Category: nonfiction

#56 – #57 Crush It & The Tipping Point

There’s nothing new that I can possibly blog about Malcolm Gladwell‘s The Tipping Point. It’s a book that’s back in the Amazon.ca top 100 today, I’m guessing because of all the Nook news, and it’s simply one of those titles that you imagine everyone to have already reviewed, if not read. So when I was browsing around the Vancouver Public Library sale last Thursday trying to ward off the persistent stomach butterflies (there because of the whole public speaking element to happen the next day; bleech), I was pleased to find a battered copy of The Tipping Point from the Kitsilano Branch for a whopping $0.55.

The central thesis of Gladwell’s book, that little “things” can lead to sweeping change, seemed particularly relevant reading for the days leading up to and passing by Book Camp. The iconic work looks at all of the social conditions that surround a product, event or action “tipping” into an epidemic. From smoking to book sales, the book comes to some pretty cool conclusions about the power of word of mouth. Words that we toss around all the time, like connectors and mavens, this theory of something “tipping” has become part of the everyday business lexicon. And it’s easy to see why.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! isn’t as intellectual nor as everlasting as The Tipping Point, but it’s a really good example of putting Malcolm Gladwell’s theories into action. Vaynerchuk grew his business exponentially by investing in his own personal brand, used the “free” tools of the internet to grow it, and then tipped over into the uber-successful range by simply working hard and “crushing it.” It’s a veritable how-to manual for his kind of success and a good handbook for anyone somewhat curious about social media.

I like how both books focus on finding/offering solutions instead of lamenting the demise of the “old” ways of doing business. Vaynerchuk’s work isn’t necessarily innovative; it’s stuff people have been doing on the internet for as long as the web’s been around. But what he managed to achieve goes above and beyond how everyday people use the tools, which is impressive. Also, he’s driven to succeed in ways that, yes I’m going to say it, regular people may not be — he’s a born Salesman, a picture perfect Connector, and proof positive that word of mouth absolutely works to drive community, which in turn drives sales, which in turn allowed his endeavours to tip into an epidemic.

The stickiness of Gladwell’s book versus Vaynerchuk’s can’t really be compared. I dogeared piles of pages of the former and returned my copy to work the morning after I read the latter. One’s a book that would benefit from repeated reads and the other I’d recommend as a handbook to anyone looking to build their brand through social media. All the way through The Tipping Point, I tried to define myself in terms of the different personalities Gladwell presented. All the way through Crush It!, I wondered how much coffee Vaynerchuk must drink in a day to get himself out there to the extent that he does — two very different intellectual exercises on my part.

Regardless, there were lessons from both books that I’d apply to my everyday and my work life.

1. That you need to pull the best, most relevant ideas from everything you read, fiction to non, and everything in between, and apply this learning to your life. Maybe it’s just in the sense that you enjoyed something and want to pass it on, but that your passion, about anything, can be contagious. And that’s not a bad thing.

2. Pay close attention to what goes on around you. You might not think you have anything in common with how “cool” becomes relevant, but within that, you’ll discover what’s authentic and what’s rubbish — especially in areas of your own expertise.

3. Don’t be afraid of people. Or situations. Or of doing things that might make you uncomfortable (read: running a seminar in front a large group of people). Ahem. YES, I realize how ironic this is coming from shy, scaredy-cat me.

4. Read more nonfiction.

5. Getting people excited about reading isn’t just about selling books. For me, it’s about the survival of our culture, whether it’s pop or otherwise, it’s a record of who we are as a people at the time. It’s necessary. It’s important. It’s valuable and it’s a part of our survival. Art matters. Fighting about it won’t get us to our goals any quicker.

The Money Books (#s 46, 47)

For those of you who know the real me, the non-virtual Deanna, you know that I’m a worrier. I fret a lot. I spend a lot of sleepless nights pondering things as random as why I’m so obsessed with True Blood this season and how on earth I’m ever going to finish the book I’ve been writing the last few years. A recurring theme in my sleepless nights is listmaking. I find that if I get up and write down a list of all the things I can actually do to assuage whatever is bothering me at that moment, I can actually get some sleep. One of the main things I consistently write down has to do with money: paying bills, managing accounts, moving things around, and debt.

Debt and I have quite a history together. For years I thought of debt as free money. I thought of credit cards as a means of filling in the gaps. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t really taught proper money management as a kid (and that’s not the fault of my parents; it just wasn’t something we discussed and then there was a lot of tragedy that sort of took over…). I was in my early 20s when I truly started to understand how money works. And with that understanding came a glimpse of a day when I wouldn’t have to worry about it all the time. I learned that it’s not just important to be in control of your financial situation but it’s also necessary to understand the true cost of things.

So, over the years I’ve read a number of money-related books: Suze Orman, David Bach, and many, many more. These books all pretty much say the same thing: buy a house, keep up with extra mortgage payments, invest wisely, blah de freaking blah. It’s the same advice packaged in fancier ways: Women and money. Going green and your money. Getting married and your money. Yawn.

I didn’t need any more “whys.” What I needed were “hows.” Enter Kerry K. Taylor‘s excellent 397 Ways to Save Money. When I read this book in manuscript form before we published it, I honestly sat at my desk, skipped lunch, and then wrote an exuberant note to her editor about how smart and savvy I thought it was. It’s a little bit of the “whys” but it’s mainly pages upon pages of good tips about how to save money. How and when to reduce, reuse and recycle. How to shop smarter. How to make your resources stretch further and longer so that you aren’t looking down the barrel of double and triple-digit credit card debt month after month.

Then I learned we were publishing a book called Debt-Free Forever by Gail Vaz-Oxlade. I’d never heard of her nor had I watched ‘Til Debt Do Us Part (both situations I have now rectified). I read it, too, in manuscript form and am only going to say that it’s changed my outlook entirely on budgeting (always thought it was more trouble than it’s worth) and living within your means (what’s the difference if all the bills get paid anyway).

I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about money in general and what it means to my life. Truly, it’s a means to an end; it’s a way for us to finish the house but, it, inherently, doesn’t have any value. What do I mean? Well, it’s not worth fighting over. It’s not worth worrying over, and it’s certainly not worth killing yourself (or others) for. Over the course of my reading, I’m going to share some of the “revolutions” I’m trying to make over the next little while. Again, if I share the list, I’m going to stick to it, right?

1. Use what I buy. Like so many people who work above a Shopper’s Drug Mart and down the street from Sephora and Holt Renfrew, I’ve got cupboards full of make up, creams, gift baskets, foot massagers, shampoos, etc. I keep buying more and more — it’s on sale, I’m there, I like the smell, and I used them, but our shower’s all clogged up with half-empty plastic (natch) bottles. I’ve vowed to use up every single last bit of something before buying something new. That includes all the samples I’ve been saving for goodness knows what and the umpteen travel kits I’ve bought from Dermologica over the years. Good for the environment and good for the wallet. Although if you see me wandering around with fuzzy, dried out hair and clumpy mascara, you know why.

2. Use up my gift certificates. I don’t know why I hoard these things but I do. I think that it’s not a good idea to spend them so I’ve got them tucked away into all corners of things. Redeem all my points for more certificates and use up those too? The best thing I’ve done? Cash in HBC rewards points for MAC makeup and Levi’s jeans. Oh, and a new coffee maker for the cottage. All FREE. Well, sort of free because we have so many points from renovation costs that we’ve cashed in on HBC gift certificates. Um, also, did you know you can use your AirMiles points for a TTC pass? Yeah, that’s what I’m doing in October…

3. Wear what I buy. See #1 above. This one’s harder because I’ve lost a pile of weight due to the almost-dying appendicitis nightmare and none of my clothes fit. Like, none of them. It’s a good thing I own some belts.

4. Use cash. I’ve put my RRHB and I on a budget that we’re going to try to stick to over the next few months while we try to make a pile of payments on the renovation debt. It’s not easy. And it’s not something we’ve EVER done before.

5. Engage in some serious staycation activities. We did some of this at the cottage the other weekend when we went to Petroglyphs Provincial Park. Even though gas isn’t cheap, I put a little extra in our transportation budget so we can take advantage of fun things we can do within driving distance. Also, we’re lucky because we have a cottage. That doesn’t mean we won’t take a vacation, it just means that we’ll be finding some new and interesting things to do that don’t involve spending $100.00 at the movies. This will be hard. I love to go to the movies.

6. Garden more. Both indoors and out. It’s hard to do during the winter, I know, but I’m already planning our garden for next spring/summer because we ate so much of our own homegrown food this year that makes the effort worth it. What I won’t do? Spend obsessive amounts of money on more and more seeds.

7. Pay all our bills on time, including our taxes. I’m usually pretty good at this but tend to let the taxes drift and drift and drift…

8. Take care of the important but really boring things like RRSPs, wills and other financial planning. I always put these off as “oh, I’ll get around to it one day.”

9. Try to find ways to write more for me. This isn’t necessarily money-related but it does go to the whole idea of the true cost of the things in your life. The more I write the more potential I have for becoming a “real” writer one day. The more I write the less it becomes a hobby and more the job that I’ve always wanted it to be.

10. Become more crafty. And not how the Beastie Boys meant it. But more like discovering the girl that grew up making pinecone decorations and sewing. This will also be hard. I feel as though I am terribly untalented in the crafty areas. It’s not a skill I inherited from my truly crafty and wonderfully creative mother.

#21 – The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Also #s 22, 23, 24 & 25)

Somehow, I feel like starting off this post being hyper-critical of myself: I should really be blogging more. I should keep writing even though I don’t feel like it. I should do a lot of things. I know that Michael Pollan isn’t purely being self aware with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but the introspective elements mixed in with his philosophical discussion of ‘a natural history in four meals’ definitely makes you think. The book hums along like any good documentary should — it’s rich in investigative journalism, full of interesting points of view about the current state of the food industry, and never fails to try and observe a situation from every angle possible.

Broken into three sections (although subtitled ‘four’ meals), Industrial, Pastoral and Personal, The Omnivore’s Dilemma unearths many real and even some invented debate (his whole rationale for eating meat in the third section I found a little hard to stomach) behind how food is brought to the table. The first section of the book, where Pollan discusses and takes apart the industrial food chain, straight from a fast-food meal eaten in the car to the fact that by-products of corn are in just about every processed item in a grocery store, was utterly captivating. One part Fast Food Nation, another part 100-Mile Diet (which I haven’t read all of yet), the sheer force by which farms have become industrialized combined with the unknown and ever-reaching ramifications made me hunger even more for the weather to heat up so I could get seeds in the ground for vegetables.

I also found Pastoral, where Pollan visits and works on a farm that lets animals be animals by having developed a very real, yet still domesticated (is that the right word?) ecosystem that not only feeds the people who live there, but also supplies many restaurants and customers in the area with fresh meat and vegetables, compelling. Never doubting the value of farmers, especially ones practicing organic and more ethical ways of reaping value from the land, The Omnivore’s Dilemma points out dramatic differences between industrial farms and smaller, independent outfits.

The third section, as I mentioned above, lagged for me — probably because, while notable, the idea of hunting and gathering my own food (that which I have not cultivated in my backyard), honestly has me stumped. I couldn’t imagine heading out into the woods with a rifle and shooting a wild pig. Yet, I can understand why Pollan felt it necessary, especially with the level of scholarship around which he answers the question: “What should we have for dinner?” Also, I really hate mushrooms. Perhaps this isn’t something I should hold against the book.

All in all, I spent much of Easter weekend reading this book. I had to pause for a moment because we had our Fall 2009 sales conference (for which I read two of the best fiction titles I’ve read in a long, long time: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter, #s 22 & 23; and one truly fantastic YA novel called The Amanda Project, #24) and there was much reading to be done (and shared), but managed to get right back into it once we were through last Friday. There is no way that I will ever think of corn in the same way again. There is no way I’ll think of tofu in the same way again. There is no way, in fact, that I’ll think of dinner in the same way again, if I’m being honest. And isn’t that a most powerful thing for a book to do — take a mundane and utterly human aspect of one’s life and turn it inside out.

Annnywaay. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been under the weather, mentally, physically, but I’ve managed to keep the garden going (loads of flower seedlings coming up; everything that needed to be planted before the last frost is in), and keep my head above the metaphorical water enough to still read. Writing, however, still remains a challenge.

Oh, and #25? I finished up Marjorie Harris’s delightful Ecological Gardening and learned many, many good tips. Not the least of which was a) that I shouldn’t be watering at night (oops!), b) that I should really figure out a way to compost and c) that companion planting (nasturtiums here I come!) is really my friend.

READING CHALLENGES: I’m adding The Omnivore’s Dilemma (which is actually the only book I’ve completed) to The Better You Read, The Better You Get Challenge. One down, nine to go. It’s going to be a long year of self-improvement, I think.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I’m halfway through Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die (Buffy is playing the lead in the film adaptation; I’m excited to see what she does with it, although I’m finding it hard to imagine how they crafted dialogue out of the author’s heady narrative).

#20 – Truth and Beauty

Already a fan of Ann Patchett, I knew I would probably enjoy her memoir, Truth and Beauty. When my friend Emma at work told me, no, insisted that I read it, I ordered up a copy and started it on the ride home from work last Friday. Um, I finished the book at about 10 AM on Saturday. Patchett, who befriends a gregarious, infamous girl from her college, Lucy Grealy, while both attend the infamous Iowa Writer’s Workshop, writes about their “epic” (as the front cover blurbs) relationship.

Lucy Grealy, whose memoir, An Autobiography of a Face, propelled her to literary stardom before she succumbed to the lasting tragedy of a childhood illness, which resulted in thirty-eight surgeries, a lifetime of pain (literal and psychological), and a terrible drug addiction. People were simply attracted to Lucy — they all knew who she was, and she gathered up friends and acquaintances, and filled up her world with them. Even though a rare form of Ewing’s sarcoma left her face permanently altered, Lucy pushed on through life, scars showing inwardly and outwardly. While tragic, the point of the book, from my perspective anyway, was to truly exhalt the idea of friendship, how in some cases it simply pulls someone into your life forever.

While both writers struggle to start their careers at the beginning of the book, Truth and Beauty also narrates their successes. For Patchett, it came upon the publication of her fourth novel, Bel Canto; for Grealy’s, it arrived suddenly with her memoir (and not from her poetry, per se). The two women support each other, derive inspiration from one another, and work extremely hard for many of the same goals (fellowships, etc.).

The most affecting part of the book for me, obviously, was Lucy’s struggle with illness (I haven’t read her book, by the way). There was a point in the memoir when Ann Patchett described how Lucy felt toward people suffering from disease with no outward symptoms, how unfair and/or angry (and I’m paraphrasing) this made her. In a way, I could relate — the Wegener’s has scarred my face (acne from the meds), bloats my features (prednisone), lost me a hip, and caused up and down weight gain (as has, um, age and inactivity!). But in another way, I could see what she was saying as well, that to walk around with a very physical reminder of how a disease had effectively ruined your face is quite different from dealing with some pimples and a few pounds.

Yet, I can’t help thinking it was a little unfair (and perhaps I’m taking it a little too personally) to judge the amount of someone’s suffering simply by outward scars of their disease. The Wegener’s attacks my insides, makes me exhausted, puts me in fear for my organs, has ruined my lungs, and all kinds of other internal things that can’t be seen. And I live with it every day. It’s amazing, at times, to think that your body has the power to kill you when every ounce of your flesh has evolved to survive. There’s a psychological struggle with disease that’s there regardless of whether one has scars on the inside or out — I suppose that’s where I kind of determined there was a selfish streak to Patchett’s dear friend.

Annnywaaay. Truth and Beauty is well worth the read. It’s a good book to buy for your best friend just to send along to say, “I love you this much.” To say, “if you had lost everything I would send you kitchen appliances and JCrew t-shirts too.” To say, “this book says it so much better than I ever could.”

#2 – Shakespeare

Years ago when I worked at History Television, I wrote a series of articles about Shakespeare. For a few weeks, I was obsessed by the Shakespeare question and read a pile of books both for and against the Bard’s “real” identity. I’ve seen Shakespeare in Love about a million times and even wrote an article for the now-defunct Chicklit.com (I wish I had a copy of it to share; it was a fun article to write) about the differences between the writer’s life and how he was portrayed in the film, tying everything back into the research that I did for my job at the time. Needless to say, I think I’m more obsessed with the idea of all the controversy around Shakespeare’s identity than I am by the man’s work. Is that a bad thing? And let me just say for the record that I believe, as does Bill Bryson, that Shakespeare was the author of his work, not Francis Bacon or any number of other writers put forth in the years since his death and ultimate canonization.

Part of the Eminent Lives series, Bill Bryson’s excellent Shakespeare: The World as Stage contextualizes the little known facts of the Bard’s life into a compact and utterly readable package. As Bryson continually reminds us, there are very few known facts of Shakespeare’s life: the date of his baptism, his marriage, the number of children he had, how many signatures exist (6), his will, etc. The rest is conjecture, scholars over the years uncovering new evidence, failing to prove their theories, and wishful thinking. What Bryson does so ingeniously is fill in his own spaces with interesting bits of history from the time period, padding Shakespeare’s life with surrounding information, giving the reader a spirit of the age rather than trying to pull a biography from thin air. He addresses the Shakespeare question toward the end of the book, and I enjoyed reading about the interesting characters who contributed to seemingly never-ending debate.

I have to admit that I found the chapter about the plays themselves a little dry, but then he grabbed me again by making the point that part of Shakespeare’s lasting impression on literature goes so far beyond the plays. So much of the language we use today, so many expressions that hadn’t been used before are attributed to him, parts of our speech that we take so for granted that we barely give a thought to the fact that he wrote “be cruel to be kind.” The book is full of information that could give anyone an edge should they end up on Jeopardy faced with a Shakespeare category, but it also has a grand sense of humour and a calm approach to sifting through what must have been miles upon miles of scholarship. By the nature of the lack of information about Shakespeare’s life, it must have been hard to write a biography about him, but I think that Bryson’s done a smashing job of it: a little Tom Stoppard, a little The Professor and the Madman, and a lot of what Bryson does so very well, write history so that it’s engaging, interesting and utterly compelling.

READING CHALLENGES: The first book I’ve finished in the Shakespeare Challenge. Next up I think I’ll read Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer, but who knows when I’ll get to it — the master list for 2009 is a little overwhelming.

The Better You Read — The Better You Get Challenge

I know I preach a lot about “green” and all that jazz. Collecting books that I never read certainly isn’t the “greenest” way I could be living, especially if many of those books have socio- and/or environmental causes behind them. So here are the 10 titles I’ll try to read this year:

1. What Should I Do With My Life by Po Bronson
2. Living Like Ed by Ed Begley Jr.
3. Gorgeously Green by Sophie Uliano
4. Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel
5. Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe
6. The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
7. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
8. Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs
9. The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner
10. When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate

11. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
12. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
13. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
14. The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

#46 – Loose Girl

Kerry Cohen’s Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity took me a little by surprise. It’s not often a book manages to catch me off guard, but from the minute I read the first few sentences of this excerpt, I couldn’t put it down. So, I took the whole book with me to the cottage and read it in an evening. I was reading when I should have been sleeping and the rain fell all over the cabin as passionately as rain tends to do in the summer. With my RRHB securely asleep beside me, Cohen’s story couldn’t help but remind me of all my mistaken times when I confused the wrong kind of attention for the right kind of intimacy.

Told in a writing style that’s almost a form of literary short-hand, it’s a swift memoir (just over 200 pages) that recounts Cohen’s tumultuous tween, teen and young adult years. Conflicted about her parents’s divorce, caught between her mother’s ambition and need to better her own life, and left behind by friend and foe, she falls deeper into her life of promiscuity.

Navigating adolescence is never easy, and for young girls who grow up traumatized in any way, I’m guessing it gets even harder. No, I know it gets even harder, when there’s no one you can really turn to for help. Wanting love is different from wanting any kind of male attention — but that’s a hard lesson for Cohen to learn, one that comes at a great cost to her burgeoning sense of self. She yearns for a boyfriend but never seems to find a boy who’ll stick around after sex. And when the nameless, faceless, can’t remember hims add up and add up, she needs to come to terms with the fact that all the sexual acts aren’t remotely satisfying.

The book, however, is deeply satisfying. Cohen recounts her story with a clear and crisp voice, allows the reader to feel deeply empathetic for what she went through, and there are moments when it’s impossible not to see or feel yourself in her shoes. The ending is a little abrupt, but it’s not necessarily awkward. It’s more that I was enjoying the story so much that I wanted to read on and on — to see the resolution vs. just imagine it from her implications. Regardless, it’s a seductive piece of work for all the right reasons.

#37 – High Crimes

If anyone’s familiar with my reading habits, you know that I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. But it seems the nonfiction that always grabs my interest are nightmare stories about Mount Everest. I read Into Thin Air in about 20 minutes, and my curiosity of the people who willingly put themselves through the grueling, punishing task on purpose always gets the best of me. I only wish my interview with Peter Hillary was still live on the National Geographic Canada web site so I could link to it — we talked for two hours and it was, to date, the best interview I have ever done.

Annnywaaay. High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed. Michael Kodas’s book has a point to prove, and it’s quite compelling: How is it that crimes that take place at 8,000 metres are not considered so, when they’d be heavily punished back at sea level? Unskilled guides passing themselves off as “experts” leading unsuspecting tourists up a mountain to perish is doing damage to the very serious sport of mountaineering. It’s ruining Everest. As is greed, human selfishness and the age-old challenge of tackling all of the biggest peaks in the world. His tale centres on two specific stories: the crumbling of his own expedition from ego, theft and a whole host of other problems; and the death of a doctor, left behind by a man who had a reputation for being not only a liar but one utterly unqualified to be a guide.

How can you just leave someone behind when he’s your responsibility in the first place? When does summiting become so all-consuming (for its material benefits) when it costs the life of someone who trusted you to take them up and then back down? It’s an impossible question. It’s easy to know your own moral code, your values, until you’re thousands of metres in the air, deprived of oxygen and the weather turns. But there’s a difference between malicious intent and an accident, the feeling of getting yourself in over your head. Even experienced climbers get into trouble, but that’s the point that Kodas, and many writers like him consistently make, Everest has become so commercial that people think they can just buy their way to the top.

On more than one page, I was utterly horrified by what I’d just read. Greed, mayhem, even murder in a place where people are supposed to be in awe of the sheer power of the Earth itself. And even while Kodas’s writing tends to the sensational (it’s very headliney, if that makes any sense), it’s an easy book to read. Perfect for a plane ride to Paris, I’d say.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The ARC I got from work on my tiny plane tray.

#25 – Bringing Home the Birkin

My, my, my, my, my, the lives some people live! They are absolutely fascinating, and Michael Tonello’s is certainly no exception. His witty, charming, and butter-smooth memoir, Bringing Home the Birkin sucked me in and wouldn’t let me go until I had finished the very last page. No word of a lie, I started the book on the subway ride home last night and read the rest throughout the day (I had to send the author questions for an interview we’re doing).

After Michael makes a drastic change in his life, giving up his lucrative and stable life in the United States for Barcelona, Spain, he finds himself making an eBay auction living buying and selling rare Hermès products. From scarves to pottery, if he can find it and it’s rare, he’ll sell it. But it’s not until he realizes the desperate need for the rich and richer to own a Birkin that his business flourishes. Waiting list? What waiting list? Tonello discovers a fool-proof method for buying Birkins, and works it around the world. Literally. The man travels to major cities all around the globe that contain Hermès stores, makes connections with other bag-buyers, and becomes an industry in and of himself.

There’s little not to love about Tonello’s warm, chatty writing style, his adventurous spirit, and his entrepreneurship. Bringing Home the Birkin is that rare piece of nonfiction that zips along like the best commercial novel, and it would make perfect summer reading, whether you’re urban-bound or lazing about at the cottage, it’s so easy to get caught up in his world you’ll be transported either way.

#39 – Devil In The White City

Erik Larson’s magnificent Devil in the White City represents nonfiction at its best. Larson’s story of how Chicago’s infamous World Fair came to life is told alongside the chilling tale of serial killer H.H. Holmes (aka Herman Webster Mudgett). At first glance, the two stories have little in common but for geography (Holmes’s sick imagination profited from the arrival of many young woman to the fair) and opportunity. Yet, Larson’s deft hand weaves the two together like a sort of magical tapestry, intertwining all kinds of other relevant material into a book that’s inevitably impossible to put down.

The Gilded Age, so eloquently captured here, remains the backdrop for the story. As the Fair’s leader, Daniel Burnham, struggles against all odds (financial, egotistical, architectural, geographical, seasonal, meteorological and personal) to complete the project, the world sits back and expects failure. Of course, as history records, the Fair succeeds and its lasting impression upon American culture, architecture and general culture felt for decades. And then, as equally magnificent, celebratory of the great heights to which human nature can sore, the feats of the murderer Holmes are recorded to show how dizzyingly, terrifyingly evil human nature can crawl. A perfect read for a rainy night with a cold, all snuggled up in my duvet with the cat at my feet. Just perfect.

And just think, only six months to wait until Larson’s Thunderstruck hits the book shelves. And dammit, can he think of great titles or what?