TTW is an excellent book, P-C. Well worth reading.

The Time Traveler's Wife is fantastic. Let us know what you think.

I just read All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, by Rachel Manija Brown, which my friend picked up for me at BookExpo. It comes out in October. Rachel Manija Brown spent a major part of her childhood growing up on Meher Baba's ashram in Ahmednagar, a dusty backwater town in central India. It's a great story, and she tells it skillfully and with a great sense of (mostly black) humor. Her mother is an especially compelling character, what with her total devotion to Baba and her willful ignorance of the awful things that happen to Rachel (being beaten in school, for example). Of special note to Buffistas: the parts where Rachel discovers science fiction at age 12, and her fascination with stories about a local warrior hero that eventually lead her to study martial arts as an adult.

The book is getting a lot of comparisons to Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors, another blackly humorous story of a bizarre and often horrifying childhood, and I think the comparisons are well-deserved. (As it turns out, Running with Scissors was largely responsible for Rachel Manija Brown's decision to tell her story.) Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed both books, and I highly recommend this one.

Oh, hey, I know her! Sort of.

Okay, for a moment there I thought I was going to have something to add, as I've just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife. But it turns out Debet and Kate have said exactly what I thought. I loved it. Even my grandmother, who doesn't like science fiction or any of that weird stuff, loved it, so it must be a pretty widely appealing book.

OK Buffista advice. I just finished the first draft of a book on solutions to global warming. It adds up a lot of different techniques to show how we could eliminate nearly 100% of net carbon emissions. To do this it it has to wander fairly far afield - into no-till agriculture, building techniques that require less wood, cement and metal and so forth.

I was thinking adding a text reminder to the page footer - showing the cumulative total, right next to the page number, - so you could always glance down and see that you are at 10% of emission eliminated, 20% , 30% etc...

I even thought briefly of using a discreet graphic - a thermeter or such. But I doubt a publisher would like the idea of a graphical page header or footer, and anyway I suspect it would make the layout too busy.

But having a little text note alongside the page number - good idea? bad idea?

Thanks.

Might work, if it's clear, doesn't clutter the page, and is explained at the beginning.

I think it could work. Maybe not by the page number, but the opposite (ie-if the pg number is at the top, put the % at the bottom.)

Am-Chau, I have other interesting things to say about the book, I just didn't want to be spoily, but if you want to discuss, I'm more than game.

Oh, hey, I know her! Sort of.

Yeah, I knew the name looked familiar when my friend gave me the book, and then I realized she was on LJ, so I stopped by and left her a little "hey, your book is really awesome!" note.

Quick question for the literary hivemind: I'm working on a care package for my National Guard nephew in Baghdad. My plan is to stuff a flat-rate priority envelope as full as I can get it, so I'm thinking a magazine or two and a slim paperback in addition to a letter. Problem is, since Nathan lives in Georgia and I live in Washington, we don't see that much of each other, so I'm not sure what he reads. Obviously, y'all don't know him at all, but I'm just looking for ideas of authors who don't write chick books and who write something slim enough for the envelope--no doorstop fantasy tomes of the type I favor when I venture into more masculine literary territory. Something where if I guess wrong and he doesn't want to read it, he won't have any trouble finding a taker for it.

Douglas Adams? Small books, funny, non-gendered.