No more!

As if I needed any more additions to my “to be read” list, I recently came across this article in the New York Times. It’s about a book with the somewhat threatening title, “1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” Great. My own TBR list is probably already over 1,000, I don’t need anyone else telling me what to read. In case you’re wondering, I looked through the entire list, and I have read exactly 46 of these supposedly essential novels. (The list is all fiction, which puts me at a disadvantage, since I read about 50/50 fiction/non-fiction.)

There are several books that overlap with my own list, and some more that I should probably read some day (I really do need to read more Haruki Murakami). But I do not foresee myself attempting to meet this book’s challenge. I have even accepted that I’m not going to read all of the books on my own list. Speaking of which, I should get back to one of the three books I’m reading now….

"Kaaterskill Falls"

“Kaaterskill Falls,” by Allegra Goodman, is a book that draws you in very gently. The story follows a group of Orthodox Jewish families who spend summers in Kaaterskill Falls, somewhere in upstate New York. There is not a lot of action, and I didn’t think I was all that into the story, but then about halfway through I realized that I really cared what happened to these characters. I especially liked Elizabeth, a young, devout mother of five daughters who decides that she wants something more than the very traditional life she has always lived.

I picked up this book in a used bookstore a couple of years ago, after reading another of Goodman’s novels, “Intuition.” That was another gently unfolding story, with a very different setting—a high-powered cancer research institute in Cambridge, Mass. Part of the reason I liked that one so much is that I have worked in similar places, and the story and characters rang true. I wasn’t sure I would like “Kaaterskill Falls” as much as that one, but it turns out Goodman is such a good writer that she can make you care about all kinds of characters. If you go into it expecting a beautifully described slice of life, rather than an action-packed story, you will not be disappointed.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma"

When the Atkins diet became so popular, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to give up an entire food group. (Especially BREAD, which is by far my favorite food group.) Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” thinks he has the answer for why Americans are so susceptible to fad diets.

The problem, he says, is that America has never had a stable national cuisine. Our traditions are so skimpy that any crackpot with a new diet plan can win legions of converts (and this started long before Atkins—remember the grapefruit diet?).

While other cultures choose their food based on taste and tradition, Americans rely on “experts” to tell them what foods are “good” or “bad.” This only feeds the national anxiety (the omnivore’s dilemma) over what to eat. When we can eat anything we want, it’s that much harder to figure out what we actually SHOULD eat.

Industrial food has seized on this anxiety and created all sorts of processed food products that supposedly add value to our diets, but really appear to just increase Big Food’s profits, at the expense of our health. Because we don’t know what real food is supposed to be, we’ll eat anything. We forget that tasteless chicken pieces breaded and fried in a variety of corn products is NOT FOOD.

In his book, Pollan traces the history of four meals — industrial (fast food), industrial organic (Whole Foods products), pastoral (from a small local farm), and a meal in which everything was hunted or gathered by the author.

It turns out that industrial food is based, to a rather shocking degree, on corn products. Not just high fructose corn syrup, but all sorts of other starches, oils, etc. Plus, most industrially raised livestock are fed on corn, a diet that cows and chickens are not designed to eat, which is why cattle must also be fed so many antibiotics. Between the antibiotics, the pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and petroleum needed to transport all this food to and from various processing facilities, it sounds like a completely unsustainable enterprise.

Which leaves us with what Pollan seems to think is the best way to eat – from a local farm, preferably one where you know the farmer or at least know a lot about how the farm is run. It turns out that old-fashioned agricultural principles like crop rotation and pasturing animals rather than force feeding them corn were actually pretty good ideas, in terms of quality of food produced and environmental health.

Reading this book made me very glad that I am a vegetarian — just think how much better off the world would be if we didn’t devote so much land to growing corn to feed livestock. Instead, farmers could grow food for people… and maybe we wouldn’t have skyrocketing food prices and food riots. Just a thought.

Extremes

I have been sadly delinquent as a blogger and reader this month, for some reason. I have only finished one book! It was a good one though: “Under the Banner of Heaven,” by Jon Krakauer, which I read for my book group.

The book is about Mormonism, specifically a breakaway group of fundamentalist Mormons who still practice polygamy. Coincidentally, this story about a compound of Fundamentalist Mormons broke while we were reading the book. I had no idea that so many Mormons were still practicing polygamy, but, as Krakauer describes it, there are several towns in the Western U.S., Canada and Mexico where there are still enclaves of polygamous Mormons.

The Mormon church officially condemns polygamy, but these fundamentalist groups say that true believer must practice it, because it was proclaimed by the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. Smith claims that he received a revelation from God saying that polygamy was an essential sacred practice, but it seems like the truth was more like he decided he wanted to sleep with women other than his first wife, especially younger women. (His first wife was not very happy about this.)

Under pressure from the U.S. government, the church outlawed polygamy in 1890, but as illustrated recently in Texas, the practice still continues. Disturbingly, many of the “wives” are barely older than 15.

Krakauer focuses on the history of the development of fundamental Mormonism. As an extreme example of such fundamentalism, he relates the story of a murder that took place in 1984. Ron Lafferty, a Mormon who had decided he wanted to practice polygamy, claimed he received a revelation from God telling him to kill his sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, who he felt was obstructing his efforts to expand his family.

Krakauer’s descriptions of fundamentalist Mormons reminded me of another book I read recently, “The Looming Tower,” about fundamentalist Muslims. In both religions, when taken to extremes, followers believe that not only is their brand of religion the only valid one, but non-believers, or anyone else who gets in their way, must be killed.

There are so many bizarre aspects of Mormonism, from the founding revelation of the church, delivered by an angel named in Moroni in upstate New York, to the long undergarment that all devout Mormons are supposed to wear every day. But to be fair, all major religions have elements that are really strange if you think about them at all. It’s just easier to pick apart Mormonism because it developed so recently and its history has been documented extensively.

Not surprisingly, the book was not very well received by the Mormon church. Amusingly, one day while I was reading it on the T, a young Mormon missionary (I could tell by his nametag) got on the train and sat down across from me. I tried to obscure the cover of the book, I don’t think he noticed it. Phew!

"It's not you, it's your books"

I love this essay from yesterday’s New York Times.

I have never broken up with anyone over their taste in books, though it seems like something I am capable of doing. I tend to agree with the author quoted in that essay saying, “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period.” Even better, I found a guy with pretty good taste in books—he even borrows mine sometimes ;)

Ghost stories

OK, I have finally gotten around to writing about “The Ghost Map.” :) This is another in my series of books about death and disaster, which I so enjoy reading. In this installment, the agent of destruction is the bacterium that causes cholera, and the setting is 1850s London.

I don’t think I would really have liked living during this time period. For starters, the city was overrun with sewage. It was also a place where illness and death constantly lurked, in the air you breathed, in the water you drank. And the worst of it was, people had no idea what was causing cholera or any of the other diseases that periodically broke out in the overcrowded city.

As author Steven Johnson writes:

“To live in such a world was to live with the shadow of death hovering over your shoulder at every moment. To live was to be not dead yet… As a matter of practical reality, the threat of sudden devastation—your entire extended family wiped out in a matter of days—was far more immediate than the terror threats of today.”

One London physician, John Snow, suspected that cholera was transmitted through drinking water, but his theory was sneered at by most of the medical establishment, who believed the disease was “miasmatic,” or carried in the (very stinky) air that arose from London’s overflowing sewers and cesspools.

During one outbreak in August 1854, Snow determined that the vast majority of those who fell ill had drunk water from a particular neighborhood well. Even when he presented this map to city health officials, they clung to the miasma theory, but eventually Snow was able to persuade them he was right. That realization led Londoners to built one of the most extensive sewer systems in the world and essentially eliminate cholera in the city.

In fact, the development of modern sewer systems, according to Johnson, was one of the key factors that allowed cities to develop into places that can sustain huge numbers of people.

This book is loaded with historical detail and Johnson does a good job of placing the 1854 outbreak into a broader historical context. It’s also a definite page-turner. I highly recommend it, especially if you share my taste for books about disease and disaster…

Expectations

Yesterday was an exciting day – I finished TWO books that I have been reading for a while. I’ll start with “People of the Book,” by Geraldine Brooks. I was really looking forward to reading this book because I really enjoyed all of her others. I even bought it in hardcover (though it was pretty cheap on Amazon :) ) I had high expectations, but I have to say they were only partially met.

The book is set in 1996 Sarajevo, where a book conservator named Hanna is asked to examine a very old manuscript, an illustrated haggadah (used during the Passover seder) known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. There is an actual Sarajevo Haggadah that inspired the novel, and its real history is fascinating – Geraldine Brooks also wrote a piece in The New Yorker recently about how it was saved from the Nazis by a Muslim librarian during World War II.

Anyway, back to the novel – it alternates between scenes from Hanna’s life and her study of the book, and flashbacks to critical moments in the book’s history, all the way back to its creation in the late 1400s. I would say that the book only half fulfilled my expectations because the historical chapters were very good, but the chapters that focused on Hanna seemed very unrealistic. They reminded me of “The Da Vinci Code,” but not in a good way (contrived plot twists, lame dialogue).

Both of Brooks’ earlier novels were historical fiction, and one of them won a Pulitzer Prize, so I’m hoping that she will return to that genre in her future work :)

I’ll post something soon about the other book I just read, “The Ghost Map,” by Steven Johnson. Stay tuned…