Back from Labor Day weekend and back to work this week. We had an unseasonably pleasant holiday, with temps in the low eighties and incredible, upstate-New-York-like low humidity. I did everything I could to spend the entire weekend outdoors, which makes it a little easier to be tied to my desk this week.
The first week of September always reminds me of going back to school, even though I’ve been out of school for almost twenty years now. In the tradition, I thought I’d give you a little book report on what I was reading during the past couple of months.
Earlier in August I finished reading Real Food: What to Eat and Why, by Nina Planck. I really enjoyed this book, probably because it confirmed a lot of my own prejudices about food. Ms. Planck is the daughter of Virginia vegetable farmers and has her own consulting practice building farmers markets both here and in the U.K. Greatly simplified, her message is that if people weren’t eating it two hundred years ago, you don’t need to eat it either. That excludes all kinds of industrially processed foods, from trans fats to high fructose corn syrup. Planck’s book is much more readable than the better known book by Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan’s book is written in a muckracking style reminiscent of Upton Sinclair. I never had the sense that Pollan even likes food, whereas Planck is more of a kindred spirit, a true food lover. I’ve always refused to give up my butter, eggs and whole milk, so it was great to get her thoroughly researched explanations for why all that is better for you than margarine and skim milk anyway.
I dipped back into some old favorites on the bookshelf last month. One was The Cat Who Went to Heaven, by Elizabeth Coatsworth. This Newberry Award-winning book was first published in 1930 as a children’s book, but its timeless story is the best short primer on Buddhist compassion I’ve ever read.
Another book I revisited after a long break is Eight Skilled Gentlemen, by Barry Hughart. The novel is an unusual cross between fantasy and mystery, and takes place in an ancient China where mandarins co-exist with demons and monsters. Hughart has a playful way with language, riffing off of Chinese poetic style while also including a lot of dry humor. First published in 1991, sadly this is one of the only Hughart books still in print. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it, so it was great to rediscover this one.
A friend very kindly loaned me her copy of Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen. I thought books like this couldn’t get published anymore. Great plot, great characters, and the best part is the setting within a second-rank traveling circus during the Depression.
And I have to thank my sister for catching me up on the current crop of young adult best sellers. You may have noticed two books by Stephenie Meyer camped out atop the best seller list this summer: Twilight, and Eclipse. The gothic novels about a teenager in love with a vampire are exactly what I would have adored when I was fifteen. Reading them at the age of 42 I felt too old for them, but I can certainly see what the fuss is all about. I enjoyed another young adult novel more: A Great and Terrible Beauty. This one is set in a Victorian boarding school for upper class girls. It involves magic and visions, but what I really enjoyed was the spot-on portrayal of the inner workings of a girls clique. Girls of any era have always had the ability to be creatively vicious, and the writer, Libba Bray, clearly remembers the social game well.
What are you reading? Please drop me a line and give me some more books to add to my list!
