I am reading these books right now because they “instruct and delight.” There is meat to them, and their messages spark what is already inside all of us on the verge of Springtime: the urge to do, think, and feel in ways that are more true to the happy person that we all have in us.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts… by Susan Cain (New in paperback)

I have heard solid and ecstatic reviews of this book come from all kinds of people, from visual stylists at Nordstrom to economics professors. I think this speaks to the relevancy of the topic; it is important to individuals and to social and work environments. About half of people are introverts, and introverted qualities tend to be misunderstood in our culture.

In this picture is Cain’s “Manifesto for Introverts.”

Lean In: Work, Women, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (Forthcoming on March 11 – we pre-reserve)

This book is the most fitting of the (generally) inspirational books I’ve read lately. Sheryl Sandberg made her way to the top ranks of Facebook, never flinching in her will to have the most impact she could through her career. As the COO of the company, she is one of few women who hold such powerful positions. She is also a mother of two small children, and made time to write a book about all of this because she feels very strongly that women – herself included – need to “lean in” to their careers and estimate their own potential higher. She also explains that companies need to expect this of women as well as men. She asks women and men to perpetuate a culture in business and the working world in general that supports women, so that, in end, the right person fills each job role, whether a man or a woman. Ultimately, this is about making the world a better place. She speaks from experience, and this book, like Quiet, is equally about both personal growth and societal improvement. I read this book in about a day. I recommend it for just about everyone.

The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux puts to use his skills as a seasoned writer, traveler, and (interestingly) reader. He put together this book by connecting excerpts of others’ writing, from ancient to contemporary, under themes that are fresh, and by adding a lot himself. Chock full of quotability, this book will force regular travelers and sedentary people alike to see things differently through Theroux’s eyes. It’s a lovely and crucial push in the directions of elsewhere.

by Whitney

Sometimes I wonder about the timing of book releases. For some books, it just doesn’t seem to make any sense — there appears to be no forethought given to the timing. Other books are launched with what seems like good timing, but circumstances conspire against them. But for certain books, everything just clicks into place. Serendipitous, even.

Nate Silver was fairly well known as a baseball writer (particularly in sabermetric circles), and had gained some notoriety for his election forecast blog FiveThirtyEight. Silver’s projections had performed well in the 2008 and 2010 elections. But the FiveThirtyEight blog really grabbed public attention in the 2012 elections. After months of criticism that alternated between charging Silver with unwarranted overconfidence and accusing Silver of uncertainty and hedging his bets, Silver’s projections correctly forecast all 50 states and predicted Barack Obama’s popular vote percentage within 0.3%.

And it was in the midst of this pre-election discussion and debate that Nate Silver’s book was released. The Signal and the Noise was on the shelf for a little over a month when the election results vindicated Silver’s methods and nearly every post-election report begrudgingly acknowledged his excellent performance. I imagine Silver’s publicist at Penguin was dancing around his or her office at this point.

The question now is whether Silver’s book holds up. Election forecasts are one thing, but writing an engaging and entertaining book about forecasting is another. And it’s my experience that this kind of book often tires the reader over a few hundred pages — I find myself wishing it were a really tight 10 or 12 page article instead of a 500 page book. But I had reason to be optimistic here. Silver isn’t just an excellent forecaster; he’s adept at communicating the idea, the theory behind the forecast. I’d enjoyed his baseball writing years ago; I was hopeful he’d brought the same clear writing to The Signal and the Noise.

412 pages into a 454 page book, and I’m not disappointed. Sure, I’ve set it down a few times to read something else, but not out of boredom, nor out of fatigue. I’ve set it down at times because the writing is so clear, the thesis so fully fleshed-out, and each chapter so complete and well-formed, that I have no fear of losing interest or momentum. The chapters are unique, separate stories; each addresses a new topic, a new field or industry or controversy, and can be read individually. But Silver expertly ties each chapter together into the central theme; each chapter serves as a piece of the argument Silver is constructing.

And that argument? That more data does not equal more knowledge. The massive data explosion in the internet age does not ensure greater understanding, or wisdom, or insight. If anything, the increase in the pure mass of data offers great opportunity for misinterpretation, for obfuscation. The forecaster faces a constant balance: the signal and the noise.

The signal: the meaning, the truth, that which delivers the information we seek. The noise: the static, the random, that which threatens to drown out the signal. When the forecaster constructs his argument too broadly, he includes not only the signal but also much of the noise; he risks drawing conclusions from random bits of data. When the forecaster constructs his argument too narrowly, he excludes the noise but also much of the signal; he throws out information critical to an accurate prediction.

Each chapter addresses a new topic. Baseball, elections, climate change, chess, online poker, earthquakes — each is an opportunity to examine forecasting from a slightly different angle, and Silver uses each to expand and elucidate his methods. In one chapter you might learn why your local weatherman is more interested in avoiding sending you out in the rain without an umbrella than in delivering an accurate forecast. In another, you might see how Gary Kasparov’s eventual defeat at the hands (digits?) of Deep Blue was possibly caused by a programming error. The stories are compelling. The pages fly by. The book holds up.

by Kelly Pickerill

Unless they’ve written a book I’m familiar with, I don’t recognize the names of the essayists in The New York Times Book Review. But when Katie Roiphe’s new book came out this fall, a book of essays called In Praise of Messy Lives, I recognized her name from an essay in the Book Review. Weird, I know, but it’s because her essay, on the front page, which is unusual in itself, was so fascinating. In “The Naked and the Conflicted,” Roiphe contrasts the treatment of sex by novelists of two generations, that of Updike, Mailer, Roth, and Bellow, with that of younger writers such as Jonathan Franzen, Benjamin Kunkel, Dave Eggers, and Michael Chabon. She asserts that the former group’s virility has been transmuted by the latter into a kind of “passivity . . . a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite,” where “the cuddle [is] preferable to sex.”

The essay caused a bit of controversy, with some folks reacting quite intensely: “Not only are you contributing to the total annihilation of the literary culture, but also to the destruction of our civilization.” She’s been described as “an uncomfortablist,” a term which, if a criticism, is perhaps less harsh, and one she herself admits is apt. In most of her essays, though, it works, as she critiques what in our culture seems like a trend of bourgeois conventionalism, for example, that our obsession with all types of “healthiness” elevates shopping at Whole Foods to an act of heroism.

If Roiphe’s personal essays can be a bit overbearing, it’s that her method of praising the messy over the conventional in her own case reads a bit like, “if your life is put together you are simply boring, ha ha I win because I have two children from two different men.” But when applied to our culture as a whole, this method elicits some fascinating stuff: could we love Mad Men because our conservative sensibilities crave the spectacle of stylish people who smoke too much, drink too much, and sleep around, or is our obsession with being the perfect parent doing more harm to our children than we realize?

Roiphe’s essays on literature though are by far the best part of the book; like “The Naked and the Conflicted,” they are unconventional yet close readings of works that remind us of why we like to read, and why we like to read about what we read. So I don’t mind that Roiphe makes me a little uncomfortable.

I know that books can be intimidating, okay? Although a lot of people in their twenties are still working through Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre and picking up Anna Karenina to prepare for the movie release, we also want to laugh really, really hard. That’s why we watch television.

But what happens when season 2 of Girls doesn’t begin until January 13? Enter: Davy Rothbart’s essay collection My Heart Is An Idiot. (Could the title be truer?) This is a collection of stories that are fitted to the short attention span of sitcom-watchers, to read during the commercial breaks, and to read while heating up a frozen pizza. I know this from experience. They are, as blurbist Susan Orlean says, “utterly engaging.”

What’s brilliant about these autobiographical stories is that they maintain a lovely balance between ridiculously confessional and self-deprecating. The writer is literally naked walking around Manhattan for the greater part of one essay. There are moments when his intentions to be alone with a girl at the expense of a friend are loathsome, but delicate and human. And a lazy habit of peeing in bottles, rather than walking to the bathroom, facilitates this great and telling moment with his ex-girlfriend, who is saying goodbye before moving across the country with her new boyfriend:

Sarah marveled at the collection of pee-filled bottles I’d amassed. “It’s absolutely incredible,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.” She sniffed the air. “I can’t believe they don’t smell.” I was ashamed, but also sort of proud, and fascinated with them myself. The range of pee color, in itself, was striking—dark, hornet gold, to pale yellow, to nearly clear. “There must be fifty bottles here,” said Sarah.

“There’s more behind the TV stand,” I confessed.

Sarah said, “Let’s count.” We tallied them up. There were ninety-nine. Sarah began to sing, “Ninety-nine bottles of pee on your wall, ninety-nine bottles of pee…” She trailed off. “I can’t believe I’m leaving you,” she said.

I picked up the song, and continued on, sadly: “Take one down, pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of pee…”

People have, in the history of the world, complained that almost all books are written about writers, who are boring and narcissistic people. Here you have a person who seems to have been pulled into writing by means of carrying around too many quirky stories, too many intrinsically American experiences, too much truth about it all.

Interestingly, these stories take place in almost every region of the country except the South. Lucky for you, the Found magazine 10^th anniversary tour will bring Davy and Peter Rothbart for a signing, reading, and music on Thursday, December 6 at 5:30 here at Lemuria.

My Heart Is An Idiot by Davy Rothbart, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2012, $25.00.

See all the tour stops this December.

Visit Jackson Free Press for Kathleen Mitchell’s interview with the author.

by Whitney

As much as oil figures into politics, war, and finally into our daily lifestyles, there is another resource which we often take for granted: water. Water has always been humankind’s most pivotal resource and today, water, not oil, is the resource of the 21st century. As 20 percent of our planet already experiences fresh water scarcity and 40 percent do not have adequate sanitation, Steven Solomon explores the realities and challenges of a planet that will increasingly find itself in conflict over water.

From antiquity to the Industrial Revolution, Water is an engaging narrative capturing the struggles, personalities, and inventions that have shaped our use of water. Water management presents our planet with some of the most challenging economic, political and environmental problems. Solomon presents a harsh reality but not without the hope that our ingenuity will find a way to manage water humanely. Aptly selected as the opening quote is Benjamin Franklin’s old adage: When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water. Solomon’s book is one we should all have in hand.

Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Soloman, Harper Collins, 2011.

This review will be featured on The Book Shelf of Mississippi’s very own magazine Well-Being. We are proud to contribute to Well-Being and always enjoy working with the Well-Being team. Mississippi is lucky to have such a great magazine and Lemuria has copies to pick-up for free at the Fiction Desk! Well-Being magazine is great way to keep up with local healthy events and fitness activities. You can also follow Well-Being on Facebook.

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For those familiar with the author Cheryl Strayed, you may already know that she has a new memoir Wild that was published this past March. What you may not know is that Ms. Strayed is also the anonymous (until recently) columnist for the “Dear Sugar” advice column on The Rumpus.net. “Dear Sugar” got her start in 2010, and quickly developed a following of readers who could identify with her no-nonsense, yet warm approach to dispensing advice. Sugar issues a wake up call to her readers in conjunction with terms of endearment such as “sweet pea” and “darling,” and in doing so hits at the core of human empathy. She feels for you, she really does, but that doesn’t mean that she is going to let you wallow or be paralyzed by fear of the unknown. Sugar doesn’t (pardon the expression) “sugar coat” it, and that is precisely why her readers love her. Not only does she acknowledge that life is impossibly hard at times, she truly understands the hardships and includes anecdotes of her own struggles in her responses. Sugar is the interactive “Dear Abby.”

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.