I'm going to be throwing a huge party

A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration - Meg Keene (Da Capo Press, 2012)

Offbeat Bride: Creative Alternatives for Independent Brides - Ariel Meadow Stallings (Seal Press, 2010)

Ladies, thank you for helping save my sanity (so far). The blogs A Practical Wedding and Offbeat Bride came across my radar pretty quickly after I succumbed and created a (private) wedding Pinterest board. They seemed chill, and interested in bumping up the parts of a wedding that I cared about, and savvy about how to help you downplay the parts that weren't important to me. (And also really awesome about the fact that everyone's going to have their individual lists of what is and isn't important.)

But there are also books! Stallings's book (well, the first edition) predated the blog, and Keene's came out of her blog. And I tried to get them both from the library, but when OB proved hard to get, I went to the store. And after reading my library copy of APW, I was back at the store to get my very own.

[Note to the universe: would LOVE LOVE LOVE more independent bookstores in my area]

I'm going to suck at reviewing these, and perhaps the most important reviews will come after the Big Event, but both were complementarily (a word?) so helpful. Keene's book made me weepy pretty much once a chapter, while Stallings was more likely to make me giggle. Both are filled with history and examples and ideas about how to navigate the path from getting engaged to getting hitched (or not). And both offered hugely practical advice. (Keene: cross out almost everything on those other sites' "to do" lists, which reminds me, the Offbeat Bride checklist has made me really really happy, even if still overwhelmed. Stallings: consider all the aspects about who will be your best wedding party members, if you have a wedding party.) There's tons of overlap, although Stallings is geared toward a decided more eclectic crowd.

I've set the books aside, as my December is filled up with non-wedding stuff, but you had better believe that come January, these babies will get all sorts of use.

National Library Week

I enjoyed the heck out of this NPR blog post about how awesome libraries are. It's a lot about how it's free, but there was also this:

In particular, I found that all those cheap romance paperbacks were beaten, mangled, shaken and stirred. Not so that you couldn't read them, but just so you knew they'd been read a lot. Oddly, I found this ... comforting. I picked up some of those horribly abused books and felt like I was putting my hands on tangible populism. Those books are there because they're read, and it actually made kind of a good reminder that the library was trying to help, that the idea was to serve readers.

And anyone who manages to check out DFW's Infinite Jest and three Nora Roberts novels on a single visit deserves applause for sheer awesomeness. (Also for being quite a bit like me, although I needed my own IJ copy, and have different guilty pleasure authors.)

The Little Things Add Up

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun - Gretchen Rubin (Harper, 2009)

Sometimes it almost feels like certain books were written just so that I could read them. (No, I swear I don't really think the universe revolves around me.) This was one of those books. My friend Siel first recommended the book around this time last year. I couldn't tell you for sure why I didn't get it then, but when a patron had me add her name to the request list, I took it as a sign that the time had come. I mean, I had already looked at Rubin's blog, and read her contributions to Slate.

There were so many little things that Rubin mentioned that made me (literally, sometimes) exclaim, "Hey, that's just like me!" For one, the Pavlovian response that taking off contacts and putting on glasses means sleepytime. Another, the need to collect what she refers to as "gold stars." I could go on in this vein for a while, and certainly I ought to talk more about the philosophical underpinning of the book, but I sorta want to skip to the good parts... by which I mean how it relates to me. (Egoism, party of one.)

Rubin's premise is that while she's not unhappy, there is room to be happier, and she owes it to herself to see if she can be. Without making crazily life-altering changes. So for a year, she pursues her Happiness Project, complete with themes for each month, specific resolutions, and a chart to mark her progress. She acknowledges that each person's project will be unique, and indeed while I read it felt very clear which parts were important to me, and what other things are important to me that she didn't need to address in these pages. And so... my takeaways:

• January: walk outside more; get more sunshine; get enough sleep - it really matters; there are so many types of clutter, and chances are you'll be happier without them; the wisdom of "engineer[ing] an easy success"
• February: embrace physical contact (it's been an interesting road for me discovering when I am and am not a touchy-feely person); seek fewer gold stars; be considerate of the ones you love
• March: have an expansive self-definition; enjoy the moment instead of always anticipating the future
• April: remember the validity of others' feelings; keepsake happy memories; honor traditions; make time for projects
• May: fun is energizing; relationships thrive on common interests
• June: connect! - keep in touch; seek out new friends (hmm, writing this reminds me of that song about friends from Girl Scouts...)
• July: don't be afraid to spend - know yourself; make and stick to decisions
• August: appreciate the moment; be grateful; what we admire in others is a quality that is nascent in ourselves waiting to be fully realized (this from a commenter on Rubin's blog). [This is also the chapter where she discusses the fear of "tempting fate" with our happiness, an idea that I have struggled with since at least my freshman year of high school.]
• September: accept what you love; push to grow within an area of passion
• October: examine your "True Rules" - do they make you more or less happy? Hold onto my own mantra: Be Here Now.
• November: be willing to laugh, even at oneself (but I personally should probably beware too much self-deprecation); value others in conversation; "Enthusiasm is a form of social courage"
• December: accountability; acknowledge what makes you happy, not what you wish made you happy

So you see, there's plenty there. I feel like I will be meditating on different aspects of this book for weeks and months (if not longer) to come. How it will inform the ongoing project that is my life is not quite certain, but I already know I am grateful for it.

I read newspapers & stuff...

A couple book-y articles that have caught my eye in the last couple days...

I didn't even notice the title of "Hero librarians save my babies" ("Librarians saved my babies" in the print edition) until I finished reading it. This says something about how little I notice headlines when I am charging my way through the paper. Anyway, it's a cute essay about how the characters in a novelist's work are like children that you send off into the world, and that reviews and fan mail and sightings of your book on store shelves are the ways in which you hear that your little ones are all right and making their way out there. And that when you hear your book has been remaindered... well, that's bad news for your characters. Except...

The horror of the "R" letter is mitigated by only one thought: Your babies are safe at the library! Were it not for libraries, there would be no safe harbor for characters and stories, nowhere for them to wait out disasters and economic storms. And were it not for librarians, there would be no one to introduce your characters to new children as the older ones grow up and move on.

And for this, I want to thank librarians, for the work they do and for the many, many lives they save.

So, there it is. Good job, libraries.

And then courtesy of John Dickerson's Twitter feed, I get to find out this morning about a woman who is reading a book a day for a year. (This was impressive enough back in 2007 when my friend Siel did so for a month.) So, Nina Sankovitch, I envy you. I want to do this. And then have a blog about it. Except I wouldn't want to give up the things that the NYT article says she has: The New Yorker, coffee with friends. And what I definitely would miss is getting to take time off after reading a book that really moves you. Or getting to stop and wait at least a day before you finish, because you want to prolong the experience of being inside the book's world.

Oh, and I imagine we'll see Sankovitch's book at some point in the next couple years? And finally, while I have read excerpts and stories from several more of the books, of the 349 books she has read thus far, I have read a whopping total of 7. Seems like I need to get busy...

New books are just more fun?

See? Just the other day I wrote about how I have a hard time reading the books I actually own. And today I come across a Booklist blog on the same topic. Based on this WSJ article and its comments, Keir Graff muses on the to-read pile.

And yet I still buy and hoard books. I’ve joked–joked–that I’ll have to quit my job as a book reviewer in order to read books. But given that I won’t, I imagine I’ll spend my first months of retirement doing math, dividing the number of pages per day I can read into the number of years I think I have left–and weeding my thousands of books to read accordingly.

Jesus, I hadn't even thought about doing that math. I need to get on this.

But it's mildly reassuring to remember that I'm not alone, b/c we all have more books to read than we ever will read. And we all let books sit for far too long. I think I might be unusual in that I am more likely to use the "But I will like it so much I just want to save it for a little longer" excuse. But in the end, it is still an excuse. And one that gives me time for re-reading Emma and watching deliciously bad teen shows.

Russian Reading Challenge 2008

(crossposted from the Russian Reading Challenge blog)

I've only glanced at other lists, but what I've seen all sounds good and I am a bit envious and excited for the reading ahead in 2008. While I LOVE lists, I was overwhelmed by the prospect of figuring out what to choose, so I limited my choices to only books that I had already sitting on my shelves and hadn't read. Which was still too many, but eventually got whittled down to the following:

Natasha's Dance - Orlando Figes
Keys to Happiness - Anastasya Verbitskaya
The Winter Queen - Boris Akunin
King Queen Knave - Vladimir Nabokov

and for extra credit, since it was written in English and doesn't count: Olga's Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov.

[My other challenge: reading at least 5 other books that I already own]

War and Peace and Sex

This week's LA Times Book Review brought a few happy discoveries:

New translations of War and Peace. Tolstoy's tome is in my all-time top three, so the idea of new, updated interpretations thrills me. Plus, one of them (by Andrew Bromfield) is of an early draft of the novel, a shorter one, and one in which my favorite character appears to meet with a less tragic ending.

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. Reviewed by Carolyn Kellogg, formerly of LAist. She notes that this book is getting lots of review attention. And speaking of, I heard Perrotta on last week's New York Times Book Review podcast.

Me and everybody else

Happy Blog Action Day! Apparently I am one of thousands of bloggers worldwide who are joining together today to post about the environment.

Those of you who know me know that I'm a bit compulsive about recycling. I have a friend who swears up and down that recycling is actually uses more energy and creates more waste than it saves, but has yet to send me any back-up documentation. So I say hmph.

We do however both agree that not creating the waste in the first place is ideal. And while I have given up plastic water bottles in favor of my Klean Kanteen, my favorite waste-avoidance tool is the canvas bag. I have oodles, and they go with me to the grocery store and just about everywhere else. Over the past few years, I have found I get far fewer confused and dirty looks from baggers. It's finally gone mainstream (and a little too hip), but I was at the head of the pack, I swear. If you need bags, check Siel at greenLAgirl, who is constantly having giveaways.

And for more reading, Siel is also blogging for the LA Times at Emerald City.

So while I'm only really going eco on here for today, I try to be green all year long. And so should you.

What Other People Are Reading

There's a new addition to my blogroll at right: L.A. Stories. Don posted a comment about reading during commute and lunch - negating the need to combine reading and nightlife. Absolutely true, although I can no longer read on buses b/c I get sick, and now I spend my lunches with friends. So it doesn't quite work for me, but I am making efforts to find a better balance between the literary fun and social fun. So far it's working out.

But I checked out his blog, and discovered my new favorite kind of post: what books he notices on the bus. NICE. During my old bus commute, I pretty much only noticed people with the newspaper and the Bible. On BART in the Bay Area on the other hand, I noticed all sorts of random things.

Anyway, thanks Don for this peek into LA public transit readers. I'll be looking for more.