All of Darin and my books, however: packed.

In an attempt to get some interesting reading material here and there, however, we have actually ventured back into bookstores from time to time and picked up a few books. If they don’t make the cut, out they go! (We’re really good at letting things go right now.) But we don’t have many books around at the moment. Darin, who is not a big believer in e-books, is always looking for something to read, so in a fit of boredom he picked up one of the “flaky” books I’d bought and read it.

“This is really good,” he said. By which he meant: full of substance and not so very flaky after all.

The book is The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, takes 10 Great Ideas from ancient philosophical and religious traditions and investigates them using scientific studies: Is the Golden Rule so golden, for instance? What are the divisions we live with in our daily life, and what do they mean? (For example, mind vs. body, left vs. right, new vs. old.) Is it better to live a life with or without adversity? What in the hell is happiness, anyhow?

The best thing about this book is not the ground he covers, although that’s pretty good. The best thing about this book is Haidt’s writing is immensely clear and conversational: you feel as though he’s discussing these ideas, right here with you, right now. Instead of either being too esoteric or too chatty, he manages to keep the discussion at an adult level that doesn’t presume that you, too, have a degree in philosophy or psychology.

By the way, I can give you one of the takeaways from this book right now: happiness is achievable, right now, no matter who you are or what your circumstances are. So no excuses, people.

One of the best parts of the book is how he shows that meditation, cognitive psychology, and Prozac are all equally effective for managing your mind—the book has, in fact, inspired me to finally give meditation a shot again. (If I manage to keep the practice up, I’ll report back about any and all effects I get from it.)

Yay, Sigil!

Re: the ongoing e-book format wars: damn, is there nothing more annoying that downloading an e-book…and then discovering you can’t upload it to the e-book reader of your choice (in my case, an iPhone) because you picked the wrong damn format? Yes, yes, I know: “Diane, you’re a dumbass.”

But still: trying to pick the right format out of the many competing ones…is there any wonder I just buy from Amazon and eliminate the middleman?

I have some .pdf files of old books I would like to read, but they’re not formatted correctly for my iPhone ebook reader (whether Kindle…or eReader…or Stanza…or B&N eReader (which doesn’t read the same books as my eReader/Fictionwise app, dammit)).

What I’ve done so far is open the .pdf file in Lexcycle Stanza and save it as an .epub file, which is the same thing as a .zip file, only with a different extension. Everything I know about the .epub format I learned during this tutorial, in case anyone wants to double-check my knowledge.

So I change the extension on the .epub file and unpack the zip, which gives me

• mimetype
• META-INF folder
• OEBPS folder

Great. I edit the HTML info in the content.obf and toc.ncx files (and maybe that’s a problem, because those are UNIX executables when I open them, but when I save them, they become text files), and I edit the various header information in the separate chapter files.

I save the .zip file, change the extension back to .epub, and upload to my iPhone…whereupon I get the error “Failed to download and import…” because the information in the container.xml file is wrong.

Well, I didn’t touch the damn container.xml file. I could understand if one of the other files were causing the problem, but they’re not.

My friend Rob recommends I just use DropBook, which I have now given a shot (but where is it putting the completed book file? I can’t find it anywhere).

This process is very frustrating. And I know that right now the ebook market is the Wild, Wild West, but in case book publishers would like to know why ebooks haven’t taken over the world, this is why: it’s too confusing, there are too many variables, and there are too many damn formats.

During the oh-so-crucial shopping season of September through December, during which glossy magazines swell like so many Octomoms with their endless advertisements, Vanity Fair led me to invent a new verb, “to vanityfair,” which means, “to rip out the gigantic quantity of ads from the magazines, sometimes reducing its thickness by over a third.”

Every so often I’d say, “God, this magazine sucks, I have to stop getting it,” but then they’d have another article that was totally wonderful and unexpected and I’d start liking it again.

But they’ve done it. They’ve finally managed to get me off my ass and cancel my subscription.

Last month, they had Jessica Simpson on the cover. Why? I don’t know. The story was all about how she’s not fat, she’s gorgeous. I don’t know that much about her, and I knew when I first heard the “Jessica Simpson is fat” stories that they were all an attempt to get some attention and sympathy. To have Vanity Fair waste my time with that story made me go, “Oh, please, do we really not have any celebrities any more?”

(In fact, we don’t, not really. The reason we have Brad and Angelina on the checkout stand every week—well, maybe you do; thankfully, my supermarket does not have checkout tabloids, yay Lunardi’s—is that they are recognizable to a vast audience and have great crossover appeal. The great expansion of the entertainment infosphere through hundreds of channels and the internet and iPods and such has led to inevitable schisms of domain—now there are tons and tons of celebrities, all of whom are known to a smaller and smaller audience. Movies are targeted to extremely narrow audiences: the likelihood that anyone over the age of 35 knows the name Shia LaBeouf, let alone what he looks like or how to spell his name, is pretty damn low, which is why he was in that stupid Indiana Jones movie last summer.)

But no, it wasn’t even Jessica Simpson that did me in. It was their 87 millionth article in a row on the great travails caused by Bernie Madoff.

They could not say any louder that they are New York-centric; they couldn’t be any clearer that the magazine is designed to be read by people that range from the Upper West Side to the Long Island Expressway. They have lots of New York things and nothing else. It’s tiresome and incestuous, it really is.

I know Bernie Madoff did a very bad thing. But it’s really not Topic #1 everywhere in the country. It’s really not the most interesting thing to happen ever, you know?

No, apparently Vanity Fair doesn’t know, because in this month’s issue (possibly my last), there’s another goddamn Bernie Madoff article.

The obvious criticism, of course, is that Bernie Madoff is exactly the kind of uber-successful, high-flying financier that Vanity Fair has extolled and sucked up to for years. Their endless investigations of the criminality of the Bush years does not make up for their continual praise of the Bush gang while things were good. (Really bugged me at the time too.)

Anyhow, in case VF is wondering why they lost another subscriber, that’s why!

I did keep hearing about this book Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell, though. I can’t remember why or where. But I kept running across references to this book here and there, and I thought, Well, I’ll get it from the library.

Holy God, I wish I’d bought it; this book was that entertaining.

Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan Catholic, the worst hospital in New York. He is also a former hitman for the Mob, currently in the witness protection program. This works because he spends all of his time at the hospital, and no one with any options (like mob guys) would go near ManCat on a dare, so he never runs into his former associates. Until, of course, he does.

This book is hilarious, violent, vulgar, moving, and one of the most fabulous reads I’ve run across in a long time. Peter Brown is actually a doctor, despite his past, and despite the snark and exhaustion you can see he’s actually getting something out of his new chosen profession. He also explains in detail what he got out of his last job too—how he got into it, why he got out of it. It’s filled with footnotes of information about medical processes and random asides that are interesting and hilarious unto their own right and all of which are…let’s just say, read the damn footnotes, okay? Details you think are just random bits of color keep coming back in strange and unexpected ways.

The book opens with Brown getting mugged on his way to work. It doesn’t stop until the last page. Along the way, you get interchanges like this:

I sit back down. Wipe my nose with my left hand to cover the slow movement of my right hand toward my beeper. “Guy’s got some right buttock and subclavicular pain OUO despite PCA*,” I say. “Looks like a fever, too.”

* Like you care what this means.

This novel also has one of the more, uh, memorable climaxes I’ve ever run across. In fact, I had to skim that part because it was so graphic and deeply disturbing. What’s more disturbing: that’s not even the violent part. The violent part of the climax gets skimmed over in the text, because it’s completely beside the point by the time it actually happens.

Seriously. This book is a total ride.

However, one of the scenes in the book featured one of the most disturbing sex scenes I’ve ever read. I myself don’t find vampires at all sexy— hello, they’re DEAD—but this scene was, I think, supposed to be uber-sexy and I was simply appalled. You know how drinking blood is supposed to be the equivalent of sex to a vampire? Take that to the nth degree. I’m wondering if I’m going to pick up book 3 because not only was the scene icky (it’s a technical term) but it made me dislike the characters.

I don’t think all sex scenes have to be sexy. All they have to do is move the plot along (which, come to think of it, this scene didn’t do either). But I wondered if there was a serious disconnect between me and most readers of paranormal romance/urban fantasy, because none of the reviews on Amazon mention this particular scene in the book, and it’s all I remember.

Colette Gale (a pseudonym for an author who is known for her historicals…or rather, her paranormal historicals) has begun a series of erotic retellings of famous stories. Her first one was Unmasqued, which was a retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, a story that clearly lends itself to somewhat more sensual goings-on. I read Unmasqued and I have to admit it did nothing for me: I was annoyed as hell by Christine, who was weak and passive, and by the emphasis on bondage.

However, see above: still interested in finding erotica that satisfies (ooo) as a story as well as sex. So I was interested in reading Gale’s retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, Master.

Right off the bat, I could tell Gale had done something interesting (and smart, in my opinion): this isn’t Edmond Dantes’s book. The focal character is Mercedes, the woman Edmond loved and then lost when he was imprisoned. So we see all of the events of the book from her perspective — which means that while we lose lots of The Count, we’re also not tied to following that book faithfully. This works wonderfully in Master’s favor.

The other excellent thing about Master is Mercedes herself. She isn’t a shrinking violet, at everyone’s mercy: the book spans 20 years, so she has a knowingness and a personal strength about her that is so goddamn refreshing. When she realizes who the Count is, and what he’s put her through, she doesn’t weep and throw herself on his mercy — instead, she basically says, “Get over yourself; you’re not the only one who suffered around here.” She gives as good as she gets, which made me very happy indeed reading this book.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a slightly spicier read (with a heroine who has a spine, to boot!).

Of course, did I have my camera with me, like I promised Toni I would? I did not.

But I bought my copy! And I was deeply gratified to see that the quote from “Diane Patterson” remained intact in the text. Your job: go buy this book (it is freakin’ hilarious) and find that quote!

Bobbie Faye is about a woman named Bobbie Faye (natch) who gets caught up with organized crime, bank robbery, the FBI, voodoo priestesses, and alligators, and for a woman who’s known far and wide for being a walking disaster, even this day rates as pretty damn bad.

Yesterday, as Darin and I wandered around Borders, I was struck by how many Templar-related novels there are out right now. And other Da Vinci Code related nonsense, such as (I am not making this up) The Diet Code.

I walked over to Darin with one of the books in my hand and said, “I know this isn’t an original sentiment, but… Dan Brown has a lot to answer for.” He nodded.

So much for the line of dialogue I always wanted to put in a movie: “Those fucking Templars are at it again.”

1) I don’t know when I started reading — somewhere between 2 and 3. I don’t remember my parents reading me stories before bed. I think I must have read myself my bedtime story every night.

2) A favorite family story about me is how one day during our vacation in Bermuda I disappeared in the main town. My mother, frantic, asked a policeman for help in finding me. He asked her about the sorts of places I liked. She mentioned bookstores, he took her to the nearest one, and there I was, reading the D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. I still have that copy of the book with its original (though much battered) dust jacket; it’s currently on the bookshelf in Sophia’s and Simon’s room.

3) Darin’s favorite genre is science-fiction/fantasy; mine is mystery. Strangely, if I pick up an SF book, Darin is rarely interested in it, and likewise I am not particularly moved to read Darin’s set of mysteries.

4) I knew Darin was the boy for me when I discovered his idea of the perfect vacation was the same as mine: go somewhere peaceful and beautiful and bring a suitcase full of books along with. We actually brought a bag full of books with us on our multi-week trip to Israel. And we read them all.

5) My favorite book when I was a kid was Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key. I must have read that book ten million times. I saw the movie three times, but I was secretly disappointed because it veered so much from the book. Of course, I had yet to learn that was SOP for book adaptation. (My mother, when cleaning out her house and getting it ready for sale, found my old Scholastic book club edition of this book. We never throw anything away.)

6) I read The Lord of the Rings instead of studying for finals sophomore year of high school. I’m not sure what it means about me that a)I don’t remember a thing about the books except for the bit with the spider and b)I did pretty damn well on my finals anyhow.

7) I have never read Huckleberry Finn. In fact, there are quite a few classics I have never read but expect to before I, you know, die.
There are quite a few classics, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin that I have read and remember absolutely nothing about. I do not feel more educated as a result of reading these books.

9) I loved The Scarlet Letter when I read it in high school. I am undoubtedly the only former or current American high school student to make this claim.

10) How many books do we own? I have no idea. Easily a few thousand, in just about every subject and genre you can name. And we’d have a lot more than that, but we got rid of 26 boxes full of books back in 2001, in order to clean up our house a little.

11) The scariest book I own is Practical Homicide Investigation (the manual of choice for serial killers everywhere). When I finally get around to arranging the books in my office, the sex-related books go on the lowest shelves, and the crime-related books go on the uppermost.

12) Every so often Sophia says, “We need to go to the bookstore. I hear a book calling to me.” Darin and I look at one another knowingly.

13) I get books out of libraries now. If I really like them, I go buy a copy. I buy at least one library book per month (usually cookbooks, but not always).

14) I have read plays and short stories in French and German, but I have never managed an entire novel in a foreign language.

15) I read Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, in English, in one sitting at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Hmmm. I guess I’m supposed to tag someone. Well, I’ll tag the Maitresse, Andrea, and the Piefessor.