Staircase/Library

Check out this cool staircase/library on Apartment Therapy.

Review: 3 Books by Italo Calvino

After I commented on Shelf Love's review of If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino that I loved Calvino's work, Jenny asked me for a recommendation of another Calvino book to read.

I commented that, Invisible Cities is my favorite Calvino book (I think because I am an architect). Outwardly, Invisible Cities is the story of Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan about all the cities he’s visited. Of course, what’s its really about is the nature of cities and imagination and human nature. It is beautiful.


I also commented that I enjoyed Marcovaldo: Seasons in the City, which is a short story collection. Normally, I don’t love short stories, but maybe because I think even Calvino’s novels are fairly episodic, he just does them so well. From this book, my favorite story is “Moon and GNAC”, which I think is a perfect gem of a story.

Another interesting Calvino book (that I didn't mention on Shelf Love) is Cosmicomics, another short story collection. The collection is unified around the theme of science, though its fantastical science, and most of the stories have the same narrator, Qfwfq. The book is a little strange, but still wonderful.

There are other wonderful Calvino books, but I will stop there. If you've read any of Calvino's books, let me know which ones you'd recommend. And if you read any of these, let me know what you think!

Buy Invisible Cities on Amazon.

Buy Marcovaldo: Seasons in the City on Amazon.
Buy Cosmicomics on Amazon.

Review: Bitten (No Vampires, but Werewolves!)

Its Vampire Day at My Friend Amy's! I'm a huge Buffy fan and am watching True Blood, so I thought I'd play along. Unfortunately, other than Buffy graphic novels (okay, comic books), I don't read many vampire books. I've successfully avoided the Twilight books and haven't read any of Charlaine Harris's books (which True Blood are based on), so the last vampire novel I read was probably Bram Stoker's Dracula back in high school.

I did read a good but trashy werewolf book recently, though. It was Bitten by Kelley Armstrong. From Armstrong's website, here is a description of Bitten:

Elena Michaels is the world's only female werewolf. And she's tired of it. Tired of a life spent hiding and protecting, a life where her most important job is hunting down rogue werewolves. Tired of a world that not only accepts the worst in her— her temper, her violence—but requires it. Worst of all, she realizes she's growing content with that life, with being that person.
So she left the Pack and returned to Toronto where she's trying to live as a human. When the Pack leader calls asking for her help fighting a sudden uprising, she only agrees because she owes him. Once this is over, she'll be squared with the Pack and free to live life as a human. Which is what she wants. Really.

There is a lot of sex and violence in Bitten, which would usually turn me off, but this book had me glued to its pages. The plot was fun and the characters were interesting to get to know. Bitten was the first in the Women of the Otherworld series, and though I haven't read any of the others yet, I plan to soon.

Buy Bitten on Amazon.

Secret Library

Wow! A (mostly) secret library in a regular house! Okay, sure, the people who own it are probably fairly well-to-do since she wrote a series of books that were recently made into a movie, but still, its cool. It makes me feel like maybe someday I really will have my own secret library.

Thanks for the link, bookshelves of doom.

Preview: Cleopatra

This week's Newsweek arrived yesterday, with a review of a new book, Cleopatra: The Last Queen of Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley. Tyldesley is a respected Egyptologist with a long list of credentials to her name. Cleopatra is a look at the history behind the myth, and it sounds great.

Cleopatra has fascinated me for a long time. I read The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George years ago and absolutely loved it. (You can read an excerpt on George's website here.) George is a great writer and the historical research she pours into this book shines through, especially in the little details that make the book.

Buy Cleopatra: the Last Queen of Egypt on Amazon.

Buy The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel on Amazon.

Haunted Libraries - Boo!

Haunted libraries from the Britannica Blog. (Thanks to Bookslut for the link.)

Any of you librarians out there have a ghost at your library?

Books as Art

There is an amazing display of various artworks made out of books at Dark Roasted Blend. Blogger isn't letting me load any photos right now (annoying) so I can't show you the awesomeness, but I highly recommend you check it out.

Thank you to She Reads Books and Worducopia for the heads up.

See my previous posts on art about books here and here.

Preview: Museum of Human Beings

My newest LibraryThing Early Reviewers book arrived this weekend. It is Museum of Human Beings by Colin Sargent. Since I am a little busy right now (see my earlier post about what I should be doing), it will probably take me a little while to read and review it. It looks really interesting, though.

The Publisher's description on Amazon:

From deprivation in the wilderness to the lavish courts of European nobility, this poignant historical novel explores the life and quest of Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea. After the famed Lewis and Clark expedition and the death of his mother, Jean-Baptiste was brought up as Clark's foster son. He was eventually paraded throughout Europe as a curiosity from the wilds of America, labeled as a half gentleman and half animal, entertaining nobility as a concert pianist. Jean-Baptiste returns to North America with a burning desire to create his own place in the New World. In doing so he returns to the heart of the American wilderness on an epic quest for ultimate identity that brings sacrifice, loss, and the distant promise of redemption.

While it won't be out until November, you can pre-order Museum of Human Beings at Amazon now.

Must Study

OMG! I just had a terrible scare when I thought I have not updated this since you last visited... You would not believe my anguish at my misdoings. Please don't abandon me!.

I am absorbed with work, being distracted by the shiny, just generally being a nuisance to my employer, my day is long and tiring from the light through yonder window breaks to whenever. I am putting money aside so I can run away. I need a nap.

I totally promise I will write something that makes sense soon. Truly! This is for my ever faithful, devoted public.

Thanks to the Lazy Bloggers Post Generator.

In all seriousness, I am supposed to be studying for my tenth and final licensing exam*, as I am scheduled to take it in three weeks, and my husband, mother and employer will all be very annoyed if I do not pass it. So I will probably be posting lightly until then, and most of my posts will probably be of the "check this cool thing out" variety, rather than long and thoughtful. But please don't abandon me! I do so enjoy having readers.

XOXO
Lorin

*Do not let me go off on how much I hate the state of California for putting me through this. I would have been a registered architect in every other state in the US a year ago, as that was when I finished the first 9 exams. But, no, California is special, and is making me jump through this last hoop before I can get my license.

Gunshots at the Guggenheim

Thanks to Life Without Buildings, for the heads up on The International, a new movie which apparently features a little gunfire in the Guggenheim. (The NY Guggenheim, by Frank Lloyd Wright, that is.) Cool. Follow this link for images and a peak at the movie trailer.

Zaha Hadid's Shoes Part 2

She's at it again!   Zaha Hadid is designing shoes for Lacoste. At least these look more comfortable.

Church Architecture: Oakland Cathedral

The new cathedral in Oakland, formally known as the Cathedral of Christ the Light (official site here; wikipedia here), was dedicated September 25. (The Catholic Voice published some great photos of the dedication here.) I didn't have the chance to go to the dedication ceremony, so my office went for a visit last week. (Photos are by my office, unless otherwise noted.)

Here is a view of the Sanctuary building from the entry. The plaza is actually the roof of a building that houses offices and a convention center. (There is also an office building on the opposite side of the plaza.) I think the plaza will be a lot better once all the plantings have had a chance to grow in, especially the ficus planted along the walls.

The baptistry at the entry.

This is the interior of the Cathedral. It was really amazing. The plan of the building is in the shape of an icthys, aka a "Jesus fish." Even more than that, the building was really evocative of a boat for me. The exterior glass wall was, I thought, almost sail-like, and the wood on the interior very much made me think of a boat wooden hull.

The image of Christ over the altar is really interesting, too. It looks like its printed, but its actually perforated metal. I'm undecided if I like it, but its an arresting site.

Here is one of the side aisles next to the altar. I thought the woodwork was very impressive.

The Cathedral was designed by Craig W. Hartman of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, aka SOM. SOM is one of the largest architecture firms in the world, with offices pretty much everywhere (including SF, NYC, London, Hong Kong, etc). So, of course, when you design that much, not all of it is going to be perfect. But unlike a lot of corporate architecture firms, SOM also does some fantastic projects. Some famous buildings they have done over the years include Chicago's Sears Tower, the Air Force Academy chapel in Colorado Springs and, one of my favorites, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. (Photo below from Wikipedia) The exterior of the library is made out of a translucent marble, which glows with a warm, subtle light. Its an amazing place.


For the mausoleum at the Oakland Cathedral, which is directly below the sanctuary, SOM borrowed this idea for the glowing marble from the Beinecke. This a view from the entry to the musoleum area and one of the cross at the back wall. Its much cooler in person.



While there were some misses (the parish hall for example), generally it was a great church. The sanctuary was warm and inviting, as well as being visually stunning. I hope to go back soon for a service.

Find more photos, plus plans, on SOM's website here.

Writing Reviews

According to Deadline Hollywood Daily, famed movie critic Roger Ebert is coming under fire for writing a movie review after only watching the first 8 minutes of a 99-minute movie (story here, review here). In his opinion, it was so bad that after watching 8 minutes, he knew it was a stinker and walked out (or, um, stopped the DVD). Here's the part that bothers me, though: he then partly based his review on information found on imdb.com and only made it clear that he hadn't really watched the whole thing until the last sentence of the review.

From my point of view as a book reviewer, I have not done this so far, but I can understand hating a book so much that you just can't bear to go on. For example, I remember reading Devourer of Book's review for a book so bad she had to give up. But she admits this in the very first line of her review. Regarding Ebert's movie review, on his blog, Ebert writes that his own editor told him "Your original review is clever and well-written but I think morally dishonest because you conceal your MO until the very end." Ebert's response is that the logical flow of the review didn't require him to admit that he hadn't seen the movie until the end.

I'm interested in your take on this. As a reviewer (of books or movies), are we obligated to finish the whole thing? If not, is it valid to write a review of something we haven't finished?

Update: Thanks to Ali for pointing out that Ebert went back, watched the whole movie and wrote a new review. Definitely the right thing to do.

As an aside, here's a line that popped out for me, as a book reviewer, from his blog post about writing a new review:

In even my negative reviews, I try to give some sense of why you might want to see a film even if I didn't admire it.

London's Secret Tunnels

Continuing on my interest in secret rooms and tunnels, comes word that the (no longer) secret WWII/Cold War tunnels under London are for sale (link via Archinect). See the BBC for a slide show. 

You'd  think secret tunnels would look a little more mysterious, you know? Maybe a pool (or snooker) table kills the mystique a bit.

Church Architecture: Crystal Cathedral

My firm does a lot of work with churches, so I try to see a lot of them. I recently visited several, both old and new, so I will be posting photos and thoughts about these projects in the next week or so.

The first is the Crystal Cathedral Congregation, located in Garden Grove, California, near Anaheim. (All photos are by me.) The Cathedral was designed by prominent architect Philip Johnson and was finished in 1980.

The front of the Cathedral, reflecting the bell tower.

The bell tower and chapel.

Interior. There were some guys working on the organ when I was there. It was pretty impressive to hear it being played.

Its a really compelling space, though I can't comment on what it would be like to attend a service there. I studied this building in school, but I was not really familiar with the other buildings on site, which I also found interesting. The original buildings were designed by Richard Neutra, who is one of the titans of Modern architecture and, according to the tour guide, was very close friends with the original church pastor.

The original Neutra building, flanked by the Cathedral and the Meier building.

Awesome Neutra bell tower. The original sanctuary is at the right. There was an event going on, so I couldn't go in, unfortunately.

The Neutra courtyard and Family Center. It is just textbook California mid-century modernism.

The most recent of the famous architect additions to the site is a visitor center and cafe building, by Richard Meier. This looks like a very classic Meier design to me.

A view of the Meier building, from the plaza.

Entrance to the cafe inside the Meier. Its so... Meier-y. (Edited to add: this is not a bad thing. Meier is a great architect and its a very dynamic space.) The stairs here, by the way, were at about 6 and 14, and were very uncomfortable to walk down.

There is also an unfortunate school building on the property which was designed by a local architect, I believe. I did not take any photos of the school, but picture every boring SoCal office complex and you get the idea.

Otherwise, I really enjoyed my trip to the Crystal Cathedral. Its not often I get to see such an interesting collection of buildings in one place.

Secret Rooms and Passages

WebUrbanist has a great story today about secret rooms and passages. Some of them are well-known, and most are kind of gory (like the secret murder room constructed by H. H. Holmes, which you can read all about in The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson). The coolest one, I think, is the secret bookcase door at the Mont Sainte-Odile convent library (see photo above). I definitely need one of these for my dream library!

American Wife on NPR

Today on NPR, Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviewed Curtis Sittenfeld (photo above from The Observer), author of American Wife. Earlier in the broadcast, they had an interview with Josh Brolin, who is starring in the new Oliver Stone movie, W.

Find my review of American Wife here and the Fresh Air interview here. 

75 Books Every Man Should Read

As I previously wrote, Esquire published their list of the 75 books they think all men should read (here). I'll assume its because I'm not a man, and not because I'm woefully ignorant, that I have only read four books on their list.

Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

They are all, I would say, excellent books and I'd recommend them to anyone. Does this mean I need to read the other 71 books on Esquire's list?

75 Books Every Woman Should Read

About two weeks ago, in response to Esquire's list of the 75 books every man should read, Jezebel published their list for woman (find it here). I thought I'd see how I'm doing. (Books I've read are in bold.)

The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Like Life, Lorrie Moore
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
Earthly Paradise, Colette
Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
Property, Valerie Martin
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Runaway, Alice Munro
The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
The Group, Mary McCarthy
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Three Junes, Julia Glass
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
Sophie's Choice, William Styron
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
Spending, Mary Gordon
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Possession, A.S. Byatt

So I've read about a third of them. How is it that I've read Fear of Flying but not To Kill a Mockingbird? And my dirty secret: I've never read anything by Jane Austin!

How about you? How many of these books have you read?

Lydia

I've been working on a painting based on a pastel by the American Impressionist, Mary Cassatt, shown below. Its entitled Lydia at the Theatre, or sometimes Lydia Leaning on Her Arms, Seated in Loge. Cassatt frequently used her sister Lydia as a model.

Here's my interpretation, as an oil painting instead of a pastel drawing.

Now, of course, I'll have to read Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman. I've heard such great things about it. Here's a review from fellow blogger Bermudaonion. And here is the description from Publishers Weekly via Amazon:

Elegantly conceived and tenderly written, this cameo of a novel ushers readers into a small, warmly lit corner of art history. Inspired by five Mary Cassatt paintings of Cassatt's older sister, Lydia, Chessman paints her own intimate portrait of the admirable Lydia, chronicling Lydia's thoughts and feelings as she models for Mary in Paris in the late 1870s and early 1880s. All the while, Lydia is conscious that she is dying of Bright's disease, and her thoughtful contemplation of her life and dashed hopes give shape to the tale.

Doesn't that sound good?

Review: My Stroke of Insight

I was very excited to read this month’s selection for my local Book Club, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. The author, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, had a stroke when a blood vessel in the left side of her brain exploded. My Stroke of Insight is Taylor’s story of what happened the day of her stroke, her subsequent recovery and the lessons about herself learned from this experience.

In the end, though, I was really disappointed by the book. This was a very quick read for me (the hardcover clocks in at 184 pages including the appendices) and it shows. Taylor, I felt, only lightly skimmed over most topics. For example, while Taylor has two brief chapters describing the science of the brain, it is done in the simplest way possible, perhaps even to the point of having dumbed the science down. Once the scientific explanation was out of the way, I felt like Taylor ignored further opportunities in the course of telling her story to return to the science and explain how the anatomy covered earlier tied into the events happening. I am all for making the science understandable to the lay-person but not at the expense, I thought, of fuller explanations.

As a point of full disclosure, and because I understand that I may be somewhat unusual in wanting more science, I should say that my husband is a professor of anatomy and frequently lectures on neuroanatomy. I, however, am most definitely not a scientist and not an anatomy expert myself.

The latter portion of the book is devoted to the insights Taylor had about herself and her brain from having a stroke. In a nutshell, the big insight is this: inner peace is available to anyone because it’s already in your brain and if you would just get out of your own way by meditating, you would be happier. While this is a lovely insight, I was really annoyed by the amount of time Taylor spent on this topic, considering the libraries devoted this subject, when in the end, I don’t really think she added anything new to the discussion. Once again, I feel like she just glossed over how to, as she calls it, step to the right of our left brains. The pages devoted to how to meditate are, in my opinion, perfunctory and yet also a waste of space when there are so many other resources out there about meditation (including other books; an Amazon search for "how to meditate" pops up 4,356 books).

I think that as a scientist, Taylor had an opportunity to create something really special. I had eagerly hoped for something along the lines of A Leg to Stand On by the great Oliver Sacks and in the chapters about the day of her stroke, Taylor comes close. Otherwise, I think there was too much focus on new age glossiness and not enough on substance.

Disappointment aside, I do think there is one group of people for whom this book will be very helpful: family and friends of stroke victims who have lost the ability to speak for themselves. While Taylor makes it clear that every stroke is different, I think this book could be very helpful for anyone who is at loss of how to interact with a person in recovery from a stroke.

Abelardo Morell

As I said in an earlier post, I like art about books. So maybe it not surprising that one of my favorite artists is Abelardo Morell. He is an amazing photographer. The work above is Naked Maja by Goya, 1994.

Morell also did an incredible Alice's Adventures in Wonderland series, illustrating an edition of Lewis Carroll's book. I will let Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, explain for me why they are so great:

For his illustrations, Abelardo Morell had the brilliant idea of making the book itself a character in the story. His photographs, at once eerie and full of wit, are beautifully realized.

In addition to his photographs of and about books, he also does wonderful work using a camera obscura. Here is a recent piece titled Camera Obscura: View of Central Park Looking North-Summer, 2008.

Review: Written in Blood

This weekend, I read Written in Blood: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery by Sheila Lowe. From the author’s website, here is a description of the book:

When beautiful young widow, Paige Sorensen, is accused by her stepchildren of forging their father's will and handwriting expert Claudia Rose is retained to defend her, Claudia has no idea that she will soon become embroiled in a violent family battle. As she grows to know Paige better, she also develops a mentoring relationship with a troubled young student at the Sorensen Academy, helping her with graphotherapy. A shocking disappearance puts the spotlight on the student, and Claudia is forced to use every scrap of her wits and her courage to discover what happened and whether her young friend is really a brutal criminal.

I thought that Written in Blood was really well-paced, with a great cast of characters. The writing is very to the point, maybe even a little basic, but it’s the plot that carries here. It was fun, too, to learn more about hand-writing analysis and graphology.

There were a few plot twists that had me rolling my eyes a bit. Without giving too much away, I found the revelation about the bad guy’s other criminal exploits to be unbelievable.

Fortunately, this was a small blip in what was otherwise a good book.

This is, of course, because I love reading mystery series. To me, they are the take-out food of the book world. There are lots of them around, some not so great, but if you find a place (or, um, an author) that knows what they are doing, it’s so satisfying, you’ve just got to keep going back. Just think of what you get in each book: juicy stories, with interesting new characters in each book, but also the comfort of the regular sleuths and the satisfaction of learning a little more about these favorites in every book. Of course mystery series are popular. (I think the same thing must apply in the TV world, which must explain the near-world-domination of Law & Order and the CSI franchise.)

From reading Written in Blood, Sheila Lowe’s second installment of her new Forensic Handwriting mystery series, I’d say she has done quite well in tapping into this gotta-know-more formula. I definitely want to read the first book, Poison Pen, also starring handwriting expert Claudia Rose, and look forward to more from Lowe in this series.

The Sorted Books Project

Thanks to Lenore for the heads up (she in turn heard it from Jena) about the Sorted Books Project by Nina Katchadourian. Some of the "clusters", as Katachadourian calls them, are sentences, but all of them tell a story. I liked the simplicity of this one:

I love art about books!

My Library

As a follow-up to Lisa's comment to my previous post about keeping books, I thought I'd post some photos of my little "library." Okay, so its actually my dining room, but we use it for books much more than for eating, really. (Sorry for the awful quality of these photos!)

In addition to these three bookshelves (which are double-stacked and have piles on top, too), we also have two bookshelves in our living room.

(Yes, that's a replica of a human skull. No, we're not weirdos; my husband is an anatomy professor.)(Okay, we're a little weird, but not because of that.)

Our house is tiny, only 800 sq ft, so we go vertical as much as possible to fit all our books in. Someday I'll have a real library!

Book Suggestions

I got a request today from a good friend of mine.

I just finished Independence Day by Richard Ford, which was phenomenal, and am now reading Lolita, but I feel like I'm in an author rut. Would love to hear if you have any suggestions...

Absolutely!

I loved Lolita, and though I've never read it, I've been told (by people who know) that Pnin by Nabakov is even better.

Have you tried reading anything by Richard Russo? I really liked Empire Falls. I think it got made into a movie, too, though I didn't see it.

For another book in the "sad but well-written examination of American life" department, you could try The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates. I have to confess I didn't finish this one, because it is long and dense, but Oates is a great writer.

Also, The Ha-Ha by Dave King (which I blogged about recently) is great and I can't recommend it enough.

If anyone else is looking for book suggestions, let me know what you like and I'm happy to see if I can help.