Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

As a sort of self-portrait, I decided to stack up and photograph all the books I have in my house that I’ve read for the first time since moving here (in August 2006, so this is just about 3 years of reading).

Fiction

Nonfiction

All the books, stacked up evenly

Click to get huge versions, where you can zoom in and see the titles and authors clearly, or comment if you’re curious about any of them!

I realized I missed a few — like Hackers and In The Beginning Was The Command Line — and some, like Feminism is for Everybody, are loaned out — and though I can’t think of examples, there must be books I’ve read without owning — but this is the bulk of them. As I suspected, I’ve been reading a lot more nonfiction than fiction, even when you count Gravity’s Rainbow.

This weekend brought me a handful of new T stops, visited both deliberately and in the course of my other adventures. I spent Friday afternoon working at a cafe in the Charles MGH area (the last new-to-me Red Line stop that’s on both lines!); its architectural feel is a pleasant mix of modern urban business district and (literally centuries-)old-school upscale rowhouses.

I’d also heard great things about “that liquor store at Charles MGH”, as friends had been describing it, so I stopped by. The store did not disappoint! They had two entire walls lined with single bottles of beer, including a lot of fancy/unusual brews. I’ve been a deficient beer geek (and hop lover!) in that I haven’t yet had a chance to try 120 Minute IPA, so I was excited to be able to pick up a bottle — though at 20% alcohol, I haven’t yet found the right time to try it.

Saturday Jesse, Sam, and I spent the afternoon on an odyssey of many-transit-typed adventures around the city. We first went to an art space in the South End to see more of this guy’s work (first encountered at Somerville Open Studios). We hit the Silver Line to uber-terminal Dudley Station for lunch — though the Silver Line isn’t a T stop for the purpose of my transit project (the Silver Line is not a train, my friends! it is merely a bus laboring under the *delusion* that it is a train!).

Post-lunch we took one of Dudley’s approximately 7234582910 buses to Roxbury, where much to our dismay The Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Center was closed. Another time! The visit was not in vain, however, since on our way to the Stonybrook Orange Line stop (in a pretty neat place, across from a cutely-landscaped park), we accidentally walked by the Sam Adams brewery and accidentally got free beer (they were asking visitors to vote between two samples of beer, only one of which can make it into next year’s officially-marketed lineup). Nom nom nom!

Since our evening plans were in Somerville (and since this was a stop I hadn’t yet visited), we rode the Orange Line all the way across town to Sullivan Square. Like Dudley, Sullivan is a mega-transfer point, where many bus lines have their termini; unlike Dudley, Sullivan, as far as we could tell, offers absolutely no motive for visiting other than transferring to a bus. So, that’s what we did!

I furthered my plan of visiting new T stops this weekend — we went to the open studios at the Distillery in South Boston by way of the Andrew T Stop. The Distillery was about a mile from the T stop, so we got to explore South Boston on our walk, which was pretty interesting and cool (though not literally cool — Boston’s 3 weeks of nice spring/summer weather seem to be over, and it’s oppressively hot and humid). Southie wasn’t quite what I’d expected — with colorful, close-together houses on hills, some streets looked surprisingly San Francisco-esque, but the Irish pub we stopped into definitely didn’t (its decor tended more toward Irish nationalist propaganda).

Later, after walking downtown post-studios, we also hit up the New England Medical Center T Stop to get home — I hadn’t realized that the FAO Schwartz Bear had a new home!

This was the smallest of the three open studios I’ve seen in the past year, and the artists skewed the youngest — one friend commented that it seemed like college art, which I agreed with. In contrast, the Fort Point studios from last fall were full of mostly professional artists, and the Somerville studios from earlier this spring seemed to have a lot of adult amateurs (a demographic that I think produces a lot of interesting work!).

Today I went with a handful of friends to the Somerville Open Studios; we went to the Fort Point ones last fall. In both cases, we got to meet and talk to artists while looking at their work and workspace (which is also usually their home), but in Fort Point, most of the studios were subsidized spaces in dedicated artists’ collective buildings, while in Somerville, a lot of the artspaces were run out of people’s apartments or garages, and there seemed to be a lot more side project work from people who aren’t necessarily professionals. This was pretty neat! I felt like in addition to seeing art, we were seeing a lot of the Somerville community (and Somerville geography — I’m still tired from walking all afternoon around parts of the city I didn’t know existed) of ordinary artistic people. Jesse said at one point that he thought the anthropological aspects of going into these people’s homes and workspaces was almost more interesting than the art.

Of course, the art was interesting too. There were a lot of cool things, but a few favorites: a Moomers-esque apartment where we chatted with the guy who makes crazy robot sculptures from repurposed metal, and a couple of guys in a garage, one of whom paints realistic images of suburban scenes, and the other of whom paints surrealistic images of an astronaut moving in a world that’s a cross between the familiar and the futuristic, exploring our relationships to prior generations’ notion of the future (more at his website, astronautdinosaur.com(!!)).

I’d never heard of open studios before last fall, but it seems like a pretty sweet idea. People from the community can see what is going on in the local art scene and learn more about the art process through talking to artists and seeing their workspaces; artists can get exposure, show off their stuff, connect with each other, and sell pieces.