_Here if You Need Me_, Kate Braestrup

Library book for BPL book group.

Wow. This is really the perfect book, at least for me. Who knows how it'll turn out at book group (assuming people show up).

This memoir of a middle-aged mother of four whose Maine State Trooper husband was killed in a car accident, filtered through the focus of their grief and her decision to go to seminary (which her husband had been considering as a post-cop career) and become a UU chaplain for the game wardens, is entertaining, enlightening, easy to read yet thought provoking, available to readers whether religious or not, spiritual or not, having experienced tragedy or not and probably of basically any age. The language is mostly simple but the ideas expand the encompass what you bring to them.

I loved this book. I really liked her, too, which is not necessary, but damn helpful in a viewpoint character, particularly in a memoir.

And she reminded me a lot of the other woman I know who went to seminary and became a pastor, altho in her case, I don't think she was UU and she had a regular congregation. But similarly a great listener who had really interesting ideas about the Bible.

Also, I think if faith-based funds went to people like her for purposes like the one she is serving, I wouldn't have any particular problem with issues of separation of church and state etc., a conclusion I find surprising, and wonder if it will last overnight (sometimes I really get taken in by a friendly, charismatic person).

Great stuff. If you knew about this book and avoided it because you worried about it being horribly depressing, I personally recommend you take the plunge. I worry a lot about books being horribly depressing. This wasn't, and the sadness was absolutely worthwhile.

ETA: This book is insufficient evidence one way or the other, but so far, Ms. Braestrup is a massive violation of my people-who-have-four-or-more-kids-are-crazy. Sometimes they were crazy to have the four kids. Sometimes they were crazy as a result of the kids. Sometimes the crazy is a really good crazy. But Braestrup does not strike me as crazy. She strikes me as completely sane.

bemused by the bonus/bailout scandal

Just to be clear, when people are out to slash budgets, I really do believe that we should adhere to contractual obligations. I don't like to see union contracts abrogated -- even in bankruptcy court, much less to stay out of bankruptcy court. But I also don't like to see some people treated as if they are somehow sacred cows in the literal sense of we can't touch them even if the rest of us are starving. (I actually do know a little about the tradeoffs involved in the no-touch-cow thing, so please bear with me.)

That said, I'm right there with all the folk scandalized by the idea that AIG is going to pay hundreds of millions (yes, chump change compared to hundreds of billions, but still -- enough for lattes for a day for everyone in the US is Meaningful Money). Personally, I think a great solution is to pass a little one-year addition to the tax code: if you worked for AIG and got a bonus in 2009, you owe 110% of it to the IRS. That should bring them right to the table for negotiation. We can still change tax law for TY09, without resorting to breaking contracts or anything. I'm not sure why no one is suggesting this -- possibly because they're afraid of where this kind of thing could lead.

I got a little e-mail from someone-or-other about organizing protests at banks over the AIG bonuses (boni?). I read that Cuomo is looking to get 'em via state law. And Summers is looking a little eggy with Obama saying go back and double check make sure we can't undo this. The media is all over it with weird complaints (what do you think you're going to find? are you in bed with AIG? blah, blah, bleeping, blah). And I gotta say, this is a far cry from, we NEED these boni to retain the Important People.

Who Cuomo is now threatening to prosecute.

wouldn't that make for a more interesting book? maybe not

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343111,00.asp

Never read anything by a futurist. Oh, well. Here's the funny line:

"For example, what if a Harry Potter e-book included not only text but 3D graphics and clips from the movie? Wouldn't that make it a more interesting book?"

I know you're not supposed to answer rhetorical questions, and definitely not in the negative. But still, _no_ it would not make it a more interesting book. It would make it, possibly, a moderately entertaining hypertext stack or something like that (which I suspect is where this guy's heart is, judging by his bio). It would not make it a more interesting book.

playing with books

I used to spend a lot of time playing with books. I rearranged my library every little while: changed the subject categories, how I alphabetized, where stuff was shelved. I'd buy new shelving. I'd move shelving from one room to another. Some of this was to optimize space (i.e. wedge more books onto the shelves). Some of it was a part of weeding/purging/making room for more new books. A lot of it was just the fun of looking at each physical book and contemplating where it belonged. It was also a way to remind myself of books I owned that I had not read, or had not reread recently, and sparked a desire to open up a volume or two and dive in.

Given that the kindle doesn't supply any facility -- either in the media library or on the kindle itself -- for organizing things, that pleasure does not translate to the virtual world well at all. I don't even bother to index on LibraryThing all my kindle purchases (maybe some day. . .).

As I have been cataloging my physical books as I pack them up for the move -- something I fervently desire never to have to do again, and given that I plan to move again when the kids are grown, I sure hope to transfer the bulk of the library to virtual form before then -- how do I feel about the loss of this activity? It would be easy to wax poetic, as so many self-described readers have before me: to lovingly describe the smell of physical books, the feel of the binding, the crackle of the paper.

Blah, blah, bleeping, blah.

But I have kids, and I have complex politico-socio-psychological issues with hiring someone to clean my stuff. As a result, my books are dusty (I used to dust them when I played with them. No play, no clean = dust). The dust makes me sneeze and cough. The dust gets in my eyes. I worry about the dust collecting in my son's bedroom and aggravating his asthma. I think about how I should try to find the time to dust, and then about how dusting is so much less important than just about anything else I could be doing with my time. Like smiling at my baby. Or sleeping. Or googling news articles for kindle and dmca to find out what the latest developments are.

Intellectually, I think I should miss playing with books. In reality, playing with books has been replaced by buying books and reading them. I used to play with books because I didn't have money to just buy any book I wanted, so I bought more of them used, and more of them were weak substitutes for the (new, expensive, hardcover) books I really wanted. Also, I used to really want to want to read more non-fiction, but in practice, I just wanted to read genre crap over and over and over again. Now, I get pretty tired of the genre crap, and revert to non-fiction fairly regularly.

This is kind of a weird head space to find myself in. A good head space, but unexpected.