I started Bookcrossing about a month ago and haven’t stopped telling people about it since. Bookcrossing is the act of leaving books in public places for others to pick up, read, and then do likewise. It’s a great way to get people reading, and to share the books that you’ve read or aren’t interested in keeping anymore.

So how does it work? First you go to the Bookcrossing site (www.bookcrossing.com ), set up an account, and register the book you wish to set free. You’ll be given an ID number; you then write a  journal entry on your profile about the book. On the inside cover of the book you can either print out a label from the site, or hand-write a note which will tell the reader that the book is free, and that if they register the ID they can write about what they thought of the book once they have read it.  When they are done reading, they can once again set it out into the world to be picked up and read by another person.  Books can be tracked by journal entries all over your city and in some cases the world.

There are two different ways to release a book: wild releases where you leave books in designated places in the city for people to pick up, and controlled releases where you recycle a read by giving the book to a person, or group of people you know.

Bookcrossing was started in America by Ron Hornbaker in the spring of 2001. He was inspired by two community-driven and public-motivated schemes; first the Amsterdam bike system, where the public are encouraged to get around their city using bikes which are available to them at different pick-up and drop-off spots around town, and secondly by the “Where’s George? & Where’s Willy?”  money-tracking projects that were set up to trace US and Canadian dollar bills as they move around the country.

The Bookcrossing site has created an international network, a place that allows you to track books all over the world.

In Canada we just came to the end of the country’s annual Freedom to Read Week (Feb 21^st-27^th), a week that encourages Canadians to think about intellectual freedom. Bookcrossing along with the Freedom of Expression Committee saw this week as a great time to ask people to share books that are considered to be challenged books.

By registering challenged books such as To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and sending them out into the world, these organizations  hope to  make others aware of books that have been in some cases blacklisted within schools and libraries across the country. What a great idea! There are many challenged books that I have read over the years that I could pass onto others via the Bookcrossing site, maybe you should check it out too!

Leanda is a writer based in Toronto. For the past 13 years she has hosted & produced music radio shows, managed bands & worked in online music PR. She now runs a music site & also writes for music & culture magazine `Relevant BCN`. Read more of her writing here - http://www.bloggertronix.com

The heart of Leonie Sandercock’s Cosmopolis II lies in its subtitle, Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century. The mongrel nature the author considers is the accelerated multiculturalism of cities due to what some are considering an “Age of Migration.” While Sandercock suggests there are four ways in which cities are being socially and culturally reshaped, an argument may be made that the main focus of the book could be distilled to one of them primarily–international migration–with a lesser, but equally important emphasis on all forms of minority integration. Cosmopolis II addresses the age of migration by deconstructing the planning process and offering a reconstruction that co-opts modernism’s visionary nature and enthusiasm while adhering to a postmodernism acceptance of many narratives.

Planning needs to be deconstructed when faced with heightened flows of migration. Unlike large flows in the past, which were fairly homogeneous and amongst a handful of countries, the new ones are multinational creating an unprecedented plurality in many urban landscapes. In Europe, open border agreements fostered by the EU have facilitated a drastic change in the ethnic make-up of many countries. In some cases, this demographic shift is occurring in a time frame so short, that standard planning practices can’t accurately address the sweeping changes in neighborhoods, let alone in entire cities. Despite increase attention on its southern border, the United States continues to see high levels of immigration of both documented and undocumented individuals. Once across the border, however, the new arrivals are either dispersing to increasingly nontraditional locations of residence or concentrating at levels that have heretofore been unseen helping to create what are now urban areas just north of the border. Additionally, continued political strife in African and Middle Eastern countries is supplying a steady stream of the dispossessed that, if not forced into a new urban experience in an unfamiliar city, are creating vast refugee camps in their own right.

This time of a hypermobile global population demands an equally flexible planning process. The rapid and exceedingly dense multicultural change in cities requires a planning that breaks free of the rational measures effective at developing infrastructure. The speed of change and randomness of migration flows demands way more flexibility than a comprehensive procedure, which starts and stops on a dime and may take years to complete. Sandercock observes that the dense multiculturalism has created neighborhoods, cities, and countries that may contain multiple publics. And while Sandercock offers a “Radical Postmodern Planning Practice” paradigm that relies heavily on the communicative nature of those that have come before her such as John Friedmann and John Forrester, the resulting paradigm suggestion is not as revolutionary as the way in which she deconstructs the planning process to get there.

The most striking feature of Cosmopolis II is the consideration of “story.” In order to deal with multiculturalism, she first deconstructs that to determine its exact meaning. She finds that the new multicultural societies are collections of diverse peoples with a common bond not based on race, religion, or ethnicity, but on a shared commitment to a political community. Unlike the popular and homogenized history of Industrial-era United States immigration, these new communities are not static and will not eventually become “melting pots.” In order to deeply understand this community, it is important for planning to be political, and the planner to understand the history, customs, and desires of each immigrant community that makes up the larger whole. The planner needs to understand their “story.”

The author then argues that to understand the story of someone else, a planner must understand the stories created by planning and the ones excluded by it. She states, “In order to imagine the future differently, we need to start with history, with a reconsideration of the stories we tell ourselves about planning’s role in the modern and postmodern city,” adding, “If we want to work towards a politics of inclusion, then we had better have a good understanding of the exclusionary effects of planning’s past practices.” With that, the author then briefly examines how the history of planning has systematically excluded the stories of women, gays and lesbians, Native Americans, and African Americans from the history of planning. This exclusion implying that until planners understand these “planning insurgencies” to be of equal value as the myriad of paradigms discussed in planning education programs across the country, the possibility of planning being able to address single neighborhoods with a myriad of marginalized voices is not high.

After focusing the lens of story on where planning has been, Sandercock then operates on a meta level and presents case studies, or as she intimates earlier in the book, what could function as stories imparting wisdom from elders to those in search of knowledge. These provide the reader with the only semblance of practical procedural knowledge. And, while effective in that role, it is emblematic of a critique that may be leveled at the book. As a planning tome, the focus rests squarely on the community building social side of the issue at hand. Discussion of the physical is nascent at best, and the consideration of any quantitative perspective is entirely absent. Granted, the theoretical analysis is so detailed that strands of the physical or quantitative are not hard to see. For example, when considering the author’s train of thought concerning dense multicultural neighborhoods, an immediate thought for cultural geographers may be, how does the neighborhood provide for multiple houses of worship? This is a topic the book touches on briefly. The statistical nature of the immigration flows are not detailed, but the general nature of the flows is easily enough understood through the book’s discourse on the subject.

Sandercock examines what works and what does not, then utilizes story to consider the future. In detailing the varying ways stories can be used in planning–as catalyst for change, speculation on the future, tool for mediation, non-verbal representation, etc.–the author furthers the concept that communication is a necessary tool in understanding the “other.” This understanding is crucial when one of the common responses by both immigrant and native is to fear each other. In a dense multicultural neighborhood, that fear is subject to dangerous economies of scope and scale.

As stated previously, Cosmopolis II does not offer an especially groundbreaking planning paradigm in response to the new age of migration. Sandercock’s “Radical Postmodern Planning Practice” paradigm functions as a subtle tweak to what has been presented by other theorists who did not have the opportunity to present discourse in a time when the nature of migration has radically transformed in speed and scope. The book may be critiqued for having too narrow a focus in terms of planning, relying on concerns of community without substantial, or any, consideration of the physical or quantitative. Some may also find the sheer density of the information and a narrative that is occasionally tangential to be a distraction to the author’s substantial vision. Incidentally, this is a critique easily levied against another sprawling work published in 2003 that had significant impact on the discipline of geography, Connell and Gibson’s Soundtracks–indication that perhaps, it is a critique worth having.

Regardless, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century is an indispensable addition to the library of planning theory. It is easy to dismiss globalization as a theoretical construct spatially removed and homogeneous in nature. In reality, globalization means that the local is becoming more heterogeneous. Sandercock’s critical examination of planning theory’s history of exclusion is a bold and welcome statement in a world where the global is next door. Her use of story is equally bold and welcome for an understanding of planning theory’s future of inclusion.

Michael is a doctoral student in urban planning and public policy at the University of Texas at Arlington. You can follow him on Twitter here, visit his website here, and listen to his band here.

I am in a band with my wife, Jenny. She is a Ph.D. fellow studying the history of borderlands, bakes a mean apple pie, and was born on the same day as Willie Nelson. As Shiny Around the Edges, we enjoy making music together and occasionally have a chance to collaborate on things non-musical because of the band. The kind folks at Popshifter asked what our “Top 10″ list was for 2009. We hadn’t even thought about this throughout the year, but had a good time putting a list together late one evening over a glass of wine. It should be noted that we would have had our bassist Kerm contribute, but he was on a vision quest exploring his roots in beautifully sparse west Texas. The resulting list is what my wife and I have listened to, watched, and read throughout the year that made an indelible impression. It is either hopelessly out-of-date or incredibly prescient depending on your personal politics. In no particular order:

1. Emma Goldman: Living My Life

A two-volume autobiography penned by one of the leaders of the anarchist movement of the 1900s. Exploring Emma Goldman’s life story is a first-hand look at anarchism, feminism, Marxism, and more in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. This is a great read and helps one understand from where much of modern counter-culture has originated. It is well written and full of wit and insight into the United States and Russia at the dawning of modernism.

2. Frank Sinatra with Antonio Carlos Jobim: Sinatra & Company

A forgotten masterpiece (and out of print in the United States) that is filled with standards like “Bein’ Green” along with bilingual gems such as “Drinking Water (Agua De Beber).” Like all of Sinatra’s albums, the arrangements are superb. Hearing Sinatra and Jobim collaborate is worth the effort to find the vinyl used or order the import CD. I believe it might also now be available digitally.

3. Dust Congress: Regurgitate Sunshine State

Broken down folk with marimba and trumpet from Denton, Texas. They live up the street from us and we never tire of hearing Nick Foreman’s contemplative wail while the notes supporting him waver and stumble in a beautiful procession. The 12″ vinyl is also worthy of coffee table display.

4. Mad Men, Seasons I & II

What started as a deft, retro look at the time when media and commerce began to intersect is now one of the darkest commentaries on the beginning of the end of modernism.

5. Castanets: Texas Rose, The Thaw, & the Beasts

We always enjoy hearing Ray’s new songs and this album is the perfect marriage between Rafter’s production skills and Ray’s songwriting: a sonic voyage greater than the sum of its substantial parts.

6. Leonie Sandercock: Cosmopolis II

This book looks at the questions urban planners will have to answer in a time of hypermobile global population shifts. The speed and diversity of immigration is creating neighborhoods, cities, and countries that are hybrids demanding new approaches to planning.

7. Sonic Youth: Confusion Is Sex

This is on our list every year, with good reason.

8. Russian Ark

Unbelievably (and spectacularly), this film is one entire shot from beginning to end. It takes the viewer through 33 rooms of what is now Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, involved literally a cast of thousands, and details events in Russian history in a non-linear way. The narrators are ghostly presences slipping between observation and interaction with a disquieting ease. The resulting effect is dreamlike.

9. Michel Foucault: History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction

A philosophical staple that crosses academic disciplines, this book offers a new way of thinking about sexuality, knowledge, and power and the ways they are created and transmitted.

10. Black Sabbath: Paranoid

Our elderly VW Golf’s CD player stopped working at the beginning of the year. Inexplicably, this cassette made its way into our car and we have been revisiting it throughout the year. Our recently recorded collection of songs reflects this to some degree.

Michael is a doctoral student in urban planning and public policy at the University of Texas at Arlington. You can follow him on Twitter here, visit his website here, and listen to his band here.

My summer and winter reading couldn’t be more different. In the summer, like a lot of people, I want something fast; something that moves and communicates and gives me a good, satisfying story. But with winter on its way I want books as heavy as bowling balls; stories you feel like crawling into a cave with and rolling the stone to shut yourself in. I want dense, crowded books that give you a universe but make you work for it.

This is my to-read list…

Imperial, William T. Vollman
With fiction, I write about where I grew up and, because of that, I do a lot of reading within the region. Narrowing the focus even further, Vollman’s Imperial is 1,300 pages on a single county in my hometown. I’d say that makes it essential.

Ulysses, James Joyce
I’m actually on this one already. Halfway through. People talk a lot about Ulysses being dense and referential to the point of unreadability but I think I must’ve just found it at the right time in my life. I get this book. It’s funny, engaging, and it hits you with some truth that’s hard to miss. Over the course of 900,000 pages we follow Leopold Bloom through one day in 1904 Dublin. But it’s more than that. It’s life; a big, struggling, wormy, steaming, scary, laughing, vomiting chunk of it.

Black Spring, Henry Miller
I started Black Spring a few years ago and thought it was crazy, unintelligible B.S. This was before I’d read any Miller and a book like this is not a good gateway. You need to read the lighter stuff first, the Tropics, maybe the Rosy Crucifixion. But now, just a few years later, Miller’s my guy. I’m ready.

The Reivers, William Faulkner
Same as above. This was the first Faulkner I read. Story of three thieves and a car. Not a lot of payoff. Very Southern and dry. Didn’t feel it. Then, this summer, a friend gave me Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, and his style suddenly made sense. Now I’m down for a reread.

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Moby-Dick is no simple man versus whale story. Melville’s greatest is a wordy, complex, labyrinthine piece of experimental prose. To think this was published and read when it was blows my mind. Where were people’s heads at back when this was released? Definitely not where they are now. Maybe we’ve hit a sagging point in culture–or maybe the collective consciousness doesn’t need books like this anymore. Whatever it is, no agent in their right mind would pick this up in 2009. And that’s a shame.

So there’s my list. None of these are easy books but they’re worth your time. Dig in. Hunker down. Here come the dark months…

BIO: Adam Gnade's (guh nah dee) work is released as a series of books and records that share characters and themes; the fiction writing continuing plot-lines left open by the self-described "talking songs" in an attempt to compile a vast, detailed, interconnected, personal history of contemporary American life. Check out recent writing here and songs here. Contact: adam@asthmatickitty.com

Couple months ago I went on the Warped Tour as … a book tour. Yeah, I know. Here’s how it looked. What you won’t see in these photos is how horrible the music was, how mean people were about a table of books, and how HOT it was all summer. This is the Warped Tour, part 1.

BIO: Adam Gnade's (guh nah dee) work is released as a series of books and records that share characters and themes; the fiction writing continuing plot-lines left open by the self-described "talking songs" in an attempt to compile a vast, detailed, interconnected, personal history of contemporary American life. Check out recent writing here and songs here. Contact: adam@asthmatickitty.com

Today I was locked out of the house. Keys inside. Two house-mates on the road. One busing tables at a floating restaurant down on the river. But what a day to be locked out! Eighty-five degrees. Everything blooming. First hot day of the new spring. And I was prepared—just back from a long bus-ride to town that had acquired me four cans of Dr. Pepper—my favorite—and one slightly used paperback copy of James Michener’s Centennial, his Colorado book.

I grew up in Southern California but I spent every summer of my kid-life with my grandparents in Colorado. Theirs was the Colorado Michener writes about in Centennial; cattle land, Indian land, a good place.

My grandparents lived in a well-kept farm house on the outskirts of a town called La Veta, which is in Huerfano County at the foot of the Spanish Peaks and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the northern edge of the Cuchara River Valley. The town covers approximately 1.2 square miles and, as of 2007, it had an estimated population of 856 people, which is small even for small towns.

Local legend goes that around the time La Veta was incorporated, the people of the Ute tribe put a curse on it that said the town would never gain or lose population. And from what I’ve seen, it hasn’t.

Now, as kid-memory goes, La Veta is only available for reference in flashes of imagery, sounds or smells. Grasshoppers the size of your finger. The poultry and Kool-Aid smell from the pantry. Guinea hens pecking in the yard. The grassy plateau above the house where my grandfather found arrowheads. I can see the stump where they killed the rooster for supper and I can see the hen house, which was always clean and had a smell like fresh straw and sawdust. I also remember the voice—but not the face, for whatever reason—of my summertime-best-friend, Jace, who would later assume a kind of mythical childhood heroicness in my memory. He’s a cowboy now. Still lives in town.

I remember the grownups sitting around the porch slapping mosquitoes and talking about the violent war between the bottling plants (where’s the history of this?) And I remember the air, fragrant with grass clippings, dust, and livestock. I’ve lived in a lot of places, but La Veta has stuck with me all these years—and that’s why I picked up Centennial.

Starting a new Michener book is a good moment. If you’ve read his work, you go into it knowing you’re about to be plunged into LIFE, generations of it, usually a thousand pages plus. Of course Michener isn’t high literature. It’s storytelling, and it’s history—on equal terms. Which isn’t to say it’s badly written. Just don’t go in expecting Proust. (And, let the record show, I’ll take Michener’s endless fiction over Proust’s endless remembrances any day.)

Michener’s good because he gives me what I need. I ask a lot from the books I read. I want solid, natural writing and not a lot of art. I want visual imagery, believable dialog (it has to read like people talk) and an engaging story that tells me something about why we’re here, how we got here, who we are, what we’re doing. Just like Sophocles did with Antigone—illuminating his own nation’s problems by digging into antiquity—I want to be given answers and truth.

Sitting on the bus home I imagine I looked insane getting through the first few pages, laughing out loud—not because it’s funny, and it is, but because Michener set it up so well, and so accessibly considering the very un-pop-literature turn I knew it would take. And you know this if you read enough Michener. You know he’s going to sabotage the narrative with dense, slow-plodding, highly-detailed history. You have to be ready for this, and if you are, it’s as rich and decadent an experience as reading somebody artsy like Nabokov or the Symbolists.

Centennial begins in Georgia. Dr. Lewis Vernor, a professor of history at an unnamed university, gets a call from one of the section editors at US Magazine in New York who—I’m condensing 37 pages here—commissions him to spend a few months in the small town of Centennial to research its history as factual backing for a double-issue article on the place that will embody “nothing less than the soul of America… as seen in a microcosm.”

At this point I’m hooked. I’m hooked because I can guess what happens next. Vernor will fly to Centennial and then suddenly we’ll rocket back into the past—in this case three billion, 600 million years—and then we’ll start—methodically, patiently—working our way back to the present.

The book’s acknowledgment section is divided into categories of researchers Michener tapped for the book, and it gives a good overview and syllabus of what you’re about to read. They are, in order: geology, paleontology, early man, flint knapping, Indian life, early St. Louis, Old Lancaster, Oregon Trail, Fort Laramie, cattle trails, ranch life, sugar beets, birds, Denver Stock Show, Mexican-Chicano problems, dry-land farming, cattle industry, guns, railroads, irrigation, and Appaloosas.

After the introduction it begins with the land: “When the earth was already ancient, of an age incomprehensible to man, an event of basic importance occurred in the area that would later be known as Colorado. To appreciate its significance one must understand the structure of the earth, and to do this, one must start at the vital center.”

After a general geological breakdown of the entire effing planet (seriously, right?) we begin following the area’s early inhabitants—prehistoric mammals, proto-horses, dinosaurs, mammoths, beavers—and then the Indigenous people and European settlers. And that’s where it really gets good. Because how big do your problems feel when you see people dealing with the same B.S. hundreds of years before you were born? But see, that’s a trick question. The natural inclination might be to say they feel smaller, and maybe they do. But maybe they feel bigger. Maybe you feel connected to everything and everyone in this great, sad, long-running narrative and struggle of being HUMAN and LIVING and LOVING and DYING while the world goes about its business around you. And isn’t that what we’re all here for anyway? To find some commonality and meaning in the midst of meaninglessness? I love it! It kicks me in the teeth and re-writes my inner-plan and I love every minute!

So, Michener, this one’s for you; for your wit and eye for detail; for your patience and for your love of AMERICA. I love it too. It’s who we are.

BIO: Adam Gnade's (guh nah dee) work is released as a series of books and records that share characters and themes; the fiction writing continuing plot-lines left open by the self-described "talking songs" in an attempt to compile a vast, detailed, interconnected, personal history of contemporary American life. Check out recent writing here and songs here. Contact: adam@asthmatickitty.com

I’m not a crab and I’m sure you’re not either but I recently got a little insight into what it’s like to be one. Like us, James Michener isn’t a crab but he won the Pulitzer for fiction (Tales of the South Pacific, 1948) and his 1978 historical epic, Chesapeake, is a damn fine thing. And then there’s the crab, but we’ll get to him in a second.

Michener’s book documents the lives of four families over the course of more than 300 years (1583-1978) alongside the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a big read; nation building and colonial expansion and political upheaval all set to the quiet rhythms of the bay waters. Over the course of 1082 pages (I’m on 832) you get a saga of American life at its most panoramic and real and messy. Economical dynasties rise and fall. Great men and women establish themselves as masters of their space and trade only to succumb to illness or musket balls–or age.

The book is an inspiring thing to get caught up in; all that trying and failure and hope. We see first-hand the Quaker shipbuilders and iron-hot abolitionists; seasonal hunting cycles and pro-slavery sermons. War comes like a big steel-toe boot and stomps flat everything then, like an aside, revitalizes a snuffed-out human spirit. Industry furthers expansion and breaks old ties. Racism spits its poison then slips back under the skin and festers until the infection is too widespread for anything but eruption (and it does, with a wild, pus-sputtering fury.)

It’s a grounding piece of work–and it’s humbling. The center of it, of course, is the main character, the bay. Throughout, it’s a sweeping geographic love poem, from ol’ James M. to Mama Chesapeake’s dirty salt/fresh waters.

And she has crabs. Haha, right, yeah, but no. The Chesapeake Bay is full of them. I’ve lived on her banks twice before and I’ve seen ‘em in action… black mud crabs, hermits, the brave little fiddler with his big ol’ slugger thug arm, even that nasty prehistoric mofo the horseshoe crab (which isn’t actually a crab and is closer related to the tick, spider, and scorpion families.)

But it’s the blue crab I want to talk about here, specifically their moulting period, which blew my mind when I read about in the book.

I grew up in the fishing industry. My father was a commericial fisherman and abalone diver before the California coast abalone morarium was imposed (Senate Bill 463, 1997) so I know all about moulting. But I never really thought about it; never really broke down what exactly it means and the steps by which it happens.

Here’s what Michener had to say about the day “Jimmy” the blue crab shed his shell: “Swimming easily to the bottom of the bay, he found a sandy area, a place he would never have considered for a moult in normal times, and there began his gyrations. First he had to break the seal along the edge of his present shell, and he did this by contracting and expanding his body, forcing water through his system and building up a considerable hydraulic pressure that slowly forced the shell apart, not conspicuously, but far enough for the difficult part of the moult to proceed.

“Now he began the slow and almost agonizing business of withdrawing his boneless legs from their protective coverings and manipulating them so that they protruded from the slight opening. With wrenching movements he dislodged the main portion of his body, thrusting it toward the opening, which now widened under pressure from the legs. He had no skeleton, of course, so that he could contort and compress his body into whatever shape was most effective, but he did continue to generate hydraulic pressures through various parts of his body so that the shell was forced apart.

“Three hours and twenty minutes after he started this bizarre procedure, he swam free of the old shell and was now adrift in the deep waters of the bay, totally without protection. He had no bony structure in any part of his body, no covering thicker than the sheerest tissue paper, no capacity for self-defense… And yet, even at his most defenseless moment his new armor was beginning to form. Eighty minutes after the moult he would have a paper-thin covering. After three hours he would have the beginning of a solid shell. And in five hours he would be a hard-shelled crab once more, and would remain that way until his next moult.”

That’s on page 814 but you should read the whole book. It’s worth your time.

BIO: Adam Gnade's (guh nah dee) work is released as a series of books and records that share characters and themes; the fiction writing continuing plot-lines left open by the self-described "talking songs" in an attempt to compile a vast, detailed, interconnected, personal history of contemporary American life. Check out recent writing here and songs here. Contact: adam@asthmatickitty.com