Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

“Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry” by Rosalie K. Fry

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Recommended to me by: Sanguinity

10-year-old Fiona McConville doesn’t thrive in the city, so she’s sent back to her beloved islands to live with her grandparents. Imbued with the fierce magic of the sea, this book shows what can happen when children and adults are attuned to the sea and to each other. The events in the story are not always gentle, but the storytelling is gentle and everything comes right in the end.

The pen and ink illustrations are also delightful. Highly recommended! Originally published in 1957.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Just Being at the Piano” by Mildred Portney Chase

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Subtitle: Harmony Begins in the Soul, Long Before the First Note Is Played

Recommended to me by: the Little Free Library down the street

A meditative little book on how to learn and teach piano in a kind, body-centered way. Mildred Portney Chase was a musical prodigy, playing piano by ear at age 3 or 4, and went on to be a concert pianist. She writes in detail about how she finds relaxed, sensitive movement in her fingers, hands, and arms to play her best. She fiercely defends the right of young students to improvise and learn at their own pace.

I have only studied a little piano. Some of the book is applicable to singing, and some of it is specific to the piano, which as she says is an instrument that cannot be brought close in to the musician’s body. I passed the book along to a piano player and teacher, and I’ll be curious to hear what she thinks of it.

Recommended if you’re interested in music and musicians, or if you play piano and want to create beautiful tones.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Day You Begin” by Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López

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Spanish title: El Día En Que Descubres Quién Eres! (The Day You Discover Who You Are!)

Recommended to me by: the Little Free Library down the street

What a gorgeous, loving picture book. “There will be times when you walk into a room, and no one there is quite like you.” Full of colorful flowers and multi-cultural children, the illustrations contrast their inner liveliness with their feelings of disconnection at school.

On the cover, a brown-skinned girl with tightly curled hair emerges through a partly opened door that is marked like a ruler. Later, a Korean girl protects her “too strange” lunch from the other children’s stares at a cafeteria table that is also a ruler. A boy excluded from playground games leans against a tree drawn with ruler markings. When two of the children make friends, they swing from a tree drawn with bark.

Highly recommended for children who might not quite fit in, and for adults who remember that experience. It made me cry, both times I read through it, and I’m taking it right back to the Little Free Library for someone else to find.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” by Jenny Davidow

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Subtitle: Open the Floodgates to Your Creativity

Recommended to me by: the author

Your Mindful Journal and Memoir by Jenny Davidow has great advice for making journal entries more lively and personal and present. My paper journal is completely private and I’m not trying to improve it in any way, but the tips feel useful for online posts, and could apply to creative writing, too.

I met Jenny at Balkan camp years ago and we corresponded a bit about her book. I was happy to review it on Amazon:

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” is good medicine for our frenetic, fragmented modern lives. Jenny Davidow distills decades of experience with mindfulness, journaling, creativity, and teaching into a step-by-step guide full of wisdom and kindness.

For someone new to journaling, the book offers ideas on what to write and how to center it on the present moment even when it is about the past. For someone whose Inner Critic says, “You can’t say that!” or “You’re doing it wrong,” the book offers a shift toward safe experiments and listening inwardly with a kind ear. For someone whose attention is focused on external approval, the book offers fiercely guarded privacy and tuning in to one’s own voice and preferences.

For everyone, the book offers innovative ways to combine journaling with mindfulness and self-exploration, creating a lively personal record. For those who want to share individual entries or publish a memoir, the book offers strategies to do so with creativity and care.

As a longtime journal-writer, I appreciated the gentle invitations to turn events into metaphors, and I enjoyed reading the author’s example entries shared from her own journals.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to keep a journal but struggles with what to say, or who wants to heal their connection with their creativity, or who wants to create a memoir but doesn’t know where to start.

Available at Amazon.

“Effective Testing with RSpec 3” by Myron Marston and Erin Dees

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Subtitle: Build Ruby Apps with Confidence

Recommended to me by: a coworker who started a book group about it

RSpec is an automated testing framework for Ruby and Rails programs. It covers both unit tests (fast, narrowly scoped) and feature tests (slower, broadly scoped).

A small group of coworkers met every two weeks via video chat and discussed one chapter at a time. We reviewed the chapter topics and discussed how they apply to the large application we work on. I did most of the exercises and outside reading because I learn better that way.

The book starts with an extended, detailed example that covers most of the topics in the book, and then those topics are covered again chapter by chapter. It reads as if the example was originally at the end, and then they decided to move it to the beginning and then duplicate a lot of material to make it understandable.

That caveat aside, the book is clear, understandable, and very useful when working with RSpec. It covers details of configuration, command line arguments like –only-failures (only run the tests that failed on the previous run), and suggestions for how to structure tests to be reliable, readable, and maintainable.

Recommended for anyone who writes or maintains RSpec tests or who would like to start using RSpec for Rails or Ruby code.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Recoding America” by Jennifer Pahlka

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Subtitle: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Recommended to me by: my workplace, a federal contractor

I work for a federal contractor as a programmer, so they strongly encouraged us to read this. I can see why! The government project and team I work on use Agile methods and have a strong focus on user-centered design. This book made me appreciate that a lot more.

It explained some of the difficulties that government projects encounter, including the problems with the healthcare.gov launch, the unemployment insurance backlogs at the beginning of the pandemic, and why a new generation of GPS satellites are running old software. Not only does government traditionally subscribe to the old waterfall methodology of requirements, then design, then implementation before users see working software, but it starts earlier with Congress making laws that drive the requirements.

Conservatives have actively pushed digital competence out of the government and said it should be contracted out. Then contractors are given no leeway to do research with users and alter the plan to work better. According to them, creating software is implementation which is entirely separate and considered “lesser” than creating policy, which is the government’s concern.

Jennifer Pahlka and others have been driving a quiet revolution in government, introducing 18F, a group of federal employees who use Agile software techniques and user-centered design to consult on a multitude of projects. Another new group, US Digital Service, also bring technological know-how inside the government.

She describes some of the victories, where individual government employees have been able to push back against the snarls of red tape and create, for example, a streamlined SNAP application in California that allows many more people to successfully apply. Covidtests.gov is another example of a big win, a very simple website that successfully delivers tests to 2/3 of American households, and corrected out of date USPS address database entries along the way.

She mentions that people say the “best” programmers are in the private sector, but there are highly competent people who prioritize service to the public over getting the highest salary, so the government gets the “best” by a different definition. The government also places an active priority on diversity and inclusion, so it gets a wider field of good people.

Highly recommended for people interested in government, software, and the joys and tribulations of CivicTech.

Available at bookshop.org.