Now, this is expressive writing! Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See (edited by Bill Shapiro), which I commented on recently, has many examples of writing that touches the heart. Here are some that appealed to me:

“I love that you sent me an actual letter. I can feel your hand on the pen, pressing firmly on the paper. Did you moisten the envelope with your lips?”

“If you were here now, I would kiss you. I would hold your hand and look at you with wonder. And then, if you would let me, I would kiss you again. And again. And again.”

“The man of your dreams, perhaps not — maybe just one of the many that have fallen, but for now I am ridiculously happy to be the one who curls himself around you.”

“The first thing I want is a park bench. Wooden, weathered, solid, comfortable. And with a view. Doesn’t have to be of the ocean. Could be a simple garden. Or a squirrel in a tree. Would you sit next to me, on my park bench? Would you take my hand and help me watch that squirrel?”

Besides the romantic interlude, what’s fun about the book is that you see the letters as they were written, on napkins, crumpled paper, e-mail printouts, postcards and scraps of paper. They are scrawled, carefully printed, typed. And at the end, there are comments from some of the people who contributed the love letters, describing how they felt digging them out (”I cried my eyes out,”  “I was completely surprised by how painful it was,” “I saw progress in how I dealt with rejection…”).

The book also includes a section with an update on how some of the lovers met and what happened to them. Some have since married; some dated briefly and then split up. One of the most touching, “Reasons Why I Love Kay” (100 things like “I can be myself when I am with you” and “You’re the one that holds the key to my heart”) was composed as a gift from Don to his wife of 24 years. Not long after, she was killed in a car accident.

When I looked up the love letter book, Amazon helpfully told me that people who bought it also bought PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions From Ordinary Lives by Frank Warren, which I also talked about. I’m not sure what that says about our voyeuristic tendencies!

Again, the book contains heartfelt messages from ordinary people. In this case, they are all writing a postcard to share a secret they have never told another soul, in response to what began as an art project in 2004. Warren started by handing out 3,000 postcards, but he has now received more than 150,000. The secrets are shared in this book and three others, the most recent being PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God, (being released Oct. 6), and on www.postsecret.com. The site gets six or seven million visitors every month, and in five years, the PostSecret community has raised $500,000 for suicide prevention.

There are happy or funny secrets:

“I bought a bunch of postcard stamps to use for PostSecret but I used them to write to my friends instead.”

“I stole your duck and took him to San Francisco.” (with a photo of a stuffed duck in hat and overalls)

“Loving you saved my life…”

but more often they are painful, touching, wistful:

“I hope there is a heaven (and I hope you’re there)”

“I wish my parents could see me for what I am…instead of what I didn’t become.”

“I’m 25, and I’ve never been kissed. It’s not that I don’t want to…it’s just that no one else does.”

Warren says, “After seeing thousands of secrets, I understand that sometimes when we believe we are keeping a secret, that secret is actually keeping us.” He relates his own experience, being reminded of a childhood humiliation he had long buried, then writing it on a postcard and walking away from the post office feeling lighter.

“Some of the most beautiful postcards in this collection came from very painful feelings and memories,” he says in the introduction. “I believe that  each one of us has the ability to discover, share, and grow our own dark secrets into something meaningful and beautiful.”

Through the serendipity of the web, I somehow came across a blog called 37 Days. Asheville, North Carolina writer Patti Digh asked the question, “What would I be doing today if I only had 37 days to live?” after her stepfather was diagnosed with lung cancer, and died 37 days later.  She later turned the experience into a book, Life is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally.

I just love how she describes its philosophy:

“Life takes action, not wishful thinking. It takes mindfulness and intention. It takes slowing down and saying yes and being generous and being amazed and loving more.”

Hear, hear.

Have you read it? What did you think?

Has anyone read Four Letter Word: Original Love Letters (edited by Joshua Knelman and Rosalind Porter)? Although one reviewer said it “unleashes the romantic in all of us,” I didn’t find it that way at all.

Confession: I am a hopeless romantic. Actually, make that hopeFUL romantic. So I looked forward to reading this collection, described as “testimony to the creative powers of our leading writers…each guaranteed to seduce.”

Each piece was indeed “radically different from the others,” as billed. While the pieces are set up as letters, they are really more like short stories in some way related to some kind of love. For instance, there’s a stalker, a daughter writing to her dead father, an e-mail exchange sent to the wrong address, an ode to a house. Yeah, a house.

In 245 pages, only two passages really spoke to me:

“I cannot wait to hear your voice again. This is such a frustratingly cold medium in comparison to the heat of your touch, the warmth of your smile, the glow of your expression when you catch my eye.” (Lionel Shriver)

and

“…the town is behind me, the moon rides gloriously high above and I am scudding along the coast road towards Llanystumdwy. Ah, I feel the ecstasy rising! That light beyond the woods up there? Can it be your light? Is the breeze from the sea stirring your heart at this moment as it stirs mine? Is your kitchen door open for me, with a flicker of your firelight brightening the yard? Oh my love, my light, my glory! I am coming! You are waiting!” (Jan Morris, talking about “my one and only house”)

So now I’m in search of Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See, by Bill Shapiro, which sounds more like what I was looking for:

“Fevered notes scribbled on napkins after first dates. Titillating text messages. It’s-not-you-it’s-me relationship-enders. In Other People’s Love Letters, Bill Shapiro has searched America’s attics, closets, and cigar boxes and found actual letters — unflinchingly honest missives full of lust, provocation, guilt, and vulnerability — written only for a lover’s eyes…what at first appears to be a deliciously voyeuristic peek into other people’s most passionate moments will ultimately reawaken your own desires and tenderness…because when you read these letters, you’ll find the heart you’re looking into is actually your own.”

Now, doesn’t that sound like something for a hopeful romantic?

This is such a great contest: The Diagram Prize’s Oddest Book Title of the Year. Its 2009 winner is The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-miligram Containers of Fromage Frais.

I’m sure you are wondering, how could that possibly have beat out Baboon Metaphysics (#2) and Curbside Consultation of the Colon (#3)? Such is the nature of the wonderfully whimsical contest, now in its 31st year after being conceived by The Diagram Group’s Bruce Robertson as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The Bookseller posted a short list of six books vying for the prestigious title, receiving just over 5,000 votes in an online poll to come up with the winner. “Six seems such a cruelly low number given titles such as Excrement in the Late Middle Ages and All Dogs Have ADHD were rejected,” said Philip Stone, a sales analyst at The Bookseller.

He added that The Diagram Prize “celebrates the diversity within book publishing today, the risks publishers are willing to take to support freedom of information, the beauty of print-on-demand for fascinatingly niche titles, and perhaps most of all, complete and utter oddity.”

(Thanks to Gloria for reminding me to blog about this.)

The quest to rid employee communications of buzzwords and management-speak never ends, so it’s always encouraging to find support. Of  course, it’s unlikely those who speak in “methodologies” and “strategic imperatives” will read books like Don Watson’s Death Sentences: How clichés, weasel words and management-speak are strangling public language, but having Don’s words out there can’t hurt.

The author observes, “Rarely in history have sensible human beings found it so hard to say simple things.” He gives lots of examples, analyzing and discussing them (OK, sometimes at a bit too much length). I particularly liked his description of “anesthetic writing”:

“You cannot read it without losing a degree of consciousness. You come to and read it again, and still your brain will not reveal the meaning – will not even try. You are getting sleepy again.”

Most amusing is the glossary at the end. Don’s examples substitute buzzwords in well-known lines from Shakespeare, songs, speeches and other sources and he encourages the reader to think of a more effective way to say the line.

I have author/historian/actor/broadcaster Studs Terkel to thank for a shining moment of glory. Studs (real name Louis) died on Friday at the age of 96.

During a game of Trivial Pursuit, my opponent practically rubbed his hands with glee at the question he was going to ask me. “Oh, you’ll NEVER get this,” he laughed. The question was something along the lines of “Name the author of the book called Working, about people in everyday jobs.”

Unfortunately for my opponent, I had recently read Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do for a writing class. Well, the glory didn’t last long. I had plenty of time to trip up on sports category questions.

Reading the various accounts of Studs that have appeared in the paper since his death, I found out how he got the nickname. He worked as a radio show producer during the Depression and, in his spare time, acted in the Chicago Repertory Theatre. His nickname came while acting in a play with another Louis. To keep the two straight, the director named Terkel after a character in the book he was reading:  the hero in James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, about Irish life on the South Side of Chicago.

I’ve written before about the delightful column in The Atlantic where Barbara Wallraff posts reader requests (and ideas) for words that don’t exist but should. I didn’t realize that she also has a book called Word Fugitives until my husband, knowing what a word nerd I am, got it for my birthday.

Ms. Wallraff describes a word fugitive as “a word that someone is looking for, which other people helpfully try to find or coin” and “holes in the language that dictionary words have failed to fill.” She usually lists the many variations people come up with, and then the one she likes best. Some examples:

…the word for that restless feeling that causes you to repeatedly peer into the refrigerator when you’re bored: fridgety.

…the word to describe how you hear of something for the first time and then start hearing about it everywhere: déja new.

…the word for the tendency to make more mistakes when a very critical person is watching: carper-fumble syndrome.

…the word for sending an e-mail that says a file is attached and forgetting to attach the file: forgetfileness.

Pretty clever stuff. Get it. Read it. Enjoy!

Astrologers who find new stars get their discoveries named after them; so do researchers identifying new diseases. Did you know that there is at least one writer who has been similarly recognized, although for a practice rather than a discovery?

I had never heard the term “tuckerization” before I encountered it reading the Mental Floss newsletter. It explained, “Many science fiction authors raise money for charity by auctioning off ‘tuckerizations,’ the inclusion of an individual’s name in a story.  The practice is named for author Wilson Tucker, who often included his friends’ names in his fiction.”

Marc Brown is another author who regular tuckerized his books. The writer and illustrator of the Arthur series of books hid the names of his two sons, Tolon and Tucker, in all but one of the books. My sons enjoyed scouring the books to find the names, which were often hidden in plain view as book titles or names of food items. We often found the names of Brown’s daughter (Eliza) and wife (Laurie), too.

If you are a word person, wouldn’t you like to have something word-related named after you?

This spring, I posted about the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. I recently found out that The Bookseller has crowned the Diagram of Diagrams, bestowing the title of Oddest Book Title among all the winners of the past 30 years.

You may be surprised to find that Bombproof your Horse and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories did not win. In second and third place, respectively, were People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead and How to Avoid Huge Ships. But the coveted crown went to Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers. Apparently, it’s a comprehensive record of a sector of Greece’s postal routes. Why, we may never know.

Besides the book titles, what I think is hilarious is that the original prize was conceived by The Diagram Group’s Bruce Robertson “as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair.” See what creative wonders the idle mind can accomplish?

The library in my town has been there for me for many years. When my children were small, we joined the reading program every summer, and we were frequent borrowers of books and occasionally toys throughout the year. It’s the first place I turn when I hear of a good book (so I can try before I buy). And it just proved its worth again when I couldn’t remember the name of a book.

I had the first word of the title but not the author. Searching under “Dish” brought up thousands of possibilities at both Amazon.ca and ChaptersIndigo.ca. Many of them were cookbooks, most including the word somewhere but not first. But where was the book with a title beginning “Dish”?

A search at my library’s site returned the book I wanted as number two. (Note: Afterwards, I tried it again and Amazon found it, also as #2). It’s Dish: Midlife Women Tell the Truth about Work, Relationships and the Rest of Life, by Barbara Moses.

What I also liked about a recent “touch point” (as marketers like to say) with the library: I received a one-sheet update saying, “Here are just some of the ways we’ve used your donation to bring our services to life in your community.” I liked knowing that children read 30,000+ books during this summer’s reading program. I also liked that I wasn’t asked to give again, although the contact information is there to make it easy should I want to.

Do you use your library?