Peachy Reads

The monarch butterfly of Eastern North America typically migrates thousands of miles in order to overwinter in the mountains of Mexico.  This journey is all the more miraculous since the route is completed by several generations of the insect (so there is no “memory” of the route by any single butterfly).  But this winter, in Kingsolver’s most recent work of fiction, Flight Behavior, due to fluctuating temperatures and other meteorological events tied to global warming, masses of orange monarchs drape the trees on the mountain overlooking the Turnbows’ farmstead in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee.  Their sudden and unexpected appearance is seen as a sign of God by some, and a harbinger of environmental collapse by others. Entomologist Ovid Byron comes to Feathertown, TN, to study the monarchs, and Kingsolver uses his voice to deliver sometimes preachy sermons on how man is destroying his natural surroundings.  (An interesting point that Kingsolver makes ...

If walls could talk… Ashenden is the story of a palladian mansion in the Berkshire countryside. It’s fictional, but based on a real house called Basildon Park (picture below). The book opens with the original building of the house and the delivery of the stones by river from a quarry in Bath, and then revisits it every ten years or so thereafter. It offers mere glimpses or snapshots into the lives of the people who reside in the house and its outbuildings, and the fortunes of the house itself—we see it in hard times, abandoned, reclaimed and done up in Victorian splendor, serving as a convalescent home after World War I, and a POW camp in World War II. This book has touches of Downton Abbey, but the reader doesn’t have much opportunity to become attached to many of the characters, since they rarely make it to the next chapter of the house’s history. I really enjoyed this one. It’s a brief history of England of the last three hundred years. from Wikimedia Commons

Nothing is better than embellishing a story with the retelling.  It’s a device that has characterized storytellers from primeval campfires to drunks on bar stools. Sedaris is the master of embellishment— transforming life’s mundane moments into absolute hilarity with his deadpan and usually more than slightly cynical delivery. He gives a bit of insight into his process in this book—journaling everything and highlighting the unusual or slightly madcap moments that make up only a sliver of his life.  Maybe 95% of his life is dull, but it’s the 5% that is repackaged in essay form that has made me a fan.  Is it fiction or nonfiction?  Who can say, but it is probably a little of one, more of the other.  This book has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, but has some parts that don’t quite make the grade.  Still, I think it’s better than his previous book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk , which I only found mildly entertaining. 

One day Joe, a Native American teenager, helps his father pull saplings that have taken root in the cracks of the foundation of their house. It turns out to be a metaphor for the cracked foundation of their own existence. Mother is late coming home, and their worry sends them out in the car to see if she’s perhaps had a flat tire. They see her driving at a fast clip towards home and further speculate that she’s forgotten that it was Sunday and the grocery was closed. They can never imagine the real reason for her lateness.  Their world is turned topsy-turvy when it transpires that she has been the victim of an unspeakable crime.  Because of the mish-mash of property boundaries that separate tribal land from federal and state land, and the fact that the perpetrator was a white man, bringing the criminal to justice is all the more complicated. Erdrich creates almost a legal thriller with The Round House , but its setting on the reservation makes it all the more interesti...

The Aussies have their vegemite, the Europeans their nutella, but the sandwich spread that unequivocally and perhaps uniquely defines the American palate is peanut butter.  This book tells you all you need to know about peanut butter from its humble origins (no, George Washington Carver was not its inventor) to the consolidation of the triumvirate of national brands: Jiffy, Skippy , and Peter Pan .   Did you know that peanut butter tastes more flavorful when made from Spanish, Valencia, or Virginia peanuts and not the less tasty (but easier to process) florunners ?  A major “improvement” in peanut butter production was eliminating the oil separation which still characterizes natural brands.  Unfortunately for the consumer, the solution to a creamy, more stable spread was adding partially hydrogenated oil, this being the poster child for trans-fats, the nutritional bad boy in recent years.  (The U.S. government calls standard grocery store peanut butter...

Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt , has that folksy quality that harkens back to the gentility of a bygone age.   Maybe it’s growing up in rural Georgia, as she did, that defines her character to such a degree, and comes through so well on the written page. In any case, her musings and her thoughtful prose are always a joy to read. In this book she takes on a topic that resonated with me—saving seeds to plant for next year’s crop.  Why is this so important?  Well, with hybridization and genetically modified crops, farmers (and more and more, home gardeners) no longer are able to keep and replant seeds the following season. I n fact, in the case of farmers, in most instances it’s illegal for them to do so.    Remember that prize tomato that grandpa grew when you were young?  Chances are that variety is not in any seed catalogs any more.    This diminishes plant diversity and makes agriculture beholden...

I heard the author of Going Clear being interviewed on NPR and was captivated.   What I knew about Scientology wasn’t much—its Hollywood adherents including Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, John Travolta; its science fiction writer founder L. Ron Hubbard; and the fact that Scientology seems to be a near constant magnet for controversy.   This book filled in some of the gaps for me, including the foundation of their beliefs: …Teegeeack [Earth] was a dumping ground for thetans, it became known as the Prison Planet, “the planet of ill repute.”  The Galactic Confederacy abandoned the area, although various invaders have appeared throughout the millennia.  But these free-floating thetans remain behind.  They are the souls of people who have been dead for seventy-five million years.  They attached themselves to living people because they no longer have free will.  There can be millions of them clustered inside a single person’s body.  Auditing for Scie...