So, with that in mind, here’s two samples I’ve read recently, and I’ll try to make this a semi-regular feature after I polish off a few. With each one, I’ll include a quotation.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee is a book about cancer, as one might guess from the title. I heard Mukherjee speak and decided to check his book out, it just took me a while to get around to it.

Leukemia is cancer of the white blood cells—cancer in one of its most explosive, violent, incarnations As one nurse on the wards often liked to remind her patients, with this disease, “even a paper cut is an emergency.”

For an oncologist in training, too, leukemia represents a special incarnation of cancer. Its pace, its acuity, its breathtaking, inexorable arc of growth forces rapid, often drastic decisions; it is terrifying to experience, terrifying to observe, and terrifying to treat.

I’m definitely buying this one.

Kook by Peter Heller is a non-fiction by a man who, coming back from writing a book about Tibet’s deepest gorge, has a crisis of what to do next and so decides to take up surfing.

Most sports, at first entry, balance the initial strangeness and difficulty with immediate rewards. In kayaking, you launch down your first riffling whitewater, take the first little waves over your bow, feel the speed like a revelation as the current tongues into a smooth V between rocks. You may dump and swim but you’ve had that rush. Skiing is the same; the bunny slope gives you that first alien and wonderful sense of slide and acceleration, though you may not know how to stop or turn.

Everything works this way except surfing.

Surfing is one of the only pursuits on earth that can drub you into numb exhaustion and blunt trauma time and time again and give you nothing in return; nothing but sand in your crotch, salt-stung eyes, banged temple, chipped tooth, screaming back, and sunburned ears—gives you all of this and not a single stand-up ride. Time and again. Day after day. Gives you nothing back but tumbles, wipeouts, thumpings, scares. And you return. You are glad to do it. In fact, you can think of nothing you’d rather do.

I’ll also be picking this one up, but this quotation did remind me why I gave up surfing.

She didn’t actually get it on her birthday, which fell on a Thursday, but we did get it to her shortly thereafter. A good thing, because mom was told she had cancer on her birthday.

She’d put it out in one area of the front yard, one that people come and steal plums from (because no one’s really known who the land belonged to).

Naturally, with cancer surgery and recovery and then the rainy season setting in, it was still in its pot, though put in its appointed place.

She last remembers seeing it this weekend, but noticed today that it had gone. Lacking locomotion of its own, that means someone nipped our palm tree.

It went like this:

October 19, she called the Kaiser advice nurse.

October 20, she had an appointment to see her Ob-Gyn.

October 26 (her birthday, unfortunately), she gets the news she’s got endometrial cancer.

Nov 1, she has an appointment with the gynecologic oncologist.

Nov 7, she has surgery.

Later that week, it’s confirmed by the pathologist that they got all the cancer.

Nov 20, she returns to work.

There’s so many bad stories about cancer out there, I figured someone could use a good one.

This wasn’t a fashion show, it was Jerry Springer. The show jumped the shark so hard it left orbit.

Or, as Marion Zimmer Bradley put it, “I want my disbelief to be suspended, not hung by the neck until dead.” Or words to that effect.

The only redemption edit Jeffrey could have gotten would have involved a hot poker, his tongue cut out with a knife, and a permanent vow of silence. Even that wouldn’t have been enough.

One critique I particularly liked, where the story starts with the character asleep. So many new writers start with their character waking up (or asleep), forgetting that the beginning of their story needs to match the ending of the story, and there’s not a lot of time to waste. Don’t make it start the way the reader starts their day or it’ll be mundane. (And yes, I’m giving this critique almost exactly in Critters this week.

Look at each entry, and then her comments. You may not agree with her, but maybe you’ll learn something. I did.

Last year, the judges called Santino a coward when he was team lead and suggested one of his teammates be the one eliminated. But this year Vincent gets a pass? What’s up with that?

The only thing that should have saved Vincent was the fact that Tara Conner happened to like his Joan Jetson knockoff dress. His dissing of Angela was not only unprofessional, it showed that he didn’t do his job as team lead. True, Angela was ineffective, but she did try to collaborate, which is more than Vincent did.

In the end, Vincent had a badly-constructed garment, a horrible experience (“worst day of my life” unbelievable), and no one but himself to blame for it. It’s obvious why Vincent had to leave fashion before: he can’t get along with people, and he hasn’t learned.

A lot of people disagree with the winner, but it really wasn’t about the best dress, it was about the most appropriate dress for Tara, and I think Kayne and Robert really nailed it.

Edited to add:

Thanks to Vincent’s commentary on Blogging Project Runway, I’m going to retract my criticism of Vincent above. Also, at the time I wrote the above post, there were a few bits of the episode I missed because I was out of the room (like where Angela was lobbying Kayne), nor had I seen the first episode yet.

Given that, I’m with 60+% of the other Project Runway fans that Angela should have been the one axed (about 20+% think it should have been Vincent, and 5% Malan, but Malan has shown himself to be a surprising fan favorite). The presentation of a design was also a part of the challenge, and she didn’t present one too. While neither Vincent nor Angela were shown as being good at teamwork, I think the episode’s editing was unfairly harsh on Vincent. That said, it’s a show, you know? Editing must go on.

Having looked at Angela’s web site, and read up a bit more, I genuinely think that Angela is insufficiently talented for PR. It’s possible that she may surprise me — it’s happened before.

Thanks for the corrections, Vincent.

As Tim would say, carry on.

Since others may be considering shopify, here’s my critique:

1. There’s no easy way to charge tax only in one vicinity, but not others. In the US, if you charge tax in your state, you may not charge it in others. Canada, where Shopify was developed, has both a national GST and a provincial one, so its tax structure is fundamentally different.
2. There’s no practical way to charge actual cost for shipping. But that’s what I do already (though I ship priority mail and charge for the median zone price for that weight with an estimate of box and packing material weight). In shopify, shipping rates are a function of state. Priority mail rates do not break down by state, but rather by zip code ranges. Frequently, these do not follow state boundaries. Yet, with web services, calculating actual cost should be easy, right?
3. Most e-commerce sites are poorly designed for people selling one-offs. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting a lot (because it is fairly unusual), but sometimes a store consists entirely of one-offs. Like mine.
4. No API, thus no easy way to develop add-on tools, e.g. bulk info uploaders, especially handy for those of us selling one-offs.