Deep Inferno Trading Post

Yeah, yeah. Just like everyone else, I have a huge embarrassing crush on Alison Bechdel. I've long been a fan of her hilarious comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and then reading this "staggeringly literate and revealing" (Detroit Free Press) comic autobiography pretty much sealed my doom. Read it if you want to, but remember: I was in line first.

When I worked as a personal trainer, this book was required reading for all my clients. It's not a diet book about how to lose weight. It's more about the psychology of mindless eating. Wansink has been called "the Shelock Holmes of eating," because he gleans clues from scientific research to explain why people eat too much of things they don't even like when they aren't even hungry. He presents research into such danger zones as meal stuffing, snack grazing, party binging, restaurant indulging, and desktop dining. Utilizing a few simple changes in your environment, Mindless Eating shows how to mindlessly eat better, instead of obsessively eating right.

"The second of three books published by the Center for Environmental Structure to provide a "working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building, and planning," A Pattern Language offers a practical language for building and planning based on natural considerations. The reader is given an overview of some 250 patterns that are the units of this language, each consisting of a design problem, discussion, illustration, and solution. By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design." -Amazon.Com

This is not a self-help book, but a wryly humorous and entertaining scientific explanation of the limitations of the human imagination and how it steers us wrong in our search for happiness. Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, draws on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to argue that, just as we err in remembering the past, so we err in imagining the future. I was irredeemably hooked after reading the hilarious acknowledgment page, and the actual meat of the text only gets better.

If you're one of those people whose moods are highly sensitive to your surroundings, if you're more interested in expressing your True Self than putting on a show to impress other people, and if looking at my irreverently demented home decor didn't drive you to jab icepicks through your corneas, then you might enjoy My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Living by the exuberant potter and designer Jonathan Adler.

It was a major turning point and milestone for me when I found myself shifting from just frantically trying to kill the cancer and survive, to developing an optimistic obsession with taking proactive steps toward actually healing my severely ravaged body and soul. Dr. Silver is a psychiatrist specializing in rehab medicine as well as a cancer survivor herself, and this hands-on guide is packed with all kinds of useful information my oncologist never mentioned, about healing physically, emotionally, and spiritually. During the worst months of chemo hell when I wasn't even sure if there would ever be an "after treatment," I went around clutching this book to my cheek like a toddler with a blankie. It helped enormously.

This is without a doubt the funniest, truest, most bullseye accurate book ever written about cancer. And maybe the saddest too, because Miriam died on October 17th, 2006, shortly after the book was published, a week after I started chemo, and just when I'd begun to feel like she was my very own personal best friend. It's a hilarious and brutally honest view of everything from diagnosis, surgery, chemo, support groups, wigs, and the awful things people manage to say, to the dreaded horror of a second diagnosis and chronicling her own death. Required reading if you're a human being.

Take my advice: don't read this book on an airplane. For two reasons. First, you will spew beverage all over your seatmates every three minutes as you try in vain to suppress rowdy eruptions of uncontrollable laughter and gurgling nose noises; and upon gleaning from the shocking photo on the cover that this book you find so damn funny is about human cadavers for heavens sake, the hapless seatmates will grow suspicious and alarmed at your cavalier hilarity towards death and buzz the flight attendant. And second, there's a riveting chapter about what happens to bodies at the cellular level, forgodsake (!!!) during a plane crash which will make your hair stand straight on end and your knuckles turn white with terror as you grip the wrists of the aforementioned unfortunate seatmates who are by now plotting to surreptitiously shove you out the emergency exit while the flight attendant is off fetching them a dozen or so tiny bottles of scotch. Read it, you know, just not on a plane. Ok?

This is, simply, my very favorite book ever. I've read it about 30 times, and I never loved a book as much as I love this one. I don't know what else to say.

In this blistering exposé, Samantha King challenges the commercialization and hypocrisy of the burgeoning pinkety-pink breast cancer movement. She points out how global corporations and politicians have jumped aboard the pink bandwagon, exploiting the epidemic for free publicity and to expand their market shares via pink logoed ‘awareness’ promotions. Meanwhile shoppers get to feel virtuous and altruistic whenever they buy a pink-lidded Yoplait yogurt or a test drive a BMW. But with all eyes focused on Finding The Cure, nobody looks twice at other issues like prevention (a convenient oversight, since corporations that manufacture carcinogens are at the forefront of the Pink movement), or accessibility to health care for the under-insured. Read it and get pissed.

Fascinating and a fun read that clearly illustrates how free market economic forces affect the reader's day-to-day life. Harford exposes the dark underbelly of capitalism using simple, playful examples (written in plain language that even someone with severe chemo brain can follow) to elucidate complex economic theories. A little too dismissive of sweatshops for my taste, but he kind of makes up for it by showing the world how companies from Amazon.com (oops!) to Whole Foods to Starbucks have gouged consumers through guerrilla pricing techniques.