Way back last spring Jenny D. first wrote about Toni Schlesinger's Five Flights Up. She said it was the book to buy, if we were only buying one book in the year, and she loved it enough to gush about it at her site, in a review for the Village Voice and later in an amazing piece for The Believer.

I have learned to value Jenny's literary opinion quite highly but while I was certainly intrigued by the book from the start, I could not wrap my head around exactly what it is that Schlesinger does while writing the pieces that make up her collection. I mean why should I, someone who lives on the opposite side of the country from NYC, care about the sort of space that New Yorkers live in? Why should their choices and opinions matter to me? And yet - yet there was something about Jenny's enthusiasm that made me read some of Schlesinger's past columns and then pick up a copy of The Believer to enjoy that review. There was something about this book, about these columns and what Schlesinger does, that was clearly very compelling - that went far beyond notes on square footage and kitchens. I wanted to read it, and after receiving the book for Christmas, I can happily say that it has proven to be as wonderful as Jenny has been saying all along.

Oddly, strangely, I was completely riveted by one of Schlesinger's "Shelter" columns after another. I understand now what she meant when she wrote in the book's intro about her first column in 1997, on Allure writer Loris Morris' East Village home, "When she stood near her orange Formica night table and starting talking about the 1980s television set that she brought from her parent's house in Glencoe, Illinois, I went into a trance. Years later, I still have not come out of it." I just could not stop reading the columns in this book. I was amazed each time I turned the page and found a another person living in a 300 sf apartment, or a family living in less that 500 sf or a group of friends in a loft who went ages without hot water. I wasn't angry or even bemused by their circumstance I was just fascinated by who they were - by the various stories about where they came from, why they were there, what they did for a living, what they thought of their neighborhood. Schlesigner has such a talent for finding the most interesting things to talk about with people who on the surface seem utterly and uncompromisingly ordinary that she never failed to impress and surprise me. Sometimes, even though she was the interviewer she still did most of the talking and oddly - that was okay too. In her Believer piece, Jenny noticed so many things about what makes Schlesinger's style special - how she notices "the beauty of small things", or her "capturing of patterns of speech, and more precisely, the particulars that conjure character". And while there is a deep knowledge and impressive grasp of NYC history in these columns, I agree with Jenny, that it is "her use of language that I find so alluring". Anyone could write about apartments, but it takes a rare talent to make this sort of writing fascinating - to make those of us who are so far away still want to know more.

When I finished Five Flights Up last week I wandered into my office and started looking for the right bookshelf to place the book. It is not really history or biography, certainly not natural science or anything to do with polar exploration. It's sociology or urban planning or cultural studies more than anything else (or social anthropology - urban anthropology?). The Library of Congress places it under "Apartment Studies" - for all the help that does me. But the more I tried to figure out where to put it, the more I found books placed in very different sections that echoed it somehow.

What about George Howe Colt's The Big House, now in biography/memoir? The story of a family home and all those who loved it over the years - all of their stories too. And Cottage for Sale, also a memoir - about a woman buying a cottage and relocating it so it can be attached to her existing home. The book is about how she finds the cottage, her visceral reaction to seeing it, her need to make it part of her world. Then there are the Neighborhood Story Project books, all with my other books on New Orleans but while they are about that city, they are more about living in a certain place, about that sense of place and how it shifts from neighborhood to neighborhood in the very same city. I even have to wonder about Howard Mansfield's Bones of the Earth - an essay collection about landmarks that includes cemeteries turned into shrines by grieving families. His is not about houses or homes, but is certainly about how we live, which seems to be central theme to all of these books on such disparate shelves - they are all about how we live, and I loved each and every one of them.

I read a blip of Dava Sobel's Powell's interview the other day on a bookmark. She said, "When I was in school, nobody talked about science writing as a profession. If I had known about it, I would have been set from the get-go instead, I had to go through five majors and a lot of angst." I thought of that when I considering all of these different books. I have never heard of someone pursuing a career on writing about how we live - about people in urban space, suburban space - about meeting people in neighborhoods and talking to them and writing about what does and does not work in their communities. You could use this information to go beyond the obvious - to learn about differnt sections and regions and subsets of American society. You could see what our similarities and differences are - what makes us happy or scared or successful. You could share a far broader picture of a city or state based on this sort of writing then any red/blue map mess will ever show.

You could see us for who we are - all of us - and then tell the world what you found.

I love Toni Schlesinger's book - safely shelved now in my newly formed section of titles all about how we live. I hope I find more books like it in the future - I hope I find a ton. I find this subject matter riveting and so very important. We write about the past all the time, what a novel idea to write about the present - how simple, and yet how wonderful to read.