Reality Check: What your mind knows but isn't telling you by David Weiner

Ok, essentially the same premise as Zen Physics except where Zen Physics left me feeling positive about life and death and gave me some faith, Reality Check just left me in despair. He looks at the same astronomically infinitesimal odds of life springing from matter, the vastness and infinite smallness of the universe and sees nothing, meaninglessness whereas I see more meaning than ever. He thinks that because each of us won a 300,000,000 to 1 sperm lottery then we are each insignificant whereas I feel like a winner. My dad could have coughed at a crucial time and I'd be a boy or brilliant, but he didn't, and I am as I am, and I am grateful. The thing was full of typos anyway.

The Diaper Diaries: The Real Poop on a New Mom's First Year by Cynthia Copeland

I recommend this to all new mom's and not new mom's. It's hilarious and all so true. It's quick with cute little cartoons. I've read a lot of books that only deserve one line reviews and I don't bother posting them. But in this case it was worth the mention in case anyone's reading this might check it out.

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex by Olivia Judson

I had fun reading about all the buggies and fishies and how they mate or spawn and eat each other and all that good stuff. It was enjoyable in a zen way, but I am disappointed that I don't feel like I have a bunch of knowledge to show off. It was just so much information whizzing by. Mostly reading or watching anything about the animal kingdom makes me glad to be a human. So to make this more interesting I'll just randomly open to a page and share the most intriguing animal on it. OK, hmm, let's see, male bowerbirds. They're related to the birds of paradise that do those awesome dances for their women and puff out their feathers like fuzzy UFO's. Anyway, bowerbirds build and elaborately decorate huts and towers. They use leaves and twigs like a normal nest, but they take the time and care to decorate them all fancy by painting them with berry juice and hanging shrooms, flowers, feathers, shells, bug parts and other goodies. But what's even cooler is that they seem to have various fashion districts. Plus they're totally not random. If you go and move some dude's art around, he'll put it back the way he had it. They've also been known to steel camera equipment and socks. If you think you're helping him out by adding your own touch, he'll throw it out. Don't go messing with his vision.

Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream by Carl Elliott

It's hard to sum up this observant report on how we Americans live. Each chapter goes on its own little adventure through the psychosis that is identity. I guess if I were forced to say what it's "about" I'd say enhancement technologies and their place in American culture but it really doesn't take a stand on them. What I found telling is the point made in various ways that most people who purchase enhancement technologies (i.e. Prozac, boobs, amputations [?!]) claim that they do so to feel "more like themselves". People don't see themselves as depressed, fat, flat-chested, anxiety ridden, short, or rather their egos refuse to see themselves as such. The medicalization of stupid, old, home-body-ness, prone-to-blushingness has come about because our egos can't stand those labels as part of our identities. Surely I am none of those things, the real me is just like all those people on tv, all I have to do is fork over my hard earned money to buy the surgeries and pills I need to show the world who I REALLY am. I am thin, my body is just fat so I'll pay for liposuction so I can jump out and say "ta-da, look world, I was a skinny girl hiding in a fat suit all along, take that, I kept telling you all I was thing but no one believed me!!" I am a happy person, my BRAIN is just depressed. And a country like America where the economy is so wholly dependent on the "self" as a deity is happy to oblige. I guess I'm giving away my opinion on matters here a little =) What I also found interesting was the discussion of group identities (goths, punks, bodybuilders, etc). If you don't fit in with the mainstream, you can always join a subculture and fit in with them instead. What they don't like to admit though, is that subculture is just a "sub" division of our mainstream culture. You can't truly opt out, ever. You can pretend like you're "above it" that you don't "buy into it", but people are still judging you, always, you don't get to just not play. If you go outside of your house you will be observed and deduced about. Even Adbusters has its own anti-brand brand called Black Spot. No one's original, and if your thing is being original, there's a whole bunch of other people out there whose thing is being original too. They call you "alternative" or "indie". And once those get too trendy they'll come up with something originaler. All that high horse crap of mine aside, the final and more interesting adventure took us through territory inhabited by people who feel they were born in the wrong body, either the wrong gender, or with, ahem, two legs and two arms. Yes people are begging to have their limbs amputated to feel "more like themself"!! This is the kind of thing (the only kind of thing) that might make me think twice about my above position. Amputees in past lives perhaps?

Zen Physics by David Darling

Since I was about 3 or 4 I have been afraid to die. Of all the people I know, I might be the most intensely afraid. Despite a largely Christian upbringing, my rational mind does not accept its teachings and all I can see is an infinite void, utter annihilation of my self. So ever the loving father, my dad tried several different times to frame death in a way that did not scare me so. Essentially, he told me that even if death were nothing, I would never know, cuz it's nothing. This never helped. And that's the message of this book, if death is truly nothing and the self is only a construct of a living brain, then there will be no self to experience death, and therefor we can only experience life. Why this book put my mind at ease and not my dad? Dunno, but David Darling rocks. Despite a detailed description of what happens to the body in the weeks after death and a vivid tour of Japanese ritual suicide, I have never read a more uplifting affirmation of life. Using findings from quantum physics, he illustrates how the brain is not a source or conduit of consciousness, but a limiter and prison of it.

The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America by Victor Tan Chen and Katherine Newman

Wow, each one of these stories was more depressing than the last. I don't mean this in a bad way, I mean you know going into it that it's a sad subject. If anything it made me feel gratitude for what I have in a time when I was really lacking it. However, all the subjects were from the same little area in New York and 98% of them were immigrants who barely spoke English. The problem with this? It's not about the near poor in America, it's about immigrants and their difficulty getting a foothold here. That's ok, just call it that. I agree with all the reforms and programs proposed at the end, but so what, it's just a book. If only books could change things like they used to. They made an important point in warning not to let the American principal of if you work hard you will prosper become a lie. But it already is a lie. People who have it good think that the people who don't make a lot of money deserve it because they are lazy. These people work their asses off. All employed people work their asses off. Working your ass off in America isn't rewarded equally. Another realization is the effect of two simultaneous fucked up events. On one hand over here you have welfare reform booting a bunch of single mothers into the workforce. Ok yay, punish those welfare queens. On the other hand over here you have No Child Left Behind resulting in all kinds of extra academic demands on children and their parents. So now you have a bunch of kids of single mom's failing school because their mom's can't get off work to be a force in their children's academic life. So now their kids are gonna be undereducated (stupid) and will have to take their own shitty paying benefit free exhausting job. I'm not really describing this properly right now because I am also watching "Obese and Pregnant" on TLC. Anyway, point being, those of you "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" people forget that not everyone has boots. Yes we do expect people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and welfare isn't supposed replace effort, it's just the boots. To those of you who begrudge them this I say wow, good for you, I sure admire the choices you made before you were born, aren't you glad you didn't go get high the day parents were handed out like those other losers.

The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Gregg Easterbrook

This must have been written before the "recession" "depression" "economic downturn" we seem to be currently experiencing. Well, at least I am, everyone around me seems to be doing dandy. Maybe it's just because I didn't go to college and made the wrong choices with my personal life, lied to myself about what I really wanted in life because I thought I couldn't have it, and am therefor stupid and deserve less security than everyone else. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, so since we all aren't dying of plague, dumping our poo out the window onto homeless people, and have food (any food) we should all be happy now. He totally tortured the statistics to prove his case and must live in some gated community where he doesn't have to look at poverty. He's right to make fun of all the garbage there is to buy and all the people desperately spending dollar after dollar hoping to fill the void left by their jobs which can never pay enough to make up for the portion of the soul they've taken. Anyway, I didn't finish it, the guy was a silver spoon asshole.