Peachy Reads

Lobster is rather creepy when you think of it. Looks like a giant insect... a scorpion in fact. It just tastes so darn good that people are willing to put up with its off-putting looks, its dangerous claws (Atlantic lobsters, that is), and the struggle it takes first to cook it (if you are so daring) and then prise the meat from its shell. This book chronicles the history of lobster and how it earned a revered place on our table. Lobster are pictured in ancient Roman mosaics and seemed enjoy a place in their feasts, but like many things that the Romans promoted and perfected, lobster fell into obscurity until the 1800s. In Colonial times it was considered a poor man’s replacement for meat and saw the early coastal setters through lean times. “Coastal” is a key word here, since lobster’s popularity only really took off in modern times when refrigeration and transportation made it possible to get it to restaurant tables more than a stone’s throw from the ocean. Lobsters can live from 50...

If Garrison Keillor had grown up in Botswana instead of Minnesota, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series might be the result. The tone is not so different from his folksy homespun style about the frequent whimsy of daily life, innocent misunderstandings, human foibles, and other things of seemingly little consequence. At the same time it is these apparently inconsequential things that make up the bulk of our own daily existence and can take on huge significance and tell us a lot about human nature and ourselves. Of course, there is a detective case here—someone is grievously injuring a client’s cattle and it is Detective Ramotswe’s task to find out who the perpetrator is. The main focus of the novel, however, seems to be Mma Ramotswe's quest to reacquire her old and beloved van, her help in getting the apprentice Charlie out of a ticklish situation, and Mma Makutsi's misadventures with shoes, and her wedding to Phuti Raduphuti of course!

This is a book I had been intending to read for about ten years—and I only now got to checking it off my list. My wife had borrowed the paperback from the library and I read it after she was done. It was nice to have the shared experience of a book read in common. Hadn’t done that for a long time. One of the pleasures of more unscheduled time in the summer. Bel Canto is a wonderfully crafted story about people and relationships. It starts out like an episode from the television series 24 when terrorists storm a posh birthday party at a government mansion somewhere in an unnamed South American country. The hostages are a disparate group of international businessmen and diplomats, many of whom do not share a common language. The sole female hostage is Roxane Coss, an internationally acclaimed soprano opera singer who was the evening’s entertainment. In lieu of a common language, it is music that serves as the lingua franca (and soothes the savage beast). As the days turn into weeks and...

Jonathan Franzen seems to have a knack to chronicling America’s dysfunctional families. The Corrections was certainly memorable in that regard and in Freedom he charts the ups and downs of the decades-long relationship of Patty and Walter Berglund from St. Paul, Minnesota. The characters in Freedom offer an antidote to the St. Paul denizens of Garrison Keillor’s Minnesota ideal, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”. In Franzen’s Freedom individuals are flawed and far from perfect, and in spite of this they are very relatable and very human—they’re people you know, probably people you have Thanksgiving with (probably people you'd argue with at the Thanksgiving table). The subplot (beyond the chronicle of the Berglunds' long-suffering relationship) is a misguided attempt to purportedly create a habitat for an endangered bird, while flattening a mountaintop to do it. I thought during the course of reading this t...

Guernsey, a Channel Island located closer to France than England, was occupied by Nazis during WWII, the only English territory to suffer German occupation. The novel records the stories surrounding a somewhat quirky group of islanders who created a literary society as a pretense to give them an alibi for breaking the occupation-imposed curfew. The literary society takes on a life of its own, all the more so when a London-based journalist joins their circle, first from afar and then in person, and is smitten with island life. The book is told almost entirely through letters, a device which might seem clever at first, but is stretched thin and I thought it grew tiresome in some parts. Apparently multiple daily postal deliveries did make it possible to maintain back-and-forth communication almost as if it were as instantaneous as email, even in 1946, at least in London and larger cities. But sometimes it isn’t successful in propelling the plot forward. I can see why this novel had such ...