Reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan for Jeane’s DogEar Reading Challenge. I am anxious about food-type books (because I love food), and I was planning to put this off to the very end of October, except someone has a hold on it at the library. So if I don’t read it by 18 October I am out of luck. 11 October 2009 8:30 PM: Exciting. My very first book about food except for Fast Food Nation, which let’s face it, I skipped a lot of that book because it gave me unhappy feelings. I start reading and am…
33 CommentsTag: nonfiction
Don’t you love titles with semicolons? This one’s full name is The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. In a lot of ways, it’s like And the Band Played On – a medical mystery! The book follows a cholera epidemic in London in 1854 (the year Oscar Wilde was born!), how it began and how it spread, and how a scientist and a vicar tracked it down and discovered how it was transmitted. What had happened was that a baby girl got cholera, and her mother dumped…
8 CommentsFor Jeane’s Dog Ear Challenge: West with the Night was the nonfiction book on an obscure topic/on a topic you don’t often read about. I had a broad selection of Jeane recommendations for this one, since she is always reading books that sound interesting but that I would never pick up on my own. West with the Night is Beryl Markham’s memoir of growing up on her father’s farm in Africa, and becoming a horse trainer, and eventually learning to fly a plane. Beryl Markham sounds like a pretty cool person, though from reading her Wikipedia article it sounds like…
14 CommentsA.D. is a graphic novel about seven people from New Orleans. The author interviewed these people extensively, visited New Orleans, took pictures, and then created this book. It tells the stories of people who left and people who stayed, wealthyish people and poorish people, black people and white people. I liked reading this book, because it aligns very nicely with my memories of the hurricane. The high school kids talked about how they were going to miss a couple of days of school, and everyone expected it to turn east the way they always do, and the doctor has a…
6 CommentsThe Bible just got bumped off my five desert island books list. Sorry, Bible! It’s just that you have all that stuff about begatting and oysters, and none of my other desert island books take long breaks from being awesome to talk about stoning your disobedient sons! And you know I can’t do without Shakespeare, and The Color Purple and Angels in America are JUST SO EPIC, and Greensleeves is my favorite book of all time. You understand, don’t you? And we can still be friends? I mean when you think about it, way more people would take you to…
9 CommentsFrederick Douglass is my hero. Him and Julian of Norwich – an unlikely pair, and I am not really sure what they would make of each other, but there you go. I have been saying for ages that we should put Frederick Douglass on our money. And bump Jackson. Jackson is the obvious choice to get bumped, but I also think we could get rid of Grant, in a pinch – it’s not that I hate him or anything, it’s just that, you know, he wasn’t that amazing a president, and we are already representin’ for the Civil War with…
6 CommentsIn Chicken with Plums, Marjane Satrapi writes about tar musician Nasser Ali, a great-uncle of hers who decides to die after his wife destroys his tar in a heated argument. He tries and tries to find another tar that will be the equal of the one that was destroyed, but even the best of tars will not make the music he imagines. He lies down on his bed and stays there for eight days, upon which he dies. Chicken with Plums follows him through those eight days, through visits and memories and dreams and hallucinations. The good: Marjane Satrapi charms…
4 CommentsI love a memoir, y’all, and you know what I love more than a memoir? A graphic novel memoir. Delicious. My library has a new section on their ever-growing graphic novels shelf, which is Biography. When I went in yesterday (collecting films for my poor sick little sister and lots of excellent books for me), I took three of the five books from the new wee little section. Including Fun Home – which I remember the library not having last time I checked, and I was well cross about it. Fun Home is Alison Bechdel‘s memoir about her father, a…
11 CommentsWhen I was in high school, and my mum was getting her master’s degree in pastoral theology, she used to read us excerpts from her textbooks. Sometimes these were interesting, like about Jesus’s genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew and how it’s implying that Mary was sexually suspect. But mostly she was reading bits aloud to us as an illustration of theologians’ complete inability to express themselves clearly. I have no patience with writers who can’t make a sensible sentence – read C.S. Lewis, people! You could all learn a thing or two from the book that is C.S. Lewis! …
2 CommentsStolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries, from World War I to Iraq, Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger We had to read Zlata’s Diary in ninth grade, and I remember thinking, Sheesh, if I were Zlata as a grown-up, I would really wish these diaries weren’t out there. They are just like the diaries I kept at that age, lots of Oh why is this happening to me, and How can these trivial things make me happy when there is so much darkness in my life? – the difference being, of course, that she actually had bad stuff happening to me;…
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