After buying my Nikon D40 Kit, I tried to learn as much as I can about it by reading the manual. What I initially thought was: “Bad idea.” However, after reading this article, I’m beginning to rethink my whole strategy. It has great tips on how to read your camera manual. They recommended using Post It notes and breaking down your bookmarks into the following categories:

• What do I already know?
• What do I need to know right now?
• What do I need to know a lot of the time?
• What do I need to know some of the time?

If you think about it, this is actually a fantastic idea. The manual is supposed to have all the information you need about the camera. All you have to do is know where the information you need is located and mark it for easy reference.

I couldn’t have discovered this book at a better time. After owning Izzie for a week, I was at Target buying some last minute doggy supplies for her when I walked past the books and magazines section and saw this adorable cover staring back at me. I didn’t even have to read the first page. I saw the front cover and put it into my shopping basket.

In Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog by John Grogan, John and his wife Jenny have just adoped a rambunctious and lively dog whom they named Marley. This book catalogs his life (and everything he ate and tore apart) with the Grogans from beginning to end with love and laughter.

…Beneath the dense branches of the pine, the snow was just a few inches deep. The tree acted like an umbrella, and once underneath it Marley was free to move about and squat comfortably to relieve himself. I had to admit, it was pretty brilliant. He circled and sniffed and scratched in his customary way, trying to locate a worthy shrine for his daily offering. Then, to my amazement, he abandoned the cozy shelter and longed back into the deep snow en route to the next pine tree. The first spot looked perfect to me, but clearly it was just not up to his sterling standards.

This is a GREAT book for anyone who has ever owned a dog. It touches on every emotion every dog owner goes through from puppyhood and beyond. Grogan describes every account in a way that only a dog owner would truly understand.

So over my lovely and relaxing long vacation last weekend, I came across a book called Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan. And because Barnes & Noble has constructed an environment that actually encourages spending long hours in their store just reading and browsing books, I actually got to spend some time with it before purchasing it.

If you’re like me and live in an apartment, I HIGHLY recommend this book, especially if you don’t mind hippy dippy talk about the flow of energy through your home, etc. Think of this as feng shui for the modern apartment dweller.

It may have been more than mere coincidence that I purchase the book the week it was being featured on Oprah. I unfortunately missed the episode, but I visited the site and learned about how March 5 marks the start of Spring Cure ‘07 and I completely plan on participating.

The great thing about the book is it’s laid out like an easy-to-follow 8 week plan. The first week, I’m supposed to start out small and just get a vision of how I want my living space to be. After that, it goes into putting together a budget and even having a celebratory dinner at the end of the 8 weeks.

I talked with a friend from work about being my decluttering buddy. Anyone else feel like participating?

Wick Allison wrote this very powerful and inspiring article in DMagazine that reminded me of that time in my life when I was a newspaper major for like a day. Our professor kept hounding us about finding the interesting stories. This article reminds me of him.

Ok, Amazon.com continues to amaze me with it’s seemingly broad and endless inventory of items. Like today, for example, when I was looking for a copy of Civilization 4, I came across this book title How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men.

And then… thanks to Amazon’s “Customers who bought this also bought…” came about the following string of books:

• How to Attract Asian Women by Ming Tan
• Seduce Me! What Women Really Want (Seduce Me!) by R. Gregory Alonzo
• The System: How to Get Laid Today!

In this day and age? Really?

It’s been a long time since I’ve been so captivated by a book that it’s kept me awake well past my bedtime on several occasions. Prep: A Novel, a novel by Curtis Sittenfeld, will bring you back to that awkward time in high school when we were dying to fit in, but not make it look like we were trying so hard. I honestly think that anyone who’s ever experienced high school and adolescence will, at some point, be able to relate to the main character, Lee Fiora.

At the beginning of the book, Lee is just arriving at Ault School, a prestigious boarding school in Boston. She’s observant, intelligent, thoughtful, and as you come to learn, also neurotic, insecure, and plagued with low self esteem. Throughout the book, Lee is an outsider, a peripheral, observing life at Ault rather than living it. Unlike her peers, she’s there on scholarship and therefore doesn’t come from the same upbringing. Her freshman year she meets Cross Sugarman who becomes her love interest in addition to the other classmates, friends, and teachers who all affect her life in some way or another.

I can’t name one thing I love about this book, mostly because there are so many. Not only was it so well written (hat’s off to Ms. Sittenfeld), there’s something beautiful, sad, and very touching about this story. Yet at the same time, it’s so unromantic, raw, and unsentimental to be considered your typical Sweet Valley High book. No, definitely not Sweet Valley High, but more like J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. To read some of the things going on in her head, some of her thoughts, I felt like I was reading my own personal memoir of my time in high school. I was reliving what it felt like to be in that awkward adolescent stage where you tried so hard to be unattached, even though deep down inside you just wanted to blend in.

This story is almost like therapy for high school. No matter how long it’s been since you graduated, this book seems to make that period of insecurity, angst, and awkwardness ok.

Can I say, this is the first book I haven’t been able to put down in a long time. I mean, seriously, wow. The sad thing is it’s not exceptionally well done or surprising. The plot seemed a little typical, but I couldn’t stop turning pages, eager to see what became of Jo Slater and the Countess de Passy.

When Jo Slater, one of the grandest of New York’s grande dames and great patron of the arts, befriends a young French countess, trouble begins. Ignoring warnings from friends, Jo abruptly discovers the truth about her mysterious guest. But it is too late. Jo is knocked off her pedestal and the young woman takes her place in society. Dethroned and dispossessed in the world where she once reigned, she sets out to recoup her fortune and reclaim her throne. Using her knowledge of the eighteenth century, she concocts an ingenious scheme based on the greatest historical swindle of all time, a true story involving Marie Antoinette. In order for the scheme to work, however, she must resort to the most desperate of all measures: murder.

This is a neat little mystery written in classic mystery form with just enough wit to keep a person’s interest.

If you’ve never read Practical Demonkeeping by Christopher Moore (or any of his books rather), you’re missing out on a real treat. In this book, Moore combines wit, clever religious humor, and comedy in this funny and engaging novel.

Catch and Travis make up the Demon and Demonkeeper pair, trapped in a master-slave relationship for almost a century. It wasn’t until they came across qaint, little Pine Cove, California that things started to stir to life. Travis wanted to get rid of Catch, and Catch wanted to move onto bigger and better things. And of course, eat more people and wreak more havoc than Travis would allow.

I love this book. I have to admit, it was slow in the beginning, and the way Moore planned out the book was rather confusing, dedicating a chapter to a number of different characters, never revealing the reason why he was talking about them. And if you feel frustrated and tired of hearing about these people like I did, don’t give up. Moore never leaves a stone unturned in this book and by the end, everything will make sense. Overall, it’s a great book and a fast read. Very highly recommended. And it has a feel-good ending that I think the story deserved.

Once again, I’m late in posting a review of a book I finished a month ago. For the longest time I’ve been wanting to read this book since my comm design professor recommended it to me my first year in university. Three years later and after graduating with a journalism degree instead of an art degree, I bought this book on a whim.

My impression of it? Ok in the beginning, great in the middle, but at the end? WTF? Seriously, I felt a little cheated at the end of the book, though perhaps I just didn’t get it. So if you’ve read this book and thought it to be brilliant, please email me and let me know what the hell it means. Basically it’s about this kid who tries to survive his first year as a graphic design student and comes across the most eccentric graphic design professor. Really, he has them doing some weird assignments, but weird enough to actually be believable.

Other than that, I think it’s a great book—a very unique story that only insiders who’ve ever gone through university level art classes will understand. Believe me, the narrator’s experience are true to the dotted i’s.

ColourLovers.com. An excellent color palette resource. I still, however, highly recommend The Color Index.

This is a long overdue review of a book that is certainly worthy of wide coverage. In this book, Joshua Braff paints a picture of a seemingly perfect Jewish family: older brother Asher, middle son Jacob, younger sister Dara, baby Gabriel, and father Abe and mother Claire.

From the publisher:

Take one adolescent boy with an overactive imagination and a flourishing libido. Add a narcissistic father who can shower is children with love one minute and verbally cut them to shreds the next. Take a mother who seems to be always “out” and three siblings at various stages of development. Hire a sexy babysitter to take care of the kids and move them all to a new house in a leafy green New Jersey town in the 1970s, and you’ve got the makings of a comic and heart-wrenching novel of suburbia.

Amazingly well written, touching, intelligent, and witty novel well worth a read.

So I just happened to discover that EA Games and Maxis put out the very first expansion pack for the Sims 2. Like all other geeks and Sims fanatics, I ran out to the store the second I find out its on the shelves.

I install it after I get home and I’m pretty excited to see the new objects and actions they’ve added. I set up the university and allowed one of my neighborhood girls to attend. She moved into the dorms, picked out her room, and met a few people. She even ate dinner in the dorm cafeteria (yes, they have one of those too).

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