The War of Art

From Ellen Degeneres' book picks, comes this book about breaking through your creative potential. Worth a look see, whether you are knowingly battling the creative muses or just wish you were!

Ellen's New Book Pick: 'The War of Art'

Classics also worthy of your attention: The Artist's Way and The Right to Write both by Julia Cameron. A prolific writer herself, her books have been a go-to guide for years for anyone in the creative field.

This Year's Great Reads from RJ Julia

WAIT!! How'd it get to be December 2010? Time warp city, I say. Or I could say: renovation, unemployment, life distraction city, but really: who cares? The fact is there's ALWAYS time for books!

Happily, while I've been goofing off, doing time for everyone else but me, RJ Julia has been on the ball. Never heard of them? Sheesh! Only one of the most fabulous independent booksellers around. (Yes, yes, Northshire, I still love you, but Madison, CT is blessed too.)

If you know about RJ Julia and Roxanne Coady, you may even know about her book The Book That Changed My Life, which in itself is a list of books worth reading, but also the correlating experiences. Sometimes that Great Read is great because it reveals a pearl of truth at the essential moment you need it. Sometimes it's great because it transports you to a precious time or place. And sometimes, oh surprise, it is great because the writer just made it crackle!

If you'd rather not live vicariously and instead experience your own life altering read, check out RJ Julia's Top 10 Books for 2010. Bonus: there's a list for both fiction and non-fiction so you actually get TWENTY choices. Their holiday gift to you.

So click away to their site and find yourself a good read or perhaps even a good gift- if you can think that far ahead!!

Books: A Memoir

Here's a book I would have loved to have penned if only I knew how to express my affections for books in an engaging, readable manner instead of just gushing about my favorite titles, authors or enormous world of unread books that awaits me on my bedroom bookshelves. (The cover at book melee gives you a rough approximation of my bookcase, only on a different scale!)

Novelist Larry McMurtry, best known for his tales turned Hollywood (Brokeback Mountain, Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show) shares his own love of tomes in Books: A Memoir. While barely mentioning his own notable successes writing, McMurtry delves into his life long love affair with printed stories and his own lesser known life as a used bookseller. (The dream of bookseller is one that I also dally with.)

Born into a bookless household, McMurtry wasn't smitten until he was six when a WWII drafted cousin gifted him a carton of books. A decade later in high school, McMurtry's interest had become an obsession and he never looked back. By the early '70's, he and a pal had bought the inventory of a DC bookstore closing its doors and they launched Booked Up, a used/antiquarian bookseller that was an icon in Georgetown for 32 years before moving to its present location in Texas.

Cavorting cross-country to book shops, auctions, junk yards and yard sales, McMurtry offers his take on the book marketplace of the past and its future evolution. By his own admission, the book may provide "more arcane info" to trade readers than to the general public, but if you are book lover who shudders to have to pass a used book store without a visit, this book may be your next good find.

The Necklace: Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives

You may have heard this story back in 2004. 13 women join together to buy a $37,000 diamond necklace and then share ownership. Wacky? Definitely. Book worthy? Maybe. But a good tale, for sure. After falling in love with an extravagant 118-diamond necklace, Jonell McLain brainstormed the idea to sell shares (she must have REALLY liked this necklace, dontcha think?). Enough of her friends "bought" into the idea to make it a a reality, especially after McLain talked the store owner down to $15,000, and recruited his wife in the process.

The Necklace: Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives is as much about the necklace as it is about the women who own and wear it. Author Cheryl Jarvis uncovers how the necklace gave each woman an opportunity to feel special and shares how being part of this unique group gave them the opportunity to rethink their lives. Reaching cross party lines, business backgrounds and societal standings, the women agreed on a name for the necklace (Jewelia), how to share "her" (each woman gets the necklace for four weeks a year), and why the "bling" factor was just the beginning (the necklace has raised thousands of dollars for local charities).

With this new sense of commuity, the women flourished: one recaptured her marriage; another found grace following the death of her sister, pursuing her love of singing; a third realized there was more to life than work. While not every woman's tale is strong, the unique circumstances that brought these women together and transformed their lives make it a book worth looking at. I mean who doesn't have $1,250 to look like a million. Or maybe I should say "didn't have." In this time of economic insanity, trot your library card down to the local branch and soak in some diamonds for a while--and maybe feel a little richer in the process!

Annie Freeman's Fabulous Travelling Funeral

The minute my friend Trish began gushing to me about this book, I thought "what a great plot!" (Is this how all aspiring writers think??) Not "sounds like a great book; I must get it." but "what a great plot." Silly, eh?

But no need to get lost in my interpretation. I think you'll agree from the title alone, Kris Radish's book is worth a look and serves up a great summer adventure to get lost in. At the risk of over-promising, Annie Freeman's Fabulous Travelling Funeral could be the new " Thelma and Louise" without the car scene at the end (I hope!).

The book begins when a good friend of Annie's receives a mysterious package. Annie has recently lost her battle with cancer and has clearly decided not to let a little thing like death interfere with her love of friends and a good time. Inside the box, the friend finds a pair of red sneakers filled with Annie's ashes. An enclosed note delivers Annie's final request: a traveling funeral, stretching from Sonoma, California, to Florida, and Manhattan to Seattle. Arrangements have been made for the most important women in her life to visit the most important places in her life to scatter her ashes in each location.

You can imagine what happens when these friends cum "pallbearers" come together to honor Annie's wishes, while trotting blindly across the country. In return for laying Annie to rest in her favorite spots, the friends get to share memories of Annie, laughing and grieving together, while working through their own long-buried secrets about the turning points in their lives.

I just love the premise of this book- the final adventure; the bringing together of friends and events from different parts of life; the opportunity to help yourself while helping someone else and of course the appeal of countering pain with love and laughter.

Enjoy your ride with the travelling show and imagine your own, if you dare.

Predictably Irrational

How a book with this title not warrant attention? When I saw it, I immediately thought: BOOK GROUP CHOICE, but then realized my pickin's are done for the time being. Maybe I'll have to read this on my own. (Note: this is not recommended to be read near your other half during certain times of the month. No need to provide more fodder for abuse.)

It seems lately I have been on a kick of "psychology" books. What's up with that?? Perhaps it's a subconscious nod to my (as yet unfulfilled) desire to go back to school for counseling. No matter, this subject matter sounds like good fodder for day-to-day navigating or cocktail party combat. It all feeds back to the same question: why DO we do the things we do??

Here's what the website of the book's author, Dan Ariely, had to say about the book:

Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet and exercise, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by? Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need? Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents? Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who haven’t? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace? By the end of this book, you’ll know the answers to these and many other questions that have implications for your personal life, for your business life, and for the way you look at the world. As a bonus you will also learn how much fun social science can be, and how to see more clearly the causes for our everyday behaviors, including the many cases in which we are predictably irrational. Another reviewer said: "A marvelous book that is both thought provoking and highly entertaining, ranging from the power of placebos to the pleasures of Pepsi. "

Enjoy the read, or at least understand what made you want to pick up the book up in the first place.

Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living

Ok, the "What I did last year" memoir category is getting a lot of competition these days, but what's not to like about this title? (It does inspire me to wonder how much different the story would have been with a title like: "Farewell My SUV.") In this ditty, NPR's Rural Guy vows to give up modern conveniences to move to a ranch in New Mexico where he'll grow all his own food--never mind that he has no practical experience or mechanical skills. At first blush it sounds a little like Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods) meets Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver). I realize too that I am getting a little Eco-happy here, but indulge me! I will try to break the trend soon!

Mustering all his resources and sense of humor, Doug Fine, also author of Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man, shrugs off his "Gilligan and Quarter Pounders" upbringing, trades his comfortable Thai-takeout-and-Netflix lifestyle and becomes an off-the-grid ranching goatherd. The result is a great tale of the spirit and challenge of truly living green.

Fine spent time travelling from Burma to Tajikistan as an environmental writer and NPR correspondent, but finally settled down after buying the Funky Butte Ranch in southern New Mexico. He decides to eat locally, use less oil and power his life with renewable energy, but the following months test Fine's humorous resolve to "prove that green Digital Age living was possible." He survives drought, biblical floods and crackpot UN-hating neighbors as he gradually becomes "solarized" and converts a gas-guzzling monster truck into a vehicle that belches the disconcerting aroma of Kung Pao chicken.

You can root for this dry witted renegade and his rosy green dream. Challenge yourself and your need to know with such probing queries as: Will his tiny "herd" of two rambunctious goats purchased on Craigslist turn Fine into the Mimbres Valley's ice cream man? Will this new singleton finally find love and satisfaction while raising organic rainbow chard and reducing his carbon footprint? Fine's funny struggle to become a better world citizen will entertain both the eco-aware, and those who doze peacefully in their home's formaldehyde fumes.

Baaaaaa.... (or is it Bleat?)