May 2013 | Kate's Point of View

Month: May 2013

Officemates!

On May 9, 2013

My new officemates are cute as can be (is that unprofessional to admit?) but pretty loud and so, so messy. We may only be sharing an office until Friday (we’ll see how the rest of the building’s tenants take to them) so I think I can manage.Did I mention they’re pretty cute?

A great book for nerds. And aren’t we all a little nerdy?

By Kate

On May 7, 2013

In books, reviews

Sometimes a book becomes one of my favorites because it is entertaining. I don’t always want to travel to new places and learn new things, to be challenged and pushed. Sometimes I simply want to be transported. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan accomplished this for me.It was wonderful.

I reviewed the book for Nudge. Here’s an excerpt:

When Clay Jannon visits Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore for the first time, the bookstore proprietor asks him, “What do you seek in these shelves?” That turn of the traditional question, “How can I help you?” is like a conspiratorial wink that implies, “How can I assist on the adventure on which you are about to embark?” It’s an apt question for such a book as Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan.

Clay is between design jobs when he gets third shift work at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. What should be a pretty dull job, standing behind a counter at an infrequently visited bookstore in the middle of the night, is made more interesting by the eccentric characters that do come to the store for books. They pay no money for the books they seek, which contain only coded text, instead checking them out them as if at a library. During his near-solitary evenings, Clay can’t help but become intrigued as to how the bookstore can stay open and what the books are that people are checking out.

You can read my complete review of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan on Nudge.

Professional Desk-Jockey and Amateur Crafter

By Kate

On May 6, 2013

In uncategorized

I’ve written several times about my forays into the arts and crafting so when I got an opportunity to review an early copy of Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, by Emily Matchar, I was pretty psyched. I’ve never considered myself domestic, but I acknowledge that a lot of my creative pursuits are things my stay-at-home-mom grandmother was doing about 65 years ago.An Etsy enthusiast (and shop owner) and avid Pinterest viewer, or, as I say in my review, a professional desk-jockey and amateur crafter, I think the topic Matchar is exploring is incredibly timely. Matchar defines new domesticity as “the re-embrace of home and hearth by those who have the means to reject these things.” Some examples of how I see this playing out:

Many of my friends make their kids baby food on their own. This has been happening so much, that I don’t even think of it as a thing anymore. One woman started buying her own grain to mill on her own for making pancakes. That was the thing that made me say, “Whoa.”
A while back my sister-in-law started making her own laundry detergent. My first reaction was a snarky comparison to the Duggars, which Wonder Boy made me promise not to vocalize. Little did I know she was onto a thing. All over Pinterest there are recipes for making your own cleaning products. It’s cheaper and uses less (if any) chemicals. If online posts are to believed, my inner Duggar comparison was too quickly cast.
Years and years ago a co-worker used to pack her cloth napkins with her lunch each day to reduce paper waste. The woman’s sister made the napkins. I thought it was pretty uber hippie. Until I started doing the same thing.

I have more examples, but the point I’m trying to make is that all around me people are trying to live more simply, even though that sometimes means more work. Matchar interviewed hundreds of people who ranged from people living off the grid to those who craft in their spare time or others who provide for their family by what they create and sell on Etsy and at craft shows.

Is Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity a perfect book? No – at times it dragged a little for me and I found myself getting really ticked off at some of the people Matchar spoke with… enough so that I would have to put the book down for a while and work to pick it back up. But the book does a great job at capturing the trend of new domesticity and, to a large extent, explaining it.

You can read my review of Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity by Emily Matchar on Nudge.