How depressing

Here is a distressing but unsurprising news flash for you: “US report says young people reading a lot less,” from page one of the Boston Globe. The story reports on a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts, which contains the following nuggets:

• Only 30 percent of 13-year-olds read almost every day.

• Almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure.

• The average person between ages 15 and 24 spends 2.5 hours a day watching TV and 7 minutes reading.

This has led to a sharp drop in reading profiency. Again, not surprising.

Interestingly, the study found a correlation between reading for pleasure and other activities, such as voting, political activism, participation in culture and fine arts, charity work and regular exercise. It seems like the bottom line is, reading is good for you! (And fun!)

I guess I should consider myself lucky that when I was little, my parents took me to bookstores at least once a week and bought whatever I wanted (in retrospect, the library would have been a lot more economical, but my parents are like me—they like to own their books :) ).

Also I’m lucky that cell phones, ipods, Blackberries, etc. did not exist when I started my reading habit (not to sound like an old geezer—I’m only 30!). One of the reasons offered for the decline in reading is that people, especially teenagers and college students, have so many electronic gadgets to play with. I abhor the idea of electronic book readers, but maybe they will prove the savior of reading: Books just might seem “cooler” when you can read them on a tiny little screen with flashy colors. How sad.


P.S. I know I haven't posted on my current reading in a while, I did just finish "The Road," which I will blog about later this week... stay tuned!

Good God, she’s done it again…

I think it might be time for Oprah and I to come to an uneasy truce, similar to the Oprah-Letterman detente. The book club queen just announced that her next book is “Pillars of the Earth,” which is one of my favorite novels of all time. I had to read it for a class in high school and was completely absorbed in the medieval world it creates. And Ken Follett just wrote a sequel, “World Without End,” which I am dying to read. Now the real question is, how many of Oprah’s loyal followers are actually going to plow all the way through “Pillars,” which clocks in at nearly 1,000 pages?

Faire la cuisine

Earlier this year, I read a couple of books by and about Julia Child. I like to cook, so I was tempted to try some of her recipes, but my vegetarian self just couldn’t embrace the idea of wrestling with a roast chicken, or digging marrow out of a cow bone to whip up a Bifteck Saute Bercy. So, I was pleased to discover a more accessible, recently published French cookbook called “Chocolate & Zucchini,” which grew from a blog of the same name. The woman who wrote the book, 29-year-old Clotilde Dusoulier, basically has my dream job: living in Paris, cooking delicious food, eating it and writing about it. I tried her recipe for Quiche de Broccoli a la Pomme, and it was scrumptious. For some reason I had always thought making quiche would be really difficult, but this was pretty easy. (Although I cheated by using a store-bought crust.) Next up, Billes de Noisettes au Chocolat. Or maybe a nice Tarte Amandine a la Myrtille….

Dumbledore is what?

I’m not quite sure what to make of J.K. Rowling’s recent outing of Dumbledore. At first glance, it seems positive for the books to embrace diversity and feature a gay character. But upon further reflection, maybe Dumbledore is not the best gay role model that Rowling could have offered up. Let’s think about it: He’s 115 years old, has no significant relationships, and spends much of his time with 13-year-old boys. Sound like any recent scandals we’ve experienced in Boston?

In an essay in Time Magazine last week, John Cloud, a gay writer, argues that the outing is “no gay triumph” and wonders why Rowling never acknowledged Dumbledore’s nature in the books. “We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful,” he writes. “His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.”

I also tend to agree with this boston.com blogger, who maintains that authors can’t just make major revelations about a character after the fact, without any mention of it in the text. Maybe Rowling didn’t want to give the Christian Right another reason to try to ban her books, but then why broach the topic at all?

Flippin' good

Every time I try to make pancakes, it turns into a disaster. I know everyone says the first one is always a dud and you have to throw it away, but last time I tried it, I had to throw away the ENTIRE batch. At that point, I resigned myself to going to IHOP to fulfill my pancake cravings.

Then last week, while reading on the train, I came across an article that gave me hope. The article, written by a New York Times columnist, is part of an anthology I’m currently reading, “The Best Food Writing 2003.” (Yes it’s random, but I LOVE to read about food, so I am devouring it—sorry, bad pun.)

Anyway, this article ("With Pancakes, Every Day Is Sunday") made it sound like it was no big deal to whip up a batch of light, fluffy pancakes at the drop of a hat, so I decided to give it another shot. I’ve never made pancakes from scratch before, but I tried the author’s recipe for “Mississippi Pancakes,” which he claims are the best he’s ever had.

True to form, the first one was quite inedible (I accidentally folded it onto itself while trying to flip it, so it turned into an omelette), but after that, I did manage to produce a decent number of good pancakes. They were especially yummy with blueberries and maple syrup…...mmmmmm……pancakes……..

Here is the recipe, if anyone wants to try. It doesn’t say to grease the pan, but I used some cooking spray anyway. It also claims to make 20 “medium-sized” pancakes, but I halved the recipe and only got 7 (including the one I had to pitch), and they weren’t very big, so I would recommend making the whole recipe.


2 eggs
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons butter, melted
1 1/4 cup all purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
3 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt

1) Place a nonstick griddle or a skillet over medium heat. In a large bowl, beat eggs until light and foamy. Add milk, oil and butter. In another bowl, sift together dry ingredients, then beat them into the liquid ingredients with a wire wisk.

2) When skillet is hot, pour in about 1/4 cup batter for each pancake, leaving space between. Flip when batter bubbles. Continue cooking for about a minute. Serve immediately.


For the topping (I made this up) heat 2 cups of frozen blueberries in a skillet with a few tablespoons of maple syrup. Pour over finished pancakes.

Between innings

OK, this is becoming my mantra—I am a terribly delinquent blogger. My excuse du jour is the Red Sox. All these loooooong playoff games are really cutting into my reading time. Although for some people, the long games help promote literacy: During the interminable Game 2 at Fenway, the TV cameras caught Stephen King reading a book between innings. In an interview with a Fox reporter, King dissed the network’s extended commercial breaks, saying that he normally can read 18 pages per game, but now that Fox is airing the games, it’s up to 27. The reporter, seemingly oblivious to King’s point, replied “Thanks for the plug!” Huh? Anyway, maybe I will follow King’s example and read between innings of Game 5 tonight, but somehow I think I will be too nervous to focus on a book…..

9/11

There have been plenty of books written about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. I just finished one of the most comprehensive, “The Looming Tower,” by Lawrence Wright, which is an account of the rise of Al-Qaeda in particular, and Islamic fundamentalism in general.

I learned a lot of things from this book. For starters, radical Islam has been around for quite a while, starting with the writings of Sayyid Qutb, a scholar who attended school in the United States in the late 1940s. Qutb’s writings excoriated the influences of modernity, specifically secularism, democracy, individualism, tolerances, materialism, mixing of sexes, etc. Things that Americans are rather fond of.

Wright recounts the long history of Islamic movements in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, culminating the formation of Al Qaeda in the 1990s, headed by Osama bin Laden. Their philosophy of mass murder of innocents relies on the concept of “takfir,” which essentially says that anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who does not agree completely with the fundamentalists’ particular interpretation of Islam, is an infidel and should be killed. A rather extreme point of view, which has no basis in the Koran but developed later among some radical Muslims.

Wright did exhaustive research for this book (his list of interview subjects takes up seven pages), and it shows in the meticulous detail of his story. For the most part the story moves right along, but it gets bogged down a little in the details of the long series of wars in Afghanistan (against the Russians), where bin Laden and his friends first started to wage “holy war.” As Wright humorously points out, the Afghans actually just wanted Osama and pals to go away because they were such incompetent fighters.

The book also describes, in painful detail, many of the puzzle pieces held by either the FBI, CIA or NSA, who didn’t share information and thus couldn’t put together the big picture of Al Qaeda’s grand plan.

Alongside the chronicle of Al Qaeda's rise, Wright recounts the compelling story of FBI agent John O’Neill and his efforts to track down the terror network. O’Neill was a flamboyant character who juggled relationships with four (yes, four) women at once as he worked long days and nights on the Al Qaeda case. O’Neill, the one person who could have probably put all the pieces together, didn’t get the support he needed and retired from the FBI in August 2001. He took a job as head of security for the World Trade Center and was killed on Sept. 11.

So, it’s not exactly a cheery tale, but it’s definitely worth reading, if you are interested in learning about the factors that led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the people who tried to stop it. Six years later, the phrase “Sept. 11” has become so politicized that it’s easy to forget how horrific that day was, and the maniacal drive of the people who were responsible for it. (I note that those people are still roaming around the mountains of Pakistan—thanks again, W.)