Peachy Reads

I don’t usually get my book recommendations from Parade magazine, but this time I did.  And a good recommendation it was, too!  Josh Hanagarne is a father, a Mormon, a librarian, and a physical fitness enthusiast.  Oh, and he has a severe form of Tourette’s.  I basically downloaded this book because of the library angle ( it has an absolutely hilarious opening ) ), but was taken in by the other angles, as the author tries to come to terms with all the disparate, clashing, facets of his personality.  He finds that physical training is one way that he can control his Tourette’s, and even tries out Highland games as an extreme way to tame his muscle tics and uncontrollable impulses.   This is an interesting, frequently humorous memoir, mostly about Tourettes, but a lot about the positive influence of family in his struggles.  It’s a little off-beat, but ultimately rewarding.  You really don't need to be a librarian to enjoy this one. ...

Winston Churchill once famously said of Russia, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”  The same might be said of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Sweet Tooth , set in 1972 during the Cold War, when the UK was trying to define a new role in a postcolonial world in which the US and the Soviet Union were the key players, and there was money to be spent on culture wars. Muses, literary prizes, and bookstore readings aren’t usually the stuff of spy thrillers, and a novel that starts so promisingly as Serena is drafted as a secret agent, very quickly becomes something quite different.   Sweet Tooth definitely had its moments, and McEwan’s style is always a treat, but as a novel it just didn’t work for me.  The premise was credible enough I suppose, but just not that compelling in the end.  And then the whole unreliable narrator thing—didn’t McEwan already try that with Atonement ?  I used to so look forward to anything ne...

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...