Stuff I like by Benita
I'm awesome.
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Linda Holmes on The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything
“Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, ‘I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.’ It’s saying, ‘I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.’
Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. Surrender is the moment when you say, ‘I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I’m supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn’t get to.’”
If “well-read” means “not missing anything,” then nobody has a chance. If “well-read” means “making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully,” then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we’ve seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can’t change that.
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Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin
“The horrible thing about being young and stupid (among others) is that you can’t know what you dont know. But you can have a sense that you don’t know shit. This is a curse I notice most of my classmates don’t have. They seem to think they know a lot about a lot of things. I don’t know why I have to be the magical elf of a teenager, but I somehow know it’s impossible to know much until you’re way older than we all are. I hate that. Both the fact of it and the loneliness of being the only one who seems to know it.”
I picked this up because I liked the cover (I know). But it turned out to be pretty good. It reads a bit like a young adult novel, and I think it could be both for teens and adults, but adults would understand it a whole lot better because they’ve been through it or at least know enough to know that it’s not the end of the world. The main character is a little person (this aspect is done very well) high-schooler who is desperate to fit in and be liked at a liberal arts school in Ann Arbor (there are LOTS of AA specific references here that are kind of fun, I haven’t checked but I can guarantee the author either went to U-M or also went to high school in AA). She has something really awful happen to her by some other students there due her obsessive need to fit in and as a result she’s run away, which is where the story begins. It’s told in flashback form with the final chapter back to the present day.
DeWoskin was able to capture high-schoolers’ thoughts and feelings perfectly, including the frustrations and naive stupidity. Some parts were difficult to read, especially when the main character makes horrible decisions. It wasn’t a fantastic book, but I’d recommend it as a good vacation read.
No. 16 of 50 books in 2011.
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Just Kids by Patti Smith
I loved this book. I don’t have much to say about it except that I enjoyed reading about that era of so much creativity (and chaos) in NYC. It’s clear that Patti Smith is a poet and songwriter. She tends to dramatize events and is good at making everything seem sentimental and pretty among the grit. I felt a lot of it was a bit too much for me, though, slightly exaggerated and full of “deep” analogies, which aren’t really my thing. But the story and the people were great. Smith downplayed her famous-ness, which was nice but also a little frustrating. But Patti and Robert’s relationship is fascinating and this was a heartfelt tribute worth checking out if you’re into music and arts culture. Bonus: Patti lived in Detroit in the 1980s and her kids were born here. Triple bonus: Patti’s husband was in Detroit band MC5 and their son is married to Meg White.
No. 17 of 50 books in 2011.
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A bookstore created inside a historic theater in Buenos Aires! So pretty. I’m adding this to places I must visit.
“The bookstore to end all bookstores, at least in South America, is the majestic and stunning El Ateneo on Avenida Santa Fe in Buenos Aires. Where else can you sit in a theater box and leisurely read a volume of Neruda, or sip a cortado where Carlos Gardel once performed? In a city with a rich literary history and excellent bookstores, this theater cum bookstore is a historical and beautiful building to visit, and a great place to stock up on books and music.”
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Indiespensable - Powell's Books
I just subscribed to this.
“Powell’s subscription club delivers the best new books, with special attention to independent publishers. Signed first editions. Inventive, original sets. Exclusive printings…. Every six weeks, another installment to read and admire.
Plus, every package is stocked with exciting surprises!”
I figure I already spend at least $40 every six weeks on new books, so this will replace any new purchases. And I’ve been getting mostly everything I read from the library recently so this will be a fun “present” in the mail. Also, judging by some of the past installments, this definitely caters to my taste. Signed first editions and extra surprises? Awesome!
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Why "The Help's" critics are all wrong - Salon.com
This is an interesting and well-written piece on the “controversy” surrounding “The Help.” I haven’t read it yet so I have no thoughts one way or the other (I didn’t want to travel with my borrowed large hardcover), but it’s next on my list.
“As a reader or viewer, you might not like “The Help.” It is a formulaic Hollywood feel-bad and then feel-good work, one in which beautifully bathed-in-sunlight characters say Very Important Things while music swells. But there’s a difference between being critical of the work and being squeamish about someone’s right to create it. It’s clear that the main problem a lot of people have with “The Help” is that the story was written by a white lady. And that’s a really bad road of reasoning to go down, people.
The job of fiction is to inhabit someone else. Argue, if you will, that Stockett didn’t do a credible job — but don’t bother taking offense that she ambitiously took on the challenge in the first place. Don’t assume that only the Toni Morrisons or Alice Walkers or Sapphires of the world have permission to write in the voice of African-American women. Or, for that matter, that members of any group should only write about their own.
Flaubert once famously said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Who’s to say that a man can’t write of the tragic frustrations of a housewife? That a Russian can’t channel a Continental pederast? A Japanese man can’t write about postwar English servants? Or a white woman can’t write about African-American maids? That’s fiction in a nutshell for you. Otherwise, it’s called memoir.”
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Read this: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
If you’ve been ignoring this book because you think it’s full of science jargon and will read like a textbook, think again. Yes, it’s nonfiction and about HeLa cells, which have helped scientists create treatments for all sorts of disease including polio, cancer and AIDS. But it’s fascinating! This is the story of the woman and family behind HeLa: Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman who grew up on a tobacco plantation and died of cervical cancer in 1951 at age 31.
The author, Rebecca Skloot, was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today but I was on my way to work and had to go in before she came on. Here’s the link to the broadcast: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/25/139948707/college-common-reads-lessons-from-henrietta-lacks
The book combines science, history, a family’s story and even journalism in an extremely accessible way. Skloot worked with the Lacks family for more than a decade to tell their story and it shows. She became almost part of them and I really loved how the facts and scientific history blended seamlessly with the family’s story, and partly Skloot’s own experience. She details how she went about finding the family and her struggles with getting them to eventually trust her enough to talk. I’m sure some people will find the overtly science sections to be dry, but I actually found them fascinating. I like knowing the facts and background behind things. I’m the type of person who will look up specific things on wikipedia or google, then get caught up in hours of facts and history seemingly unrelated to the original thing I was searching. This book is kind of like that, every bit of information is related in some small way and you get lost in the story of figuring out how. Skloot manages to include facts and historical information at just the right moments.
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(via The little library that could… - thestar.com)
This is fantastic.
“On Felton Place, a residential street in Madison, Wis., there is a very small library holding about 20 books. Not much bigger than a bird house, the little library is of rustic construction. A door adds to the charm and to the notion that the books are to be valued and protected.
It belongs to retired professor Marshall Cook and his wife Ellen. Within three kilometres of their house, there are a dozen more little libraries, each with an ever-changing assortment of books.
Look at the titles. There’s something for everyone. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson, Pippi in the South Seas by Astrid Lindgren and even Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul IV.
It’s based on the pay it forward principle. Take a book, leave a book.”
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The Office's Mindy Kaling on Why You Need a Man, Not a Boy
I love Mindy Kaling so much, and I’m SO excited for her new book, even more excited than I was for Tina Fey’s book.
And it’s not just because I get “You remind me of that girl from The Office” more often than I should, which is never because I do not look like her other than the fact that we are both brown. But maybe they’re implying I’m funny, in which case, fantastic, but that would be giving them too much credit.
“Until I was 30, I dated only boys. I’ll tell you why: Men scared the sh*t out of me. Men know what they want. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn’t on the floor. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they’re thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before.
OK, maybe men aren’t exactly like this. But this is what I’ve cobbled together from the handful of men I know or know of, ranging from Heathcliff Huxtable to Theodore Roosevelt to my dad. The point: Men know what they want, and that is scary.
What I was used to was boys.
Boys are adorable. Boys trail off their sentences in an appealing way. Boys get haircuts from their roommate, who “totally knows how to cut hair.” Boys can pack up their whole life and move to Brooklyn for a gig if they need to. Boys have “gigs.” Boys are broke. And when they do have money, they spend it on a trip to Colorado to see a music festival”
Newspaper copy editor, semi-new homeowner, amateur baker who is in love with words, sarcasm, news, pop culture, bright colors, music, design, books, Detroit, DIY.
