photo: houzz.comIn this season of Halloween and autumn leaves, shades of orange come to mind.
In Feng Shui, Orange is a color that represents the Earth element. Depending on the specific Feng Shui reading, Earth can be used to help promote harmonious relationships, or avoid possible accidents. If you have had a Feng Shui consultation with me, you know exactly where you need to add Earth in your space and how it will benefit you.
Along with orange, other colors that represent the Earth element are yellow, tan and brown. So if you really want to create a powerful “earth” room, add more than one earth color.
photo: J. AsnusIn this little boy’s room, I mixed shades of orange and yellow. Based on his birthday, he is an Earth element, so the colors in this room support sound sleep and good health.
According to the 5-element cycle of Feng Shui, Earth element has a productive relationship with the element Metal. Metal colors are white, gray, silver or gold. For this reason, I especially like mixing orange with white or gray.
photo: R. GomezIn this Hamptons bedroom, there was not enough space for night stands on either side of the bed. So I built a custom headboard with built in lighting and painted it orange.
The walls are pale yellow. The bedding is kept white. And the bed sits on top of an orange, brown and white Jonathan Adler rug. So here you have Earth and Metal working harmoniously together. This room supports good relationships.
photo: mecoxgarden.comOrange is a timeless, classic color that also has a lot of energy and freshness. There are not many colors you can say that about.
For some fun ways to incorporate orange into your space:
photo: sanderson.comThis wallpaper from Sanderson has a fantastic mix of pale orange and gray in a retro floral pattern.
photo: flavorpaper.comThis bold graphic design from Flavor Paper has strong orange on a dark chocolate background.
photo: lampsplus.comA few fun pillows make a big impact. These are from LampsPlus.com.
For a chic pop of orange, you can always add an orange throw – I prefer Hermes!
photo: rdujour.comShare on FacebookLinda KHi Reiko, Thank you for the nice article. I love orange! It adds vibrance and cheer to a room any time of year! I value your Feng Shui and decorating talents in helping me 2 years ago with transforming my son’s room from a cool baby room (which he refused to sleep in) to a happy “big boy” room (which he loves to spend time and sleep in)! Your recommendation to use Earth tones/colors (based on his birthday and Feng Shui of that room) were fabulous! (What’s more amazing is that you didn’t even know orange and brown were his favorite colors at the time!) Your suggestion to use “sunsets/sunrises” as a theme was inspirational! The room now has a wonderful warmth, energy, and life that it lacked before. (Attached are “before” and “after” photos of the transformation.)
Linda KI’m not sure if my pictures posted (I didn’t see them so trying again) …
ReikoLinda these pictures look great! I love how you took my feng shui design recommendations and incorporated them into your own beautiful design. This shows what a long distance feng shui design consultation can do. I hope to finally meet you soon!
Linda KHi Reiko, I’d love to have you come design a room in our house one day. I wish you were closer! Let me know if you are ever in the area.
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You’d have to have spent 2010 in a bunker somewhere to not know that Justin Cronin’s The Passage was the Big Book of the year. Big in that it was ubiquitous in the way that, say, The Marriage Plot is right now and in that it was nearly as long as the also-currently-unavoidable 1Q84. Oh, and it was about vampires, sort of, and they were still (sort of) all the rage.And that’s basically all I knew about The Passage. It was everywhere, and pretty much everyone I knew read it. Most of my friends loved it, though the ones who didn’t were fervent in their dislike, and I felt like I couldn’t win. If I read it and hated it, I’d have that awful feeling that I must have missed something vital, or worse, that I simply wasn’t up to understanding something about it, and if I loved it, I’d feel like I had to defend it (and by extension, my taste) to the ones who deemed it less than worthy. Add to all this the fact that I wasn’t really doing genre at the time, and you have the makings of an epic case of bookcrastination.So I just left it languishing on my galley shelves. I saw it every time I moseyed over to select my next read. I picked it up and *almost* started it a few times. I even took it on two vacations. But I just couldn’t get excited about it. For a while, I thought this failure to launch was a result of the hangover from all the hype surrounding the book’s release. Despite the fact that I knew a great deal of the buzz about The Passage was genuine because it was coming from people whose recommendations and opinions I trust, there was so much talk about it that I was a bit turned off. I needed to put some space between all that chatter—and all those loaded expectations—and my experience with it.The stars aligned last week, and I finally picked it up (and then promptly hunkered down), and you know what? It was pretty great. Not perfect, but perfectly enjoyable. I knew that Cronin was a literary writer (dude won the PEN/Hemingway Award, after all), but I didn’t expect the writing to be quite so gorgeous in parts. Not to say that genre books can’t also have terrific writing, but I’m new enough to them—and attached enough to my literary fiction roots—that I still find it surprising when I’m moved to pause in the middle of an apocalyptic vampire thriller to underline a beautifully constructed sentence. Also, multiple narratives are the most powerful of my book kryptonites, and I was thrilled that Cronin presented the story not just from many different characters’ perspectives but also through incorporating non-traditional formats like emails, journals, and academic papers into the text.The plot is compelling and scary in that “holy shit, what is the government experimenting on that we don’t know about?” kind of way AND in the usual vampires-are-creepy way, and Cronin forces readers to consider just how easily something could get out of hand—or fall into the wrong hands—and cause the end of the world as we know it. There are some pacing problems that make the first half of the book seem to drag at points, but the end (literally, the stuff that happens in the last 20 pages of this 800-page tome) makes them seem like non-issues after all. There are a lot of characters to juggle, but Cronin mostly succeeds in making each one recognizable and memorable, and all the important ones are just plain unforgettable.Though I didn’t lurve The Passage, I liked it quite a bit, and this was a ridiculously fun and generally positive reading experience for me. I’m not well-versed enough in the tropes of vampire fiction or science fiction to address other critics’ accusations that The Passage is derivative, and I think that actually made me an ideal reader for this book. I didn’t know what Cronin was modeling his book on (many say it’s Stephen King’s The Stand), so I was able to meet it where it was.When I realized that—that one of the most important things about my experience with this book was the fact that I was able to meet it where it was—I also realized that this wouldn’t have happened if I’d picked it up a year ago. In mid-2010, I just wasn’t ready for it. Plain and simple. But my adventures in genre over the last ten months have shown me that I can read, understand, and enjoy genre fiction, and they’ve given me a deep appreciation for the magic that happens when a talented literary writer sets out to write a book in which Things Actually Happen.The moral of the story? Next time there’s a Big Book you feel like you’re supposed to be reading but not right now, wait it out. Let it come to you. You’ll be glad you did.
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Published November 8, 2011 by HarperOne 
My friend and trusted font of book recommendations Josh Christie mentioned this title on the Bookrageous podcast a couple weeks ago and said, “It’s changing the way I read.” And that was all I needed to hear. I mean, we read books that change the way we think all the time, but how often do we read something that changes the way we READ? I had to get my hands on it.Relentless pursuer of excellent reading material that I am, I obtained a galley and devoured The Lifespan of a Fact whole. Here’s the quick and dirty: author John D’Agata was hired in 2003 to write an essay about a teenager’s suicide jump from the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. It was rejected from the magazine that originally commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies, but The Believer picked it up. And they assigned then-intern Jim Fingal to fact check it.Sounds straight-forward, right? But here’s the thing: an essay is not a piece of journalistic reportage. An essay, as D’Agata reminds Fingal throughout the text, is an attempt. An attempt to tell the truth. To reveal something about humanity. To get at an idea or event in a way that straight non-fiction cannot. It’s the old Tim O’Brien “story truth vs. happening truth” polemic. And yes, for the sake of this conversation, an essay is a story more than it is a factual account. So The Lifespan of a Fact (coming from W. W. Norton February 2012) goes like this. Fact checker Jim Fingal reads a sentence of D’Agata’s piece, identifies the factual claims it makes (think: height of buildings, angles of intersections, minute but potentially important details) and trots off to investigate their accuracy. He reports inaccuracies to the editor and to D’Agata, who responds with increasing frustration to Fingal’s apparent lack of appreciation for the value and application of artistic license. This book presents the text of D’Agata’s original piece along with excerpts of the email conversations D’Agata and Fingal had over the next seven years. Seven years of conversation! About one essay! It boggles, but in the best possible way.While D’Agata and Fingal grapple with the tension between factual accuracy and emotional poignancy (false dichtomy? perhaps…), readers are invited to consider the ways in which The Lifespan of a Fact has itself been edited, and for what purposes. D’Agata and Fingal ask us to think about whether we care more about knowing how many seconds it *really* took the boy to fall to the ground or feeling that the story of his fall is connected to larger themes in the essay. They force us to examine the value we place on finding “the truth” and to acknowledge the compromises—artistic and otherwise—that affect the works we think of as nonfiction.And that’s the thing about this book that will change the way you read. You’ll never pick up another nonfiction book believing that, because it is heavily-researched and made it past the gateways of mainstream publishing, it must be factually true. The Lifespan of a Fact will make you question every so-called fact you read, and while that sounds like it could quickly devolve into you locking yourself in the basement to think about conspiracies like those Lone Gunmen dudes from The X-Files, it really means that you’ll think more about the art of writing (and reading) nonfiction and become a more engaged, critically thinking reader.I’m calling it right now. The Lifespan of a Fact is going to be a 2012 favorite. Put a circle around February 27th on your calendar. You’ll be glad you did.
Julie @ Read Handed onNovember 16th, 2011 8:54 am 
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Care's Online Book Club onNovember 16th, 2011 10:50 am 
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Rebecca Joines Schinsky onNovember 16th, 2011 12:22 pm 
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Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness) onNovember 17th, 2011 8:18 am