Book Review: If at Birth You Don't Succeed

I slowed down a bit, but not to fret - I'm still chugging away at my reading goal. 

6/33: If at Birth You Don't Succeed by Zach Anner. 

Two memoirs in a row! I had been intending to alternate fiction and non-fiction, but the fiction book I had was just too dense. 

This was rather better written than the previous, though the story order was slightly disjointed - lots of jumping backward and forward in time. It did make me literally[1] laugh out loud at parts (see: "With Apologies to Gene Shalit"), and moved me at other parts (his experiences with music and family were touching).  

As is often the case, this book could have been about 25% shorter. But take that with a grain of salt; Devo frequently thinks books could stand to be shorter. Or even made into pamphlets. 

If you want to watch, rather than read about, all of Zach's adventures, they're all on the Tube of You.

xo, 
Devo

[1] As Kory Stamper would say, "usage 1" - that is, actually "literally" and not "figuratively."

Book Review: As You Wish

5/33: As You Wish by Cary Elwes. It was alright; mostly I finished it because I, like many people, love The Princess Bride. I learned a few things (that William Goldman is a celebrated screenwriter; that Wesley and Inigo did their own sword fight), and enjoyed reading about how great Andre the Giant was. 

It wasn't well written, despite that "with" helper-author credit. Some of the turns of phrase made me roll my eyes quite dramatically. 

If you like The Princess Bride, give a go; it's not a taxing read. Then go watch the movie again. 

xo, 
Devo

Book Review: Everyone's A Aliebn When Ur A Aliebn Too

4/33: Everyone's A Aliebn When Ur A Aliebn Too by Jomny Sun. It's a graphic novel, which is not something I ever read, but I enjoyed it. It touches on a lot of my interests: dealing with death, linguistics (here's a nifty article about the misspellings), how to feel your feelings. 

These two panels are my favorite, and I'll probably share them whenever someone brings up death anxiety. 

I love this one for its sweetness and subtle inversion of the narrative. Hamlet says, giving voice to a very real anxiety we have about dying and the fear of what might come afterwards, 

Who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscovered country from whose bournNo traveler returns, puzzles the willAnd makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?

But the little aliebn subverts that, saying to the snail, "Maybe the reason they don't come back is because the afterlife is great." [1]

But even the aliebn isn't free from death fear. He's afraid of his friends all dying, and is comforted by the snail. "It's okay," says the snail. "Everything dies. No need to fret."

It's a sweet book. A little bit of existential dread, a little bit of linguistics, a little bit of the Giving Tree. A solid foray into the graphic novel genre for me. 

Currently reading As You Wish by Carey Elwes. 

xo, 
Devo

[1] See also: Season 6 of Buffy, when she returns from the dead...and *spoiler* (though it's over a decade old so you should really get on that) it turns out she was in heaven. 

Book Review: The Housekeeper and the Professor

Y'all, I am killing it. 3/33: The Housekeeper and The Professor by Yoko Ogawa. This short, sweet book was quiet and lovely. I enjoyed learning about math and baseball (not things I know much about). I loved reading about kind people just being, well, kind to each other. A good meditation on memory and what it takes to form good relationships. Recommend.

***

I feel like a kid again, getting whole armloads of books from the library and actually reading them. Well, more or less. I had to give up on Rise of the Rocket Girls - while the subject matter was quite interesting (women in the space program! woo!), it had too much of that names-dates-places stew that I don't like. I'm not really one for biographies or historical novels, and this felt like that; too many random events, not enough narrative. That's personal preference, of course; if you want to learn about rockets and women and math, give it a go.

**

What should I read in my 1k Quest? Leave me a comment with your recommendation and I'll give it a shot. (No promises I'll finish it.)

xo,
Devo

Book Review: Word by Word

2/33: Word by Word by Kory Stamper. What a delight. Highly recommend. 

As a kid who sometimes read the dictionary for fun, who is now an adult linguist, this book checked off so many boxes for me. I loved learning about the process of writing a dictionary; I loved knowing that there are other people out there who care so deeply about style guides as I do; I loved her humor. I loved that even though she was quite obviously invested in the dictionary, and wanted it to be good and right, she didn't take herself or her fellow lexicographers too seriously. 

Here are some quotes: 

"[Old English] looks like drunk, sideways German with some extra letters thrown in for good measure." She's not wrong. 

"Adverbs look like everything else; they are the junk drawer of the English language (like so)." They're the junk drawer of every language, really. 

Describing a conference room: "...a small table, around which four editors can sit comfortably and six in introverted terror..."

xo, 

Devo

Book Review: A Natural History of Dragons

Prepare yourselves for many short book reviews because I have to read 33 more books to reach 1,000 on my read-list and I'm ready to knock that out.

So, here we go. Book 1/33. [1] A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan.

It's pretty much what it says on the tin: A naturalist's look at dragons. Oh sure, there's a little drama and some plot, but I'm thinking that's not really what Brennan wanted to write about. She wanted to write about science and taxonomy and discovery, and she did.

It was...fine. Not really my taste, but the dragon-lore and dragon-science were well put together.

Mostly it made me realize I'm getting tired of female protagonists who don't fit the social mold of the times - instead they are BRAZEN and SMART and PRAGMATIC. Just...give me a girl who likes to knit sometimes, y'know? Credit where it's due though, this protag had a little bit more social understanding, and realized she really couldn't be effective if she eschewed conventions entirely.

The illustrations were pretty.

xo,
Devo

[1] Yes, I know it's a totally random number. Sometimes life doesn't fit neatly into boxes.

The orange books

Here they are, in all their glory: 

The great thing about a home library is that you can arrange it however you want; its sections and shelves can be as idiosyncratic as you. So as you can see, even though this is the orange book section, not all orange books are orange (and some covers-that-are-orange are not, in fact, "orange books"). Orange books are about facts (What If?, Do Fish Drink Water?), economics (Undercover Economist, Freakonomics, When to Rob a Bank, The End of Poverty, An Economist Gets Lunch), and data-driven ways to change your life or surroundings (Barking up the Wrong Tree, Predictably Irrational, Reality is Broken, Nudge, The Design of Everyday Things, The Power of Habit [1]). Somehow this categorization makes sense to me.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is on the outer edge of this category, as it's very orange and full of facts, but more of a "just so" ethnography than truly an "orange book."

(Maybe it's real, maybe it's confirmation bias, but pop economics books seem to get orange or yellow covers, nearly without fail. If you have one that's not orange, please tell me!)

What ways do you organize your shelves? Do you have peculiar arrangements like mine, or are they all nicely alphabetized by author?

xo, 
Devo

[1] The Power of Habit is out on loan, but rest assured, it's yellow and goes in this section. 

Les Mis in a Month: Final week

Finished on Saturday! It took a lot of listening and a little bit of skipping [1], but I made it through!

Am I glad I did it? Yes. Am I glad to be done? Double yes. I think if I ever read something this big again, I'll break it up into chunks: read for a few weeks, break, read some more. Hopefully it would help the reading fatigue. I'm afraid the second half of Les Mis didn't get a fair shake from me, since I was just so tired of reading it by page 700. 

That said, Hugo is dramatic as heck. Sometimes I couldn't help but laugh at Marius, Cosette, Valjean, Eponine - all of them, really. I know their lives were hard, and it's an epic tale told epically, but geez. 

Some thoughts: 
- Name play an important role; the main characters all get at least a few
- The story's really about saving Cosette, isn't it? 
- The sewer tangent was really not as bad as people make it out to be. Granted, I skipped it, but I think it was only 15 or 20 pages, instead of the 50 pages of the Waterloo tangent. 
- Marius is very irritating there at the end, forbidding this gentle, loving man from seeing his daughter. And he's not even man enough to do it directly! No, it's all, "take away a chair here," "don't light a fire" there. Passive-aggressive nonsense. He reminds me of Claudius from Much Ado in a lot of ways - jumping to conclusions, being extra, overwhelmed by love. 

xo, 
Devo

[1] For a regular book, I would have skipped a lot - about a hundred pages or so. When your book is 1400 pages, though, 100 is hardly anything. 

Les Mis in a Month: Week 3

I'm a little late, but here's the Les Mis thoughts for last week.

- Made it past page 1000, which feels like a milestone...can I count this book as like, 4 books on my read-list, seeing as how it's so long? I learned that it's 1900 pages in the original French to which I say: Slow Your Roll, Victor Hugo.
- I'm starting to get a little bored/fatigued. It. Just. Keeps. Going. The plot has drawn away from Valjean and towards Marius & Cosette, who I cared very little about in the musical and continue to care little about in the book. Their love scenes are hilariously dramatic in the book, though, which is a certain kind of entertainment.
- Find myself enjoying the minor characters more in this second half: Gavroche (who knew he was Thenardier's son??), Monsieur Mabeuf (seriously, I love him so much; his having to sell his books just about broke my heart), Marius' grandfather.
- I still have no idea what the revolution is about, why it's happening, or why Les Amis are invested in it. Seriously, I know more about Mabeuf's motivations and feel more strongly for him than for Enjolras.
- Hugo's tangent about argot was both fascinating and ridiculous.
- Still no sewers.

xo,
Devo

Les Mis in a Month: Week 2

I just rounded page 700, which means I'm halfway through and pretty proud of myself. Still haven't hit the infamous sewer section, though. 

Progress/Thoughts
- Gotta love Hugo: At one chapter's end he's all, "Let me tell you about Marius" - and then immediately begins the next chapter like, "So this Monsieur Gillenormand..."
- Names for the main [1] character, so far: 1) Jean Valjean; 2) Prisoner 24601; 3) Father/Monsieur Madeleine; 4) Monsieur le Maire; 5) Prisoner 9430; 6) Ultimus Fauchelevent; 7) Monsieur Leblanc
- Hugo is a fan of physiognomy 
- I care a lot less about this second half of the book, at least so far. 

xo, 
Devo

[1] YMMV on who's the main character, Hugo sure does

Book challenge: Les Mis in a Month

I'm doing it. The unabridged brick and me, we're taking a journey together this month. If you want to join me, you have to read 50 pages a day to finish (so, a few more now to catch up). Despite being up to approximately page 275, which for most other books would be almost near the end - or at least halfway - 275 is barely a drop in this 1400-plus page bucket.

I'm reading it on paper and listening to the audiobook, in combo. Trying to set myself up to succeed, y'know. I listen to it when I take walks and then read whatever's left at the end of the day. Though I'm not a huge audiobook fan (nor am I a fan of this narrator), it's been helpful for Les Mis: not only can I listen while doing other things, the emotion of the narrator adds to the story. While Hugo is a big fan of description and repetition, he's not so much on description-of-dialog. Is the character sarcastic? dramatic? sincere? Because the book is from a very different time, and I've not studied this period of literature, I find it difficult to successfully interpret the emotional valence.

I'll give you weekly updates of my progress and thoughts, bullet-style:

- I'm slightly behind (need to read ~20 pages from yesterday, plus today's pages), but am mostly on track.
- The saintly bishop is my favorite so far.
- Valjean's waffling about whether or not to turn himself in is super anxiety-provoking. I know that feel, bro.
- The musical is sad; this is sadder (probably due to that Hugo-ian penchant for repetition).
- Though, I'm surprised at how close (at least so far) the musical is faithful to the book.
- *run into a dream sequence* Not even for you Hugo; I'm skipping that nonsense.
- The chapters are short, so you get a nice steady sense of progress.
- Themes so far: the beast within; honor (external) vs. honesty (internal); The Law and The Religion
- Those Thenardiers are truly awful, aren't they?

xo,
Devo

Book review: Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The middle of this book is what most interested me; the other parts I found dull. In case you want to transgressively read as I did, here's the breakdown:

- Prelude: Skip
- Ch. 1: Skim (but don't entirely skip)
- Ch. 2: Read and try to understand. It's important foundational knowledge.
- Ch. 3-5: Yes, good, read the whole thing.
- Ch. 6: Meh, it's okay. Very speculative, so feel free to skim or skip the more boring sections.
- Ch. 7-8: A little repetitive, but asks some good questions.
- Epilogue: Skip

I like books that encourage me to ponder big questions and tackle big fears. What happens when we die? What is the nature of belief? And now this one: What does it mean to be human during the robot apocalypse? What scares you about the AI revolution?  

What frightens me is what this author and many others seem pretty excited about: possible immortality and endless material wealth. I want to be more than just a consumer in the "Digital Athens" of the future. If (when) machines and algorithms take over all our jobs, I will be reduced to just a consumer of goods and services, and never be a maker or a contributor - and that sounds terrible. 

In my more hopeful moments, I speculate that humans will end up in the robot world like pets are in our world: living fulfilling lives, without understanding what is going on in the wider sphere. What does a dog care about linguistics and the large hadron collider? How could he? But a beloved dog has his needs taken care of, is lovingly interacted with, taken on walks, given stimulation appropriate to his understanding. I imagine that's what "being human in the age of AI" will be like - we won't understand what the robots are doing or why they're doing it, but it won't matter because we'll have fulfilling human lives still. 

During more hopeful moments, I think that. During less hopeful moments, I figure we'll either be exterminated or kept in a zoo, bored out of our minds and longing for freedom. But you can read this book and think through the scenarios for yourself - what frightens you?

Despite all that, what I love about Tegmark's book is its optimism. I may have misgivings and fears, but Tegmark is ready for the AI singularity and joyful about what it could bring to the universe. He writes cogently about the pitfalls and possible apocalypse(s), but doesn't dwell there. He's convinced that with planning and hard work, humanity can make sure it's a "good" AI that succeeds us as the smartest thing around. 

And Tegmark really wants a successor. He wants something out there to appreciate the universe, because, as he writes, "Galaxies are beautiful only because we see and subjectively experience them." His fear, it seems, is that humans will self-destruct or fail to create conscious AI and that there will be nothing and no one left to see and therefore create beauty out of the cold dark of space. 

This idea of beauty existing only when seen is one of several poetic ideas in Life 3.0. I'm also taken by the notion of a galaxy-level AI who thinks one thought every 10,000 years. It reminds me of Pratchett's Great A'Tuin, the world turtle. Its goals are known only to itself, and it moves at slow pace (it's a turtle, after all) through the universe - but what mysteries of consciousness it holds we can only imagine. 

It all comes back to Discworld in the end, really. 

xo, 
Devo

Book review: A Man Called Ove

"We can busy ourselves with living or with dying, Ove."

If you want a one sentence summary of A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, there it is. Over the course of the book, he does just that - first he busies himself with dying (multiple suicide attempts, which must be aborted in order to help a neighbor), and then gradually, with living (becoming Granddad to the neighbor kids).

The blurbs my copy is saddled with, however, might lead you to expect something different. Certainly not suicide attempts and borderline OCD, wrapped in dark humor though they be. "Hysterically funny," says Kirkus Reviews. "A funny crowd-pleaser that serves up laughs to accompany a thoughtful reflection on loss and love," says Publishers Weekly. Me and the critics must have been reading different books, because I got the exact opposite. There are some laughs, sure - even the saddest times need not and indeed are not unremittingly grim and terrible - but really the book is a reflection on loss and love. The laughs are secondary.

Grief and the dealing therewith is the biggest theme. Backman writes, "[T]he greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone." That's at least Ove's greatest fear; or, if not fear, then the difficulty he must face throughout the book. How does one carry on when one's love is gone? How do you make sense of and navigate the world when the person who was your world is dead?

You do it by living, the book says. Living in the best (or only) way you know how. For Ove, living is in the doing and the fighting. Fighting for what's right, fighting for the rules (Ove is Lawful something alignment, that's for darn sure), fighting sometimes just for the sake of fighting so that you can feel alive. He reminds me of Granny Weatherwax, who Pratchett described thusly: "Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge."

Ove, too, is angry. Angry at the men in white shirts for stymying him at every turn, angry at the Youths for not buying sensible cars, angry at God for letting his wife die, angry at people who drive on the grass when the sign clearly says not to. He's angry at being made to retire, at being made redundant in his old age. He's angry at the world for changing, and not appreciating his contributions. But that anger? That fight? It's what eventually connects him to a full life. Somebody has to help; somebody has to keep the white shirts from taking away his Alzheimer-stricken friend. And that someone is Ove, brimming with enough vigor and fight to shout down a whole gaggle of bureacrats and a whole truckful of skinheads.

xo, 

Devo

I am overwhelmed by the sheer number of reviews I could theoretically write, part III

The book *reading* goal has been going along swimmingly; the *writing* goal? Not so much. So here we have another installment of  Overwhelmed by Reviews. Let's get to it. 

1. Women Food and God by Geneen Roth.
I wanted to like this more than I did. I picked up a lot of good nuggets, to be sure, but overall, it was lacking. It had way more "women and food" and way less "God" than I was expecting - which, while not a bad thing, was kind of not the point. 

What I found most compelling was this notion: "When we realize that the stories we are haunted by are simply that - stories - we can be with what we actually feel directly, now, in our bodies." I live a lot in my head; I think many of us do, in the modern industrialized world. Our thoughts supersede our lived, bodily experience, and that can sometimes twist us all around. By learning to come back to our bodies in the present moment - rather than relying on the stories our brains tell us about how we felt about a similar situation in the past - we can ground our feelings and better understand them. 

2. The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean.
Another one I expected to enjoy a lot more than I did. Orchids? Some of my favorite flowers! Journalistic investigations? One of my favorite genres! Eccentric characters? Some of my favorite people! But it just didn't coalesce for me. It got bogged down in places by names and historical details (and you know how I feel about that), and didn't really ever seem to reflect on the wider ramifications or teachings that roaming the Fakahatchee swamp with an orchid thief might teach. 

But she was right about one thing, for sure: "The marvelous plant world. We are but visitors in it."

3. Irena's Children by Tilar Mazzeo.
This one was a surprise in the opposite direction: I loved it, against all odds that I wouldn't. One of my main reading rules is Do Not Read Things Involving Nazis. My reasons are two-fold: If well-written, I'll be extremely depressed and anxious; if poorly written, it's an annoying Heightens The Drama plot device. 

BUT. Irena's Children was as hopeful as it was distressing, as gripping as it was informative. It tells the tale of Irena Sendler, who herself was instrumental in saving many Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. More than that, though, it tells the story of the Polish Resistance, of the ordinary men and women who did extraordinary things in the face of terrifying danger and depravity. This line especially struck me: "[T]he draconian consequences [being shot for aiding a Jew] also meant, as Irena could not help but observe, that one might as well do more than just smuggle in vaccines. You could only die once."

The author was at pains to point out the human failings of Irena and her compatriots, not wishing to paint a superhuman picture of them and their accomplishments. This was well done, as it kept them real and understandable - people that can be admired and emulated. 

4. The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery.
What a delightful book - this was what I was expecting out of #2. The author described the world of the octopus in magical, informative ways. She also talked about the nature of intelligence and consciousness, the excitement at discovering hitherto unknown things, and shared a love for something that personally, I will probably never do - diving. Montgomery sums it up well with just six words: "There's nothing as peculiar as an octopus."

5. Jesus the Christ by James E. Talmadge.
The accomplishment I'm most proud of from last month is reading this 800 page behemoth. Small print, densely-set pages at that. While I didn't find every bit compelling (I really couldn't care less where exactly in the Middle East Christ's life took place, nor the debates surrounding it), there was a lot of interesting stuff packed in. I especially enjoyed the cultural and historical notes about the Jewish culture of the time. 

6. Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward. 
This was a sad memoir about a woman's experience with death in her Black community. She writes concisely about grief and loss, about poverty and powerlessness, about cycles of pain and degradation. 

***
Partially completed: 
1. On Edge by Andrea Petersen. A memoir of, as well as scientific look at, anxiety. It didn't really speak to my experience, and I found it rather boring. 

***
xo, 
Devo

Book-a-week challenge: An update

I did it! Read an entire, real-life book every week in August. Here are some thoughts about that: 

I was worried that by setting such rigid goals, it would become a chore. Sort of like when you start getting paid for something, it becomes more like work and less like fun, no matter how much you originally enjoyed it. Thankfully, though, that didn't happen. The goals gave me structure and small successes, but didn't make the reading feel like too much of a chore. 

I read a bonus book - fiction, even: The Red Tent. Someday I'll write a review. 

While I doubt I'll ever get back to my elementary-school-days reading level (adult books are denser, adult lives are busier) it was awesome to connect with my somewhat ignored Reading Self. I didn't get the name Devo for nothing, after all. In the super-abundance of entertainment and information that is the modern age, I had forgotten what a joy it is to sit down and read a long-form book: to collect quotes, think deep thoughts, and be undistracted by a deluge of opinions from the internet. 

I liked this experience so well, I'm doing it again (with an extra goal) in September. Here are some thoughts on that: 

The books I'll be reading and blogging about this month are
1.  The Orchid Thief 
2. Irena's Children
3. Reviving Ophelia
4. ??? Several options here, triangulating friends' recommendations with what's available at the library. 

(Reading order may change.)

The bonus goal is to read the nearly 800 page Jesus the Christ this month, in addition to the weekly books. It's one I've been meaning to read - started it, even - but haven't been disciplined enough to get through. So with newfound reading energy and a success high from last month, I'm going to give it a go in September. 

Oh, and I'll probably beta read a Phony book or two, but those are a little more sporadic and unpredictable. 

Do you have a reading goal for September? If so, please share!

xo, 
Devo

Book review: Haldol and Hyacinths

As part of my book-a-week project, I've been keeping one-line reviews of the books in a notebook. For Melody Moezzi's Haldol and Hyacinths, it says, "Could have been more cohesive, but an interesting look at psychosis." And that's pretty much the entirety of my thoughts.

Jk. I'll give you some more words.

This memoir touches on a lot of things: anorexia, law school, religious devotion, Obama's election, care-givers, cultural identity, terrorism, family. I would have loved a longer memoir and more time devoted to (at least some) of these topics [1]. These and more were tantalizingly glimpsed and touched on, but I was left wanting more meditation on these facets of her life. Her Islamic faith in relation to her mental disorder, that would have riveted me. "...I learned that God cannot be found, only sought. ...I learned how such seeking trains us to love without restraint."

The focus was (reasonably) trained on her: her life, her thoughts in the psych ward, her hypomanic experience in Montana. Of course, it is her memoir and Moezzi can tell it however she pleases. But I would have liked more about her family's and husband's experiences coming to terms with a loved one having a (pretty severe) mental illness.

xo,
Devo

[1] Because of my interests, I'd prefer more on religion, care-gives, and family.

Book review: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Three for three so far on choosing books - I've liked them all.  An un-vetted, saw-it-on-the-shelf-and-grabbed-it one is up next for the end of the month, so wish me luck.

***
I'm a little late to the party (like, I remember my mom reading this book when I was 8 or so [1]) but John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was very good. It's interesting; it's weird. What more do you want out of a narrative non-fiction read?

There's a little something for everybody here: murder mystery--religious rites--high society rituals--public scandal--drag queens--lawyers--sports devotion--the South, writ large. I can't really think of a downside, other than it's a little dated, in terms of language and representation.

But here's the quote you need. It's the entire essence of the book:

She could hardly exclaim, "Isn't it wonderful!" because a plot involving sodomy, murder, and theft could in no way be described as wonderful. There was nothing in those horrid little stories that was even slightly discussable at a polite luncheon party.

xo,
Devo

[1] I definitely thought it was a spooky book, based on its title and cover. Spoiler: It's not.

Book review: When Breath Becomes Air

The second August book-of-the-week was When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. It was so good (and I was so free) that I finished it Wednesday. It was a moving and bittersweet look at what makes life worth living in the face of imminent death. I cried at the end.

Kalanithi meditates on many things: dying, living, medicine, literature, family, cancer.

Regarding medical school, he writes, "You would think that the first time you cut up a dead person, you'd feel a bit funny about it. Strangely, though, everything feels normal." This is exactly the content I signed up for - astute, somewhat jarring, insider thoughts on a process I never intend to experience. There is no way I'm going to be a surgeon or coroner, and thus a vanishingly small likelihood that I'll ever cut into somebody (dead or alive). But I'm infinitely curious, and interested in what makes people go, biologically as well as psychologically. When Breath Becomes Air is a good window into a mysterious world.

There was, of course, a lot about death: presenting it as a doctor, accepting it as a patient, rejecting it as a young person, trying to understand. He writes, "The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live." Like many others, Kalanithi comes to realize that we're all dying, just some faster than others. And that's okay. The trick is to live life while you've got it to live, or, "knowing that even if I'm dying, until I actually die, I am still living."

xo,
Devo

Book review: In Defense of Food

The first August book-of-the-week was In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan. I had a certain visceral, anti-elitist reaction to it, but overall a good book worth reading. 

Or, you could just read the 7 word manifesto prominently printed on the cover and call it a day: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Still here? Then let's do quotes.

"If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication that it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat." As he points out later on, for something to have a claim it has to have a package, and packaged food is generally less good for you. I do appreciate that he breaks down why industrialized, packaged food is not healthy - I've heard all my life that processed food is bad, but never really understood why. It seemed like a lot of bougie nonsense, just another excuse to sell me overpriced vegetables and and ridiculous health smoothies. 

But I understand a little bit better now, and can see how processed food is food made easy - and like so many things in life, easier is not always good. In fact, slower and harder is often better for us in the long run than faster and easier: meaningful work is better than endless leisure, exercise is better than bingeing Netflix, learning to fail is better than always succeeding.

"...Culture, which at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother." Parts of this approach I agree with: knowing what to eat and how to eat it (as passed down from mother to child) is how we survived, not a fad. Don't give up on the traditional ways/foodstuffs of eating in order to stay on trend. On the other hand, when he advocates for eating "like your great grandmother," I have to question. Do you know what my Southern forbearers were eating? Because it sure wasn't vegetables - it was bread and meat soaked in lard. 

"But who knows what else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?" I love this line. It's a good summation of his point that food is more than the sum of its parts, and we don't really know what nutrients or configuration thereof makes us go. So just eat foods, as straight from the dirt as you can get them (or at least, combined with other foods that are also straight from the dirt). 

And finally, the favorite quote of my memento-mori soul: "Don't eat anything incapable of rotting." 

xo, 
Devo

Book-A-Week Challenge: An Intro

If we're ever going to have that 1,000 books party, I gotta get to reading. The count is 939 right now [1]. Soon to be 943.

I read, sure. Articles, scriptures, dumb internet lists, fan meta...but my actual book consumption has decreased drastically. And I want to change that. And when better to do it than before we leave the major metropolitan we currently reside in, and I have access to their massive library.

So here they are, the books for August. If it goes well, I'll do it again in September.

1. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
2. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
3. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
4. Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life by Melody Moezzi

Yes, they're all non-fiction. I'm done fighting my desires. The heart wants what it wants and what my heart wants is snappy non-fiction. Reviews to come as I finish them, no later than the Sunday of the week. (I hope.)

#4 is a bit of a wild card - the others have been on my list for a while, but Haldol and Hyacinths caught my eye at the library with its lovely alliterating title and (less lovely) subject matter. Here's hoping.

***

Bonus book is a re-read of Night Watch by Terry Pratchett.

xo,
Devo

[1] More, if you count all of Phony's books I've beta-read.