Fifteen Minutes Outside by Rebecca Cohen

I will admit to picking up far more of these kids of books than I actually read. You know, the "it's really easy to make significant life changes by just doing this One Easy Thing." Many of these seem to start out as a blog, though I don't know if this is the case with this one. 

The first "do one thing" book I read was Being Julia Child. At the time I was in grad school and had just picked up a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking at a planned parenthood book sale in Santa Barbara, one of the most unrealistically beautiful places I imagine I'll ever live. But back to the book - I had started cooking these recipes both as a way to learn to cook (it was FAR BETTER than anything on the cooking channel) and an excuse to invite people to the house (there's only so much cream one should eat in one serving). Reading that book I was profoundly disappointed: here I was slaving away at a dissertation, and this woman simply blogged about the thing I was already doing, and had far more people read her work WHILE making money than I ever would. 

My first reaction to this book was very similar to Being Julia Child - why didn't I write this?!?! Or if not me, than a couple of enviro-types that I know. The answer is most certainly a topic for another post, but I am happy that I did not put down the book in the early chapters. The only niggling complaint I have as I continued to read this book is the amount of self-promotion in it: my preference would have been to put these things in the back of each book or chapter, with a small paragraph describing her products. I get she needs to hawk her wares, I just don't like it to get in the way of my reading.

And on to the meat of the book! Each chapter is simply a list of seasonally appropriate activities to get you and your kids outside for 15 minutes. Kind of like Things to do with toddlers and twos, but with an outside focus. These lists were great. In addition to a wide variety of activities, they were generally appropriate for a range of ages and interests and were easy to implement with little or no equipment. These are indeed my favorite kind of activities, especially if they are only going to last 15 minutes. Sure your kids may like some of these suggestions and do them for hours, but if they don't, at least there's not a big time, energy or equipment investment.

Would I buy this book? I don't know. After reading it, I would probably use it most if it were a laminated sheet for each month even though I likely needed the book to flesh out some of the ideas the first time I made it. Even better: a spreadsheet of all of the activities, then you can check the ones that would work for your family (anything with a hose is out in our mountain desert, for example) with boxes for you to add ones that work for your area/environment. Oh look, I made another product to sell!

Into Hot Water, A Four Corners Mystery by Judith Ann Isaacs

The second book I read for the Family50 was Into Hot Water, A Four Corners Mystery by Judith Ann Isaacs. Judith has written at least a couple of local guidebooks I have read, and all of them have been both straightforward to use and useful in their details regarding our local area. Given this, I was happy to pick up Into Hot Water.

Just a little background: For a few months after college I worked at a self-publishing book business in Bloomington, Indiana. It sticks in my mind for two reasons: I learned not everyone has a book in them, and if you are a small business owner, Indiana allowed you to let your workers smoke in the workplace. This was the primary reason at least two (yellowed, odoriferous, desiccated) employees worked there. Back to my first point - egads do some people write terrible, terrible books. It truly was a vanity press in the worst sense of the phrase. Given this background, I was pleasantly surprised with this book. The book layout, editing and story were all fantastic for not having been released by a major publisher.

But was it a good read? I will say this: I finished the book and never once thought of putting it down. It was a solid mystery with character development enough for me to care about the people in the story, adequate foreshadowing so that one did not feel the solution came out of left field, and just the right amount of filler to provide backstory but not boredom. In addition, I loved the local flavor.The land disputes, the culture, the small time police - all of this is alive and well in our part of the world, and I was happy to read a novel that captured the true flavor of New Mexico as I have experienced it. 

Recommended audience: Great beach read, New Mexico read, and mystery

The Lost City of Z

I've never been able to keep up New Year's Resolutions, and for all intents and purposes have stopped trying.  This year, however, our library is celebrating it's 50th anniversary by holding a contest: Read 50 books, and at the end of the year get your name entered into a contest. Books read to children count too. Enter the Family 50: This year each family member will either read or be read 50 books.

In a perfect world, I'd have the children write or recite a synopsis of each book they read and post it. And truly, we might get this done. But for my part I hope to write a review of each of my books, both as a way to try and consistently write and as a way to record the books I've read. Let's see if this lasts a month!

My first book is The Lost City of Z by David Grann. At this point I will only say that any review any person can write about this book will not do it justice, so stop reading this and GET THE BOOK! I myself had avoided reading it for well over a year, thinking that it was simply another adventure book.  Not that there's anything wrong with a good adventure story. They can be exciting and interesting. They can help let us feel better about ourselves by painting a picture of an explorer who invariably made a series of bad decisions we ourselves have not made. Short of traveling to a place oneself, there is no better way to learn geography than to read about others who have gotten to know a place firsthand. Truly, adventure books are great!

But this is not merely a description of one man's remarkable travels to one of the most interesting and least explored places at the turn of the 20th century, though Grann's description of the Amazon as experienced by Percy Fawcett is truly amazing (sidenote: tropical diseases are horrific!). It's a book about history, literature, anthropology, geography and technology since the discovery of the New World. Examples of questions that you will find answered: Did Arthur Conan Doyle entertain notions of the occult, and why? Where did we get all the rubber for tires when cars became more prevalent? Why would an opera company be made to perform in the Amazon, and how did they fare? Why were there so darn many explorers in the Victorian age? What do you do if you get maggots in your arm? This book has these answers and many, many more...

As you can tell, I loved this book. I recommend it to anyone with a vague interest in the greater world around them. It would be a lovely spine to a course about South America, with two weeks to read and discuss the book and the rest of the semester devoted entirely to independent projects that piqued the interest of instructors or students. Were I to pick one book that could serve as a jumping off point to learn about Conquistadores, the Amazon, the history of WWI, early anthropology, exploration, the Royal Geographical Society of London, the English, or Colonialism, this would be it. I can't believe how much the author packed into one book.