Decorating with Plants

Decorating with Plants: What to Choose, Ways to Style, and How to Make Them Thrive / Baylor Chapman, 272 p.

An alphabetical arrangement of beautiful recommended house plants, plus a variety of suggestions for different light, temperature, and water situations, plus some practical potting/arranging tips, plus gorgeous and motivational design.  I can't see myself ever having the time/energy/money to execute these arrangements, but this book sure makes me want to try.

The Ghost at the Table

The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne (2006) 304 pages

Imagine a Thanksgiving visit with sisters, Cynnie and Frances, who have very different views about what happened in their childhood, with a seriously ill mother and a father who started an affair with the tutor of one of his daughters while his wife was still alive. As the Thanksgiving visit--which includes their now frail father-- progresses, the story makes multiple passes to the time of the mother's death, with suggestions that perhaps it wasn't entirely natural that it occurred when it did.

About forty pages before the end of the book, I abruptly decided that I didn't like any of the characters anymore.

However...there are many moments of lucidity and insight in Cynnie's narration. This novel is layered like an onion, with bottled emotions, shouting, misunderstandings and deception...and maybe even a bit of caring...peeling off in turns.

Modern Retro Home

Modern Retro Home by Mr. Jason Grant, photography by Lauren Bamford, 255 pages

Interior decorator Jason Grant (who includes the "Mr." on the cover, title page, and "about the author" page) presents a coffee-table book filled with rooms decorated with plenty of mid-century flair. Each page offers Grant's takeaways on the room presented, though after a while I found these one- to two-sentence opinions more annoying than enlightening. What shines in this book is Bamford's beautiful photography and the rooms, which Grant explains are the homes of his creative friends. (That said, I know some staging was going on, if only because there is no way someone would decorate a kid's room with a cactus and an antique horse toy instead of stuffed animals.) I found plenty of inspiration for my own mid-century home, though I hope you'll forgive me for my assumption that macrame = cat toy.

Kitchen upgrades

Kitchen Upgrades / Fine Homebuilding (ed), 236 pgs.

This is one of those wonderful books that shows you how to DO things, gives you hints about how to design it right, and reveals to you that what you have done in the past might not have been the best choice.  Of course I have no ability to install cabinets, refinish floors or install a sink but I have learned that several lights in my kitchen are not optimally placed or maybe the wrong bulbs.  Maybe this book will help me to get the backslash right.  Great ideas for anyone interested in a complete remodel, a small update project, or just buying new appliances.

Novel Interiors

Novel Interiors by Lisa Borgnes Giramonti, 288 pages

Ever read one of those classic novels and think, "Wow, I really want to live in that place!"? Novel Interiors is an interior design book showing how some of the classics might inspire actual homes. Like a lot of interior design books, a lot of the looks are undoubtedly cost-prohibitive for anyone not named Gatsby, but unlike many design books I've seen, several of these look lived-in. (But not schlubby.) Giramonti separates the book into six sections, allowing us to feel inspired, in turn, by Jane Austen and the Brontes, Edith Wharton and Henry James,Thomas Hardy and Willa Cather, Somerset Maugham and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf and Isak Dinesen, and Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust. The images are beautiful, the designs are naturally full of books, and not ALL of them seem out of the realm of possibility. It's worth a gander.