More Coffee Please

I’m starting on January 3rd, so I guess I have to post about three books today to catch up.
1.
Robert Twigger: Voyageur

This crazy guy built a birchbark canoe and then, over the course of a few summers, managed to lead the second group in history to travel the water route from Fort Mackay, Alberta over the Rockies to the ocean.

The first group was Alexander Mackenzie’s crew back in 1793, which speaks to exactly how navigable the route is. You can do it by water, but it’s mostly upstream and almost entirely unpleasant. This is why things like airplanes and divorces were invented: some people see mountains and think “w00t! let’s canoe 2000km over that motherfucker!” and the rest of us think in terms of a short dayhike, probably followed by lunch, a good nap, and a contemplative beer at sunset.

He manages to make the whole thing sound less insane than it clearly was, which is impressive in itself. But this book nails the most prominent feature of long canoe trips — the way objectively tiny interpersonal conflicts, because there’s little else to do and no place to escape, grate on everyone’s nerves until mature adults end up fighting bitterly over the number of crackers in the soup. Twigger captures this brilliantly.

Worth a read if winter leaves you twitching and hovering over maps of Crown land. I see it’s coming out in paperback in April.

2. Taking interpersonal conflict to a whole other level, there’s Lionel Shriver’s fictional We Need to Talk About Kevin. . Written from the perspective of the mother of a son responsible for a school shooting, Kevin is hard to put down despite its overwhelming creepiness — and hard to stop thinking about when you’re done.

This one does not, obviously, have a happy ending. Nor is it easy, light, fun reading. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic. But Shriver writes well and the book is oddly affecting. “Very well done,” said someone when I mentioned this book, “and I wish I hadn’t read it.” I’d take this one out of the library so you can give it back and keep it from lurking around the house when you’re done.

3. Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual

Now that Mac OS X is based on Unix and Windows Vista promises to be a useless, restrictive, opaque behemoth, it’s time to make the switch. We bought a Mac mini a year or so ago and we’ve been slowly switching everyone over to Mac goodness since then.

This book is key. As with the rest of the Missing Manual series, it’s clearly written, well illustrated, decently indexed and just plain useful. Although it’s a decent primer on Mac basics, much of the content in this book covers ways of moving your Windows activities over to a Mac machine without losing data. Worth the $$.