Read: Novella Carpenter - Farm City, The Education of an Urban Farmer

This is the book that I thought Manny Howard's "Empire of Dirt" was going to be. It's a funny story of a woman raising plants and animals in her backyard. Just like Manny Howard, except that she does it for the joy of it (rather than some sad mid-life crisis) and learns from her failures to build on her successes - to the point where she progresses from raising birds (chickens, ducks, goose, turkeys) to rabbits (dozens of them) to two full-size pigs! After finishing the book last night, I am more glad than ever that we bought a lovely pork shoulder roast at the farmer's market Sunday - today is the day to make that for dinner.

Read: Michael Ableman - On good land: the autobiography of an urban farm

The polar opposite of Manny Howard's 'My Empire of Dirt'. This is the history of a real working farm, albeit a fairly small one that is in the present day entirely surrounded by California suburbia. Michael Ableman doesn't start out knowing all the answers, but he patiently keeps trying, observing, and comes to have real insight into what it means to farm the way he does, and where he does. It's all one complex ecosystem, trying to mimic how nature works, in order to bypass the destructive processes of industrial-scale agriculture. At the same time his suburban neighbours come to have a surprising connection to the farm.

Read: Manny Howard - My empire of dirt: how one man turned his big-city backyard into a farm

This was a disappointing book. Manny Howard took on the challenge to grow/raise all his food for one month in his Brooklyn backyard as a magazine assignment. He doesn't seem to have any particular interest in the plants or animals themselves, he's just having a midlife crisis and doesn't know what else to do with his life. He flails about helplessly, which I suppose is meant to be comical, but I found it depressing - he never really succeeds at anything, and in the meantime his family life just about unravels. I kind of wish I'd never read it, and I don't often have that reaction.

Read: Nigel Dunnett and Noel Kingsbury - Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls

A great book. Ever since visiting Norway and seeing the green roofs there on both traditional and contemporary buildings, I've been curious about their construction and benefits. This is a comprehensive resource on all the current knowledge, while also pointing out future areas for research. I had mostly considered the insulation benefits, so one of the biggest surprises was finding out how much green roofs can reduce water runoff - a huge benefit in overburdened urban areas.

Read: Jacqueline Carey - Santa Olivia

I bought this book last year while visiting New York, and read it in one fast go over a couple of days. I left it behind for my friend to read, and then picked it up again when visiting this past weekend.

It's a pretty off-beat future story - the world has somewhat fallen apart after a flu epidemic, a US town that borders Mexico ends up caught in a military-controlled no man's land when the border is sealed. It starts off with an ordinary woman meeting an unusual man - a genetically modified man with great strength, speed, and no fear. You think it's going to be their love story, or maybe a government intrigue story, or an end-of-the-world society falling apart story, but it isn't. She gets pregnant, he flees the military, and it becomes the story of their daughter, Loup, who inherits her father's characteristics.

Growing up she's the force behind some pranks that convince the town that Santa Olivia (a legendary girl who brought peace during a war by bringing a basket of food to the soldiers) is real, and wreaking vengeance upon the evil and doing good deeds for the well-deserving. So you think it's going to be a Robin Hood kind of story, but it isn't. The pranks get too much heat from the military, so she backs down, just as her brother dies in a boxing accident. Next thing you know, it's a boxing story - she's taking on his legacy to fight the man who killed her brother.

And it's a good boxing story - something I never thought I had any interest in, but Carey makes it comprehensible and gripping. Along the way Loup falls in love with the most unlikely person in town, makes friends with another unlikely person, fights her fight, and then makes her escape. It's all set up for a sequel, which I see on the author's website is in the editing stage - I can't wait to read it, because it's pretty difficult to predict where the plot will twist with this character.

Want to Read: A.J. Jacobs - The Know-It-All

I was reminded that I've been wanting to read A.J. Jacobs' 'The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World' after seeing his blurb for Mary Roach's 'Stiff'. And, on top of that, my friend Jane friended him on Facebook after reading it. Plus, his year spent reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica is just the kind of crazy thing I'd want to do on my own year off, if I didn't already have such a long list of sabbatical goals. I'll have to settle for reading about him doing it.

Want to Read: Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

I've already read the first few chapters of a temporarily borrowed copy of Mary Roach's 'Packing for Mars: the curious science of life in the void'. So I'll have to track down another copy (I'm thinking bookstore, rather than library, since it's so new) in order to finish it off.

Read: Mary Roach - Bonk

I had read Mary Roach's 'Stiff' (the curious world of human cadavers) several years ago, and when visiting my friend Jenn this past weekend, we met up at The Strand so that she could purchase her newest book, 'Packing for Mars' (the curious science of life in the void). Which I then proceeded to monopolize for the rest of the weekend.

Since I didn't want to abscond with her most recent purchase at the end of the weekend, Jenn lent me 'Bonk' (the curious coupling of science and sex) instead. And, after an hour and a half waiting for my bus, and another four and a half hours riding it, I had finished the book.

Mary Roach has a knack for tying together wacky research findings and journalistic interviews into a fairly coherent narrative. Even when the connections are a bit wayward, she's funny enough to keep you reading along at a good, swift pace. And luckily the cover of the book is tame enough that I felt reasonably comfortable reading it while sitting next to the nice, mild-mannered mother of two beside me on the bus. Perhaps she never even picked up on its subject matter? For a book that's all about sex it really isn't very racy, but it certainly is fascinating.

Want to Read: Mark Changizi - The Vision Revolution

I started reading this book the other week at the bookstore, and got part ways through the chapter on why our eyes are positioned as they are - it puts forth a new theory that depth perception is all that important, but being able to track an object behind the visual clutter of leaves, twigs and grass is. It was a pretty radical rethinking, it had convincing experiments and demonstrations, and I'd like to read the rest of what he has to say.

Read: Connie Willis - Lincoln's Dreams

I had read this book a few years ago, and since it deals with events of the Civil War, it seemed like a good time to re-read it, as I tour Washington's many historical sites.

I'd forgotten how similar this book is in structure to her later novel, 'Passage'. It has the same uncanny feeling, with the central theme of the dreams as messages echoed in many of the other events and characters - different kinds of messages being interrupted, or going astray, or being difficult to interpret. It's a powerful layering of imagery - she hardly needs much of a plot to make for compelling reading, which is good - the book doesn't really end with much resolution of events, although it does bring up a revelation that casts a different light on the narrator's role.

'Passage' was very similar, having the characters misadventures in navigating through the hospital's labyrinth and the sinking of the Titanic echo the central story of near-death imagery as messages from the brain. 'Passage' was more successful in having warm, compelling characters and relationships, which allowed it to have an even more daringly unresolved ending.

There's nothing like a great novel to make the details of history come alive and have meaning - I'll be thinking of Tom Tita, Lee's cat that was left behind trapped in his house's attic, as I tour Arlington cemetery.