Sprenzy Shopping Blog

Last year, the only books I read where business books. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the only things I’m reading these days are blogs, magazines and online newspapers. I’m pretty well informed on most topics, but there’s something special about reading a really good book.

I love finding a book that completely captivates me. One that I can’t stop reading at 3:00 AM or one that I don’t want to end. Some books that I put in this “captivating” category were Blindness by Jose Saramago, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

So for 2007, one of my resolutions is to read more books that aren’t business or work related. Looking for good books to read, I found last year’s major book award winners and listed them below.

2006 Man Booker Prize - The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - “Kiran Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard , was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep.”

2006 National Book Award Winners:

• Fiction: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - “On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an identical impostor.”

• Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan - “The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage.”

• Poetry: Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey - “Published in installments across several decades, Mackey’s two epic series—one called Mu, the other Song of the Andoumboulou—bring the attitudes of free jazz and the reverberating patterns of West African ensemble music to the goals of the American encyclopedic long poem à la Charles Olson. The mysterious, even hermetic, new verse extends both of Mackey’s epics, even (as his prose foreword explains) merging them, so that they form one enormous text describing a mystical quest.”

• Young People’s Literature: The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. 1) by M.T. Anderson - “Set against the disquiet of Revolutionary Boston, M. T. Anderson’s extraordinary novel takes place at a time when American Patriots rioted and battled to win liberty while African slaves were entreated to risk their lives for a freedom they would never claim.”

2006 Pulitzer Prize:

• Fiction: March by Geraldine Brooks - “In the classic American novel LITTLE WOMEN, the father is more of a presence than a character. He’s serving in the Union Army at the beginning and comes home to recuperate from illness later on. Author Geraldine Brooks has taken the patriarch of the March family and spun an entire story. It is set in the Civil War, and flashbacks help flesh out the back story of his philosophical growth.”

• Nonfiction: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins - “Forty years after Kenyan independence from Britain, the words “Mau Mau” still conjure images of crazed savages hacking up hapless white settlers with machetes. The British Colonial Office, struggling to preserve its far-flung empire of dependencies after World War II, spread hysteria about Kenya’s Mau Mau independence movement by depicting its supporters among the Kikuyu people as irrational terrorists and monsters. Caroline Elkins, a historian at Harvard University, has done a masterful job setting the record straight in her epic investigation, Imperial Reckoning .”

• Biography: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - “delve deep into J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and deliver a thorough and devastatingly sad biography of the man whose very name has come to represent the culmination of 20th century physics and the irrevocable soiling of science by governments eager to exploit its products.”

• History: Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky - “All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines–and beyond.”

• Poetry: Late Wife by Claudia Emerson - “a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems.”

I’m actually going to start with The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It was recommended to me by my significant other who recently read the book. She told me it was a great book about “a journey of a man and his son in a postapocalyptic setting.” It’s also a short read to get me back into the book reading habit. I hope I can put it in the “captivating” category!

The Nike Air Pegasus 2006 running shoe was awarded 2006 Shoe of the Year by Runner’s World.

“The Nike Air Pegasus 2006 had previously been selected as an Editors Choice winner in five of Runner’s World’s nine international editions over the past 12 months, earning the honor in Germany, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States (Runner’s World publishes its Shoe Guides for buyers four times a year in the U.S. and several times a year in each of its worldwide editions).

Editors in each of those countries cited the neutral-cushioned shoe for its smooth ride, improved fit (from the previous Air Pegasus 2005) and “plush” cushioning, with several editors calling it the “benchmark” model in the neutral cushioning category.

Additionally, wear-testers in both Spain and the U.S. called it “the most comfortable shoe’ they had tested to date.”

Even though the Nike Air Pegasus was dubbed the shoe of the year, it may not be the right shoe for everyone. The shoe falls into the neutral cushioning category and is “recommended for runners who need maximum midsole cushioning and minimum medial support. These shoes are best for biomechanically efficient runners (minimum pronation) and midfoot or forefoot strikers with high or normal arches.” Additionally, the shoe is built for small to medium framed runners (Women - less than 150 lbs, Men - less than 180 lbs).

If the terms neutral cushioning, pronation, high or normal arches are foreign concepts, then I highly recommend reading the Runner’s World foot diagnostic articles. Finding the right running shoe for your running style, biomechanics and frame size is extremely important and it’s critical to determine which shoe type (motion control, stability, cushioned, etc.) is best for you.

Switching gears slightly, the Nike Air Pegasus 2006 Clima is an all-weather upgrade to the Air Pegasus. The Clima has the same performance as the Air Pegasus but includes a Clima-FIT upper, which repels water.

I really like the Air Pegasus 2006 Clima because of the dark colors. It reminds me of my New Balance trail running shoes, which I run in occasionally and use as my every day shoe. More importantly, I like to pack very lightly when I travel, which means a pair running shoes and a pair of casual dress shoes.

I prefer the dark colors of my trail running shoes but don’t like running on pavement with them. So the white road running shoes are worn on my trips, which means I become the typical tourist tooling around in white sneakers. Why are the majority of road running shoes white?!?

Anyway, I’m excited about trying out the Nike Air Pegasus 2006 Clima. It’s a highly rated cushioned running shoe, water-resistant and the dark colors make it a little more fashion friendly during my travels.

Wired magazine recently released their 2006 gear and gadgets guide with the reviews available online for the first time. I’m a big fan of Wired and always enjoy reading the gear guide issue. The last paragraph of the editor’s note is quite amusing.

“Sure, there are other gear mags, but many of them don’t spend any hands-on time with the products they write about. In our world, that’s a catalog, not a guide. At Wired Test, we used everything we rated. If we say a product sucks, it does. And if we say it’s amazing, it is.”

This year, the gear guide has over 300 product reviews across 11 categories. The ”Best of Test” in each category are:

• Mobile Phones - Motorola Q

• Digicams - Pentax K100D

• Videocams - Canon HV10

• Televisions - Sony TAV-L1

• Video Gear - Tivo Series3

• Portable Audio - Toshiba Gibabeat MES30VW

• Home Audio - Tivoli Audio Music System

• Household - Black & Decker Infrawave Speed Oven

• Laptops - Apple Macbook Pro 15-Inch

• Gaming Gear - Nintendo Wii

• Automotive - Lexus GS 450H

I own the Motorola Q and it’s perfect for my needs. I’ve been longing for the Tivo Series3, but I’m still waiting for the price to drop. There isn’t enough HD programming currently (I’m a Comcast customer) to justify the $700+ price tag.

The gadget on the Best of Test list that intrigues me the most is the Black & Decker Infrawave Speed Oven. I actually own another infrared oven, the Flavorwave Oven. And believe it or not, it works pretty well. I’ve roasted chickens, made prime rib and bbq ribs in the Flavorwave, and it produces good food in half the time of a conventional oven. I still prefer using a normal oven but if you are time constrained, an infrared oven will definitely save some time.

Getting back to the B&D Infrawave Speed Oven, I like the toaster oven form factor, which makes it more versatile than a Flavorwave Oven. The idea of heating up leftovers in half the time of a normal oven without the microwave soggy food issue sounds very appealing. I think I’m going to retire my toaster and replace it with a Black & Decker Infrawave Speed Oven. Sorry toaster, but I don’t eat enough toast to warrant your counter space.