Julia

Wow. If you want to read about food and romance, fuck “[b:Eat, Pray, Love 19501 Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1269870432s/19501.jpg 3352398],” and get your hands on this book. Ruth Reichl is a gifted writer and incredibly knowledgeable about food, so her writing about food is nothing short of sublime, but what really makes the book fantastic is her unstinting honesty about all the messy parts of her personal life (and keen observations about her friends, family, and coworkers) as she moved professionally from a line cook in Berkeley to the food critic for the LA Times. No pun intended, because it's too apt to be funny–this book is juicy. And there's nothing better than a recipe with a little history to it, so it went right on the shelf with my other cookbooks, and I'm already plotting occasions to try recreate some of the food from her life in mine.

This book is so flipping charming! It is suffused throughout with the obvious admiration and affection Wohlleben feels for the trees (and all other living creatures) in the German woodland he manages. My husband is an arborist, and I still learned a great deal from the book, from what we don't know (e.g., we don't actually have any idea how large trees manage to move the huge quantities of water they do every day) to the remarkable stuff we do (e.g., trees can communicate to each other via scent). Wohlleben's “agenda” is clear, but it's such a good one that it's hard to fault him for it: he thinks we should all be more in awe of trees than we are, and more willing to find ways to serve trees and the ecosystems they create, versus expecting them to serve us. My one complaint is translation-related; it felt a little uneven. At times, passages were beautifully and fluidly written; at others, word choices distracted me from the content. A small quibble.

Lending library find. This is the closest I've gotten to not finishing a book, and I still can't totally articulate what compels me to slog to the end. In this case, I think it was sheer bafflement? Coulter's book is...almost like a cartoon of a romance novel? Or of any novel? The dialogue is laughably wooden, the flirtation between the two sets of lovers is meant to be playful and clever but ends up being more like playground back-and-forth, and...I don't even know what else to say. We get Merlin at the end, which is not a spoiler, because it's not really related to the plot? I can tell from goodreads that many of Coulter's other books are better loved, so I'm sure she is too wise to take this one's reviews to heart, and I will continue on my merry way, amused & bemused by this book and my compulsion to finish it.

I mean, you always hope that something that won a Pulitzer is going to be good. Indeed, “Angle of Repose” is. Quite. It's funny, but as I near the end of my third year out here in Utah, I really do think there's something about geographical location that lends different tones to writing. Stegner sounds somehow “Western” to me, and not just in his subject matter. His style is an inimitable one; at times very emotionally intimate (e.g., the narrator alternates between prying and gentle deference to his grandmother's privacy as he speculates on her quashed love for her female best friend), and at other times, a more detached survey of the space of the western mountain states (e.g., he gets the sun-bleached tumbleweeds and canyons that appear out of nowhere in Idaho spot-on). It's clear to me now the debt that Abbey owed Stegner; Abbey is more free-wheeling and irreverent, but nonetheless obviously cut from Stegner's cloth. Loving Abbey, I'm certainly grateful for that! At any rate, it's a captivating novel that remains relevant 40 years later. Perhaps my favorite aspect of the book is the unflinching focus on the ties that bind...a quote, as the narrator addresses his grandparent's tumultuous but decades-long marriage: “What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.”

Brit chick lit in the style of Bridget Jones. Finished in two days, consider me v. amused.

Third of four in the Alexandria Quartet; review of the Quartet forthcoming. In the meantime, another favorite quote:

“Indeed, now the masters were beginning to find that they were, after all, the servants of the very forces which they had set in play, and that nature is inherently ingovernable. They were soon to be drawn along ways not of their choosing, trapped in a magnetic field, as it were, by the same forces which unwind the tides at the moon's bidding, or propel the glittering forces of salmon up a crowded river–actions curving and swelling into futurity beyond the powers of mortals to harness or divert.”

Given that Allende's style is magical realism, I'll be cheesy and chalk my five stars I can't completely explain to the whimsical (magical, if you will, haha) style of her prose. Of course I love a book with strong female characters, and Allende provides that in spades, but it's also a pretty interesting reminder of Chile's troubled 20th century history (los deseparecidos of the CIA-backed junta, anyone?). Allende makes you feel deeply for all the family members we meet of this multi-generational saga, and is also someone who seems always capable of capturing a sense of wonder about even the more mundane aspects of life. Tore through this LONG book in two days on a Mexican vacation, and if you're looking to be transported, I highly recommend it.

Living outside of Virginia for the first time in my life, I get nostalgic for it (although I already know I'll miss Utah's mountains when I leave, and that's years away). So it's hard to separate my general love of Barbara Kingsolver's writing with my adoration of the rolling green hills of, for example, Nelson County in July. Which is pretty close to where Kingsolver's family's year of eating locally unfolds. But I'm not sure those feelings need to be separated; part of Kingsolver's point is that many of us have allowed ourselves to forget (or be ignorant of) where our food comes from, and that both eating and living thoughtfully include an awareness of place, and our relationships to it. It's not preachy, though, it's just plain beautiful.

I can imagine that a lot of people DO find the book preachy, but I guess what I would say to them is this: beautiful as this book is, thinking about industrial agriculture, a bottom-line-driven food industry, and our implicit (sometimes even enthusiastic) support of both is really, really challenging. It can be scary, and it can make you feel guilty about buying a bell pepper in February anywhere other than in California. Fear and guilt are okay–they are okay, if not desirable, because we have things to be scared and feel guilty about (plus, she's right...no February bell pepper from CA tastes quite the way a bell pepper from the farmer's market in the middle of summer does). That's where I think the real power of the book comes in–we open ourselves up to experience the joy of food when we allow ourselves to examine all the ways (some small, some big) that we can choose not to have anything to be scared or feel guilty about.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes me excited about my farm share this summer, excited to cook, and excited to eat. Nothing quite like reading the writing of someone in touch with their own capacity for joy.

I vowed to finish this before the inauguration, and I did, but I definitely think my enjoyment was hampered by having started it at the end of fall semester...this is not necessarily a memoir that can be read in bits, and I think I didn't experience the full force of the narrative as a result of a haphazard reading schedule. Bits-and-pieces aside, obviously it was great. I can't pretend like there aren't things I think are indicative of someone's first book (first memoir, especially)...like at 400-ish pages, perhaps there was some streamlining to do? But it would be impossible for me to have read this without getting even more excited about a president I'm already ecstatic about. He is a complex, nuanced, and deep thinker, about to take office in a job that requires nothing less. Plus, he's a better orator than writer, I think (which is saying quite a lot), so I'm stoked for the next 4 years of speeches!

I would have read this at the beach, except I'm not at the beach. I'm stuck staring down the deadline for a huge grad school obligation. Blah. But this was a fun bit of distracting fluff. Ryder Howe could have been obnoxiously pretentious (I think my roommate thought he was), but I found him droll. Just the right book at the right time, you know? And an interesting sliver of the deli scene in NYC, interracial marriages, and the inner workings of a hoity-toity literary magazine. Quite the cultural smorgasbord.

I got a copy of this from Dr. Maurer himself, who lives in Spokane. He's a very talented clinician, and has skillfully condensed his approach into this great little book. This is self-help that is practical, not platitude-filled. The steps are straightforward, compassionately-described, and evidence-based. I use it with patients often, and also often reflect on its wisdom in my own life.

I don't think I have anything to add here that hasn't already been said more eloquently by more intelligent people. Coates has written an extraordinary letter to his son, and anyone who reads it will be better for it. Those are both vast understatements of the importance of this work.

Meh. I take full responsibility for the two-star rating. Perhaps this is a lovely book (I certainly enjoyed some lovely moments in it), but I read it on a series of flights around the country for internship interviews. So the switches from present realism to past parables felt disjointed, and I kept wondering why Obreht wasn't giving us more of the narrator's here-and-now, as opposed to using her as the vehicle for retelling tales. Given the glowing critical acclaim plastered all over the cover, I personally may have just missed the nuance.

Overall, I think this could be a useful book for many people in their recoveries from eating disorders. I do feel like it's necessary to add one big cautionary note: while I think that many readers would appreciate hearing about both authors' own struggles with eating disorders, and find solace and hope in the personal anecdotes, I can imagine such stories being hugely triggering for others. I don't think it's an insurmountable problem, even for those it might trigger (as dealing with triggers is, indeed, part of recovering from an eating disorder), but I do think it's a book best read after careful consideration of where along one's path to healing a given individual is.

Well, here's the thing: I like Jonathan Franzen most of the time. And I certainly zipped through Freedom. I can't, however, help harboring the sneaking suspicion that he is just a little bit sexist. Certainly not misogynistic, nor a male chauvinist, but just a wee bit biased towards his male characters. I'm sure someone could offer a compelling argument about how Patty Berglund's character in this novel is not only central to the plot, but a detailed and sympathetic portrait of a troubled woman. Alright, fine fine. But she's the sole central female character flanked by three central male characters, and two women who certainly could have had their stories woven into the plot more intricately seem simply flat against the more in-depth psychologies of the other four. Franzen spends a lot of time on how Patty was the forgotten child of her family of origin, and then, ironically (and, I believe, unintentionally), allows Patty's daughter, Jessica (written to be an eerie match for her mother on several dimensions) to become the forgotten child of the Berglund family.

All that is not to say that I didn't like the book. I did. And Franzen can clearly write about whatever he wants to write about, and plenty of people will (probably justifiably) adore it. I'm just saying (admittedly, quite possibly as a result of the blossoming of my inner feminist curmudgeon) that I would have liked it more had I not finished with the sense that Franzen is an eminently capable and entertaining writer, but, also, a dude.

My partner hiked a portion of the PCT similar in length to what Strayed tackled, and I've heard lots of stories about his experience, so reading this had an oddly familiar feel to it. I'm honestly not sure what else to say about it, which is perhaps why I'm stuck at three stars and not four. I'm glad she had the experience, glad she wrote about it, and actually also glad that the movie about it was made (more movies with female protagonists, Hollywood - MORE!!), but the most moving things I think Cheryl Strayed has written include stuff like this: http://therumpus.net/2011/04/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-71-the-ghost-ship-that-didnt-carry-us/

This was a very, very excellent first novel. But certainly a first novel. I can't say there are a ton of books with a more interesting premise; Truong takes a historical tidbit, that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had a Vietnamese cook while in Paris, and tells the story of his childhood, immigration, and struggle with his identity (he's gay) while caring for the two most famous lesbians of the decade. The best part of Truong's often sensuous writing is her ability to channel Binh's expressive love of food as a medium through which he can express his feelings, as he struggles to connect with other men (who don't share his native tongue) in first French, and then English. The only part I struggled with was Truong's sometimes confusing switches from one era of Binh's life to another. I'm generally pretty good at handling that in literature, and I don't know if the jumpiness was intended to convey both Binh's unease and nod to Stein's famous writing style, but it doesn't quite work with the overall fluidity of the novel. Still, I'd read more of her work, for sure. This is a good book for anyone who loves food, as well.

I think this is my favorite of the trilogy. So much juicy exposition, both of characters and plot. This is easily the busiest I've been at work in my adult life, and I try to be pretty strict about my bedtime, and the best thing I can say about this book is that I kept staying up too late reading it.

I labelled this one as “feministy,” because I don't think that Stacy Schiff could deny her “let's re-examine Cleopatra's ACTUAL awesomeness as opposed to this hyper-sexualized harpy-witch-seductress-harlot nonsense” angle. Pulitzer Prize-winning past or no, Schiff delivers fluff here. Good fluff, feminist as opposed to misogynistic fluff, but fluff nonetheless. Grad school is starting to ruin me for reading things that aren't in academic journals; after Schiff would state a presumed fact, my internal monologue would often go, “Yes, but how do you KNOW that? What source did you use? I don't want to thumb through the epic notes section in the back, I want to know NOW” (to be clear, I read all the notes, and found them quite worthwhile, it just involved a lot of page turning). All my griping aside, I was glad for the trip back through history, much of which I hadn't actually known in particularly much detail before. Schiff is also blessed with an eye for detail, combined with an ability not to get so enamored with all the jewel-encrusted whatevers in Cleopatra's history that she forgot to tell a good story.

So I read Wallflowers #4, then #1 and now #2. I can't tell if #4 has been my fave so far just because I started there? As a quartet, things get a little formulaic. The love story is always adversaries-to-lovers, which is a totally fine story (although I doubt there will ever be a finer version than Elizabeth Bennet & Mr. Darcy), but the repetition across this set makes me more critical of the idiosyncracies of each version. Lillian & Westcliff are my least favorite of the duos thus far, because their “we dislike each other so much maybe we're secretly crazy about each other” vibe is just a smidge too close to a “tease elementary school crush in ineffective and annoying ways” thing. They are legitimately obnoxious to each other at several points! But who am I to begrudge two fictional characters their happy ending of mutually pleasurable bickering punctuated by equally mutually pleasurable sex.

I suspect that I wouldn't be a huge fan of Didion's fiction, since she seems to be the type of woman to pride herself on not being a “typical woman” (you know, lots of slightly misogynistic male friends, blah blah blah), which drives me bonkers. However, I guess everyone is made a little more vulnerable by grief, and I found much of her memoir to be deeply moving. Well-written without ever slipping into cliches, which is a pretty formidable accomplishment given the subject matter. Strangely uplifting at the end.

My rating for the first half of the novel is higher than the second half, particularly the end. I got a copy of the 10th anniversary edition, and it was interesting to read Okorafor's notes a decade later. The protagonist, Onyesonwu (whose name means “who fears death”), undergoes female genital mutilation (using the author's descriptive phrase here) as a preteen, and based on controversy around Okorafor's depiction of the practice, the novel was originally banned in Nigeria (Okorafor is Nigerian American). She doesn't regret her authorial choice, and I'm really glad it's in the book: it's a nuanced portrayal of the very complex cultural issues that surround any practice that is controversial to those outside a culture (and often, as the novel portrays and real life makes clear, to those within it!). Okay, I need to lay off the parentheticals. Anyway, I wish other equally interesting plot points had been treated with similar intricacy. The novel is essentially Onyesonwu's bildungsroman blended with a hero's journey, set in a futurist Sudan during a genocide in which rape is frequently used as a weapon of war, and I felt a little let down on both major themes. Onyesonwu's development and personal growth is beautifully traced in the first half, but flattens noticeably in the second half, and the issues related to genocide and the problem of evil, are similarly flattened into overemphasis on a singular villain as opposed to the social circumstances that give such people the opportunity to reach for and wield incredible destructive power. There is tremendous moral ambiguity in the final chapters, which I actually appreciate, but very little exploration of that ambiguity, especially Onyesonwu's penultimate actions, and I think that lets down a great character. Overall, though, I'm glad I read this, and am curious about what else Okorafor has written. I'm also glad that this was optioned by HBO, because although it would be tempting to get sucked into the magical elements of the plot, I think a great actress could take what's there and run with it in a way that would add depth to Onyesonwu's later choices that would adjust for the weaknesses at the end.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is great. Parts of the workbook are also great, and it should have been condensed so that all the great parts were smooshed together concisely. But life's not perfect, and I still use the parts I love with patients often.

My current neighborhood has a bunch of those Little Free Library things (https://littlefreelibrary.org/), and when I saw this in one, I couldn't pass it up. My husband asked me to estimate the number of times I've read this book, and I don't know. But a lot of times, and it's always wonderfully nostalgic.

The entire time I was growing up, my feminist lawyer mother had a subscription to Vogue. I can't completely explain it myself, but woman does love her shoes. Anyway, I spent elementary school reading Steingarten articles for the mag, where he is still the food columnist. My conclusion for this book is that he is probably best in small doses. Like, monthly doses. But, if you've never read any of his stuff before, I'd check this out in one-essay-at-a-time stints. Steingarten is obviously brilliant (like, went to Harvard Law brilliant, got an order of French merit for his writing on French cuisine brilliant), and very funny (particularly when reporting on his wife's reactions to his crazy food experiments; when his quest for the perfect french fry left their NYC loft full of 100 pounds of potatoes and three deep-fryers, she muttered while walking past his mess, “Smile and the world smiles with you. Fry and you fry alone.”). And I think he's at his best when he convincingly argues that pretty much every dietitian and nutritionist ever wants to suck all the fun out of eating (he is side-splitting when talking about the toxic potential of salads), and champions instead for everything in moderation and that pleasure in the preparation and consumption of food is a critical part of true health. I think it's just that over a 300-page span, each individual essay gets lost, and the cleverness, which is definitely there in each stand-alone essay, starts to seem twee from over-crowding. If I could do it again, I'd use the index to make this the funniest reference book I've ever read–or hope to read–about food.