The Savvy Reader

HCC News – The Tattletale Edition

Plagiarism, books in outer space, and cheating husbands -- this may just be one of our most scandalous HCC News editions yet. And who doesn’t love a bit of good ol’ gossip? So get comfy, grab a margarita or two, and get ready to surf this week’s stormy waters.

• What would you do if you found out your whole life was a lie? Julie Metz wrote a bestselling book, so the New York Times visited her at home to find out more. For those of you with satellite, watch Julie talk about her ordeal on Good Morning America on July 1st.
• Bibliohistoria says the Doomsday Key was “fast moving, with plenty of action, lots of history and even some science and archaeology as well”  Is it ever any other way with James Rollins?
• Speaking of James, don’t forget to enter our Rollins Contest for a chance to win no less than 8 signed copies of his books. And if you just can’t get enough of him, follow him on Twitter for updates on the upcoming Altar of Eden.
• Who is Mark Twain?, asks Mark Twain. And the Globe & Mail answers.
• Lynn at Canadian Books and Authors says Sam was the character she liked the most in Step Closer. Who do you relate to more? Browse Inside and find out.
• What’s better than a wondrous faerie land in Central Park? An audio version of a wondrous faerie land –- as read by author / voice actor Lesley Livingston. The audio book edition of Wondrous Strange is out this week.
• Roxana Saberi, the American journalist imprisoned in Tehran, is publishing a book. And it promises "a penetrating look into Iranian society and culture."
• Our Sales Director just sent out an email regarding “the situation with Chris Anderson’s book Free.” Where do you draw the line in the digital age? Here’s what Anderson says. 
• Kenneth Oppel's Governor General's Award-winning Airborn has gone into outer space! A Canadian astronaut, Dr. Robert Thirsk, is part of the current crew aboard the Space Station on a six-month mission. Each astronaut is permitted a personal "official flying kit" and part of his kit is a copy of Airborn. Very fitting. Read all about it here (item #10)
• Is love still in the mix for Jon and Kate?
• There’s just something about Vikas Swarup. His new bestseller, Six Suspects, just wowed the New York Times with its zany mix of Bollywood and the game Clue. “Can a novel be any more high-concept than that?”

-- Narvan
 

HCC News: The Almost-Summer Edition

Here in the Toronto the weather is finally starting to brighten up a little -- so no one’s going to blame you for wanting to spend every second outdoors this week-end. But of course, what’s a relaxing weekend without lounging in the sun, a refreshing drink in one hand, and a really, really good book in the other? Here are a couple of great books that were all over the news this week:

• A 90-minute docudrama based on Ken McGoogan's fascinating Fatal Passage just won The Grand Prize for best Canadian program at the Banff World Television Awards. Read about Ken’s writing process, missed NBA opportunity and upcoming book in this Q&A with Rob McLennan.
• The Toronto Star talks to Farley Follows His Nose author Lynn Johnston. And don’t miss your chance to win a copy of the book through our very own Savvy Reader / Farley contest!
• Financial blog Four Pillars says that "everyone would benefit" from reading 397 Ways to Save Money.
• Collin Ellard tells us where we are.
• Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger got a standing ovation at last week's BEA. But he can't keep publishers from worrying about the Kindle.
• Marilynne Robinson’s Home (featuring characters from her Pulitzer prize-winning Gilead) won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
• Not be outdone, Coventry by Helen Humphreys is also racking up the nominations, including ones for the CAA MOSAID Technologies Award for Fiction, the 22nd Trillium Book Award and a CBA Libris Author of the Year Award (along with fellow nominees Margaret Atwood and Joseph Boyden).
• L.J. Smith's Vampire Diaries has been turned into a Thursday night drama. Watch the trailer.
• While in town for Luminato, Neil Gaiman sat down with the Toronto Star for this front page interview. And Metro News revealed Gaiman’s interesting choice of front yard decoration.
• Luanne from A Bookworm’s World calls Crazy for the Storm “a stunning, yet heartbreaking memoir.”
• Jolted by Arthur Slade was nominated by the children of Alberta for the 2010  Rocky Mountain Book Award.

-- Narvan

The New Rules of House-Hunting

House hunting generally heats up this time of year. But with everyone focussed on the economy these days, the same budgetary realities that people may have overlooked before are now a deciding factor in terms of considering home ownership. Yet, money woes do nothing to evaporate the longing for a room to call your own. In Where Am I?, author and psychologist Colin Ellard analyzes our fascinating relationship with space, and our constant need for it. With that in mind, Ellard outlines the psychology behind house-hunting in this short essay. He shows us that by understanding what we actually want in a home -- as opposed to what we want to be seen having -- we can feel fulfilled without going into debt.  

The Psychology of House-Hunting

It’s house-hunting season. The FOR SALE signs are everywhere. The weekend Open Houses are beginning to heat up (even though the weather isn’t), and anyone thinking of moving house in the summer knows that now is the time for action. But in today’s tight economy we’re all working with a new set of unknowns. Gone are the days when we could treat a mortgage number as an abstract entity, assuming that somehow or other our wages would go up, the value of our properties would appreciate, and all would be well. Now, more than at any time in the lives of those currently in the housing market, we must think very carefully about our living arrangements. But it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, there may be some good that comes at a time when, rather than feeling pushed to buy beyond our means, we’re being asked to reflect carefully on what we really want and need out of a home. Here are some points to ponder.

1. Avoid simplistic square foot equations. Compared to people in many other parts of the world, we in North America have grown up in an age of rock-bottom real estate values. This has encouraged large building lots, houses whose size far outstrips our needs, and low-density suburbs that extend outside of a city’s core. There’s no denying the allure of having lots of elbow room and views of nature, along with all the conveniences of modern living, but we’d do well to remember that there’s not much evidence of a connection between the size of a house and its psychological value as a home. In fact, ongoing scientific studies suggest that how we use our living space is much more important than how much living space we have. It’s time to jettison the old-fashioned idea that the size of our home is a measure of our success and think instead of what we need to be happy.

Perennial - Pick of the Day

With Valentine's Day just a couple of weeks away, Diane Schoemperlen's At a Loss For Words feels like an appropriate book for our Perennial Pick of the Day. When the novel came out last year, we had a bit of fun with its themes, and the author wrote a great article for us called "8 Telltale Signs of Romantic Fixation." Despite looking for inspiration from words all around her, the novel's protagonist finds herself with mean case of writer's block after a particularly disastrous affair. As she works through what happened, she ends up finding her voice. As a bit of a bonus, here's an essay that Diane Schoemperlen wrote for the P.S. Section of the Perennial edition.

On Writing At A Loss For Words by Diane Schoemperlen

One of the questions a writer is asked most frequently is: Where do you get your ideas? For me, ideas come from anywhere and everywhere, most often by chance. For instance, the idea for my first novel, In the Language of Love, came from my accidental discovery of a list of the 100 words of the Standard Word Association Test used in diagnostic psychological testing. My short story “How Deep Is the River?” (from Forms of Devotion) grew out of a conversation overheard on a train. The idea for my second novel, Our Lady of the Lost and Found, came from television, when I watched a documentary about visions of the Virgin Mary and other mysterious religious phenomena.

10 Ways to Rebalance Your Body

Michelle Schoffro Cook has 10 excellent suggestions about how to rebalance your body and feel better in no time at all. It's about to be shorts season, right? Which means it's the perfect time to shake off those winter blues and bad eating habits!

Buy a Sack of Lemons
If you make only one trip off of the sofa today, make it a trip to your local health food or grocery store to buy a sack of lemons. Yes, a sack. Once you get home, squeeze the juice of half a lemon into a tall glass of water and drink immediately. This one step will help you to quickly reset your body chemistry.

Load Up on H²O
Drink at least 10 more cups of water throughout the day, preferably with lemon juice added to each. Lemon juice breaks down acid waste in your body and restores your blood and tissues to slightly alkaline levels. Put simply, it means you’re flushing out toxins and excess fat -- both of which are acidic -- from your body!

Breathe Deeply
Take a few deep breaths. Oxygen will not only energize your brain but it will quickly help to balance the chemistry of your cells -- and healthier cells mean a healthier body.

Take a Walk
I encourage a second trip off of the sofa. Boost your oxygen levels even further by heading out for a brisk walk. Exercise helps to quickly oxygenate your body. More oxygen in your blood means its better equipped to nourish every organ and tissue, which increases energy, mental clarity and moods.

Turn to Peppermint Tea
Instead of reaching for a caffeine jolt from coffee or cola, drink some peppermint tea. Research shows that peppermint provides a quick boost of energy and unlike caffeine, it’s isn’t addictive and won’t send your energy levels plummeting a few hours later.

Eat Your Veggies
Make vegetables the focal point of your lunch and dinner meals. Okay, I know you’re probably cringing right now, but if you absolutely hate broccoli, don’t take it out on the entire veggie kingdom. Who wouldn’t enjoy some delicious mashed sweet potatoes or rich guacamole? I share the easiest and fastest recipe for yummy guac in The Ultimate pH Solution and even my chocolate mousse recipe features the highly healthy avocado.

Take an Almond Break
Snack on raw, unsalted almonds every few hours. Not only are they loaded with calcium, magnesium, protein and other important nutrients, their high fibre and protein content help to stabilize blood sugar levels. Stable blood sugar levels tell your brain that it’s okay to start breaking down fat stores to help you slim down.

Smoothie Nation
Enjoy a delicious smoothie instead of a sugary snack or breakfast. Start with some almond milk instead of dairy to help rebalance your blood chemistry quickly. Add some frozen berries, half a frozen banana (peel the bananas prior to freezing and keep them on hand for a quick energy smoothie) and a heaping teaspoon of green powder like barley juice, spirulina, chlorella, wheatgrass, or any blend available from your local health food store. In addition to containing loads of vitamins and minerals, green powders contain chlorophyll, which research proves eliminates toxins from your body, protect against cancer, and even defends your genetic material against damage!

Go Greens
Eat at least one large salad per day. Avoid store-bought dressings full of rancid oils, preservatives, additives, and sugar. Try my blueberry dressing from The Ultimate pH Solution -- it’s fast and delicious. Add ¾ cup extra virgin olive oil, ½ cup blueberries (fresh or frozen), 1/3 cup of raw apple cider vinegar, a pinch of Celtic sea salt, and 6 drops of stevia or a ½ teaspoon of unpasteurized honey. Blend with a hand blender or cover with the lid and shake the container well. Pour over a plate of greens or grated veggies. Store the remaining dressing in the fridge.

Take a Cue from the Vegetarians
Cut back on your meat consumption. Choose beans, fish, or raw nuts or seeds instead of acid-forming meat. While fish like wild salmon may be acid forming in your body, it provides the essential fatty acids needed for a healthy brain, immune system and overall good health. Add beans to soups, stew, chili or wraps, or make them into delicious dips for a high-fibre, high-protein, high-nutrition source of energy.

Buy a copy of Michelle Schoffro Cook’s The Ultimate pH Solution from Amazon.ca or Chapters.Indigo.ca.
Visit the author’s website for more information about balancing your pH.
5 Books for a Better Body

Urban Nation Fast Facts

Alan Broadbent’s Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong is a call to action for city-dwellers across the country. Over the past 50 years, Canadian cities have come of age. What would happen if Toronto decided to take a page from Quebec’s book and campaigned to become a separate province? It’s an interesting thought -- and one that Broadbent uses to explore the idea that cities are underrepresented on both a political and an institutional level. Here are some fascinating facts from the book that might just change your mind about how we should approach the idea of the city in Canada:

Urban Nation Fast Facts

• In 1850, fewer than 20% of Canada’s population lived in cities. Over the next 150 years, those numbers would invert.
• Over three-quarters of the Canadian population lives in a Canadian city. Big cities pay for the rest of the country Toronto sends over $15 billion more to the rest of the country than it gets back in goods and services, and proportionately so do the other big cities.
• Canada’s big cities are increasingly diverse: Toronto's population is 50% foreign born and 50% visible minority, and Vancouver is approaching those numbers.
• Canada is the only developed country without a national housing program or national transit program.
• The 165,000 residents of Toronto's community housing outnumber the 138,000 residents of Prince Edward Island but, unlike PEI residents, they don’t have two senators and four MPs in the Federal Parliament.
• Canadian cities rely too much on property tax for revenue: Canadian cities derive 50% of their revenue from property taxes as opposed to 15% in the United States and 5% in Europe.
• A broad array of taxes is both more fair and more secure. A Maritime Union and a Prairie Union would generate a new regional dynamic that would reduce dependency on external resources and reverse long term economic decline.
• Urban density is environmentally sound: city dwellers have a much smaller footprint because they live on smaller lots, walk and take transit, and do things close to home.
• More fully independent cities would generate more wealth, which would serve both them and the country better.

Spring Is In The Air

With this excerpt from Christopher Dewdney's Soul of the World, a thoughtful and fascinating meditation on time, take a moment to explore the idea of how the seasons change. Something to think about on a day like today where the weather has already changed three times and it's just passed noon: from rain to giant spring snowflakes, and now it's overcast but somehow clear. True spring weather!

From Chapter Three: Monks, Steamboats and Femtonians: Measuring Time

Any day now the leaves will open. April is almost over and the twigs on the horse chestnut tree on my neighbour’s lawn look like bronze sceptres -- a fat, shiny bud crowning each tip. Every morning I walk to the corner grocery store on some concocted errand -- milk, oranges, cheese, anything I can think of -- in order to scan the maple trees in my neighbourhood. Their yellow-green flowers have already opened, and from a distance their crowns are misty chartreuse. But the leaves are not out yet, though I know that once the flowers open, the leaves can’t be far behind. Each floret is like the ripcord on a tiny parachute; once pulled, a leaf will blossom out after it. So I shade my eyes from the spring sun and search for the first green leaves.

For the past few decades I have marked down the exact day the leaves emerged. Last year it was April 29. The year before, it was May 7. The earliest, since I’ve been keeping track, was April 14. The latest was May 8. It’s always a bit of a roller-coaster ride; winter relinquishes spring unwillingly, it holds on. If a cold front arrives, the entire leaf-opening spectacle is delayed, sometimes for weeks. Forsythia bushes are suspended in perpetual yellow bloom like flowers in a florist’s cooler; magnolia blossoms can be transfixed for two weeks.

MiamiGeorgiaTwo years ago, when the leaves opened late, I became impatient. I had an impulse to drive south to meet the advancing wave of spring. It was stalled somewhere and I wanted to get to it. About a decade before, I had raced the springtide from Miami to Toronto in an Oldsmobile. It was late February but spring was well underway in southern Georgia, warm enough for me to sleep in the car at a pull-off with the windows rolled down. Outside the car, the leaves had already opened and the night air was filled with the sound of trilling frogs. It felt more like late May in Toronto. The next day I had a slice of homemade pecan pie for breakfast and then continued north, through Georgia and Tennessee, turning back the calendar of spring from May to April to March. As I drove through the southern Appalachian mountains, banded with pink and blue limestone strata like layer cakes, I noticed the thinning of spring’s greenery and by the time I reached Kentucky the buds had only just begin to swell on the trees, while snow still nestled in the roadside hollows. I spent the night at a motel in coal country. The next morning dawned cold, and midway though Ohio snow began to fall. By the time I reached the Canadian border a blizzard was in progress. I’d left summer a thousand miles behind me.

YEARS

The shock wave of spring spreads northwards at sixteen miles a day, a little more than half a mile an hour. You could easily outwalk spring; it takes months to get from Miami to Toronto. Spring’s advance is really the tilt of the earth -- fifteen degrees -- translated into movement as our planet circles the sun. Starting in late December and accelerating after March 21, the northern hemisphere of the earth beings tipping towards the sun like a sun worshipper on a beach. The sun rises a little higher in the sky each day, piling the tide of spring behind it like the wedding train of Venus. It’s so dependable you could set your watch by it.

Even without a calendar to guide me I know that my “leaf clock” is accurate to within three weeks, at least for Toronto. I’m like the early humans who had no calendars or clocks. They looked for signs: the arrival or departure of migratory birds, the blooming or seeding of plants. And there’s a lot of redundancy in the natural calendar -- it’s no problem when the signs are delayed. Here in Toronto if the nighthawks are late, the fiddlehead ferns will still unfurl like clockwork. If there’s a cold snap that delays the leaf opening by a week or two, the first swallowtail butterfly will always be on schedule some warm May afternoon. These are backups.

The sun is more precise. If I jam a piece of wood in a crevice on a large, flat rock so tightly that even winter storms can’t budge it, I’ve built a solar observatory. I can use if to measure the length of the noon-hour shadow and mark it out with scratches on the rock throughout the year. Although the distance between one day and the next is minimal, if I wait for twenty-nine days, one lunar cycle, there is a measurable difference where the noon shadow of the stick ends. This is the beginning of astronomy. Every summer solstice the shadow will land in exactly the same place. From here it is a hop to Stonehenge, Egyptian pyramids and Galileo. But I’m getting ahead of myself. A year is easy to measure by this method, even in the tropics, where eternity lingers in the seasonless months.

From Soul of the World. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright © 2008 by Christopher Dewdney. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

Buy a copy of Soul of the World from Amazon.ca or Chapters.Indigo.ca
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Two recipes from the Herbal Kitchen

Michael Chabon Defends The Right To Tights

In The New Yorker. It's almost a philosophical treatise, which is fabulous, fascinating and truly inspired all at the same time.

(link via Q &Q)