I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. In fact, the end of another calendar year rarely inspires me to introspection, despite the onslaught of it on every pair of lips and blog.com this time of year. December just doesn’t leave me inspired to “take stock”—that’s anniversary territory. But two years ago I did start one year-end tradition: The Click Clack Gorilla Year in Books.

I am a book geek. I read constantly. And because I like remembering where I was in my life when I read certain tomes, I keep a list in the back of my journal of every book that I finish. In 2009 a friend of mine shared her own list online, and I was inspired. I could share my list and start conversations with other book geeks about how our literary years had panned out! I could gaze upon a year’s worth of reading all in one neat little spot and feel smug about all the reading I had accomplished! I could pick favorites and least favorites and feel like I had a good reason to babble about them! A tradition was born. (You can check out the 2009 and 2010 years in books by clicking the hyperlinks.)

This year I decided to include audio books because I listened to so damn many of them (but I only included those that are unabridged readings and not those that are chopped up dramatized versions). In previous years I left them out because it somehow felt like cheating to include them. But then I realized that that was ridiculous.

This year I’d also like to invite you all to share your own reading lists. Especially all you bloggers reading—which is why I’m making this year’s Year in Books the first Click Clack Gorilla link carnival. So if you have a blog, post your own year in books post and add a link to it using the linky tool below. You don’t have to have kept and share a meticulous geek list like I do—I want to read your year’s book lists, hear about your favorite (and least favorite) books this year, or listen to your rants about digital readers and the deaths of independent book stores. Anything that sums up in the year in light of books and reading and literary geekery is welcome. And if you don’t have your own blog, I’d still love to hear from you in the comments. Because I love this stuff. LOVE IT. There is only one rule: if you link up to the party, please put a link back to this post somewhere in the post you’ve linked. Link link link linkity link. And now that I’m done overusing that word, onto the books.

Looking back over my list is a little like looking at a photo album of the year’s events. I remember reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide series while relaxing in Leofels for New Years with a gaggle of friends. I remember getting really into listening to books on cd while doing dishes and cleaning. I remember when Aunt and Uncle Sprinkles sent me the Song of Fire and Ice series and how I read one book after the other in the outdoor bed we set up for the hot weeks we had in April.

My mid-year reads remind me of getting pregnant when I see the onslaught of audio books I listened to because I was puking too much to handle actual reading followed by a ton of books about having babies. I remember buying books at the anarchist festival in Appelscha at a few titles, and I remember finally getting my ass to the Mainz library to get a membership at a few others. I remember resolving to read as many books from my to-read shelf before the baby comes as was humanly possible. My only regret is that I still haven’t managed to acheive last year’s goal of finally reading Kafka in the original German. Those books are still staring at me accusatorily from the shelf.

My favorites of 2011 were When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris, If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers by Margaret Killjoy, The Forest People by Colin Turnbull, and Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn. Das Labyrinth der Träumenden Bücher by Walter Moers and Eragon by Christopher Poalini were the most disappointing. And On the Road by Jack Kerouac wins by a landslide for straight-up most horrible. All in all I’d say it’s been a pretty good year. Happy 2012 everyone! And if the Mayans were wrong about the end of the world coming this year, see you in the twelves.

1. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (reread)
2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
3. Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams
4. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams
5. Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
6. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling (audio)
7. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling (audio)
8. Heraline Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a 19th Century French Hermaphrodite
9. Breakfast in the Ruins by Michael Moorecock
10. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (audio)
11. Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien (audio—I’m including the three as one because they aren’t unabridged)
12. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (audio)
13. The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino
14. The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino
15. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
16. PNIN by Vladimir Nabokov
17. Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (you can read a really well put review of this here)
18. Die 13 1/2 Leben Kapitän Blaubär by Walter Moers (audio)
19. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
20. A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
21. Issues 1-6 of The New Escapologist
22. A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
23. A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin
24. Mythmakers and Lawbreakers by Margaret Killjoy
25. Songs of the Doomed Gonzo Papers Volume 3: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
26. My Mother Wears Combat Boots by Jessica Mills
27. PM Press Outspoken Authors: Ursula LeGuin, The Wild Girls by Ursula LeGuin
28. Die Stadt der Träumender Bücher by Walter Moers (audio)
29. Eragon by Christopher Poalini (audio)
30. Dr. Bloodmoney by P.K. Dick
31. Coraline by Neil Gaimon
32. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (audio)
33. The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 3: Second Variety by Philip K. Dick
34. Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima
35. Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas
36. The Life Within by Jean Hegland
37. The Forest People by Colin Turnbull
38. Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray
39. I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson
40. Pippi Langstrumpf by Astrid Lindgren
41. Native Son by Richard Wright
42. Schrecksenmeister by Walter Moers (audio)
43. Pippi Langstrumpf geht an Bord by Astrid Lindgren
44. The Essential Hip Mama: Writing From the Cutting Edge of Parenting edited by Ariel Gore
45. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (audio)
46. Second Nature by Michael Pollan
47. All Fires the Fire by Julio Cortazar
48. Real Food for Mother and Baby by Nina Planck
49. Wise Woman’s Herbal for the Childbearing Year by Susan Weed
50. His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite
51. Rumo by Walter Moers (audio)
52. Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin
53. The Family Bed by Tine Thevenin
54. A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin
55. The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff
56. Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn
57. Das Labyrinth der Träumenden Bücher by Walter Moers
58. Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
59. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
60. How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
61. Foxfire Volume 1
62. The Birth Partner by Penny Simkin
63. What to Expect When You’re Expecting
64. Ensel und Krete by Walter Moers (audio)

Photo (cc) flickr user Shawn Calhoun

If you want to link up to the year in books party, click the tool below to add your link or to view the links others have added. For some reason my wordpress version doesn’t let me display them within the post. The party will be open for new link addage from now until January 9th at noon (in Germany).

There is really only one thing that is certain when it comes to good parenting, one thing that I think applies to everybody no matter who you are or what you believe or where you live: parenting requires flexibility. There are no rules and there is no One True Way. There is you and there is your baby and there are hundreds of angles to approaching the hundreds of unique situations and trials that you are going to find yourself facing. So of course it follows that the most important thing you can do to prepare yourself for the hatching of your own kidlet is to keep an open mind.

When friends or family respond to a parenting tactic that I’m into trying with criticism and/or with horror stories about that tactic failing for someone else, I tend to respond with something like a shrug. “Maybe it’ll work for us, and maybe it won’t,” I usually say. “But it’s where we’d like to start trying.” No use in making some sort of master plan, especially considering the fact that we haven’t even met the main player yet.

But knowing that I don’t need a master plan hasn’t stopped me from inhaling books about birthing and parenting and baby development. I bought My Mother Wears Combat Boots at an anarchist festival in Holland where we performed with Black Diamond before I knew for sure that I was pregnant. When we got back to Mainz, I took a pregnancy test—positive— and started reading right after I finished doing cartwheels at how quickly Peanut had decided to show up. I like to read, and—particularly during the part of being pregnant where I was spending all my time throwing up/laying in bed—I have a lot of time to read right now. When it turns out that Peanut is difficult on one or the other topics, I want to already have an arsenal of Things to Try Out in my head. As I don’t have a lot of parents in my group of friends, books were the first place I turned for stories from the front line.

This is a list of (almost) all of the books that I read during my pregnancy. They were all recommended to me by other gorilla parents, who I immediately began plying with questions about reading material that they had found helpful after finding out about Peanut. I’ve compiled a list (chronologically in the order I read them) and written mini-reviews for each of them so that some of you other gorilla-parent-readers can figure out where you want to start. And I’ve included my amazon links, in case you were planning on buying one of them anyway and wanted to help me earn another forty cents. Otherwise, off to the library with you! And off to the comments section with those of you who have any other books to recommend…

My Mother Wears Combat Boots // Jessica Mills

A great punk-rock-mom book. Starts with a month-by-month of pregnancy (half anecdote, half science), then talks anecdotally about a variety of topics you won’t find in many other tomes: touring with your band while pregnant and touring with children, planning childcare for demonstrations, and organizing child care co-ops, to name just a few. I really enjoyed how personal it was and how relevant the topics are for folks involved in any sort of punk/diy culture. You won’t find any advice about touring with infants in What to Expect, that’s for damn sure.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting // Heidi Murkoff , Sharon Mazel , Sharon Mazel and others

This book is supposed to be a classic, but I don’t think I would have bought it if it hadn’t shown up in a used book store downtown for 1 euro at just the right moment. I’ve found all of the information about what you can expect to happen to your body during each month of pregnancy useful, and I always felt instantly better about any new prego-mat symptoms for being able to quickly look them up and hear that they were normal. (When your hands suddenly start going numb all the time, you sometimes need someone to tell you that it doesn’t mean the baby is dead or you are about to be. It’s a good book for keeping hypochondriacal tendencies at bay, though for the serious hypochondriac it might have too many suggestions.)

BUT—and it’s a big but—I’ve found a lot of other things about the book offensive. It is written completely within the husband/wife paradigm, with nary a mention of the fact that some expecting mothers are single, some are partnered with women, some aren’t married, etc, etc. Fuck that. And fuck the section at the end about what your husband can do if he’s feeling jealous that the baby gets to spend so much time with “his boobs” once you’re breastfeeding. Seriously? So if you’re heterosexual, married, and think that a romantic relationship makes you the owner of someone else’s body, this book is for you. If you’re not, I’d probably just skip it—though if a copy falls into your lap, it can be useful if read with blinders.

The Essential Hip Mama: Writing From the Cutting Edge of Parenting // editor, Ariel Gore

I was expecting to love this book, and I didn’t. Hip Mama was a radical parenting zine for years and years (not sure if they’re still going, they have a kind of confusing web presence), so I was excited about reading a collection of punk rock mom stories ala My Mother Wears Combat Boots. But the content turned out to be a lot more abstract, a lot more “what does it mean to be a radical/’hip’/offbeat parent” then “this is how I dealt with Disney female stereotypes in parenting my daughter.” I keep telling myself that it might just be the kind of book I’ll enjoy more in a couple of years. (I think I would have preferred Hip Mama Survival Guide by the same. Anyone read it?)

Wise Woman’s Herbal for the Childbearing Year // Susan Weed

I LOVE THIS BOOK. Susan Weed is a pretty well-known herbalist, but this was the first of her books that I have read. It is full of herbal remedies for various pregnancy complaints, as well as herbal suggestions to help prepare your body for birth, help with starting labor, and taking care of yourself and your baby postpartum. Awesome. Ten stars. A plus. Seventy cheers.

The Birth Partner // Penny Simkin

At least ten different people recommended this book to me. And, though I haven’t quite made it to the end yet, I’d already recommend it to someone else. Great, straight-forward, easy-to-read guide to what happens (or could happen, in the case of a problem) during birth as well as how to be a good birthing partner. The line drawings of women being aided during labor made me cry the first time I saw them, and I’m planning on reading the whole thing again before Peanut’s debut in February.

Spiritual Midwifery // Ina May Gaskin

Ina May Gaskin was (is?) a midwife on the Farm, a rather famous Tennessee commune still in existence today. The caravan of folks who became the community’s first residents started delivering their own children while they were still on the road to their new home. Their positive, realistic, and woman-friendly approach to asssiting birth is not only beautiful, it has the caesarean rate among Farm births at 1.4 percent from a national average of 24.4 percent in the same year. Even their use of delivery instruments such as forceps is notably low (in comparison to hospital rates). All that is to say that this is a book written by a woman who knows from experience that birth can be an incredibly positive experience that can be safely assisted at home.

The majority of the book is made up of birth stories written by women who gave birth on the Farm. Part of Ina May’s goal in this book and in her birthing philosophy is to create a positive mythos surrounding birth to replace the aura of fear that is so often perpetuated. If you are afraid of giving birth, then this book might just make you feel better, make you believe that, yeah, birth can be a positive thing, intense though it might be. The end of the book is written for aspiring midwives, and covers a lot of details about pelvic sizes and baby positions that I skimmed, but which is probably very helpful to those more interested in science then anecdote.

Criticism: the phrases “it was heavy” and “it was psychedelic” are used a lot to describe giving birth—and those phrases simply don’t mean anything to me, besides sounding a little silly when used over and over again over hundreds of pages. I am not afraid of birth, and frankly, I wanted more gore. Not gore for gore’s sake, but gore for the sake of having a realistic picture of what I’m going to be going through during labor, of having some sort of concrete idea of what being in labor means. If you were to take all of these stories literally (and hadn’t read anything else) you might come away with the impression that giving birth is a lot like taking LSD. But criticism aside, I loved reading these stories, and I think the book is a total success in describing birth in a positive, woman-friendly way. I would recommend it to friends, though I preferred Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (see review below).

The Continuum Concept // Jean Liedhoff

This book was recommended to me by every anarchist parent who I asked for pregnancy reading suggestions and then some, and it is more of an anthropology book then a parenting book per say. In it Liedhoff shares her observations regarding child care from years spent living among several groups of Indians in South America. It is a compelling argument for attachment parenting, a fascinating study, and, I might add, a damn good argument in the anti-civ direction. Though based purely on observation and not on “science,” what she has to say just feels instinctively right and I have since read multiple books choc full of science that make exactly the same claims that she does (for example that baby wearing is good for your baby and that babies being included in all parts of life—though not in a way that makes them life’s exclusive focus—is good for your baby). Only problem I had with it was that at one point she attempts to “blame” homosexuality on bad parenting, which makes it sound like she thinks homosexuality is a negative result of a negative practice. Minus ten points for you Jane Liedhoff. Otherwise a really thought-provoking read.

Unconditional Parenting: Moving From Rewards and Punishment to Love and Reason // Alfie Kohn

This was the perfect book to read directly after finishing The Continuum Concept, as very similar attachment parenting principles are discussed, but this time with a heap of really well-researched evidence to support their use. It starts with a compelling point, one that felt so obvious once I read it but that had never occurred to me: most modern parenting tactics are based around the idea of raising an obedient child. (For example, usually when someone says a kid is “good” they are referring to a kid who does what it is told or is quiet.) Yet when you ask parents what traits they would like to pass down to their children, “obedient” is almost never among them. In Unconditional Parenting Kohn examines a lot of our current assumptions about good parenting and makes suggestions to help parents move from, as he puts it in the title, “rewards and punishments to love and reason.” Fascinating, thought-provoking (and occasionally even practical) read.

Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth // Ina May Gaskin

This book is, for me, the quintessential Ina May book. It has all of the positive sides of Spiritual Midwifery, with none of the annoying language that I mention in my review above. By and large, like Spiritual Midwifery, it is a book of at-home birth anecdotes, with a shorter concluding section about various complications that can occur.

So. Those are the books I’ve devoured so far. Almost. I also read Real Food for Mother and Baby by Nina Planck (which I already covered extensively here), The Family Bed (interesting, but not interesting or well-written enough to review in full), and I’m currently in the middle of The Baby Book by William Sears and Marth Sears and The Bilingual Family by Edith Harding Esch and Philip Riley. On the to-read list remain: Rad Dad: Dispatches From the Frontiers of Fatherhood by Tomas Moniz and Jeremy Adam Smith; The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding by Diane Wiessinger, Diana West, and Teresa Pitman; and Infant Potty Training: A Gentle and Primeval Method Adapted to Modern Living by Laurie Boucke.

What did you read during your pregnancy? (And what did you wish you had read?) I’m always looking for another good read, so leave me some titles in the comments.

Nine years ago I was a meat eater who subsisted largely on frozen hamburger patties that I cooked on my George Foreman grill. Later that same year I transitioned into pescatarianism (translation: a vegetarian that eats fish), then later became a vegetarian, a vegan, and finally returned to vegetarianism and then omnivorism (this time without the icky frozen burgers or the Foreman grill). I’ve learned a lot about nutrition and a lot about my body, but the most important conclusion that I’ve come to is that dietary choices are far too loaded and far too complicated to get judgmental or preachy about.

What you eat is intensely personal. You are made of what you eat. You have an intimate relationship with your food. Your food will see parts of your body that you will never glimpse. Your food is the reason you are alive. And every single body is different. Every body can handle some things better than others, or in different quantities, in different combinations, at different times. It is absolutely absurd to start talking about The One True Way when it comes to diet. And yet it seems to be one of humankind’s favorite topics to preach about. These days everybody is trying to sell you their own One True Dietary Way. Well, harumpf!

As you’ve surely noticed, scientists are constantly “proving” that something new is the Best Thing Ever or that something old Is Going to Kill Us All. With that sort of track record I see no reason to trust most of what I read on the subject, and when you stop to consider how easily statistics can be manipulated (or look into who’s paid for a study), well, you can throw a hell of a lot of “science” out the hatch.

There is some scientific evidence that I believe of course. When I hear that you can prevent scurvy by getting enough vitamin C, for example, I believe it because the science to support it has held out for quite a few years and because The Vitamin C Company did not pay for the studies to prove it. In fact, those are two questions I try to ask myself whenever confronted with new scientific evidence. How long has this information been around? And who conducted and paid for the research? (Another question that often comes soon after is how many studies from diverse sources have been conducted on the subject?)

In making my own dietary choices I combine what trustworthy scientific knowledge I can get my hands on (and I love to read about nutritional stuff, even if I can never remember the names of all the nutrients I’ve learned about to tell anyone about later) with my personal experiences with food. Am I right? Am I wrong? There’s no way to really tell for sure, but when I feel great, then I usually assume that I am on the right track. When it comes to choosing between believing my body and believing what a stranger has written on a piece of paper, I usually believe my body, and I think that you should too.

what is real food?

Real foods are whole foods. Foods that have not been industrially processed or fortified or refined. In her book Real Food for Mother and Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two, and Baby’s First Foods, Nina Planck defines it as follows: “Real food is old and it’s traditional.” What she means is that “real” foods are foods that humans have been eating for thousands (if not millions) of years. Raw diary products, the meat of animals who were not fed strange things like soy feed or bits of other animals, eggs, berries, nuts, leaves, and honey are all “real” food. (I keep putting the “real” in real food in quotations because it seems so ridiculous, almost redundant, to put those two words together. But when I think of what resides between the aisles of the Western world’s supermarkets, I am reminded that the distinction has become necessary. So I’ll cut it out with the quotation marks already.) By “traditional” Planck means foods prepared as humans have been preparing them for thousands of years (for example not pasteurized or powdered, but taken as is or prepared through processes like fermentation), before the intervention of factories.

The concept that eating real foods is good for me feels like a no-brainer. Of course eating an apple I picked or an egg from one of our chickens is better for me than eating something with an ingredient list I can only identify or even pronounce a quarter of. And the fact that thousands of years of human experience has shown us that these foods works makes me feel better than the latest study by Dr. Whoever does, tell you what. The arguments for eating real food appeal both to my logical and my instinctual sides. And they fit well with my growing interest in eating locally, eating organic, and thinking about a diet that could sustain me if all of a sudden the entire industrial complex fell apart humpty-dumpty style and I had to fend for myself. So there you have it: the abridged versions of Nikki’s Thoughts on Food and How My Diet Became What It Is Today, as well as The Reason I Am About to Recommend This Really Neat Book.

real food for mother and baby by nina planck

When I got pregnant my interest in what I was eating and why surged again in a way that it hadn’t since I’d first become a vegetarian. So, spurned on by my interest in whole foods, I ordered a copy of Nina Planck’s book Real Foods for Mother and Baby. And I absolutely loved it. Planck is matter of fact and unapologetic. She’s not finicky about local or organic, but about health and taste. She supports her position with scientific evidence, but she’s open-minded (the book is geared toward a diet including meat, but she always lists options for a vegetarian or a vegan to attempt to get the same nutrients) and very practical (which made me really love her advice about babies’ first foods). And she’s not afraid to admit that she makes exceptions herself—for the occasional pie with white sugar and white flour or a snack for a hungry and disgruntled toddler while out and about, for example.

Her perspective on food and dietary decisions, in fact, sometimes reminded me of my own. Take a look at this passage: “Recently, journalists, foodist, think-tankers, and the classes who chatter have gotten very excited about local and real food. A favorite story line goes something like this. This food is great! But it’s too expensive. And there are too many choices! People are terribly confused. Is organic better than local or the other way round? The same story runs again and again. I recommend you don’t read these articles. Once you have the information you need about food, there is no correct answer. There is only your taste and your point of view. Here’s mine.” I love me a non-fiction author willing to admit that theirs is not The One True Way, that even non-fiction is full of a lot of bias and opinion. And I love her writing style. Here is a book choc full ‘o facts and figures and charts, and it read faster than a sleezey romance novel. Here here, Nina Planck, here here.

Above all, Planck’s message is easy to understand. Unlike most of the dietary advice for pregnant women out there. Most of that advice speaks of numbers of servings of various nutrients and vitamins instead of in concrete language that is easy to understand at a glance. But not Planck. Her advice is some of the most concrete and easy-to-swallow that I have read so far. Take her break down of your needs by trimester: “You have about forty weeks to build a baby. Since we’re all steeped in the language of trimesters, let’s assume it happens in three acts. Your baby’s parts—her tiny liver, lungs, toes—are made of micronutrients called vitamins, so you hardly need to eat anything extra in the first trimester. Just eat well. If that’s difficult, take well-chosen supplements. You baby’s structure—his bone and muscle—are made of calcium and protein, so have plenty of both in the second trimester. You baby’s brain is made of fish, so it’s important to eat plenty of seafood at the end. Of course you’ll want to eat well all the while, and this cartoon of fetal development is certainly oversimplified. It may seem silly at first, but there is logic in it, and it worked for me.”

Many folks, particularly vegan folks, do not like Nina Planck. This is in large part due to an article she wrote for the New York Times a while back about a vegan couple who, having decided to feed their baby exclusively on soy milk, wound up with a dead baby. Planck wrote about why soy milk isn’t an awesome choice of baby food and how it is tragic that the parents didn’t have that information. Then her editor gave the article an offensively reactionary title along the lines of “Stupid Fucking Vegans Kill Baby with Soy Milk,” and vegans everywhere started cursing her name. But Planck addresses the issue (both of the article and of soy as a first food for babes) in Real Food for Mother and Baby quite adroitly and having experienced the meddling of editors myself, I for one am prepared to forgive her and order all the other books she’s ever written.

This post was a part of Fresh Bites at Real Food Whole Health, Freaky Friday at Real Food Freaks, Real Food 101 at Ruth’s Real Food, Monday Mania at The Healthy Home Economist, Fat Tuesday at Real Food Forager, and Real Food Wednesday at Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

I listen to Rumo by Walter Moers as I wash the dishes, and I remember. I remember buying a one-way ticket to Frankfurt, Germany. I remember that Frau Cole* met me at baggage claim in a long skirt and that I, befuddled by the change of time and place, didn’t even flinch when she introduced me to the family’s driver. I remember buying a copy of Faust at the bookstore between the Zeil and the River Main to indulge my fantasies of reading it in the original (it is still sitting on my to-read shelf). And I remember asking the Cole’s oldest son to recommend a good German science fiction or fantasy book for me to try reading. He gave me Rumo.

I read the first couple of pages. With a dictionary. Over the course of several weeks. Six years later (my six year anniversary in Germany was yesterday), and Walter Moers is one of my favorite authors. I have read all five of the books he has written about the fictional continent Zamonien at least once, and listened to them many times more. Listening to the first chapter of Rumo—the same chapter that I struggled with and ultimately gave up on six years ago—is a water mark of how far I’ve come. When I arrived I would have said (and did say) that I could speak German. And I could. But the more you know, the more you realize that you don’t.

When a friend tells you “You’ve changed,” it tends to be with a note of accusation, as if to change is to become worse. Though it sometimes can be (generally a matter of perspective), I tend to think of it as positive and thrive on it. And there is an easy way to tell the difference between the good changes and the bad ones. When a change feels false, like a betrayal of that ephemeral thing we call our “self,” it is probably a negative thing. But when it feels like a journey that takes you closer and closer to living as that “self,” it is positive, an evolution, a boon. In the Dictionary of Gorilla to change is to learn and to grow and to find fulfillment, however temporary.

There is also a brand of change that I wouldn’t categorize either way—situational changes as generally irrelevant as a change of clothes, circumstancial things that one grows accustomed to and internalizes. And the last six years have had their share of both. Changes in taste, in outlook, in habit, in lifestyle, in friendships, in habit, and in behavior. I am more outspoken, yet more reserved in talking to strangers. I have let the cultural mores that I liked rub off on me, and the rest I gaze at in wonder, glad that I can still look around this place and find something that feels as new and different as it did on the day I arrived.

*Name changed to protect the guilty, of course. You can read more about the Cole’s and my adventures au pairing for their five-year-old twins by clicking here.

**Nope, those stars aren’t attached to anything in the text. But I wanted to tell you a little more about Rumo. Rumo is a book about a dude (he’s actually this crazy breed of walking, talking, badass-fighting dog that lives in Zamonien, but that is really besides the point) who starts his life a kidnappee of cyclopses who only eat creatures that are still alive, escapes, falls in love, and has a lot of adventures in the above and underworlds. Though I hesitate to call it “fantasy”—Moers books simply feel too all-encompassing to be reduced to just one genre—if you like fantasy, you’ll probably like Rumo. (Or adventure, or romance, or or or.) There are fantastical creatures, but it isn’t about a bunch of dudes with swords. There are trolls, but there aren’t any elves. And there are a lot of dark, deeply disturbing adventures. In short, it’s fantastic. I’ve also written about my all-time favorite Walter Moers book, The City of Dreaming Books, here.

First the spaghetti squash went, shriveling into a ghastly shadow of their former selves, and the tomatoes quickly followed. Was it the rain? Insects? Mold? Despair? Suicide?

For anyone interested in helping me diagnose my plants, it happened like this: one morning I woke up and found all of the plants had wilted. There were brown blotches on the stems, and the fruits had turned hard and brown.

Just as the tomatoes went, I started reading Michael Pollan’s book about gardening: Second Nature. I wasn’t expecting it to be a page-turner—who expects any book about gardening to be a page turner?—but it really was. More than a gardening manual (though you might pick up a tip or two of you’re paying careful attention), it is a philosophical workbook for those interested in tending vegetables, lawn, or forest.

With a section devoted to each season, Pollan examines questions about morality, metaphor, and culture as they relate to gardening. Fascinating questions, and I dare say, rather important. Between the questions about the appropriate level of intervention in a garden (or a park or a preserved forest) and musings on the stories trees have to tell us is the notion that humans should stop considering themselves as opposed to nature, as outside of it. Because, as Pollan often points out, if we are to find a way to preserve human life on this planet, we are going to need to develop an entirely new relationship to it, to learn to see ourselves as part of it and it as a part of us.

Second Nature is a book of questions and interesting conversation starters. Even if—or perhaps especially because—his style of gardening is so different than mine. For example, in a discussion of weeds, Pollan’s list of adversaries mirrors almost exactly the list of plants I’d like to meet in the surrounding land. Though he at first attempts to let weeds live alongside what he’s planted, when he comes to the conclusion that it is his responsibility to get rid of the weeds (in order to enrich the lives of the plants he has planted) he does so without ever even briefly mentioning (noticing?) how useful the plants he’s decided to oust can be.

Later in the book, he plants an “ornamental herb garden” whose contents I see as anything but ornamental. And yet it does not seem to occur to him that he can actually use the plants whose appearance and scent so please him. But this is an intelligent man we are talking about, so maybe he (or his editor) just didn’t feel like talking about harvesting rosemary and sage.

But reading Second Nature remained exciting, providing me with questions to chew on while I’m ripping the corpses of my tomatoes and squash out of my own small garden bed and hope for what will inevitably be a completely different season next year.

This post was a part of the Garden Life Series at No Ordinary Homestead.

I feel like this should be a time of getting things done. Of finishing things that I won’t have much time for once the Peanut arrives in 3-D. And instead I’m laying in bed, my creativity squashed by physical misery, watching the rain outside of the window like a cat. So the obvious task to tackle was the reading of all the books on my to-read shelf. And because I’m a book geek and because a number of you showed interest when I posted the last “year in books” post, I thought I’d give you a run down of the fodder keeping my synapses firing in these slow, rainy months. Perhaps you have read some of the same and can offer me your thoughts in the comments. Someone has to help me keep this brain from turning itself off completely. Otherwise both it and this blog are going to dissolve into mush.

My mission started with Volume Three of The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick. Wow. Wow. Did I say “wow”? I’ve read almost all of Dick’s novels, but had, until very recently, never delved into his short stories. (For those of you unfamiliar with his work, he writes science fiction with a very critical-of-the-status-quo bent.) If you could say I admired him before, now you could say that I’ve sold him my soul. Short story writing was clearly his forte. And to think I’d ignored this part of his work until now! And all because I don’t like how, once I’ve finally fallen under the spell of a short story, it’s already over and generally avoid them. (This from a writer and reader of blogs. Ha!)

Simultaneously I attempted to read A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen, a task at which I failed miserably. I like Jensen’s work and agree with much of what he has to say, but I find that I currently cannot handle that which is devoid of hope. And if anything makes me feel hopeless it is reading about the downward spiral of environmental devastion being wrought on the world this very second, which is kind of what all of his books are about. I feel nauseaus often enough lately as it is.

Instead I’ve been delving into novels, the first significant pause in a long period of nonfiction-based reading and ode to my desire to escpae the dreary present. I’ve read Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas (captivating and full of interesting questions), listened to I, Robot by Isaac Asimov and Eragon by Christopher Poalini (Asimov was alright, Poalini was irritating), and re-read Coraline by Neil Gaimon (charmingly grotesque). I then moved on to Pippi Langstocking by Astrid Lindgren (fantastic anarchistic children’s books) and Native Son by Richard Wright (a captivating story and a disturbing reminder of how fucked up the racism of the mid 21st century was). And now? Now I am anxiously sitting by the mailbox, waiting for several boxes of books that will make the task of finishing the to-read shelf futile, but even more fun.

What are you reading?

Book luddites unite! I have a new button, and you can have it too if you’re a printed-book lover, just click on the image below for the code. It doesn’t do anything except to look pretty and to help you say “I like books, wohoo!” even louder than before.

I am not one of those people who claims that reading words on paper is somehow more valuable than reading words on a screen. I just like reading words on paper. A lot. And I especially like the way that books, when I am finished with them, are capable of bio-degrading, or becoming a fire starter in my woodstove. Unlike the plastic and metal parts of my computer/phone/Kindle/whatever. When the world goes to shit those aren’t going to be useful at all.

Of course, industry can rain on just about any parade, and the book printing and binding industry are using nasty chemicals (that tend to end up floating around in all sorts of places where they shouldn’t be), and when I think about what a world post-industrial-civilization would look like, I often wonder what would become of the printed word. I have a friend intent on arming himself and defending the public library from looters, if it comes to that (ever read A Canticle for Lebowitz*?), and I know that if we lived in the same place in a collapse situation I’d be right there beside him.

That being said I can’t imagine that mass-market printing would continue in any form after a big economic crash or environmental disaster. (Though I bet there would be tiny pockets of steam punks running big bulky presses and laughing at the rest of the world from beneath their monocles and well-brushed top hats.) I can imagine enormous public libraries whose books are painstakingly re-copied onto paper handmade from the contents of this century’s trash bins. I can imagine traveling tellers, and evenings spent listening instead of reading. I can imagine printing very small runs on hand-run presses, and I can imagine the crafts handwriting and oral storytelling becoming highly valued art forms. And though the thought of having to become more social than I currently am in order to continue my trade, a world with neither Kindles or mass-produced books doesn’t sound all that bad.

Where do you stand on the debate about the printed word? Are you newly in love with your Kindle (depsite previous misgivings)? Or are you a printed-book fetishist, like me? Would you be beside us, defending the public library from the hands of the angry mobs so that humans could continue to learn from their mistakes and their successes in a world lacking the electricity to run electronic reading devices?

*In case you haven’t read it, A Canticle for Liebowitz is a post-apocalyptic novel that takes place thousands of years after humans destroy most of the world with bombs (nukes, if I recall correctly) and send the world catapulting back into the dark ages. After all the destruction, the masses get very upset with the scientists of the world for having made it all possible; professors are lynched and libraries are burned.

PS Next week I’ll be getting back to doing regular dumspter finds of the week on Wednesdays; I’ve got a heap of finds waiting to be photographed at home and a new submission from Nashville, TN.

When I was a kid I subscribed to the magazine Ranger Rick. Though I have no more than a general recollection of the magazine’s contents (nature and animals and “saving the environment”) I can only assume that reading it every month had some effect on my environmental consciousness because when I finished each issue I would feed the pages to the dog. This, I thought, was a way to recycle paper much more satisfyingly direct than sending it off to the recycling plant. Feed the dog a page, get a pile of poop in the garden. Our dog also liked to eat paperclips and thumbtacks, but they came out the other side intact, which, perhaps, provided an even more important lesson in environmental consciousness. I once fed the same dog an entire issue of National Geographic in one sitting.

Since then I’ve dabbled in magazine readership without making any lasting connections. I’ve read my share of Rolling Stone and CMJ standing beside the racks at Borders. I have a pile of Rolling Thunder issues on my shelf that I’ve never read. I have a squeaky new subscription to Yes! Magazine because I’d like to write for them. And tragically, but predictably, as a teenager I had a subscription to Seventeen, which I read religiously and then removed from my life with equal intensity after finding myself thoroughly over pubescent acceptance mongering.

And then I found The New Escapologist. The New Escapologist! I read their blog and I ordered an issue of their magazine. That issue came in the mail, and after I read it I wanted to scream their name from the rooftops. THE NEW ESCAPOLOGIST! It’s a magazine so good that I immediately went to their website, ordered every issue they’ve ever published AND subscribed. I may not agree with every article (this month’s issue is about Bohemians, with whom I have my qualms), but every article is brilliantly written. That’s right, BRILLIANTLY. Intelligent writing, humor, and articles covering everything from beards to Bohemian escapology? Please excuse me while I retire to the powder room for a cold shower.

What is Escapology?
It’s about deftly avoiding the potential traps of modern life: debt, stress, unrewarding work, bureaucracy, marketing, noise and over-government. It’s about embracing freedom, anarchy and absurdity. It’s about overcoming miserliness, passive-aggression, mauvaise foi and submission. Escapology asks you to consider the circumstances in which you would most like to live and encourages you to find a way of engineering them.

Which is to say, these folks are Gorillas. Sure, we have our differences, but I like that. Anarchy, absurdity, and freedom? Now those are three words I can live by. Tattoo them on your chest, put them in your pipe and smoke ‘em, and visit their website immediately and order a subscription of your own.

Who knew there were children’s books about dumpster diving? Well, amazon.com did, and when I was browsing other trash books last summer, their mind reader recommendation robots suggested that I take a look at The Dumpster Diver by Janet S. Wong. Expecting (fearing) a treatise on diving much like what I’m working on this very second, I was surprised and pleased to find out that it’s an adorable story for those still knee high.

The book itself is large, colorful, and priced far too heftily for most dumpster-diver’s budget’s at $16.99. But the story is lovely, and I think any author who can convince a publishing company to print a book about Steve, the friendly neighborhood dumpster diver deserves my support (or that of your local library, who will probably order the library a copy if you fill out a request form).

The plot revolves around a hobby dumpster diver (Steve) who likes to check out the neighborhood trash with a few local kids. Together Steve and the kids build neat stuff out of the junk that Steve fishes out of the trash, the crotchety old lady next door calls Steve lazy and no-good for diving instead of working more so he can buy new things, and, in a strangely negative turn of events, Steve gets hurt when a trash pile collapses on him while he’s crawling around one of the dumpsters.

But, everyone lives happily ever after after all, the kids decide to collect their neighbors useful junk before they throw it away, and they build Steve a wheelchair out of their dumpster booty. Cute story for burgeoning dumpster divers and great copy-cut-and-paste flier material for freegan events.

And remember, if you decide to buy this book and do it by clicking through this link, I get hot cash! Well, ok, it’s more like cold pennies, but hey, they add up too.

And so the year draws to a close, and I continue the one tradition you can rely on here at Click Clack Gorilla: a list of the books I’ve read over the past year. What can I say, I’m a book geek, and I keep a list. For any other book geek bloggers reading this, I’d love to see your own list. If you make one, link up in the comments below, pretty please with a frozen cherry on top.

This year was rather P.K.Dick-heavy, as I reread my entire collection of his works. Best of the year were The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins (fucking amazing-worthy of at least a hundred exclamation points, but I will save your eyes) and Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. What can I say, I love apocalyptic fiction. Worst of the year were Valis and The Divine Invasion by P.K. Dick and The Worthing Saga by Orsen Scott Card, each of which I had to force myself to finish and which I intend never to read again.

Last year most of my reading list got lost among too-oft switched journals, and I had a humble total of 26 titles. Apparently this year I have shunned most social contact in favor of pressed wood pulp and words written by strangers (though I do know the author of several titles on the list—woot woot!) with a total of 56.

Here’s to a new year in books! If I was the type to make New Year’s resolutions, and I am not—I prefer to make lists that I will never complete all year long—mine might be to finally read Kafka in the original German and to get my own damn book finished and onto the shelf already. Here, here!

1. What We Leave Behind by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay
2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (reread)
3. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin
4. A Canticle for Lebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
5. Der Schrechsenmeister by Walter Moers
6. You Who Hear Tell Others by Finn
7. Ronja Räubertochter by Astrid Lindgren
8. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
9. Travels with Lizbeth by Lars Eighner
10. Ghosty Men by Franz Lidz
11. Mongo: Adventures in Trash by Ted Botha
12. Vulcan’s Hammer by P.K. Dick (reread)
13. When in Germany, Do as the Germans Do by Hyde Flippo
14. Garbage Land by Elizabeth Roythe
15. The Bells in Their Silence by Michael Gorra
16. Going Green by Laura Prichett
17. Those Crazy Germans by Steve Sommers
18. Man in the High Castle by P.K. Dick (reread)
19. Radio Free Albemuth by P.K. Dick (reread)
20. Counter Clock World by P.K. Dick (reread)
21. The Simulacra by P.K. Dick (reread)
22. Clans of the Alphane Moon by P.K. Dick (reread)
23. A Scanner Darkly by P.K. Dick (reread)
24. Hardcore Zen by Brad Warner
25. We Can Build You by P.K. Dick (reread)
26. I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrere (reread)
27. Now Wait for Last Year by P.K. Dick (reread)
28. Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
29. Rocket Queen 2 (zine)
30. Comet Bus 52 (zine) by Aaron Cometbus
31. The Worthing Saga by Orsen Scott Card
32. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
33. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
34. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
35. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
36. Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien
37. Into the Forest by Jean Hegland
38. Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody
39. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
40. The Telling by Ursula LeGuin
41. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by P.K. Dick (reread)
42. Valis by P.K. Dick
43. The Divine Invasion by P.K. Dick
44. Dwelling Portably 1990-1999 by Bert & Holly Davis
45. Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins
46. Time Out of Joint by P.K. Dick
47. Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and With (Almost) No Money by Dolly Freed
48. Land of Lost Souls by Cadillac Jack
49. Wild Ducks Flying Backwards by Tom Robbins
50. Big Hands by Aaron Lake Smith (zine)
51. Lost in Deutschland by Brian Melican
52. Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
53. Bad Habits by Cristy C. Road
54. Indestructible by Cristy C. Road
55. Xenophobe’s Guide to the Germans
56. Stinking Creek: The Portrait of a Small Mountain Community in Appalachia by John Fetterman

What were your favorite books this year? I always love me a good recommendation…