The Big Necessity

The Big Necessity (Rose George, 2008) is, to put it bluntly, a book about shit and how humans deal with it. (For the most part George refers to it as excreta, but says that shit is actually a better word for its blunt matter-of-factness.) At the beginning of the book she includes chapters on toilets and sewers of the developed world, including Japan's luxury toilets and the challenges of designing low-flow toilets in North America, but her real focus is on the struggles faced by the 2 billion people worldwide who still lack even the basic sanitation of a good latrine.

The American Duchess

The American Duchess (Joan Wolf, 1983) is an older traditional Regency romance I found in a used bookstore awhile back, and it has both the virtues and the flaws of its vintage. On the plus side, it's full of lovely accurate historical detail, with real people occasionally appearing in the story or being name-dropped in plausible ways. On the minus side, the heroine was a bit too much of a sweet ingenue for my taste, and I found the omniscient POV distancing.

Outfit yea or nay?

The clothes I ordered for Easter arrived today, and half of them are going back, including the crisp white blouse that gapes just a tad too much for safety pins to inconspicuously fix and the blue skirt that's a lot darker IRL than it appeared online. The sandals work nicely, and I like the cherry tiered skirt I got--only problem is finding something to wear it with! I have a black blouse it looks gorgeous with, but it's not an Eastery color and it's a tad too sheer for church.

So, this was the one option I came up with that might keep me from a frantic shopping trip on Friday or Saturday. My husband doesn't think it works but my daughter does. My husband is maybe a little too shy of anything flamboyant or an unusual color combination...OTOH, my daughter is five, so I probably shouldn't be listening to her fashion opinions yet!

Thoughts? The pictures make the skirt look a tad redder than it is. It's a deep cherry pink.

I'd Rather We Got Casinos

I'm not normally a fan of audiobooks, but I wish I'd gotten Larry Wilmore's I'd Rather We Got Casinos (2009) in audio format rather than reading it. The beauty of Wilmore's appearances on The Daily Show is how dry and deadpan he is, and since he read for the audiobook, I think it would've enhanced the humor. Not that the book isn't funny on its own--if you like Wilmore on TDS, you'll like the book. I think my favorite bit was the list of suggestions for how a president might sneak in an apology for slavery--e.g. bury the lead by putting it in the middle of an announcement about the first brothas to go to Mars!

Marshal Ney: The Romance and the Real

Pretty soon after I started the alternative history WIP, I realized I'd need to have real people as major characters. Because of this, my research involves a lot more time with biographies, memoirs, collections of letters, etc. than in the past. And then I take these people, men and women born 200 years or so before I was, and try to climb into their heads so I can imagine what they'd do in the alternate reality of my novel.

This kind of research leads to a strange sort of intimacy. I don't really think I'm communing with their departed souls--most of the time--but they feel independent and opinionated in a way my purely invented characters rarely do. And sometimes, frankly, I crush on the more appealing ones a little bit. Which I was not expecting to happen when I picked up Marshal Ney: The Romance and the Real (Raymond Horricks, 1982). I'm researching Ney because I decided I needed to add an additional real French bigshot on my next rewrite (which will be the third draft, and I hope the last major one). I didn't know much about him beyond his role at Waterloo. And based on that I didn't expect too much--I mean, repeated unsupported cavalry charges against infantry, especially British infantry? Who DOES that? (Trust me, oh reader who isn't a Napoleonic-era military history geek--that's not smart tactics.)

I realized less than a chapter in that I was selling Ney short by judging him on that single day's performance. No, he wasn't the smartest general in the world. He wasn't even close to the smartest general born in 1769--though it'd be a bit unfair to hold that against him, given that it was also Napoleon and Wellington's birth year! But he was an able and occasionally brilliant commander, Waterloo notwithstanding. He was straightforward, he fiercely loved his country, and he had an old-school sort of honor and chivalry. He loved his wife and had a happy and romantic marriage. As the son of a barrel-cooper who enlisted as a common cavalry trooper, he rose to the highest possible rank on merit. And, when Napoleon called him the bravest of the brave, it was only fitting--I got all weepy reading about Ney's leadership on the retreat from Moscow in 1812.

I...kinda love him. This after assigning him an antagonist's role in my WIP! Oh well. I think my book will be more interesting this way than if he'd been what I expected before I did any research. I never wanted it to be a pure Good Guys vs. Bad Guys story anyway...

A Survival Guide for Working With Humans

I was hoping for more from A Survival Guide for Working With Humans (Gini Graham Scott, 2004) than I actually got out of it. It's a series of case studies discussing common interpersonal and ethical dilemmas in the workplace and how one might navigate through them. Most of the solutions seemed like common sense to me, and I guess I was hoping for some deep insight into human nature or something. Also, the advice tended toward how to go along to get along, which is all very well much of the time, but sometimes you do have to make a stand for who you are and what you believe in.

There was one case where she recommended a course I thought unethical, with a comment along the lines of "Business is like war, and you wouldn't see a general being so fussy about ethics." I disagreed with both parts. At least, neither the industry that currently employs me nor the one I dream of making a living in are inherently zero-sum games where we need to take out our competition. E.g. I hope the already-published authors whose work is closest to mine continue to prosper, because they're building an appetite in their fans for the same type of story, setting, and characters that I write. And as for generals being fussy about ethics...well, what she probably meant is that no self-respecting general would sacrifice a numerical or tactical advantage out of some misguided sense of chivalry. Which is true. But the way she phrased it made it sound like she didn't believe in just war, that generals could be honorable, ethical people, and so on. Not the kind of thing I could read without grumbling while also in the middle of a biography of Michel Ney!

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