Perpetually Curious

Amazingly, I managed to hit half of my reading goal for the year! Between a new baby and a global pandemic, I am firmly in camp "making it through each day is a success." I somehow wound up with MORE books on my TBR shelf than I started with, thanks in no small part to discovering BookOutlet, plus the library's super-convenient website ordering and curbside pickup. I still adore browsing through the stacks, but between email list and Bookstagram recs, and having the entire NC Cardinal system at my fingertips, it's too easy to get the exact book I'm looking for. I can't wait to be able to be pleasantly surprised again, though. My Four Favorite Books:  1. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson . "Beyond race, class, or other factors, a powerful caste system influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie cast...

Yall know I like to read every now and again.* I thought I'd go over my 2016 book highlights. So, I started the year with the intention of reading my entire backlog, which was probably 8-9 years old (the astute reader will remember my daughter turned nine in August). I achieved half of that goal, that is, I read about half my back log pile. Even if that had been all I'd read, that still would've been 18 books, so respectable for the year in this day and age of "nobody reads past college". Actually, not including books I read for classes, I recorded a total of 45 books read!! And two audio books (I discovered Tim Ferriss's podcast in mid-summer so started listening to that in the car instead). A lot of those are library books, although I think I did buy enough to replenish my TBR pile for 2017. Outstanding titles: The Society of the Spectacle , by Guy Debord. Classic French not quite existentialism but amazing views on what our society truly has become:...

I'm a sucker for non-fiction books about women's friendships, or compilations of letters, or North Carolina history. So this book hit all three. March 1974 "The Observer dropped my column several years ago. They wanted the space for a staff member to do a how-to column. He calls me to ask the answers to the questions. I was heartbroken at first, because I found to my amazement that a weekly column is the most delightful way to write. You don't have to hold yourself down to any lengthy subject but you can go into whatever interests you at the moment. Then I learned so much, by being asked about so many things I didn't know, and having to find out. And the instant response is so stimulating; I would go to St. Peter's at eight, and someone would already have read the morning paper, and would comment or disagree, or have something to add." ~Elizabeth Lawrence I couldn't help but chuckle when I read this passage in 2 Gardeners: A Friendship in Lett...

"Rather, what is valuable is that one's life be actively engaged in projects that give rise to this feeling [a high quality pleasure], when the projects in question can be seen to have a certain kind of objective worth." I stumbled upon this book by complete accident. I don't normally go browsing through the moral philosophy* section in my major university research library, but this author happens to be a patron of ours, and I happened across it in the course of doing some other research, so I thought I'd pick it up. I was pleasantly surprised to hear so many of the arguments we arts folk make about why the arts are "meaningful" to a person. Wolf begins by positing that "meaning" exists somewhere between "morality" and "happiness", the normal two reasons for explaining why we humans do the things we do. Those two options still represent the reasons we do many things (pay taxes, have sex), but Wolf argues that the reaso...

From the blurb: "Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?" Sounds an awful lot like the np arts orgs world, doesn't it? Why is it some theaters succeed, balancing budgets, retaining audiences, basking in critical acclaim? While others stumble along, maybe having a hit or two, always wondering if people can be paid, eventually shuttering rather than enduring more stress? Collins doesn't set out to write about our world (unfortunately. Mr. Collins, if you ever do, please call me to be on your research team.) but his key findings--in all of his books--apply not only to the publicly traded for-profit corporations he studies but to the myriad sized and structured art centered, community building, nonprofit arts organizations we love. The companies he looks at in GbC all have the same traits: their leaders have Level 5 ambition; they have empirical creativity AND fanatic discipline AND productive paranoia; they stick with a SMaC (Specif...