Happy March!
It's been a couple of quiet weeks at Casa de Sawin. I've been reading a lot. In fact, I just finished a wonderful book called The Year Of Yes. It's about a young woman who makes a momentous decision: for one year, she will go out on a date with anyone who asks her. Instead of saying no to life, she decides to say yes.

It's not just about dating; the woman opens herself up to all kinds of new things on the journey. It's sweet sometimes, sad at others, and ultimately triumphant. I highly recommend this book!

This will probably be made into a movie. Maria Dahvana Headley (the author) and her husband are both playwrights and both write screenplays. But I would read it first.

I also read We Are Still Married by Garrison Keillor. I love listening to A Prairie Home Companion, and I've read all of his other books and found them all delightful. But this book (I think it was his first) wasn't very good. I didn't like it one bit.

I've been working my way through Ellen Hart's series of books featuring Jane Lawless, a restauranteur and amateur sleuth who lives in Minneapolis. I've liked all of the books in this series. I haven't read them in order, and the last one I finished was Hunting The Witch.

I liked The Iron Girl, the latest in the series a whole lot, too. I also recommend picking this up if you like cozies with fun characters. The mysteries are okay too, but for me the strength of these books lies in Lawless' ability to face the toughest situation and come through on the other side through fierce determination, intelligence -- and sometimes with a little help from her friends.

William Bernhardt's lawyer Ben Kincaid returns in a satisfying thriller in Capital Murder. Bernhardt writes a pretty good legal thriller, and the characters of the series are fun to read about. So Thumbs Up on the Kincaid series -- especially Capital Murder and Hate Crime.

Bernhardt's writing has really matured over his past few books, and if you're looking for a mystery/thriller/courtroom drama to read, he really delivers.

The book I'm struggling through right now is called Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes . It's about the trouble our society is in because have all bought into the popularized version of B.F. Skinner's philosophy of behaviorism.

Basically, we reward everyone in order to get them to do things but when we take away the reward the behavior we encourage ceases. Thus, we spend a lot of our lives coming up with different-flavored carrots to dangle in front of people to get them to do what we want. This means that we have a whole bunch of people who behave a certain way only because they anticipate reward or punishment and not because it's the "right" thing to do.

It's a very interesting subject, and I will finish the book someday. But Alfie Kohn is such a dry writer that I can't handle more than a page or two at a time. I would love to have been the editor on this book! In the right format, Kohn's ideas could influence a lot of people who work in human services. As it is, I like the book, but I find it unreadable! Maybe if it was a pop-up book with lots of pictures and smaller words, I would be able to read it faster.