Zorro

This is the first time I have posted! I thought that I should pick up the slack since everyone else seems to be working or something. I start school next week so then my fun reading time will go away, but in the meantime I finished a book (a rarity these days). This book was a recommendation from Cali and it was a fun and easy read. I enjoy adventure books and so if you do as well I think you will enjoy this one. It's got sword fighting, pirates, gypsies, catholics, and of course a love story (but not what I expected). There is also some historical background presented and it was interesting to read this author's tale of how Zorro came to be. Hope you all are doing well.

Jeremy

Peter and the Starcatchers

For those of you who don't know, just walking into a bookstore allows you one guilt-free book purchase. Just one. All the rest you buy are very bad, but one is completely acceptable. Anyway, Mom visited and can I help it if she needed to go to Borders? I finally was able to get Peter and the Starcatchers, which I have been looking at for a while. It was co-authored by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, so it sounded awesome. Well, it lived up to the hype. It is a good read.

Actually, I think that a prequel to Peter Pan was a long time coming. There are a lot of holes in the Peter story that I have always been curious about. How did Peter end up the way he is? Why can he talk to mermaids? What really did happen with Hook's hand? Where did tinkerbell come from? Somebody else must have been curious also. The style is also pretty funny, very similar to Dave Barry's "Big Trouble".

Here's an excerpt from the chapter when you meet Black Stache--or you know him better as Captain Hook:

"The crew of the Sea Devil understood: If Black Stache laughed, you laughed. If he snarled, you snarled. If he breathed in your direction, you ran for cover. "Ratbreath," his sailors called him behind his back. It was said that he liked to eat his vermin raw with a touch of sea salt."

The Sex Lives of Cannibals

I tore through this book. I really like the author and I will try to get his next book, "Getting Stoned with Savages." If you ever had an inclination to chuck it all and move to a very small island in the South Pacific, this is the book for you!

He also has ingenious titles to his chapters, such as:
"Chapter 2: In which the Author reveals the Fruit of his Research into the Strange Island Nation he has declared his new Home (which leaves much unknown), compensates for his Ignorance with his Lively Imagination (which is inadequate, very much so), and Packs (inappropriately)."

Therein lies:

"To picture Kiribati, imagine that the continental U.S. were to conveniently disappear leaving only Baltimore and a vast swath of very blue ocean in its place. Now chop up Baltimore into thirty-three pieces, place a neighborhood where Maine used to be, another where California once was, and so un until you have thirty-three pieces of Baltimore dispersed in such a way so as
to ensure that 32/33 of Baltimorians will never attend an Orioles game again. Now take away electricity, running water, toilets, television, restaurants, buildings, and airplanes (except for two very old prop planes, tended by people who have no word for "maintenance"). Replace with
thatch. Flatten all land into a uniform two fee above sea level. Toy with islands by melting polar ice caps. Add palm trees. Sprinkle with hepatitis A, B, and C. Stir in dengue fever and intestinal
parasites. Take away doctors. Isolate and bake at a constant temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The result is the Republic of Kiribati."

Enjoy!

d

Julie & Julia

How appropriate of me to write a blog entry about a book, based on a blog.

From http://www.twbookmark.com/: "Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that's going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year."

So some parts of this are really good, some parts are really funny, some parts made my stomach hurt (September 11 in NYC). It is, like a blog, kind of spotty and not always consistent in tone. Also, sometimes she is a little too forthcoming in her personal life. Sometimes a reader would like a little censorship. That, too, is like a blog - it's the first draft of the first thought in your head.

Over all, this is a book I have been circling for a while and I finally pulled it of the shelf at the library. I enjoyed it and recommend it for a quick and easy read.

d

Oliver Sacks

Ok, I think everyone already read this book. But, I just finished "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and it's really good. It can get a little 'sciency', but they are clinical tales, so you should know what you are getting yourself into.

Oliver Sacks also wrote the "Oaxaca Journal"

In the mean time, I also read some terribly boring books on food that I won't burden you with at this time. Tonight I'm going to the lib to get a book on cd of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time."

Enjoy your weekend!

d

Well...

Too tired to read. Real jobs are hard. If I get a minute I read "The First Days of School" by Harry Wong. Really good book if you are a brand new teacher. No takers? Didn't think so. Weekend is here and I plan to spend a good deal of tomorrow reading. So more coming. If you want to know what I'm doing instead of reading you can check out my other blog.

Catching Up

I have not been reading enough lately and have vowed to give my library card a good workout this fall. To start, I checked out Mr. Vertigo, Lamb (By Christopher Moore), Book Lust and Oaxaca Journal.
Mr. Vertigo was a wild read. I found it very entertaining - it is definitely one of the most creative books I've read lately. I loved how the kid talks in this street-wise "Hey, Mista, what's the big idea?" kind of way. I really, really liked Lamb! It was a cool spin on the old, old story, and Moore has a great sense of humor. I checked out Oaxaca Journal b/c Della said she read it on vacation, and I really like other Oliver Sacks books, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Awakenings. I will read that next.
And as for Book Lust, well, frankly Cali, if you checked out that book you would have no need for this blog!!! I have about 4 pages of a notebook filled with a 'to-read' list from it. Better get going... ;-)

Hoot

I haven't read anything else by Carl Hiaasen, but this seems very different from his other books. I did see that he has written another young adult book now, and I think Hoot has a movie. Anyway, this was a very fast read and was pretty entertaining. A great young adult novel where kids make a difference. I thought they way they went about it was sometimes questionable. After all, usually I don't see vandalism and violence getting results, but it has a happy ending. I guess if it was all peaceful protest it would be sort of a preachy book. Anyway, it's recommended if you like new kid hero stories.

The Time Traveler's Wife

This was one of Pam's book group books that looked good (so many of them do) so I grabbed it at the library. It's a little sci-fi of course...with the time travel element. But it is the kind of sci-fi that is easy to get into and you don't have to learn a whole new language to read it (those of you who have read Dune know what I'm talking about). It's mostly a character driven plot and I love the way the author sort of lets you look at their lives big picture instead of in a linear birth to death sort of way. It very circular and if I were the author I would have a hard time deciding where to start. Here's an excerpt of the main character describing his unusual problem to a friend who's not a friend yet:

"I am a time traveler. At the moment I am thirty-six years old. This afternoon was May 9, 2000. It was a Tuesday. I was at work, I had just finished a Show and tell for a bunch of Caxton Club members and I had gone back to the stacks to reshelve the books when I suddenly found myself on School Street, in 1991. I had the usual problem of getting something to wear. I hid under somebody's porch for a while. I was cold, and nobody was coming along, and finally this young guy, dressed--well, you saw how I was dressed. I mugged him, took his cash and everything he was wearing except his underwear...."
"I find myself in situations like that all the time. No pun intended. There's something wrong with me. I get dislocated in time, for no reason. I can't control it, I never know when it's going to happen, or where and when I'll end up. So in order to cope, I pick locks, shoplift, pick pockets, mug people, panhandle, break and enter, steal cars lie, fold, spindle, and mutilate. You name it, I've done it."

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Oh, my, goodness. I'm only 2/3rds of the way through this book and I had to write about it. This is the best book I've read this year.

It's non-fiction and about food production, which may not sound like the most exciting things to some of you, but this guy is great. He's a professor of Journalism at Berkeley and has written about food before (The Botany of Desire).

This is what the publisher says about the book (I can't seem to find an excerpt on line):

"Pollan has divided The Omnivore's Dilemma into three parts, one for each of the food chains that sustain us: industrialized food, alternative or "organic" food, and food people obtain by dint of their own hunting, gathering, or gardening. Pollan follows each food chain literally from the ground up to the table, emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the species we depend on. He concludes each section by sitting down to a meal at McDonald's, at home with his family sharing a dinner from Whole Foods, and in a revolutionary "beyond organic" farm in Virginia. For each meal he traces the provenance of everything consumed, revealing the hidden components we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods reflects our environmental and biological inheritance."

The great thing about him is that he does not condemn the farmer or the consumer. Yet, he is reminding us to consider what we are eating and where we are shopping and what that implies. Also, he does not admonish the reader for her bad eating habits after he witnesses the industrialized food chain. Pollan does want the reader to acknowledge that the price you pay for your hamburger at the grocery store is more than just the amount of money you hand over.

For those of you who read My Year of Meats or Fast Food Nation (also recommended) this is better. I can't say enough good things about this book, and you should all run out and get it from your library right away. I think I may buy it.

d