“Number Mania: A Visual Exploration Of 0 To 100”

Chico mathematician Scott Lape, aided by Madrid-based illustrator Víctor Medina, will make readers fall in love with digits. Even if you don’t like math, he has your number. Actually, 101 of them.

In “Number Mania: A Visual Exploration Of 0 To 100” ($19.99 in hardcover from Odd Dot/Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group) Lape and Medina provide a carnival of number lore on every page not just for kids ages 6 through 12 but for adults as well. 

We’re surrounded by numerals, in street signs and digital clocks, but things get really interesting when we start counting. “The number representing a group of objects only has meaning if there’s somebody looking at the objects, counting them, or wondering, ‘How many are there?’” 

Each number has its own mathematical personality and each colorful, whimsical page looks at how the number is expressed in other languages, its factors, a bit of numerical history, and a section that’s just wild about that number. There are 64 colors in many Crayon packages; Forty-Four is a small town in Arkansas; “The traditional gift for a 70th wedding anniversary is something made of platinum (element 78).” Bowling balls can’t weigh more than 16 pounds.

You’ll see 36 on a yardstick, of course, but also “there are 36 counties in Oregon. There are 36 black keys (and 52 white keys) on a piano.” In Judaism, “the commandment to be kind to strangers is found 36 times in the Torah.”

Zeroing in on nothing, Lape writes that “The idea of ‘none’ being a number took a long time to catch on…. The first known use of a small circle to represent zero was in 876 CE in India…. Now we have a bunch of words that mean 0: nada, zilch, zip, diddly, and diddly-squat! … There used to be a town called Zero in Iowa—but sadly, its population is now 0.”

You’ll have fun with this book. Count on it.

Scott Lape will have a book signing at the Chico Barnes & Noble on Saturday, November 23 at 1:00 p.m. And listen to a recent Nancy’s Bookshelf interview with the author by host Nancy Wiegman at www.mynspr.org/show/nancys-bookshelf.

“And I Love Her Still”

Chicoan Pamela Dean “was a wildland firefighter in the early 90s and worked on engine 4 out of Adin,” a small town (fewer than three hundred residents) in Modoc County. Though an injury ended her career, “she was proud to be a part of the group of women who forged the way.”

Adin in 1988 is the scene of what is billed as a “heartwarming romantic comedy,” but what Dean delivers is so much more. It’s a literary tour de force that propels the reader to the very end and takes no prisoners along the way.

“And I Love Her Still” ($19.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) introduces two combustible characters in Kenny, a beautiful badass woman firefighter and EMT (who handles a chainsaw with finesse), and 32-year-old Patrick, a handsome but disillusioned Seattle mystery writer who inherits a ranch near Adin. Sparks, as they say, will fly. 

Kenny and Patrick narrate alternate chapters throughout the book, always in the present tense, and the reader listens in. They are no strangers to barnyard epithets or explicit descriptions.

“Her features,” Patrick muses to himself, “are a contradiction, sweet and innocent with a touch of sin. … She has dark-brown eyes and a bunch of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She is tanned … and damn is she fit.” “He is actually kind of adorable,” Kenny thinks. “Bumbling professor kind of cute. I mean looks-wise he is a hot professor type. Dark hair and brilliant blue eyes.”

As self-deprecating Patrick gets to know the ranch that belonged to his late great-uncle Mitchell, and read his cowboy poetry (and eventually write some of his own), he finds he’s entangled in something of a family mystery. Kenny is plagued by Ryan, a young crewmember on the prowl for women, and the love lives of both Kenny and Patrick are pretty much on the skids. Until they meet.

I couldn’t put it down.

The author will be having a book signing party November 13 at the Blue Agave Room at Tres Hombres from 6:00-8:00 pm. The cover painting is by local artist Virginia Wright who will be offering hand-painted bookmarks at the signing.

“Stand Easy: Creating A Small British Pub And Considerable Comradeship In The Corner Of A Garage”

For Chicoan David Bruhn it happened almost by chance. After weekly mountain biking with longtime friend Pat O’Connell, the two would “sit at a small bar in my garage and enjoy a beverage—he a bottle of water, and I a bottle of beer. (I attribute these choices to his having served in the U.S. Air Force and I in the U.S. Navy.)”

The bar was something like a British pub, and over seven years, with input from a group of friends, it took on real character, befitting the real characters who frequented “Stand Easy” (a military term meaning “take a break”). And now Bruhn has published an account of its construction, filling it with a hundred photographs and diagrams, stories from the friends who meet there regularly, and an assortment of British pub jokes.

“Stand Easy: Creating A Small British Pub And Considerable Comradeship In The Corner Of A Garage” ($23.50 in paperback from Heritage Books, Inc.) is not just about the artifacts that populate the pub, including a hand-made chandelier of 9 wine bottles with their bottoms cut off, but “about building friendship and espirit de corps.”

Bruhn writes that “moderation is the key” during “our weekly use…. The Stand Easy is formally open between 5:30 and 7:00 p.m. During this time everyone enjoys at most two drinks and a home cooked meal prepared by my wife Nancy or Rich Varlinsky.” (Recipes in an Appendix include Nancy’s Kickin’ Crab Corn Chowder.)

Friends’ stories add to the ambience of the book, from Deadhead Grace who dated Neil Young to Rich and Cindy’s Mexican Riviera cruise. 

In 1989 sociologist Ray Oldenburg argued that “third places,” like local bars, were democracy’s grassroots where people, putting aside the demands of work and home, could meet for lively conversation, lessening some of the division that characterizes the moment we are in. Among Stand Easy’s small group of friends, the garage pub is indeed a “great good place.”

David Bruhn is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, November 6 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, November 10 at 8:00 p.m.

“Whispers In The Dark: Three Stories Of Terror”

Imagine Chico writer N.J. Hanson penning a scary story about a writer penning a scary story about “a man who moves into a new house, one he gets for a very reasonable price, which is also haunted by the spirits of the family that was murdered there.” Imagine further that the writer penning about the spirits finds on a stormy night that he, too, must deal with one of those spirits because of the pen he is penning with.

Hanson’s story is called “Inked In Blood,” one of a triad of tales perfectly pitched for the pumpkin season. “Whispers In The Dark: Three Stories Of Terror” ($6.95 in paperback from Ink Drop Press; also for Amazon Kindle) also includes “Roadside” and “Wingbeats In The Night.” 

“Roadside” is about just desserts, some might say. It begins gruesomely enough: “With a heave and a groan, he threw the body off the bridge and watched it splash in the river below. The concrete cinder block tied to it quickly pulled the corpse down to the bottom, where the dead girl’s arms, legs, and hair listed almost delicately in the current. … The man got back into his truck, the old engine of his ’73 Chevy rumbled to life when he turned the key, threw it in gear, and drove away. It was time to find a new girl.”

It ends, as one might guess, gruesomely enough.

The longest story, “Wingbeats In The Night,” takes the narrator to Mexico “to visit ancient sites of Aztec and Mayan ruins. … I planned a trip to visit the ancient city of the Sun Pyramid.” Big mistake, actually. His guide is a sketchy character but the narrator’s intense interest in the legends of these cultures drives him onward. 

The “bat god of the underworld, Camazotz,” “a human-bat hybrid,” is on the pyramid above the image of “a man held down by his arms and legs across a sacrificial altar, his chest cut open, and his heart held towards the sky in the hands of a priest”—but, this being the diabolical Hanson, it isn’t just ancient history.

Close the shutters and make way for the shudders.

“Heretic Too!: An LGBTQ-Celebrating, Divine Violence-Denying, Post-Christian Universalist’s Responses To More Of Evangelicalism’s Concerns”

Chico writer Matthew Distefano, theological provocateur and Tolkien-lover, returns for another jab at the conservative evangelical tradition he grew up in. “Heretic Too!: An LGBTQ-Celebrating, Divine Violence-Denying, Post-Christian Universalist’s Responses To More Of Evangelicalism’s Concerns” ($19.99 in paperback from Quoir; also for Amazon Kindle) is a sequel to his earlier “Heretic!”—though this time he calls himself not a heretic but an “apostate.”

Though “I still think Jesus is the bee’s knees” (and so, he adds, is Buddha), “I don’t necessarily care about all the ins and outs of the faith. I no longer care about the Apostles’ or Nicene creeds, or any of the creeds for that matter. I no longer consider myself part of the Church…. Instead, I’m way more interested in who Jesus was as a human being, why it’s important to study his life, and, if you’re so inclined, to put into practice his ethical teachings.” 

Later, though, Distefano notes that “I live on the fringes of Christianity,” and its pull continues to be evident in each chapter, which critiques many of the teachings found in evangelical circles. “It’s not that I don’t care for what Christians have to say, it’s just that I’ve become more enamored with Buddhism than I ever thought imaginable,” and “one can be a Christian and practice Buddhism.”

The bottom line is that through the strife of our present life, “love wins”—or should. Distefano wants to dismantle the doctrines that, he says, separate person from person, and that includes hell, marriages with gender-assigned roles, and heterosexual sex as the only “normal” kind (the author has come out as bisexual). The book ends with impassioned letters against Christian nationalism and the rise of Trumpism.

“Often times,” he writes, “I am cheeky, and sometimes I can be rather biting.” His theological explorations are peppered with barnyard epithets which, in an odd way, are the sign of his caring. He envisions love abounding (which doesn’t mean anything goes), a world with the sensibility of the Hobbits’ Shire, a place one can enjoy good pipeweed (in his case, cannabis) and talk with friends far into the night.

“Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America”

“This is a story,” says Sacramento-based social-justice writer Sasha Abramsky, “about the forces tearing at America’s twenty-first-century fabric. It is about a country that, pushed to the emotional and political limits by Trump, by COVID, and by the endless misinformation and echo chambers of social media, has found itself on the edge of a precipice, with political violence normalized and with wild conspiracy theories too often framing public discussions.”

Abramsky, a correspondent for The Nation, wonders whether the “corrosive forces” of “the nativism and the xenophobia, the distrust of sexual and cultural and racial minorities” will “burn out in the face of growing public unease—and even repugnance—at all that is lost when extremists seize the helm.” 

He's convinced that “it is in local communities throughout America, in ordinary places such as Sequim, Washington, and Shasta County, California, that this challenge will be met….” Both areas are explored in depth in “Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against The Far-Right Takeover Of Small-Town America” ($30 in hardcover from Bold Type Books; also for Amazon Kindle).

He begins with the COVID crisis in Sequim (“pronounced ‘Squim’”) “a town of 8,000 residents on the Olympic Peninsula,” which becomes a center of anti-vax sentiment--to the consternation of public health officer Dr. Allison Berry, “scared of white supremacists and misogynists who want me dead.”

In Shasta County, “public health officer Karen Ramstrom, along with her supporters in county government, were facing a similar set of terrors.” The stresses of the pandemic, Abramsky notes, forced people to the extremes. If health officials erred in inconsistent masking mandates, some of those who were infuriated found a home in a Republican Party “larded with violent rhetoric.”

Some Shasta County supervisors also pushed back on California’s open-carry gun ban and its mandated machine vote counts. “By 2023,” Abramsky writes, “there was an omnipresent background hum of extremism and a growing presence both of disinformation and of paranoia in everyday life.” Yet by the end of 2023 Abramsky finds hopeful signs both in Sequim and Shasta County. 

It’s a complex and nuanced story, a plea for a measured response when “chaos comes calling.”

“Meditations For Mortals: Four Weeks To Embrace Your Limitations And Make Time For What Counts”

British author Oliver Burkeman (oliverburkeman.com) invites readers dogged by perfectionism and proliferating to-dos to join him on a mind retreat. Enter “Meditations For Mortals: Four Weeks To Embrace Your Limitations And Make Time For What Counts” ($27 in hardcover from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; also for Amazon Kindle).

Each week’s theme (“Being Finite”; “Taking Action”; “Letting Go”; and “Showing Up”) explores what he calls “imperfectionism,” a realization that “the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be ‘out of the way,’ so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality.”

Instead, accepting our limitations “is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life – and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in history.”

Burkeman draws on insights from philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual writers of various traditions to open a door to what theorist Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance,” the world’s “capacity to touch, move and absorb us” when we recognize we are not, and can’t ever be, in total control of it.

He suggests some practical considerations, always recognizing they are not absolutes; we do indeed need to exert some control over our environment and sometimes must to do that pressing to-do. But if you can, he writes, “treat your to-do list as a menu”: “It’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plough through, but as options you get to pick.”

And this for people-pleasers: “It’s a fool’s errand … to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK, too.” Be careful about worrying that others are thinking bad things about you; likely they’re not thinking of you at all. Novelist Leila Sales writes that “when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy, but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.”

“This, here and now, is real life. This is it.” Choose from the day’s menu, and go for it, even if imperfectly.