Julie Pippert: Using My Words

It's almost Earth Day ! What are you going to do? Turn out the lights for an hour? Plant a tree? Go green? Start a compost pile? Excellent. How about also...read a book! If you know me at all you know how much I work to get my active on-the-go kids to sit and read. I found two earth day friendly books they liked! My oldest is a big "how stuff works" fan. For her, we found she liked this : With a LEED certified architect dad, she enjoyed the look at structures that are earth friendly. Also,this book is heavy on call-outs and factoids. It begins with a look at the roles in building. Then it talks about elements of structure and building. Next, it highlights some incredible examples around the world of earth friendly structures . Throughout it offers some great ideas of DIY projects kids can do at home. Today I get to go buy more pipe cleaners to complete the cross-bracing experiment (page 13). Last night we got a string of jokes. Did I mention there are funny jokes throug...

I am reading, no, savoring, Isabel Allende's memoir, My Invented Country . I am taking my time with this book, picking up small portions delicately, raising them to my eyes and mind with slow anticipation, chewing and digesting them lingeringly. Once, I considered myself an avid scholar of the magical realism genre. That was back in my scholar days---the late 80s and early 90s. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was king. I found Allende's House of the Spirits a pale imitation of his work. Why was magical realism so appealing to me? Nobody ever asked. However, Allende, in her memoir, has finally answered the question for me: I am a ghost of Chile, wandering the practical world with an imaginative mind fixated in superstition and surprise divined from stockpiles of observation. Chileans, Allende asserts, offset their superstition, sobriety and natural intolerance with a love of regulation, "I believe this obsession of ours with legality is a kind of safeguard against the aggression we...

Photo of us with Congressman Nick Lampson after a luncheon. Photo credit: Colleen O'Brien, reporter, Friendswood Reporter News Brunch with the fab Liv and Jenny. And a ton of birthday parties. Our weekend was nonstop---which can be good, and exhausting. Also, it sets a bad precedent with kids, who will now think every weekend revolves around MegaFun. In brief: * As always, an interesting lunch with Congressman Nick Lampson. The Democrats are the truly family friendly party. It's not a euphemism for "live according to our morality or we'll make you by law." It means, "we know people have families and we want to be supportive of that." So keep that in mind, my friends, as the election draws closer. Mr. Lampson's chief of staff could not have been kinder or more helpful in accommodating me showing up with Persistence. Mr. Lampson could not have been nicer to her, even earning her trust and a smile. The other guests were also very nice, and gave her lots...

Books. Today is a day to read . I'm not sure how this is different from any other day for me but I'll seize any opportunity to talk about books. So, instead of trading iPod Top 25 music lists, let's trade "Reading" and "Must Read lists." Because my list could go on for days, I'll limit it to books currently on my nightstand. 1. The book I just finished and can't put away yet because I loved it that much, the absolutely brilliant Must-Read: (Click on the image to go see a sample chapter and reviews.) Synopsis It's a winter evening in Boston and the temperature has drastically dropped as a blizzard approaches the city. On this fateful night, Bernard Doyle plans to meet his two adopted sons, Tip the older, and more serious and Teddy, the affectionate dreamer, at a Harvard auditorium to hear a speech given by Jesse Jackson. Doyle, an Irish Catholic and former Boston mayor, has done his best to keep his two sons interested in politics, from the da...

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition. * "Anthony Trollope," Century Magazine (July 1883) I have sitting on my bedside table two books: Richard Russo's new one ( Bridge of Sighs ) and Ann Patchett's new one ( Run ). Patchett's book begins Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in Doyle's living room asking for the statue back. They had no legal claim to it, of course, she never would have thought of leaving it to them, but the statue had been in their family for four generations, passing down a maternal line from mother to daughter, and it was their intention to hold with tradition. Bernadette had no daughters. Aren't you intrigued, immediately? Who is Doyle? Who is Bernadette? How did she die? Why wouldn't she will the statue to her sisters? Did Doyle give the sisters the statue? If so, which sister got it? Wha...

About a decade ago or so, my husband and I stepped trepidatiously into the land of infertility. We'd been married about five years when we decide to try to conceive. This was, actually, a master plan. While my husband and I were still dating I went to my friend Julie's sister's wedding shower and she shared her master plan for marriage. I thought Holly was about as cool as it got, so I paid attention to every word she said, and logged it in my head like gold. Later, my husband liked the five year plan: play for five, then settle down. And it's true: for five years we played...and played...and played. One day, it felt like time. Let's have a baby. Only it didn't at all work out that way. I've gone through it before, the infertility saga, a la Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 . The latest installment I haven't shared because...well, I am still processing. I want to, though, because sharing is what got me through infertility, and I feel like sharing might help ...

I am reading a fairly implausible book right now. It's a romantic thriller. I like to read these sorts of things now and again; you know, stuff you might read on a vacation when you prefer your mind at about the consistency of bean dip. Right now I like bean dip. A lot. In fact, yesterday I was reading this book while eating corn and black bean salsa with Tostitos restaurant style chips. I know ! Time to read! And yet, here I am complaining that what I read was implausible. It is, no matter how often the characters say, "Oh shit!" and "What a clusterfuck." Although I myself say these things frequently about my own life and times, it's not at all the same thing. And when I try to imagine myself in the plot in the book---which, with my Guiness Book World Record Level Imagination I can usually do with great ease to the astonishment of my husband and to the concern of the mental health community worldwide---I think, "Pffffft, tsk, yeah, right, whatever, lik...