2011 Reading Round-up

My goal for this year was to read 15 books off my to-read shelf, which contained 30 books at the beginning of the year. I managed to read 10, counting a couple of new books added to the shelf during the year. I also read 13 library books. But my to-read shelf is only down to 27 books, because Borders went out of business this year and every weekend they kept lowering the prices. So I added several.

My best books of the year were Bossypants, The Bean Trees, Signal, Into Thin Air, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I read 10 grown-up books and 13 YA books. Seven were non-fiction, and the rest were fiction.

I'm going to keep chipping away at my to-read shelf, and hope that by the end of the year I'll have it down to 20 books. Let's hope no more bookstores close.

State by State

State by State by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, eds.
Nonfiction, essays
Read July, 2011 to January, 2012
Review summary: Americans think of their states as unique, but there's more in common than we think (especially now that we've replaced most of the natural beauty with strip malls).

In the 1930's, as a way to invest federal dollars in American arts and culture, the WPA commissioned the Federal Writers' Project, which published, among other things, a series of state guides, one for each state. Inspired by this project, but without public funding, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey decided to collect essays about each state and publish them in this book.

They didn't choose the obvious and famous writers, like Barbara Kingsolver for Arizona (or Kentucky), Carl Hiaasen for Florida, or Stephen King for Maine. Most of the writers I had never read before. (They DID pick Louise Erdrich for North Dakota. and S. E. Hinton for Oklahoma.) Sometimes the writers' families had been residents of their state for generations, sometimes they were recent immigrants to the state. But with few exceptions, each writer aims to capture the unique quality of his or her state.

The writers take several approaches to defining their state. There are several road trip narrations, like the drive through Connecticut on the Merritt Parkway or the tour of South Dakota, culminating with the disappointment of Mount Rushmore. Several stories are about the writer's coming of age in his or her state: growing up during the civil rights movement in Alabama, as an under-age dishwasher in the Florida Keys, or in a family-run pawn shop in Nevada. For the writers who moved in as adults, it's sometimes a story of finding one's place (Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Vermont). Still others are by writers who moved away, and return to find home (Indiana, Rhode Island, Wisconsin). A few writers don't indulge in their own stories, and instead focus on a defining place or event (Idaho, Louisiana, Alaska, North Carolina). Some focus on the people (Missouri, Delaware, South Carolina) or lack thereof (Montana, Wyoming). Two, Oregon and Vermont, were drawn (comic-style), and both were strongly influenced by weather (rain and snow, respectively).


Despite the variety of writers and states, there are some themes that run through the book. When a state's history is given, it almost always includes all of the following:

1. A massacre of the native people
2. Farmers or ranchers: rural people setting up homesteads
3. Industry (logging, mining, industrial farming, or nuclear testing/power) ruining the land
4. Homogenization of the area into suburbs and Walmarts.

California, Colorado, and Washington each tell part of the American conflict of nature: we want to be in and among the wilderness, to breathe its beauty, but by making it accessible, we take away the wonder. (I'm actually surprised the Wyoming essay hardly mentions Yellowstone in this respect.)

Many essays convey a sense of home, whether it's home to generations of ancestors or to recent immigrants. It's home because the people are welcoming (Minnesota) or not (Maine), independent thinkers (Oklahoma), modest (New Hampshire), or insane (South Carolina). It's home because of the landmarks of industry (breweries, chocolate factories, farms) or nature (plains, mountains, lakes, rivers, oceans). It's home because it's where your people are, or it's where they aren't.

Very few were steeped in religion. Utah was like an anthropologic exploration into the home of LDS by an outsider. Arkansas focused on the dichotomy of decency (church) and liberty (choice), a debate played out in bumper stickers and never resolved. But while landscapes were dotted with churches, the writers don't take us inside them.

There also wasn't a whole lot about immigration from other countries. The Missouri author interviewed Bosnian immigrants, who make up the largest concentration of Bosnians outside Bosnia, and most of whom arrived in the last 15 years. Michigan is told by a Ghanaian who attended Interlochen for three years. And Iowa is the story of migrant workers from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. But nowhere is the culture clash of wall-building and "give me your tired, your poor..."

There wasn't anything about government, politics, capitalism, the media, technology, movies, factory farms, obesity, roller coasters, hot dogs, trucks, Nascar, the military, or flag waving. Nobody tried to claim that their state was the "real" America, though Dave Eggers made a case that Illinois is the BEST state, and Jonathan Franzen couldn't even get an interview with the state of New York. They were satisfied with the identity of their state, and didn't try to claim the whole country.

I'll get to the review now. The book was long. Some essays were stories that were too personal to really communicate the state's qualities. Some essays were too scattered, trying to represent too many places. The best approach I think was when the author focused on a representative place, event, or aspect (like fishing king salmon in Alaska or the ghostly ruins of hurricane Katrina in Louisiana) and told its tale completely, through conversations and stories.

I'm not sure, after reading this, that I have a good sense of what makes each state unique. I think I have a better sense of what the states have in common. Which may be the point, after all.

Below the jump: A few words to summarize each state's essay.

Task management

Well, I'm back to using Remember the Milk after a few months' using Producteev. There's nothing wrong with Producteev, and there was nothing wrong with Remember the Milk when I switched before. I just feel like I need a little change. Plus, RTM now has a free and pretty Android app. I experimented with different options because I wasn't really sure what I was looking for in task management. I think I have a better idea of what I need now.

There are two phases (for me) in publishing a textbook: development and production.

In development, I work closely with the authors to craft a good chapter. I'll work on each chapter for two to three weeks (sometimes more), then send it back to the author for a revision. That happens two or three times per chapter. There are several steps that happen in that two-to-three week period, like reading reviews, revising the art, writing a memo, etc. For these tasks, it would be great to have

1. subtasks (the steps taken to complete a chapter's edit)
2. an ordering feature, where I can say, "I can only do this task after that one is finished"
3. templates, so I can make a task (e.g., Chapter 1), and the template will fill in all the subtasks

In production, things go much more quickly, and I'm assigned tasks by email. An organizer will send me a file with a note, "Here's Chapter 1, please send any corrections by Friday." For these, I also work closely with the author to compile corrections from various sources, like old emails or random notes (as well as my head). For these tasks, I'd love to have

1. a "convert email to task" function, or even better, a shared task management app where the organizer can simply forward me the task, with the chapter attached
2. task-associated notes, where I can store loose corrections waiting to be made, even if the chapter isn't ready for me yet
3. a "waiting on" function connected to email, so when I'm just waiting for an author's reply, their reply will automatically move the task from the "can't do this yet" box to the "do this" box.

Remember the Milk and Producteev are both very powerful task management apps that can do at least some of these things. But the real limitation here is that there isn't an app we're all using. We've had limited success using Google Docs for organization among the editorial staff (there's four of us) and Box.net among authors and editors for simple file storage. But until everyone is comfortable using a system, it won't work.

This is part of why I'm so excited about things like Google+. They've taken a system of communication similar to Facebook or Twitter and improved upon it so that it can serve as a forum for conversation comparable to email, but for more than two people. (If only they'd thread comments!) I can only imagine what Google would do for task management if they tried.

My hope isn't that Google takes over social media or task management, but that they improve upon the existing formats and make them interoperable. In other words, if I'm using Google+ and you're using Facebook, we can still share and comment on each other's posts. Likewise, if I'm using RTM and you're using Producteev, we can still assign each other tasks. I can dream, right?