The year in books

Books read in 2011: 125

You'll find 10 memorable books read in 2011 here.

January (reviews/discussion here)

■ The Nest Home Design Handbook (Carley Roney)
■ Decorating Ideas That Work (Heather J. Paper)
■ Speed Decorating (Jill Vegas)
■ Flip! for Decorating (Elizabeth Mayhew)
■ Home Decor: A Sunset Design Guide (Kerrie L. Kelly)
■ Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Amy Chua; memoir, parenting)
■ Macbeth (William Shakespeare; play, classic)
■ The Other Side of the Island (Allegra Goodman; fiction)
■ A Lantern in Her Hand (Bess Streeter Aldrich; fiction)
■ Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Winifred Watson; fiction)

March (reviews/discussion here)

■ The Source of All Things: A Memoir (Tracy Ross; memoir, review copy)
■ Heaven Is for Real (Todd Burpo; memoir, religion)

April (reviews/discussion here)

■ Things a Brother Knows (Dana Reinhart; YA fiction)
■ Illyria (Elizabeth Hand; fiction)
■ The Merchant of Venice (William Shakespeare; play, classic)
■ Model Home (Eric Puchner; fiction)
■ Mouse Guard, Volume 1: Fall 1152 (David Petersen; graphic novel)
■ Mouse Guard, Volume 2: Winter 1152 (David Petersen; graphic novel)
■ The Worst Loss: How Families Heal from the Death of a Child (Barbara D. Rosof)
■ Beyond Tears: Living after Losing a Child (Ellen Mitchell)
■ Love Never Dies: A Mother's Journey from Loss to Love (Sandy Goodman)
■ After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years (Ann K. Finkbeiner)
■ Trapped (Michael Northrop; YA fiction)
■ Sherlock Holmes: Short Stories (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; fiction)
■ The Colony (Jillian Marie Weise; fiction)
■ The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country (Neil Gaiman; graphic novel)

May (reviews/discussion here)

■ Daughters-in-Law (Joanna Trollope; fiction)

■ Sempre Susan (Sigrid Nunez; memoir)
■ Gardening Step by Step (Phil Clayton, et al.)
■ John Brookes' Natural Landscapes (John Brookes)
■ Month-by-Month Gardening in Illinois (James A. Fizzell)
■ The New Gardener (Pippa Greenwood)
■ Glorious Gardens (Jacqueline Heriteau)
■ Midwest Top 10 Garden Guide (Bonnie Monte, ed.)
■ Midwest Gardens (Pamela Wolfe)
■ Low Maintenance Garden (Jenny Hendy)
■ The Complete Beginner's Guide to Archery (Bernhard A. Roth)
■ Know the Sport: Archery (John Adams)
■ Sherlock Holmes: More Short Stories (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; fiction)
■ The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton; YA fiction)
■ The Raising (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ The Life before Her Eyes (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ No Time for Goodbye (Linwood Barclay; fiction)
■ Too Close to Home (Linwood Barclay; fiction)

June (reviews/discussion here)

■ The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth (Alexandra Robbins; non-fiction, education)
■ Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (Alison Arngrim; memoir)
■ Pitch Uncertain (Maisie Houghton; memoir)
■ The Silent Land (Graham Joyce; fiction)
■ A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare; play, classic)
■ The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; fiction)
■ Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson; science fiction)

July (reviews/discussion here)

■ Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (Lauren Redniss; graphic biography)
■ A Short Course in Canon PowerShot S5 IS Photography
■ Short Stories (Doyle, Henry, Poe; fiction)
■ The Winter's Tale (William Shakespeare; classic, play)
■ Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card; science fiction)
■ The Sister Knot (Terri Apter; psychology)
■ My Man Jeeves (P.J. Wodehouse; fiction, audiobook)
■ Acceptance: A Legendary Guidance Counselor Helps Seven Kids Find the Right Colleges--and Find Themselves (Dave Marcus; non-fiction)
■ The Millionaire Next Door (Thomas Stanley; non-fiction, personal finance)
■ Fear the Worst (Linwood Barclay; fiction)

August (reviews and discussion here)

■ The Time Machine (H.G. Wells; classic science fiction)
■ Umbrella Summer (Lia Graff; YA fiction)
■ Sarah's Key (Tatiana de Rosay; fiction)
■ Never Look Away (Linwood Barclay; fiction)
■ Blank Confession (Pete Hautman; YA fiction)
■ Joy for Beginners (Erica Bauermeister; fiction)
■ Boy Heaven (Laura Kasischke; YA fiction)
■ Feathered (Laura Kasischke; YA fiction)
■ Daytripper (Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon; graphic novel)
■ In a Perfect World (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs; non-fiction)
■ One Day (David Nicholls; fiction)
■ The Idle Parent (Tom Hodgkinson; non-fiction)
■ Drawing Birds (John Busby; non-fiction)
■ Be Mine (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ Suspicion River (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ White Bird in a Blizzard (Laura Kasischke; fiction)
■ Want to Go Private? (Sarah Littman; YA fiction)
■ Mid-Life (Joe Ollmann; graphic novel)
■ A Hope in the Unseen (Ron Suskind; non-fiction)
■ A New Culture of Learning (Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown; non-fiction)
■ The Accident (Linwood Barclay; fiction)
■ The Hypnotist (Lars Kepler; fiction)
■ This Beautiful Life (Helen Schulman; fiction)
■ Beginner's Guide to Traditional Archery (Brian Sorrells; non-fiction)
■ This Girl Is Different (J.J. Johnson; YA fiction)

September (reviews and discussion here)

■ Before I Go to Sleep (S.J. Watson; fiction)
■ A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith; fiction)
■ 101 Things I Hate about Your House (James Swan; non-fiction)
■ DMZ: Volume 9: MIA (Brian Wood; graphic fiction)
■ The Leftovers (Tom Perrotta; fiction)
■ Barns of Illinois (Larry and Alaina Kanfer; non-fiction)
■ Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work (Tim Gunn; non-fiction)

October (reviews and discussion here)

■ The Sibling Effect (Jeffrey Kluger; non-fiction)
■ The Magic Flute (P. Craig Russell; graphic retelling)
■ Johnny Tremain (Esther Forbes; fiction)
■ Henry IV, Part I (William Shakespeare; classic, play)
■ The Belles Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry Prince of France (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1956; art)
■ Très Riches Heures: Behind the Gothic Masterpiece (Lillian Schachert; art)
■ The Walking Dead: Rise of The Governor (Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga; fiction)
■ Feynman (Jim Ottaviani; graphic biography)

November (reviews and discussion here)

■ Blue Nights (Joan Didion; memoir)
■ Henry IV, Part II (William Shakespeare; play, classic)
■ Elizabeth Rex (Timothy Findley; play)
■ Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (Michael Pollan; non-fiction)
■ Toxic Parents (Susan Forward; psychology)
■ DMZ: Volume 10: Collective Punishment (Brian Wood; graphic fiction)

December (reviews and discussion here)

■ The Schwa Was Here (Neal Shusterman; YA fiction)
■ My Lobotomy (Howard Dully; memoir)
■ World War Z (Max Brooks; fiction)
■ Mean Mothers (Peg Streep; psychology)
■ Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs; fiction)
■ Twisted Summer (Willo Davis Roberts; YA fiction)
■ The Grounding of Group 6 (Julian F. Thompson; YA fiction)
■ Lord of the Flies (William Golding; fiction)
■ Brain Jack (Brian Falkner; YA fiction)
■ Tomorrow Code (Brian Falkner; YA fiction)
■ Missed Connections (Sophie Blackall; art)
■ Why We Broke Up (Daniel Handler; YA fiction)
■ Drawing from Memory (Allen Say; graphic biography)
■ Pilgrimage (Annie Leibowitz; photography)
■ The Heights (Peter Hedges; fiction)
■ The Creative Habit (Twyla Tharp; non-fiction)
■ The Kitchen Madonna (Rumer Godden; juvenile fiction)

Reading life review: December

Books read this month: 17
Books read in 2011: 125

I've got a rapidly advancing bookmark in Lily King's The English Teacher, and both The Autobiography of an Execution (David R. Dow) and Like Shaking Hands with God (Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer) are poised on my nightstand for all-in-one-gulp consumption. But this seemed as good a place as any to call it a month... and a year.

■ The Schwa Was Here (Neal Shusterman)
YA fiction. A delightful and clever story from the author of Unwind, this reminded me of Richard Peck's work, as well as Gary D. Schmidt's The Wednesday Wars and Trouble.

■ My Lobotomy (Howard Dully)
Memoir. Although it seems clear that the author's message is one of hope and triumph through research and self-knowledge, this was still one of the saddest, most horrifying stories I have ever read. Related link here.

■ World War Z (Max Brooks)
Fiction. Gosh, it took me forever to finish this! But that's really more a remark on my distractedness over the last couple of months than on this compelling novel. Published three years after his popular The Zombie Survival Guide, Brooks' post-apocalyptic tale is related through a series of eyewitness reports, a device which makes the audiobook particularly compelling, according to Mr. M-mv. (Note that the full-cast audiobook, while superlative, is an abridgment.)

■ Mean Mothers (Peg Streep)
Psychology. Subtitled "Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt," this exploration of a provocative subject provided background material for a recent research project.

■ Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs)
Fiction. The photos were a neat "hook," and I appreciate genre "shake-ups" (e.g., Dan Wells' I Am Not a Serial Killer), but, in the end, Peculiar fell short for me. Related aside: I began reading this on the Kindle but finished reading it on the iPad. This is definitely a book that should be read in the traditional format or on a larger format e-reader; the Kindle simply couldn't offer the clarity needed to appreciate the photographs.

■ Twisted Summer (Willo Davis Roberts)
YA fiction. A cozily predictable mystery for the youngest YA readers, Twisted Summer features Cici, a fourteen-year-old girl who wants to be acknowledged as one of "big kids." What I appreciated about this simple story was that Cici demonstrated her maturity through her displays of tenacity, intellect, and loyalty -- not through, say, sexual and/or substance experimentation. I know, right? How positively old-fashioned.

■ The Grounding of Group 6 (Julian F. Thompson)
YA fiction. When it was first published in 1983, Grounding caused a bit of a stir with its blend of satire and psychological thrills (to say nothing of its frank sexual content, which, though tame by today's standards, was quite taboo then). I was nineteen when it was first released and missed its ascent into cult classic status (enthusiastic review here). And though I had rediscovered the merits of YA fiction by the time Grounding was re-leased in 1997, I somehow missed it again. Arriving at the book sans hype, then, I would say that it is both competent and compelling, though not nearly as memorable as a more recent entry into the "really, really bad parents" sub-genre of YA fiction: Neal Shusterman's Unwind.

■ Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Fiction. With the Misses. This was my fourth go-round with Golding's classic, and I see something new each visit. What a startlingly perceptive view of people and what little holds us together, eh? And how eye-opening to read this after having seen, loved, and dissected "LOST." I'll have more to say about this one in January.

■ Brain Jack (Brian Falkner)
YA fiction. This fast-paced blend of cyber-geekery and thriller put me in mind of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Robert J. Sawyer's WWW: Wake: Teen hacker Sam Wilson lands a position with a national cyber defense organization in lieu of a jail sentence. His job? To help protect the world from a malicious presence on the internet.

■ Tomorrow Code (Brian Falkner)
YA fiction. Not quite as seamless as Brain Jack, this was still a competent effort from New Zealand author Brian Falkner. This time, the protagonists race against (and through) time to save humanity from a virus.

■ Missed Connections (Sophie Blackall)
Art. This collection of illustrated love stories is delightful and touching. Have you seen the Australian illustrator's whimsical art before? If not, start with the blog that inspired the book.

■ Why We Broke Up (Daniel Handler)
YA fiction. Written by none other than the man behind the pen name Lemony Snickett and illustrated by the incomparable Maira Kalman, this is, quite possibly, my favorite book of 2011. Imagine Ellen Page's Juno narrating the unlikely (and short-lived) romance between a smart-talking, "different" girl and the co-captain of the high school basketball team. Now couple that sarcastic and searingly honest insight with the detritus of a failed relationship -- the ticket stubs, books, shirts, combs, matchbooks, and so on that hold so much meaning. Voilà! It's magic. It's also wonderfully cinematic; I will not be surprised when plans to translate it into film are announced. Highly recommended.

■ Drawing from Memory (Allen Say)
Graphic autobiography. I agree with the Chicago Tribune: "This visual memoir is captivating and always unexpected."

■ Pilgrimage (Annie Leibovitz)
Photography. Elsewhere, folks are rather awed by this volume, but I was left somewhat cold by the effort. The photographs are stunning, but that admission addresses not Leibovitz's eye or art but rather the compelling subjects themselves: Emily Dickinson's dress. Virginia Woolf's sitting room. Charles Darwin's specimens. John Muir's field notes. Annie Oakley's boots. Unfortunately, these fascinating subjects suffer from a poor, disjointed layout and a, for lack of a better word, distant text. Call me soulless, but when Leibovitz notes that her journey began with the headline-grabbing financial crisis that sent her into personal and professional turmoil, I didn't think she was experiencing some sort of life-altering epiphany. I thought, Yes, so you decided to get to work, put out another book, and make some money. Smart woman. All of that said, I urge you to seek out the volume for the valuable history-museum-in-a-book that it is. How many of these amazing places and objects might we miss if not for such books?

■ The Heights (Peter Hedges)
Fiction. Told in alternating voices, The Heights chronicles, as one reviewer put it, "marital claustrophobia." The dark humor, crisp narrative, and wickedly wise social observations put me in mind of Tom Perrotta and Meg Wolitzer.

■ The Creative Habit (Twyla Tharp)
Non-fiction. Chapbook entry here.

■ The Kitchen Madonna (Rumer Godden)
Juvenile fiction. In search of something different but also sweetly simple, even childlike, for our Christmas week read-aloud (because (a) they are never too old for read-alouds -- just ask them; and (b) "sweetly simple" just feels right by the glow of the Christmas tree, whether you are four, fourteen, or forty-seven), I pulled out The Kitchen Madonna, which I first heard about over at Here in the Bonny Glen. The Misses and I loved this beautifully moving story.

Chapbook entry

p. 8

Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart. Certainly, he had a gift that set him apart from others. He was the most complete musician imaginable, one who wrote for all instruments in all combinations, and no one has written greater music for the human voice. Still, few people, even those hugely gifted, are capable of the application and focus that Mozart displayed throughout his short life.

p. 39

I don't mean to get too caught up in observational focal length. It's one facet of many that makes up an artist's creative identity. Yet once you see it, you begin to notice how it defines all the artists you admire. The sweeping themes of Mahler's symphonies are the work of a composer with a wide vision. He sees grand architecture from a distance. Contrast that with a miniaturist like Satie, whose delicate compositions reveal a man in love with detail. (It's only the giants like Bach, Cézanne, and Shakespeare who could work in many focal lengths.)

p. 63

I spend a lot of time worrying about memory. One of the horrors of growing older is the certainty that you will lose memory and that loss of vocabulary or incident or imagery is going to diminish your imagination.

As a result, I try to give my memory a workout, training it to keep it sharp.

p. 64

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we're experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember, it's how we interpret -- for ourselves and others.

p. 101

If you're like me, reading is your first line of defense against an empty head. It's how you learned as a child. It's how you absorb difficult information. It's how you keep your mind disciplined. If you monitor your reading assiduously, it's even how you grade your brain's conditioning; like an athlete in training, the more you read, the more mentally fit you feel. It doesn't matter if it's a book, magazine, newspaper, billboard, instruction manual, or cereal box -- reading generates ideas, because you're literally filling your head with ideas and letting your imagination filter them for something useful. If I stopped reading, I'd stop thinking. It's that simple.

p. 165

Confidence is a trait that has to be learned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. This means vigilant practice and excellent practice habits. You've heard the phrase "Practice makes perfect"? Not true. Perfect practice makes perfect. The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they have to practice to maintain their skills. Art is a vast democracy of habit.

p. 235

Some people find their curiosity shutting down as they age, losing their taste for the new and settling in to reread their favorite books and listen to the music of their youth. And it's certainly possible to get distracted by family obligations. But there is nothing necessary or inevitable about it. We can fight the lockdown of our curiosity. We can sign up for the long run even if we might not cover the course as elegantly as our heroes.

Ten memorable books read in 2011

At this writing, I have read 123 books this year. Many of them were quite good. Others? Maybe not my cuppa. (I'm thinking particularly of the tedious hours spent with gardening books earlier this year.) So which books were real stand-outs? Setting aside the Shakespeare plays and all of the Sherlock Holmes adventures since, as the Misses have pointed out, “Those are obviously the favorites,” I am left with the following (presented in the order in which I read them):

■ Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Winifred Watson)
Fiction. Girl Detective recommended this, calling it "cheering." And it was. It was also old-fashioned and improbable, both of which likely contribute to its appeal. First published in 1938, this breezy novel is a fairy tale of sorts, in which a down-at-heel nanny is sent to the wrong address for her next assignment and is thrust into the romantic and glamorous circle of one Delysia LaFosse. Witty banter and unlikely entanglements ensue.

■ Things a Brother Knows (Dana Reinhart)
YA fiction. After a long period of listlessness, this book reminded me that I am, in fact, a reader. (Thank you, Dana Reinhart.) A well-wrought examination of one Marine's journey home -- and, perhaps more significantly, the impact this difficult journey has on his family -- Things a Brother Knows is both excellent and timely.

■ Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (Lauren Redniss)
Graphic biography. An artful combination of science and romance, Radioactive manages to be both informative and beautiful. From "The Curies, Seen Through an Artist’s Eyes" (New York Times, December 21, 2010):

Described simply, “Radioactive” is an illustrated biography of Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist famous for her work on radioactivity — she was the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice — and her equally accomplished husband, Pierre. It lays bare their childhoods, their headlong love story, their scientific collaboration and the way their toxic discoveries, which included radium and polonium, poisoned them in slow motion.

■ Daytripper (Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon)
Graphic novel. How can it be that a book in which every chapter concludes with the protagonist's death is so, well, life-affirming? From a review earlier this year (Publishers' Weekly, January 11):

A stunning, moving story about one man's life and all the possibilities to be realized or lost along the way. Brothers Bá and Moon take readers through the life of a man named Brás de Oliva Domingos, selecting a series of individual events of great significance to Brás, showing each as if it could be the day Brás dies, and in so doing creating an examination of family, friendship, love, art, life, and death that urges the reader to turn the same careful inspection on their own life.

■ In a Perfect World (Laura Kasischke)
Fiction. As I mentioned when I first wrote about this book, as much as I enjoyed my whirlwind tour of Kasischke's oeuvre, I was fairly certain she could no longer surprise me -- until this novel. In a Perfect World coyly misleads an inattentive reader to believe it is simply an exploration of otherwise mundane subjects: a doomed marriage and an equally doomed foray into step-motherhood. And then it blossoms into a beautifully written and melancholy meditation on the end of the world as we know it and how we might become our most authentic selves when it all falls apart. If my previous recommendations didn't persuade you to give a Kasischke a try, let this one do so.

■ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Alan Jacobs)
Non-fiction. The appearance of this title on my list will not surprise regular readers. I did rather carry on about it. Chapbook entry here; two other related entries here and here.

■ A Hope in the Unseen (Ron Suskind)
Non-fiction. Suskind won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for the series of articles that grew into A Hope in the Unseen, the chronicle of Cedric Lavar Jennings' journey from an impoverished and dangerous Washington, D.C., public high school to Brown University. Subtitled "An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League," Unseen unflinchingly and repeatedly points out that Jennings didn't graduate from Brown (and later, Harvard and the University of Michigan, according the afterword in this revised and updated edition) because of extraordinary academic gifts; he succeeded through hard work alone -- the grueling, single-minded study of a "headstrong monk." I was transfixed by the story, a result of its compelling subject as well as Suskind's assured narrative style.

■ Feynman (Jim Ottaviani)
Graphic biography. Both the private and public lives of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman are described in this wonderfully accessible biography, which is illustrated by Leland Myrick. You'll find an excellent review here: "The Feynman picture-book is a fine example of gekiga for Western readers." Note: I gave this book to Aunt M-mv for Christmas. Is there a higher recommendation than that?

■ Elizabeth Rex (Timothy Findley)
Play. Again, regular readers will be unsurprised by the inclusion of this book. (Chapbook entry here.) The excellent CBC Stratford Festival Reading Series recording accompanied my reading of this wonderful work, and in addition to seeing Diane D'Aquila in the recent Chicago Shakespeare Theater production (related entry here), we also had the pleasure of seeing the CBC Television production from 2002, the year after D'Aquila originated the role at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

■ Why We Broke Up (Daniel Handler)
YA fiction. Written by none other than the man behind the pen name Lemony Snickett and illustrated by the incomparable Maira Kalman, this is, quite possibly, my favorite book of 2011. Imagine Ellen Page's Juno narrating the unlikely (and short-lived) romance between a smart-talking, "different" girl and the co-captain of the high school basketball team. Now couple that sarcastic and searingly honest insight with the detritus of a failed relationship -- the ticket stubs, books, shirts, combs, matchbooks, and so on that hold so much meaning. Voilà! It's magic. It's also wonderfully cinematic; I will not be surprised when plans to translate it into film are announced.

A Christmas gift

I know. How awesome is he, right? Another cool gift? The three-volume, hardcover edition of The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Yes, from the wonderful Mr. M-mv.

______________________________

We were sick, and now we're tired, but our holiday has been lovely. I hope yours has been, too.

It's warm here, but it's hard to imagine setting a foot outside the little forever home on the prairie. Still, we may.

Merry Christmas, readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. I'll be back when I can hold a laptop without yawning every forty-seven seconds.

"I'm looking for someone to share in an adventure."

Unpacking my library

I saw this entry over at Brain Pickings and smugly thought, My own shelves are every bit as droolworthy. Heh, heh, heh. Ah, the gentle madness, eh?

Ornamental

O, Christmas tree

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

So. Mr. M-mv gave me an iPad 2. Now what?

I've synced it, updated its software, downloaded the Kindle app and the wonderful "Star Walk" app, sent a couple of texts to Aunt M-mv's iPhone, and, yes, installed "Angry Birds."

There must be more to this than that.

Educate me.

What apps do autodidacts need? What is this thing really for? Why do the photos I've taken with it seem fuzzy? Can I text someone who doesn't have an iPhone? How? Why is "Angry Birds" so durned popular? Why is my Kindle crying?

I'll see you in the comments or over on Facebook.

Joyce Carol Oates... as a doll.

You'll find more here.

Chapbook entry

p. 18

Tardy: I think not. He never pays his debts, either -- same as you lot. [Jack and Matt laugh.] Oh, yes. A manly laugh. A woman gets used to a man's laughter -- the scorn or it -- the leer of it. And the rage.

Jack: The rage, Kate?

Tardy: Aye. That a woman has more 'pacity for love than a man. So a fellow has to mock it -- make it seem Cheapside, for fear we find him standing in the shallows when it comes to his own 'pacity for love.

Matt: 'Pacity, Kate?

Tardy: 'Pacity. Yes. Some such word. I heard it only once, but I know what it means.

Ned: "She had a sweet capacity for love."

Tardy: That's it. A sweet capacity. She had, mark you.

Ned: "And he had none."

Tardy: "And he had none." You spoke it, Master Ned. I don't remember where.

Ned: Love's Labour's Lost.

Tardy: "A sweet capacity for love." A well-writ phrase.

Will: We cut it.

p. 20

Ned: Do you always move your lips when you read?

Will: Piss off.

Ned: Are you trying to get away from us?

Will: I'm already away from you.

Ned: Escape? Is that why you read?

Will: I read because I write. It is a necessity of the trade.

p. 57

Elizabeth: We are all poxed, Master Lowenscraft -- one way or another. Life is a pox. It leaves its scars on all of us.

Ned: This pox kills, Madam.

Elizabeth: Life kills. That is its purpose....

p. 81

Elizabeth: What are you writing there?

Will: I'd rather not discuss it, Your Grace.

Elizabeth: But I demand it. I've never seen a writer writing before. How fascinating. Is it your Cleopatra play?

p. 133

Ned: Here, Bess. With you. [Elizabeth falls to here knees.] Are you afraid?

Elizabeth: Yes. Yes. More than once, I have been seized by fears I had not imagined possible -- in the dark -- in the night -- but tomorrow is a certainty -- and if your love is not with me in the morning, I will not know how to rise.

Curated content

Khan Academy ponders what it can teach the higher education establishment

Khan Academy’s explicit goal is to teach people fundamental concepts. But in the process, it hopes to break new ground by changing how educators think about teaching, how psychologists think about learning, how employers think about credentialing, and how everybody thinks about the price of a good education.

“I think too much conversation about Khan Academy is about cute little videos," Khan said in an interview last week. “Most of our resources, almost two-thirds of [the staff], are engineers working on the exercises and analytics platform. That, I think, is what we’re most excited about.”

Eating your cultural vegetables

I feel guilty to be still reaching, as an adult, for culture that remains stubbornly above my grasp. My guilt isn’t unique, even if my particular aspirational viewing is my own. (Surely there are die-hard Hou Hsiao-hsien fans out there who grit their teeth every time a new Pixar movie comes out.) And my cultural guilt has only intensified as Twitter reminds me hourly that my colleagues and friends are finding deep satisfaction in reading “The Pale King” or attending “Gatz” or watching “Le Quattro Volte.”

Unpaid bills land some debtors behind bars

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan thinks more can be done. It's illegal in Illinois for people to be sent to jail because they're in debt. But Madigan thinks some creditors are abusing the law.

"You wouldn't be in that predicament if you didn't have debt," Madigan says, "But for being in debt, you wouldn't be in prison. And that essentially equates to being thrown in jail, debtors prison."

She says courts need to be certain they have correct information to serve notices. Madigan also says judges need to be properly educated in these proceedings to prevent a debtor from needlessly going to jail.

Rats free trapped friends, hint at universal empathy

In a study published Dec. 7 in Science, Mason and University of Chicago psychologists Jean Decety and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal describe their rat empathy-testing apparatus: An enclosure into which pairs of rats were placed, with one roaming free and the other restrained inside a plastic tube. It could only be opened from the outside, which is exactly what the free rats did — again and again and again, seemingly in response to their trapped companions’ distress.

You'll find the library of my links here.

Tuesday morning. Early. Dark. Damp.

I am two and half mugs of coffee, one shower, one load of laundry, one made bed, a dozen or so pages, and an Amazon order into this morning.

And it's only 6:31.

If this were a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel, the choices at 8:30 a.m. would be (a) take a short nap, (b) continue to be productive, (c) take a short nap and then continue to be productive.

Heh, heh, heh.

I wish I could maintain that today's performance has been my wont, but it has not. It has certainly been the ideal, and I guess you could say that throughout the summer swim season, when the Misses are due at the pool by 6:15 a.m., it was my custom. But throughout the autumn and nearly winter months? Not so much.

Here I am, though. Let's see what develops.

What I saw...

... while they participated in "Extraordinary Experiences: Trainer for a Day" at the Shedd Aquarium.

"Coolest Christmas present ever!"

"Extraordinary Experiences: Trainer for a Day" at the Shedd Aquarium!

The 4.5-hour program begins with an introduction to animal training techniques and then proceeds to a behind-the-scenes look at how each of the larger animals in the Oceanarium are trained, beginning with penguins and continuing to otters, sea lions, raptors, dolphins, and finally the belugas.

Note: The photos were taken by Shedd staff.

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Curated content

How Shakespeare got me through unemployment

As far back as high school, Shakespeare seemed like something I could admire but never truly love or understand. Like everyone ever born, I had to memorize and recite (disastrously, in the end) Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in English class, but that was about the extent of my Shakesperience. But here I was, in a roomful of everyday people, reading in their everyday voices, and as the lines flew by and the pages turned, I saw — or, rather, heard — a whole world opening up to me. Shakespeare no longer seemed impenetrable. And I had a sneaky feeling there was nothing going on in my life that he didn’t have an angle on. If I showed up every month, I’d discover them all.

Letters of Note: Advice from Harper Lee

A young fan of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' named Jeremy wrote to Harper Lee in 2006, and asked for a signed photo. He didn't get one, but instead received this lovely piece of advice from the author that is far more precious.

Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit reviewed

Legal theorists and philosophers, less concerned with the joys of Schadenfreude, have celebrated gossip for upholding communal harmony. Every society has norms that must be followed, and when those norms are broken, society must act. But no one has an interest in seeing every violation of a norm resolved in a duel at sunrise; there are more convenient ways to discourage unwelcome behavior. The threat of being gossiped about is often just enough to keep people in line.

Why guessing is undervalued

Everyone, even people without formal mathematical training, possesses a basic capacity to estimate. This aptitude appears astonishingly early in life: babies are already able to discriminate between different-sized sets of objects at six months of age. But it’s also the case that there are pronounced individual differences in the ability to estimate, and that these differences are linked to a more general facility with arithmetic. Especially in children, it appears that one leads to the other: strong estimation skills lay a solid foundation for learning more math as students grow older.

The politics of “prescriptivism”

In the first place, doesn't make sense to think of this question other than historically. The distinction between "prescriptivism" and "descriptivism" is a twentieth-century invention, and an unfortunate one, I think, since it implies that this is a coherent philosophical controversy with antique roots. In fact both terms are so vague and internally inconsistent that we'd be better off discarding them, and to impose those categories on the eighteenth-century grammarians, say, is gross presentism. So let me talk about "language criticism," both because it's closer to the mark, and because what linguists describe as "prescriptivism" in most of the Western languages is by-and-large just a stream of the critical tradition.

You'll find the library of my links here.

Get in the picture!

Even if, like me, you are "Queen of the Funny Lips." It's as if I'm on the cusp of speaking in nearly every single photo. My family says, "We know. We know." Heh, heh, heh.

Anyway, as I was saying, "Get in the photo!"

Stop smiling!

Hat tip: The excellent Joanne Jacobs.

Jenny Linsky

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Elizabeth Rex

Diane D'Aquila dazzles as Elizabeth I in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of Elizabeth Rex.

I was so affected by her performance and the production in general that I find myself describing both in sighing sentences that never find their conclusions (e.g., She was just so... The set... Oh, and Stephen Sutcliffe as Ned Lowenscraft...). I know. You deserve better. Well, the word "virtuosity" occurred several times as we discussed the experience. Perhaps Miss M-mv(ii)'s "Oh, I just loved it!" or Miss M-mv(i)'s "That was wonderful!" are more descriptive? No, not unless you could have heard the admixture of joy and sorrow in their voices and seen their tear-stained cheeks and shining eyes.

The best I can do right now is to assert that last night Family M-mv believed it was the night before Essex's execution and that Elizabeth I did visit Shakespeare and his players in a barn.

Our morning is off to a disturbingly late start because we minced rather than drove home in the first icy snow of the season; we all needed the sleep. So no more words right now but these: a link of interest -- "‘Elizabeth Rex’ a regal portrait of the iconic English queen" and a recommendation -- See this play.