction books. I find that if I put out children’s math books, they get snapped up. I make sure to put out fun children’s math books, like anything by Greg Tang, or A Million Dots, by Andrew Clements, or Piece = Part = Portion, by Scott Gifford. But while I was looking through the 510s for good fun math books, I found Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar.

The idea is simple. Mitsumasa Anno and his son show us a jar that contains a sea and an island. Each island has 2 countries. Each country has 3 mountains. Each mountain has 4 walled kingdoms. In each kingdom are 5 villages. In each village are 6 houses. In each house are 7 rooms. In each room are 8 cupboards. In each cupboard are 9 boxes. And within each box, there are 10 jars.

How many jars are there all together? There are 10! = 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 3,628,800. The second half of the book shows this even more clearly, using dots. And there’s an afterword as well, that explains some of the further uses of factorials.

It’s so simple. So beautiful. And it explains factorials! To children! Yes!

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/annos_mysterious_multiplying_jar.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

This review is posted today in honor of Nonfiction Monday. You’ll find the round-up at The LibrariYAn.

Review of A Praying Life, by Paul E. Miller

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review 0

A Praying Life

Connecting with God in a Distracting World

by Paul E. Miller

NavPress, 2009. 279 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Other Nonfiction

My small group began this book more than a year ago, and I continued slowly through it on my own. I think it’s the best book I’ve ever read on prayer, full of practical ideas for really getting personal with God and listening for His voice.

I like the first section: “Learning to Pray Like a Child.” He thinks of prayer in a very personal way with God, and gives examples of how that has worked in his life. He prays like someone really talking with his Father, and helps me want to do that, too.

And Paul E. Miller doesn’t simply talk about prayer. He talks about a praying life. Here’s a section from the Introduction:

Because prayer is all about relationship, we can’t work on prayer as an isolated part of life. That would be like going to the gym and working out just your left arm. You’d get a strong left arm, but it would look odd. Many people’s frustrations with prayer come from working on prayer as a discipline in the abstract.

We don’t learn to pray in isolation from the rest of our lives. For example, the more I love our youngest daughter, Emily, the more I pray for her. The reverse is true as well; the more I learn how to pray for her, the more I love her. Nor is faith isolated from prayer. The more my faith grows, the bolder my prayers get for Jill. Then, the more my prayers for her are answered, the more my faith grows. Likewise, if I suffer, I learn how to pray. As I learn how to pray, I learn how to endure suffering. This intertwining applies to every aspect of the Christian life.

Since a praying life is interconnected with every part of our lives, learning to pray is almost identical to maturing over a lifetime. What does it feel like to grow up? It is a thousand feelings on a thousand different days. That is what learning to pray feels like.

He goes on to explore many different facets of prayer. How much do we really know our Father? How comfortable are we talking with him? The ideas in this book can help.

There were many, many sections of this book I especially like, and I’ve posted them on Sonderquotes. I am sure I’m going to come back to this book again and again for encouragement from a fellow-traveler.

When it comes to prayer, we, too, just need to get the words out. Feel free to stop and pray now. It’s okay if your mind wanders or your prayers get interrupted. Don’t be embarrassed by how needy your heart is and how much it needs to cry out for grace. Just start praying. Remember the point of Christianity isn’t to learn a lot of truths so you don’t need God anymore. We don’t learn God in the abstract. We are drawn into his life.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/praying_life.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy of the book.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Bink and Gollie: Two for One, by Kate Di Camillo and Alison McGhee

Beginning Chapter Books, Children's Fiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Bink and Gollie
Two for One

by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee
illustrated by Tony Fucile

Candlewick Press, 2012. 80 pages.
Starred Review
2013 Capitol Choices List
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#6 Picture Books

This follow-up to Bink and Gollie is as irresistible as the first. Bink is short and wild. Gollie is tall and sedate. They spend a day together at the fair.

In many ways this book is about failure. Failure at Whack-a-Duck and failure at the Talent Show. But it’s not treated as failure. Not at all. After both events, the girls find happy compensation.

The pictures are the crowning glory of this delightful book. Yes, the words are wonderful, but the pictures bring it to life. Bink’s efforts to throw the ball and Whack a Duck take up an entire dramatic two-page spread. Gollie’s stage fright is communicated without a word as the scene widens to show just how many people are listening to her and the frozen look on her face.

There are not very many words on each page, but there is lots and lots of story on each page. Beginning readers will feel they’ve accomplished something, and skilled readers won’t be bored for a second.

The two girls finish up the day in a fortune teller’s tent.

“I see two friends,” said Madame Prunely.
“Is one of those friends tall?” said Gollie.
“Yes,” said Madame Prunely.

“And is the other friend short?” said Bink.
“Yes,” said Madame Prunely.

“Are they together?” said Gollie.
“Without question,” said Madame Prunely.

“That’s all the future I need to know,” said Bink.
“Come on, Gollie!”

An absolute delight for beginning readers.

binkandgollie.com
candlewick.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/two_for_one.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of A Jane Austen Education, by William Deresiewicz

Austenalia, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 0

A Jane Austen Education

How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

by William Deresiewicz

The Penguin Press, New York, 2011. 255 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Nonfiction: Personal Stories

I’m a huge Jane Austen fan. I wrote a paper on her my Sophomore year of college. I had lots of time in which to write the paper — so I read ALL her novels, and then wrote the paper staying up all night the night before it was due.

A Jane Austen Education is perhaps my favorite so far of nonfiction Jane Austen take-offs. William Deresiewicz was a graduate student of literature, and he writes about how things he learned from Jane Austen mirrored and informed his life as he became an adult. He’s not afraid to pull out lessons that he needed to learn, and there’s a lovely combination of personal observations and stories with ideas and examples from the novels.

Here’s how he begins:

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

He goes through all the novels, matching them up to different periods of his life. There’s lots and lots of good stuff here. He has studied all the novels and studied Jane Austen’s life, so he has plenty of information to convey, and along the way, he comes up with some profound insights and self-deprecating humor. I’ll include at least one paragraph from the chapter on each novel, but there’s a lot more where this comes from.

From Emma:

There was one more thing about my life that had to change, now that I’d read Emma: my relationships with the people around me. Once I started to see myself for the first time, I started seeing them for the first time, too. I began to notice and care about what they might be experiencing, and they began to develop the depth and richness of literary characters. I could almost feel along with their feelings now, as we talked, feel the contours of them as they tried to express them to me. Instead of a boring blur, the life around me now was sharp and important. Everything was interesting, everything was meaningful, every conversation held potential revelations. It was like having my ears turned on for the first time. Suddenly the world seemed fuller and more spacious than I had ever imagined it could be, a house with a thousand rooms that now lay open to explore.

From Pride and Prejudice:

But Austen, it turned out, did not see things that way. For her, growing up has nothing to do with knowledge or skills, because it has everything to do with character and conduct. And you don’t strengthen your character or improve your conduct by memorizing the names of Roman emperors (or American presidents) or learning how to do needlework (or calculus). You don’t do so, she believed, by developing self-confidence and self-esteem, either. If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are the great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance. For Austen, growing up means making mistakes.

From Northanger Abbey:

Catherine thought she saw things at Northanger Abbey that weren’t really there, but the novel, my professor explained, was not against imagination. Quite the opposite. It was against delusion, against projection, against thinking the same old thing again and again, whether it’s the idea that all balls are “very agreeable indeed” or that all old houses conceal dark secrets. True imagination, he went on, means the ability to envision new possibilites, for life as well as art. Mrs. Allen and the rest of Austen’s dull adults were not ignorant or stupid so much as they were unimaginative. Nothing was ever going to change for them, because they couldn’t imagine that anything ever would.

From Mansfield Park:

How different this was, I realized, from the kinds of stories I had trained myself to tell my friend and his wife, those polished little anecdotes that had to have a laugh at every turn. “You shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.” All about: no impatience, no competitiveness, no interruptions, no need to worry about being entertaining, no having to watch your listeners’ eyes glaze over while they thought about what they were going to say when you finally stopped talking already. Did Edmund really care about her brothers and sisters? Probably not. But he cared about her, and she cared about them, and that was enough for him. To listen to a person’s stories, he understood, is to learn their feelings and experiences and values and habits of mind, and to learn them all at once and all together. Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else’s stories — entering into their feelings, validating their experiences — is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.

From Persuasion:

Putting your friend’s welfare before your own: that was Austen’s idea of true friendship. That means admitting when you’re wrong, but even more importantly, it means being willing to tell your friend when they are. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that notion, because it flew so strongly in the face of what we believe about friendship today. True friendship, we think, means unconditional acceptance and support. The true friend validates your feelings, takes your side in every argument, helps you feel good about yourself at all times, and never, ever judges you. But Austen didn’t believe that. For her, being happy means becoming a better person, and becoming a better person means having your mistakes pointed out to you in a way that you can’t ignore. Yes, the true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same things. In fact, they can sometimes be diametrically opposed. True friends do not shield you from your mistakes, they tell you about them: even at the risk of losing your friendship — which means, even at the risk of being unhappy themselves.

From Sense and Sensibility:

If love begins in friendship, I was now able to see, it has to adhere to the principles of friendship as Austen understood them. The lover’s highest role, like the friend’s, is to help you to become a better person: push you, if necessary, even at the risk of wounded feelings. Austen’s lovers challenged each other: to be less selfish, more aware, kinder, more considerate — not only toward each other but to everyone around them. Love, I saw, for Austen — and what a change this was from the days of my rebellious youth — is an agent not of subversion, but of socialization. Lovers aren’t supposed to goad each other toward extremes of transgression, the way that Marianne and Willoughby did; they’re supposed to teach each other the value of behaving with propriety and decorum, show each other that society’s expectations are worthy, after all, of respect. Love, for Austen, is not about remaining forever young. It’s about becoming an adult.

Now, undoubtedly, my knowledge of all the Austen novels contributed to my enjoyment of this book, but I have little doubt that it would also encourage people to read the novels who haven’t before. All in all, it’s a wonderful contribution to Austenalia, a delightful, thoughtful, even scholarly contribution, and from a male perspective, as a nice contrast to so many others. I highly recommend that Jane Austen fans read this book.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/jane_austen_education.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, which I got at an ALA conference.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of The Journal of Best Practices, by David Finch

Biography, Nonfiction Review, Relationships, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 0

The Journal of Best Practices

A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband

by David Finch

Scribner, New York, 2012. 224 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #5 Nonfiction: Personal Stories

This book is sweet. As an adult, David Finch was diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome. It actually opened his eyes to why his marriage was falling apart. He began working on learning how to be a good husband, and kept a Journal of Best Practices.

He writes with plenty of humor. Some of the practices, wives might assume a husband would know without being told. I’m thinking of things like “Laundry: Better to fold and put away than to take only what you need from the dryer.” David Finch used his diagnosis to tackle things like that without blame and simply strive to be nicer for his wife to live with.

Here’s where he explains how the diagnosis helped:

Once I learned that I have Asperger syndrome, the fact that we’d had these serious marital problems seemed less surprising. Asperger syndrome can manifest itself in behaviors that are inherently relationship defeating. It’s tricky being married to me, though neither Kristen nor I could have predicted that. To the casual neurotypical observer (neurotypical refers to people with typically functioning brains, i.e., people without autism), I may seem relatively normal. Cognitive resources and language skills often develop normally in people with Asperger syndrome, which means that in many situations I could probably pass myself off as neurotypical, were it not for four distinguishing characteristics of my disorder: persistent, intense preoccupations; unusual rituals and behaviors; impaired social-reasoning abilities; and clinical-strength egocentricity. All of which I have to an almost comically high degree. But I also have the ability to mask these effects under the right circumstances, like when I want someone to hire me or fall in love with me.

Looking back, I suppose a diagnosis was inevitable. A casual girlfriend might have dismissed my compulsion to arrange balls of shredded napkin into symmetrical shapes as being idiosyncratic or even artistic. But Kristen had been living with me — observing me for years in my natural habitat — and had become increasingly skilled in assessing autism spectrum conditions in her job as a speech therapist….

Most people intuitively know how to function and interact with people — they don’t need to learn it by rote. I do. I was certain that with enough discipline and hard work I could learn to improve my behaviors and become more adaptable. While my brain is not wired for social intuition, I was factory-programmed to observe, analyze, and mimic the world around me. I had managed to go through school, get a good job, make friends, and marry — years of observation, processing, and trial and error had gotten me this far. And my obsessive tendencies mean that when I want to accomplish something I attack it with zeal. With my marriage in dire straits, I decided that even if I needed to make flash cards about certain behaviors and staple them to my face to make them become second nature, I was willing to do it.

Kristen didn’t know it, but that was what her life was about to become — her husband, with the best of intentions, stapling flash cards to his face. Okay, not to his face. And there were no staples involved. But flash cards? Definitely. Many people leave reminder notes for themselves: Pick up milk and shampoo, or Dinner with the Hargroves at 6:00. My notes read: Respect the needs of others, and Do not laugh during visitation tonight, and Do not EVER suggest that Kristen doesn’t seem to enjoy spending time with our kids.

I found two things particularly endearing about this book:

1) That he was willing to make so many changes to make life easier for his wife.
2) That his wife loved him despite the hugely egocentric life he was living before the diagnosis and that she never asked him to be perfect. (Some of his descriptions of what he was doing before are pretty outrageous. But she clearly loves him.)

This is a lovely and humorous story about two imperfect people, one exceedingly quirky, learning to live together with love and grace.

SimonandSchuster.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/journal_of_best_practices.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Austenland, by Shannon Hale

Austenalia, Chick Lit, Fiction Review, Romance, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Austenland

by Shannon Hale

Bloomsbury, 2007. 197 pages.
Starred Review
2007 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #2 Romance Fiction

I read Austenland when it first came out, but 2007 was a hectic year for me, what with finishing up my MLIS degree and working half-time and desperately needing a full-time job (and eventually finding one). So I didn’t get a lot of books reviewed that year, and never did post a review of this book.

This year, when Midnight in Austenland came out, it was a lovely excuse to reread Austenland and finally remedy that fault. I did not need to reread Austenland at all to enjoy Midnight in Austenland, since they involve different characters. But it did make a lovely excuse to enjoy this one again.

I am an avid and unashamed Jane Austen fan, and this book is one of my favorite take-offs on her work. The idea is simple: A theme park in England where women can pay to spend a few weeks immersed in a Jane Austen novel, to pretend they are really there.

Jane Hayes wasn’t rich enough to go there on her own steam, but her great-aunt Carolyn spots Jane’s hidden DVD of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth, and Aunt Carolyn figures out Jane’s obsession. She has some wise words about figuring out what’s real.

But then Aunt Carolyn goes a little farther. In her will, she gives Jane an all-expenses-paid trip to Austenland. The trip is nonrefundable, so Jane decides to take it. She reflects:

Jane lay back down, but this time placed the throw pillow under her head. Okay, all right, she would go. It would be her last hurrah. Like her friend Becky, who’d taken an all-you-can-eat dinner cruise the night before going in for a stomach stapling. Jane was going to have one last live-it-up and then quit men entirely. She’d play out her fantasy, have a staggering good time, and then bury it all for good. No more Darcy. No more men — period. When she got home she’d become a perfectly normal woman, content to be single, happy with her own self.

She’d even throw away the DVDs.

Well, needless to say, things don’t turn out quite as Jane expects. Along the way, we’ve got all kinds of fun and of course some mistaken first impressions.

This is a light and fluffy book, and so much fun. Clearly, Shannon Hale filled it with love and respect for Jane Austen, and she pulled off an appropriate tribute that’s a wonderful book in its own right.

Now I just wish someone would really create such a place as Austenland, and that I could go!

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/austenland.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, purchased from Amazon as soon as it was published.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Oh, No! by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann

Animal Characters, Picture Book Review, Readalouds, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Oh, No!

Words by Candace Fleming
Pictures by Eric Rohmann

Schwartz & Wade Books (Random House), New York, 2012. 36 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out #9 Picture Books

This book charmed me from the moment I saw it. I simply had to read it aloud. The story can be sung to the tune of “Froggie Went a-Courtin’,” with a few adjustments. In place of “Uh-huh,” you’ve got a refrain of “Oh No!” in very appropriate spots at the end of each verse, and other fun sound effects earlier in the verses.

The story is simple: Several animals fall into a hole, and can’t get out, and it looks like Tiger will eat them. When each animal falls in, we have appropriate sound effects: “Ribbit-oops!” for frog; “Pippa-eek!” for mouse; “Soo-slooow!” for loris; “Grab on!” for sun bear (bending down a branch); and “Wheee-haaaa!” for monkey. When tiger comes to taunt them, anticipating his dinner, it’s “Slop-slurp!”

But someone bigger than Tiger comes along to help, the tables are turned, and no one gets eaten. Will the animals help Tiger out of the trap? “Oh, no!”

Caldecott winner Eric Rohmann has outdone himself with the beauty of these illustrations. The book has so many elements great for a storytime picture book: A catchy tune or rhythm (if you don’t want to sing it), fun sounds, repetitive and progressive story line with nice twists, animals they might not have known, and a turn-about story that will appeal to their sense of justice.

Now, there are some places where the exact tune has to be adjusted a bit. Personally, I found I was not capable of reading it straight, without putting it to the tune. Others may have better luck! But either way, this book begs to be read or sung aloud, and you will definitely want to share it with a child.

candacefleming.com
ericrohmann.com
randomhouse.com/kids

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Picture_Books/oh_no.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Balloons Over Broadway, by Melissa Sweet

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

Balloons Over Broadway

The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade

by Melissa Sweet

Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2011. 36 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sibert Medal Winner
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out #4 Children’s Nonfiction

Balloons Over Broadway is the true story of an artist written by an artist, and it shows. To create the art for the book, Melissa Sweet began by making toys and puppets — just like Tony Sarg did.

The story tells about how Tony Sarg liked to figure out how things worked even as a child, and how he conceived of the Macy’s Parade balloons as a kind of marionette with controls underneath instead of above.

Throughout the book, there is variety and fascinating detail in the illustrations. And she captures some of Tony Sarg’s thought processes in making the parade balloons.

Ultimately, this is a true story of creativity and overcoming challenges. And like all great picture books, you really must see it yourself to appreciate it fully. This one’s worth reading for adults, but is simple enough and interesting enough for young elementary age readers. I hope kids find it in the Biography section, because what we have is a great story.

melissasweet.net
hmhbooks.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/balloons_over_broadway.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

I’m posting this tonight in honor of Nonfiction Monday, hosted today at 100 Scope Notes.

Review of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport

Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review 0

So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

by Cal Newport

Business Plus, New York, 2012. 273 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out #2 Other Nonfiction

It only took a few chapters of this book to convince me it would make a good Christmas present for both of my young adult sons (and by that I mean adults who are young, not high school students). So I will wait to post this review until after Christmas. Having just finished the book myself, I keep thinking about the ideas and about how they apply to my own career.

All my life, I believed the key to a happy work like was Finding Your Passion. I read books like Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow, and thought I’d found directions for a happy life. Now, in my second career — or really my first career, since teaching college math was just a job — I think I’m happy because I found a job that fits my passion. So why do Cal Newport’s words ring so true?

His subtitle explains what he’s talking about: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. He begins by saying that advice I’d believed in so long — “Follow your passion.” — is dangerous advice.

So, I thought I was following my passion, but why did I feel a certain criticism for others I saw not working, looking for the perfect job? I do think a certain amount of affinity is needed, but maybe that’s just another word for skills? As an example, after I got my Master’s degree in Math, I taught college Mathematics for ten years.

I love math. I even enjoy grading papers. Getting up in front of a class and teaching it? Not so much. I’m an introvert, and when I eventually began working in a library, I found the one-on-one interaction infinitely more to my liking. Even running library children’s programs feels much more individualized and personal than getting up in front of a college classroom and having to test people on what they get from my teaching.

However, to be fair, Cal Newport doesn’t just go with a simple “Don’t follow your passion.” He looks deeper at what things do go into a fulfilling career. The research shows that three key components of fulfilling work are:

Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important.

Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do

Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

If “Follow your passion” is dangerous advice, what should you do? He contrasts “the passion mindset” with “the craftsman mindset.” The craftsman mindset is summed up in the Steve Martin quote he used for the title of the book: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” And that means working hard toward mastery.

The contrast is summed up this way:

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

There are two reasons why I dislike the passion mindset (that is, two reasons beyond the fact that, as I argued in Rule #1, it’s based on a false premise). First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy — these come later. When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle.

Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset — “Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?” — are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused, which probably explains why Bronson admits, not long into his career-seeker epic What Should I Do With My Life? that “the one feeling everyone in this book has experienced is of missing out on life.”

It fascinated me that Cal Newport brought up Po Bronson’s book. I reviewed What Should I Do With My Life? in 2003, and discussed the ideas at length — what does it mean to find your calling? At the time, it was the review that generated by far the most discussion among those who read it.

Now, I still think there’s something in the idea of finding your calling. But I did like the way Cal Newport made the case that a meaningful mission comes after you’ve built up some career capital. It takes time. It’s not about deciding ahead of time and then pursuing that calling, but more often builds out of achieving mastery and then finding how to make it meaningful.

Cal Newport argues, “you adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the passion follows.”

He presents research and case studies and excellent arguments and then gives us “The Career Capital Theory of Great Work”:

The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.

Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.

The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.

He goes on to talk about how best to do that. He again looks at examples of people with satisfying, meaningful careers. He shows us the importance of deliberate practice in increasing your skills. He makes some interesting claims:

Even with the craftsman mindset, however, becoming “so good they can’t ignore you” is not trivial. To help these efforts I introduced the well-studied concept of deliberate practice, an approach to work where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance. Musicians, athletes, and chess players know all about deliberate practice. Knowledge workers, however, do not. This is great news for knowledge workers: If you can introduce this strategy into your working life you can vault past your peers in your acquisition of career capital.

He goes on to talk about what constitutes a great job. One aspect is control. But there are two Control Traps. The first one is that you need career capital to acquire sustainable control in your job. The second control trap is that by the time you have enough career capital, you’re going to be so valuable to your employer, they will resist your making the change.

He does offer some good tests to navigate those control traps and figure out if you really have the career capital to make a change. The “law of financial viability” is nice and practical: Are people willing to pay for your new pursuit?

And then he talks about building a Mission. Here’s where passion comes in — later in your career. He argues again that you need career capital for this step. And if you want a mission that makes a difference, you should look at the cutting edge of your career field. So when you’re new to the field and lacking in career capital, it’s not yet time to devise a mission.

Once you do get an idea of where you’d like to go, he suggests the strategy of “little bets” — small steps that generate concrete feedback. “Then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next. This systematic exploration can help you uncover an exceptional way forward that you might have never otherwise noticed.”

Another strategy he noticed in the people he studied was “the law of remarkability”:

This law says that for a project to transform a mission into a success, it should be remarkable in two ways. First, it must literally compel people to remark about it. Second, it must be launched in a venue conducive to such remarking.

Now, I have some questions about that. What if you aren’t going for “remarkable” success? What if you’re just going for happiness? Looking back at the traits of people happy with their jobs, I’m not sure remarkability is important. But I do like the idea of testing out which way to go — that’s all part of the strategy of building rare and valuable traits, being excellent at what you do.

Now this book, like Po Bronson’s book, didn’t even come close to talking about lifestyle choices like setting aside a career to raise children. But now that my children are grown, I like thinking about and wondering how all the different skills I’ve built in my life can combine into valuable career capital. How can I use deliberate practice and little bets to become a better librarian? And what aspects of my work do I want to deliberately practice? Reviewing? Readers’ advisory? Early literacy? Self-directed learning?

Part of the excellence of this book is that it has things to think about for people at every stage of their careers — for my son who’s just started college, my son looking for a job, for me having found a job I love, and even for someone years into their career thinking about what their mission should be or if they are ready for a change. There’s plenty in this book to get you thinking for a long time to come.

calnewport.com
bizplusbooks.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/so_good_they_cant_ignore_you.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.