159. Books Bought & Read, August 2017…

My vision was 20/20 this August: 20 bought, 20 read, but it was quality and not just quantity this summer, as you can see from the many bold recommendations in the Books Read list below. But there was a depth and breadth to my literary wanderings this month, both through space and time: from world food recommendations from the lead singer of a Scottish rock band to ancient Greek thoughts on nature; bittersweet Finnish tales of nothing to Victorian English myth; race-wide contemporary African-American struggles in the USA to everyday human struggles in Israel.

Reading is my favourite way to travel when I can’t actually travel.

Food reading abounded as ever, to feed facts and fables for my food tour, and I finally got around to reading local restaurant maven Calvin Trillin, whose wonderfully conversational ramblings on eating his way across the US matched my own perfectly. Further afield, Alex Kapranos, the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, published a regular column on what he ate on world tours, here collected by Penguin and featuring a shout-out for my beloved local Polish doughnuttery, Peter Pan’s in Greenpoint.

Hogarth Press has devised an ingenuous take on a four-centuries old staple: asking some of the best contemporary authors to come up with a modern retelling of Shakespeare tales. I managed to get my hands on advanced copies by two of the best around: Margaret Atwood’s thespian-fest take on The Tempest, and Edward St.Aubyn’s old-age home King Lear, and I enjoyed the hell out of them. The other half-dozen are now on my radar.

Whilst away on ‘vacation’ (holiday, to my former self), at a family wedding in wonderful Oregon, I followed up on a hot tip I received over a year ago from a coworker at the Housing Works. He had described Ted Chiang’s ‘The Story Of YourLife And Others’ as the best book he read all year, and it’s probably not far off mine either.

Short sci-fi stories revolving around maths and science in an updated version of Borges, (the opener about workers on the upper echelons of the Tower of Babel owes more than a tip of the hat to the Argentine genius), cover some of my favourite topics, existential angst and linguistic intrigue. Angels can appear and disappear, wreaking havoc at random, and students can have their minds altered to ignore beauty in the hope of creating a fairer society, in a tale worthy of a Black Mirror episode).

Buy this book, or at least go and see the movies which will inevitably be (and, indeed, already have been) drawn from it.

I finished the month with a deceptively simple novella by Tove Jansson. Having discovered her magical, mythical, ever-so-slightly-creepy Moomins late in life, I am now discovering even later in life than she was more than just these bizarre woodland creatures: she was a writer of subtle social observation, bitter-sweet storytelling and a creator of tales as light but lasting as the paintings which adorn the covers of her adult works. Another highly recommended quick read, with more of her to come next month.

Books Bought, August 2017

Nutshell (Ian McEwan)

Listen To This (Alex Ross)

May We Be Together (A.M.Homes)

Netherland (Joseph O’Neill)

Educating Peter: how anyone can become an (almost) instant wine expert (Nettie Teague)

How To Read Lacan (Slavoj Žižek)

You Shall Know Us By Our Velocity (Dave Eggers)

Dom Casemiro (Machado de Assis)

More Baths, Less Talking (Nick Hornby)

Tombo (W.S.DiPiero)

The End Of Love (Marcus Coral Llorente)

Between The World And Me (Ta-Nehesi Coates)

The Sandman: overture (Neil Gaiman)

McSweeney’s Issue 1 (various)

McSweeney’s Issue 2 (various)

McSweeney’s Issue 3 (various)

How We Eat With Our Eyes And Think With Our Stomachs: learn to see the hidden influences that shape your eating habits (Melanie Mühl & Diana Von Kopp)

Hagseed (Margaret Atwood)

Emma (Jane Austen)

Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)

 

Books Read, August 2017 (highly recommended books are indicated in bold)

The 7 Good Years (Etgar Keret)

Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine (Diane Williams)

Dunbar (Edward St Aubyn)

Break It Down (Lydia Davis)

Nutshell (Ian McEwan)

Stories Of Your Life And Others (Ted Chiang)

How To Read Foucault (Johanna Oksala)

How To Read Lacan (Slavoj Žižek)

Between The World And Me (Ta-Nehesi Coates)

Beast (Paul Kingsnorth)

The Sandman: overture (Neil Gaiman)

Hagseed (Margaret Atwood)

The Essex Serpent (Sarah Perry)

Day Of The Oprichnik (Vladimir Sorokin)

How We Eat With Our Eyes And Think With Our Stomachs: learn to see the hidden influences that shape your eating habits (Melanie Mühl & Diana Von Kopp)

Alice, Let’s Eat: further adventures of a happy eater (Calvin Trillin)

We (Yevgeny Zamyatim)

Fragments (Heraclitus)

Sound Bites: eating on tour with franz ferdinand (Alex Kapranos)

The True Deceiver (Tove Jansson)

 

86. ‘Don’t Eat This Book,’ Morgan Spurlock…

‘Don’t Eat This Book: fast food and the super-sizing of america,‘ Morgan Spurlock

.

Recently, I have noticed my reading habits leaning more towards non-fiction than imaginary worlds and characters: I used to aim for a one real, one not alternating policy, but there is so much fascinating, well-written scientific, philosophical and educational writing out there, I often find myself reaching for those, possibly a sign of growing up and wanting to learn as much as possible about the world around me.

.

It is also possibly an attempt to fill the gaps left by my education: I gave up on science long before mandatory tests at age 16, and was never allowed to study computers, technology or food sciences, making them all topics I naturally seek out in printed form.

.

I have often felt that food and health, subjects which were more or less entirely absent from my schooling, are surely the most important thing you can teach a teenager, and I am now playing catch-up. Devouring (a fitting term) everything I can find by Michael Pollan is just the start of it: recently I chomped my way through the excellent, extended, paper-based version of Morgan Spurlock‘s award-winning movie ‘Supersize Me,’

.

.

(For the full movie, see here).

.

Here are some things I learned from this day’s reading, some of the most important and indeed habit-changing things I feel you should know, too.

.

“…according to the Department of Transportation, there are now, for the first time in history, more cars than drivers in America…”

.

“We eat a tremendous amount of meat in this country [the USA]. The USDA says we eat 1 million animals an hour…”

.

Photo by jelleprins via Flickr

.

“You want to hear something really disgusting? The cattle industry buys millions of dead cats and dogs from animal shelters every year, then feeds them to the cattle who end up in your burger…”

.

.

“For a while, McDonald’s was even working with the giant chemical company Monsanto, former producer of the herbicide Agent Orange, to produce chemically modified spuds that had the pesticides progammed right into them…NewLeafs were actually registered as a pesticide with the EPA.

.

Let me repeat that:

.

NewLeaf potatoes were actually registered as a pesticide with the EPA! And we were eating them!…”

.

Photo by Foodiggity

.

“[Mark] Fenton [former editor of Walking magazine] told me that fewer than half of all Americans get any form of exercise at all. Not even walking…”

.

“…studies have shown that out of a typical gym period, only six minutes are spent being physically active…”

.

“Did you know that in Chinese culture, you don’t pay the doctor when you’re sick? It’s his job to keep you well. If you’re sick, he ain’t doing his job, and he don’t get paid. If he comes around and makes you well again, then you start paying him…”

.

Appendix 3 gave a terrifying list of all of the companies which come under the corporate umbrella of Philip Morris, the cigarette manufacturer, (which nowadays goes by “the vague, innocent-sounding name” of Altria): Maxwell House, Starbucks, Kool Aid, Capri Sun, Taco Bell, Kraft, Oreo, Planters nuts, Toblerone, Nabisco, Jell-O, Shredded Wheat, Daim, Terry’s Chocolate Orange, (Noooo!), Ritz, and literally dozens of others.

Depressed yet? Me too….

.

Finally, a single paragraph which (hopefully) has changed forever the way I choose my snacks:

“…consumers often perceive an item that sounds higher quality as better for them, even if no mention is made of health or nutrition. That’s why you see restaurants breathlessly shilling ‘applewood smoked bacon,’ even though it has the same amount of fat as plain old bacon. Kimberley Egan, a partner at the Center for Culinary Development in San Francisco, which has done menu development for McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s, rattles off words that give ‘quality’ clues: ‘slow-roasted,’ ‘tender,’ ‘grilled,’ spicy,’ ‘fresh-cut’…”

.

Excuse me while I go snack on some fresh-cut, tender bananas…

.

Photo by Rick Harris via wikipedia commons