You Belong with Me

Finished December 24

You Belong with Me by Mhairi McFarlane

This romance novel has a romance that we've come into at a critical moment and it deals with some interesting issues around communication, trust, and what happens when one of the pair is a celebrity. Edie is a woman who is good at her publicity job, but not as confident in her personal life. She tried to talk herself out of a relationship with famous actor Elliot Owen, but he shows up on her doorstep determined to make a relationship with her work. 

Edie had a recent experience where someone took advantage of her nature and compromised her, with Edie getting unfairly blamed for the situation. Since it involved co-workers, it spilled into issues at work, specifically bullying and mean girl attitudes. Her boss knew the truth and allowed her leeway to work from home, and recognizes her leadership potential. When she's assigned an employee from head office to report to her as a new satellite location manager, she's wary of what he's been told by her work bullies.

Edie also learns to deal with Elliot's agent and how she should deal with the publicity that news of her relationship will bring. Another interesting thing to deal with is his relationships with other cast, particularly those cast as significant others in an ongoing series. 

As Edie and Elliot learn more about each other and work out the new seriousness of their relationship, dealing with information leaks, crushes, and new opportunities puts strain on their long distance relationship.

A romance with a lot going on and some real issues at the heart of it. 

Love, Holly

Finished March 12

Love, Holly by Emily Stone

This book has a cover that makes it look like a light romance, but it is more complex than that. The book begins with Holly and her sister Lily are driving from London to a rental cottage in the country to join their parents for Christmas, with Lily's husband due to come up later. 

When they make an impromptu stop for a coffee for Holly, and a mint tea for Lily, who is in the later stages of pregnancy, Holly has a meet cute with an attractive man and gets his number.

As the two women get back on the road, an accident happens that changes everything. As a result Holly has been estranged from her family for years, and has found a new career as an art teacher, abandoning her own hopes for a career as an artist. As part of her grieving process, Holly has been participating in a program where the participants send letters anonymously at the holidays to someone else, and receive a letter in return from someone. When Emma, the woman whose letter Holly received, gives out some information in her letter that Holly recognizes, she is determined to find her and reconnect her with her estranged family. 

As the story comes full circle and Holly is reunited with the man she met just before the accident, she finds that her friendship with Emma is leading her back to dealing with her own family issues.

This is a story that begins with a tragedy, with other sad events influencing the plot, but that comes down to issues around grief and communication. The story carries you along quickly, and leaves you with a feel-good ending. 

Because Internet

Finished July 1

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

This book was fascinating. I've always been interested in language, poring over my mother's old linguistics textbooks when I was a kid, but this book brings a lot of linguistic theory into the now with its focus on how the internet changed the way we use language and the way that we communicate.

It sometimes looks back further at how other technology changed communication as well and looks at how societal change feeds the way language changes. For instance it looks at the telephone and how greetings were suggested and adapted for that new broadly adapted form of communication and compares that to the way that different pieces of the internet changed language and communication.

It looks at both formal and informal types of communication and generational differences between broad groups as the internet grew and changed and became part of everyday life. 

There was so much here in terms of ideas that made me think and bits of communication history I hadn't been fully aware of before. 

My favourite part was in the section on memes where the author talked about an embroidered piece that she made based on a common meme, that she then adapted to be more personal to herself.  She comments

Both memes and needlework are collective folk texts that spread because people remix and remake them. The words "text" and "textile" have a common origin, from a Proto-Indo-European root teks, "to weave." Writing and weaving are both acts of creation by bringing together. A storyteller is a spinner of yarns, and the internet's founding metaphor is of a web. If we go far enough back, before printing presses and cameras and photocopiers introduced the notion of faithful reproduction, all transmission is re-creation. Teks is also the root of the word "technology," which at one point meant a systematic treatise on an art or craft, or even a grammar, before it referred to a study of mechanical or industrial arts (a 1902 dictionary gives the examples of "spinning, metal-working, or brewing") and then to digital tech.

Since I am a needleworker, this really hit home for me. Since I also work with a lot of internet pieces, and have helped others navigate the internet as part of my job, this all connected for me. 

A fascinating look at language, social change, and human adaptation. 

A Small Hotel

Finished October 13

A Small Hotel by Robert Olen Butler

Most of this book is set in New Orleans, around a couple's relationship. Michael and Kelly Hays have decided to divorce after twenty years of marriage. The main action takes place on the day that Kelly is supposed to go to court to sign the final divorce papers. But she doesn't go. Instead, she goes to the hotel in New Orleans where she and Michael began their relationship and where they have often visited since, always using the same room. But this time she is alone, and not in a good frame of mind. In her suitcase are alcohol and medication and it would seem that she has the intention of ending her marriage in a different way. 

Michael meanwhile is at a former plantation, now hotel, attending a formal event with a new woman. When he discovers that Kelly hasn't shown up in court, he is distracted.

Character is everything here, as we see how Michael's background, in particular his father's idea of masculinity, has shaped him as the reticent and stoic man that he now is. Kelly is naturally more demonstrative, but has also changed to accommodate Michael's demeanor in many ways. 

There are flashbacks to their life, beginning with their first encounter when Michael saved Kelly from a bad encounter on the street during Mardi Gras. We see how their relationship developed over the years, and how they married and made a life and a family together. We also see how the expectations that each of them have of relationships has shaped theirs, and created some underlying issues that have never been resolved. 

This book is one that made me ache for the characters, for the love that they were losing, despite the feelings on both sides. It is a story of failure to communicate, of words withheld, of feelings unexpressed. It is a story of people's insecurities about themselves and about the people they care about. Butler is an amazing writer and this book shows his skill.

The Bromance Book Club

Finished October 10
The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams

This romance novel has a lot of humour and some pretty graphic scenes. It is the first in a series (as I'm writing this there are four books) that deal with romance and relationships in Nashville. It's different because there is a strong focus on the men's side of things in these relationships.
In this first book in the series professional baseball player Gavin Scott is having a crisis. He fell in love and married quickly when his girlfriend Thea became pregnant, just before he hit the majors. Now it is five years later, and his wife and him have been growing further apart for a variety of reasons. When an intimate encounter enlightens him to the fact that Thea has been faking orgasms for years, he can't deal with it, and reacts badly. Thea is now asking for a divorce and he is panicking. Enter the men's book club (it only gains the name on the cover towards the end of the novel). Some of his team members are in the book club, but so are other professional sports players and men with other high-level profiles in town. They are set on helping him save his marriage, and assign him a Regency romance book as homework. It takes him a while to understand that they are serious and to take the assignment seriously, but he begins to understand that his problems aren't really about the sex, but go much deeper. As he learns to communicate better with his wife and show his caring in ways that she can see, things improve.
The other men aren't shown in depth here, but future novels in the series focus on different men, so each gets his focused look. We also see some parts of the story from Thea's viewpoint and see how her background shaped her and the beliefs she has about relationships.
The intimacy not only of the relationship between these two characters, but of their family life as well brings depth to their story. I could already see one future romance on the horizon for the series too.
A fun read, with a different angle and more depth than at first glance. Looking forward to the next one, and have already put it on hold at my local library.

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

Finished November 28
If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating by Alan Alda, read by the author

This book was eye-opening. Working with the public, and being a manager, communication is something I'm very interested in, so learning how to be better at it was a big draw for me. I also loved both of Alda's previous books that I've read, so was glad to find this one enjoyable as well.
I learned a lot about communication, and about the author.
For instance, I didn't know about the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science before.
Alda takes us through his own journey in learning about communication, and about things he learned while working with science professionals in improving the communication skills of scientists. He gives his take on direct experiences of personal interactions, of workshops with adults and children, and of research that he's either been involved in, or that he's learned about and talked to the researchers about.
One key takeaway was the benefit of teaching improv in terms of improving communication. This isn't about comedy, but about paying attention to the person in front of you, to their facial expression, to their body language, to their gaze, and learning how to respond to those things in ways that improve not only your own communication, but also that of the person you're interacting with. It makes so much sense, but I'd never connected it before. He speaks about a variety of improv games that were used in communication workshops with people of all ages, and the effects that these had on the people involved.
He touches on the power of storytelling, the barriers of jargon, the role of empathy, and ways to get "in sync" with another person.
He also talks about his own personal experiments in changing his behaviour to see what would happen, and how he learned more about himself, as well as generating ideas for further research in this field. He includes his own mistakes and missteps, and what he learned from them.
This is an amazing read, and I highly recommend it to everyone. After all, we all communicate.

You're the Only One I Can Tell

Finished April 17
You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships by Deborah Tannen, read by the author

This book continues to look at communication, as Tannen's previous books have, this time focusing on women's friendships. She looks at all types of friendships, from intimate to casual, similar in age to cross-generational, with other women and with men.
Mostly she focuses on friendships between women, but she also looks at those instances where women identified men as their closest friend and how those relationships were similar or dissimilar to those whose closest friendships were with women.
She looked at one on one friendship but also group friendship, and she looked at the nature of friendship, from those one can truly be oneself with, to those that required playing a certain role. In a few cases, she even looked at culture and how that affects friendships.
She has done a lot of research, but what I always enjoy about her books are the examples, where she actually looks at real life friendships up close.
Some things that I found fascinating was the fears that attach themselves to some friendship situations, that she describes as FOBLO (Fear of Being Left Out) and FOGKO (Fear of Getting Left Out) that can mean that we hide part of ourselves to fit in.
I don't have a lot of close friends, and I have old friends that I'm seldom in touch with, friends who've set limits on what kind of friendship they want from me (scaling back intimacy to the acquaintance level), and friends I can instantly pick up with after a long separation.
Interestingly, I've become both more careful in who I share some personal information with, and more open about some aspects of my life. And Tannen found all of these behaviours in her research. I really enjoyed learning more about the nature of friendship and about using that learning to look at my own relationships.

Letting Go of Legacy Services

Finished May 2
Letting Go of Legacy Services: Library Case Studies edited by Mary Evangeliste and Katherine Furlong

Libraries are being asked to do more with less these days, and many of us find it difficult to stop offering services that we've been offering for years to free up resources for those new things people want us to provide. The libraries here looked at the concept of planned abandonment, a concept popularized by Peter Drucker, and how it applies to libraries. Also included are several interviews that look at solutions to common pressure points.
This book contains a number of case studies of libraries who have taken a good hard look at either those things "we've always done" or things "we've always done that way" and determined if they are still worth doing or if they should be done differently. Each case study is wrapped up with a summary by the editors called Bookend.
Case studies included here are:
* a college library that changed the way they provide periodicals to their patrons.
* a county library system that took a good look at their web-based services, overhauled their website and improved community outreach.
* a university library that eliminated their reserve services.
* a university library that redefined reference service.
* a university library that used a series of crisis situations over six years to redefine mission critical services.
* a university library that used ethnographic research techniques to help them redefine library spaces to better meet student needs, reexamine resource delivery, checkout service, fines, ILL, and equipment lending.
* a university library who used collaborative strategic planning to facilitate the shift towards electronic resources.
* a public library who responded to a natural disaster and a financial crisis to look for efficiency opportunities in technical services, acquisitions, and cataloging.
* a university library used surveys and space analysis to create more useful spaces for their patrons

Interviews include:
* talking with David Consiglio about data driven decision making in a library context
* talking with Valerie Diggs about communication strategies for successful change

The conclusion to this book provides a lot of reflection on change in the library community. One sentence in particular spoke to me: "Among the many things we need to abandon is the nostalgia that unfortunately gives us an inaccurate perception of the past and hinders discussions of the present, and the future of libraries." Insights here range from the urgency of library as space for our communities to come together in a variety of ways, you can never had enough communication, and that fostering leadership and diversity is a necessity.

The Shallows

Finished May 28
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains by Nicholas Carr, read by Paul Michael Garcia

I found this book fascinating. It isn't just about the internet and its influence on our physical brains and the way we think, although it is about that. It begins with a history of human communication, from oral storytelling, through the introduction of writing and reading, to the invention of the printing press, through newer media like movies, radio and television, showing how each change in communication resulted in changes to the way we think, and how we use our brains. It also has discussions around philosophy and how thought processes have changed. It looks at the science of research on the brain and the different viewpoints of what makes us human. It talks about the trend to refer to human functions in a machine-related way, and how machines replacing human functions affects us physically and mentally. Carr talks about his own experiences having difficulty in reading and writing with depth as he used the internet more, and how hard he found it to limit the time he spent online. Backed up by many different research studies that took place over many years, his arguments offer both hope and warning for the future. Highly recommended.

Check out this video about it.

Domestic Fiction

Finished July 6
The Condition by Jennifer Haigh
The books takes a look at a family in the late 70s at a family vacation home on Cape Cod. It then jumps to 20 years later looking at the same family.
The parents have divorced. The older son is a successful doctor living a good life in Boston, but keeping his real life separate from his family. The younger son has been running away from expectations and his own wants most of his life and only now is forced to look at his life and what he really wants. The middle child, a daughter has been living the last two decades with her genetic condition which she has let limit her life. When she is finally offered a chance to really enjoy life, her family baggage might get in the way.
The parents have their own issues too.
This look at a single family and how the lack of real communication has affected every member is an interesting vignette. Wonderfully written with characters that feel real, this book is a great choice for a summer read.

Great Book for Success

Finished May 24
The Power of Pause: how to be more effective in a demanding, 24/7 world by Nance Guilmartin
This book has got to be one of the most insightful business books I've ever read. The advice given here is simple, they have a good plan to get you going, and I can see how it will really help.
I'm always looking for ways to communicate better, and be a better manager, and this book has got stuff I can take and work with right away. It will take practice (as she tells the reader) to make this stuff a habit, but I can see how you can get better at it.
Essentially, it is about not reacting to statements, actions, etc. right away, but taking a "pause" to think about what you don't know about the situation, the people involved, or the background, and asking yourself how to find out more about those things before reacting. The question to ask yourself is "What don't I know that I don't know" which sounds a bit Zen, but when you think about makes so much sense.
There are additional steps to this system involving rephrasing, seeing the big picture, and knowing your triggers that are also very sensible. This is some advice I can really work with.

Short Sotry

Finished December 31
A Day out for Mehmet Erbil by Louis de Bernieres
I got this lovely short story for Christmas. Set in the Gallipoli region of Turkey, it came to the author during research for his wonderful book Birds Without Wings. It tells the story of an encounter between a local man and a tourist. Inspiring and thought-provoking, it gets you thinking about assumptions and missed opportunities.

The Reading Brain

Finished June 15
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
This was an absolutely fascinating read and I learned so much about both the history of reading and what goes on in our brains as we gain this function.
As Wolf says, our brains were not designed for reading, but have adapted to achieve this skill. Reading uses several parts of the brain and depends on the functionality of each of those parts as well as the connections between them to succeed. Learning to read has some differences depending on the language of the reader, and that can affect the speed at which the skill is developed as well as what parts of the brain are more heavily used.
Wolf also addresses the issue of dyslexia, and talks about the different forms that this disability takes. There are different ways this can be addressed depending on what type of dyslexia the student has. She also addresses the problems of catching this early to both address it properly and to ensure the child does not feel stigmatized. Many people with dyslexia are very creative and innovative and we don't want them to feel inferior to their peers.
Wolf includes a discussion relating back to Socrates and his stand against reading as a lesser form of learning that could lead to a false sense of understanding a subject or idea. She discusses how this change from learning by dialogue to learning by reading can be related to today's change to learning through digital tools and how similar concerns may be applicable to our young learners now.
This book should be a must-read for teachers that will give them an insight to the issues that can exist around reading. I highly recommend it.

Humour in the Workplace

Finished April 25
The Levity Effect: Why It Pays to Lighten Up by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher
This book promotes having fun and work, and offers up the research to support its platform. The authors show how the right kind of levity can increase productivity, improve communication, foster creativity, increase trust, have a positive effect on health, and better the bottom line. To get you started down the road to fun, the authors also provide some ideas on ideas that have worked. The ideas come from real-life examples and while not all are appropriate for all workplaces, there should be something that you can comfortably try in yours. They help you with arguments in favour of fun, citing the research that has already been done. They also urge you to take this fun attitude home to improve the environment there as well as relations with your family. Some great ideas are given, but the best part is the consolidation of the research on this aspect of the workplace. So get out there and lighten up at work!

The Way We Communicate

Finished February 18
Um...Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean by Michael Erard
This engaging book discusses the variety of verbal errors we make and the various studies that have been done about the reasons behind them. They include not only those place-fillers like uh and um, but also sentence stutters such as "I said, I said that we weren't..." and sentence correction such as "We went, some of us went to the game." It talks about the famous (the Reverend Spooner as well as George W) and the real versus the legend. Studies range from the psychological to the pedagogical and Erard shows how theories have changed over time. This is an interesting overview of a lesser-known area of language.