Animal, vegetable, miracle - Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver and her family moved to their farm in the Appalachians and decided to spend a year only eating local fooods. A lot of it came from their own farm. Kingsolver writes well as usual and chronicles a year of their efforts be locavores. She shares beautiful stories from their gardening adventures and cooking and canning productions. The stories are intertwined with research and data about the food production industry as well as some lovely recipes. Her response to the question why Americans eat so much bad food is "alimentary alienation" derived from Marx' theories of humans' desire to control an entire process of manufacture. Brilliant. She also writes eloquently about vegetarianism having adhered to a vegetarian diet for periods herself. Sometimes she is even funny. "Strangely enough, it's the animals to which we have assigned some rights, while the saintly plants we maim and behead with moral impunity. Who thinks to beg forgiveness while mowing the lawn?" Splendid book. 9

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

This is a book I have been wanting to read for a long time. It's amazing in its detail and use of language. I was transported to dusty hot California instantly. It's a short book that could have been expanded but it's still enjoyable. Two laborers are travelling from job to job as farmhands. George, who smarter, takes care of the dim-witted Lennie. They dream of a place to call their own where they work only for themselves. Their dream is predictably crushed when Lennie gets in trouble again. In the end, George is forced to "send off" Lennie towards that dream... Sad. Good. 8.

Julie & Julia - Julie Powell

365 days. 524 recipes. 1 tiny apartment kitchen. Julie Powell has always adored Julia Child. Around the time she is about to turn 30, Julie is depressed and feels her life is going nowhere. She is a lowly liberal secretary for a government agency populated by Republicans. She decides to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking during one year while blogging about it. Her writing is hilarious. I laughed out loud several times. This is easy and fun reading and by no means any heavy duty literature. I enjoyed it for what it is. I even learned a new word, prolix. Tediously lengthy in speech and writing. Anyway, Julie cooks her way out of depression and mediocrity and into a new career as a writer. "Two years ago I was a twenty-nine-year-old secretary. Now I am a thirty-one-year-old writer. I get paid very well to sit around in my pajamas and type on my ridiculously fancy iMac, unless I'd rather take a nap. Feel free to hate me--I certainly would." A funny and easy 8.

Clara Callan - Richard B. Wright

This book won prizes in Canada and I am not sure why. This was my choice for one of my bookclubs. And I didn't even like it very much. My bookclub seemed to like it however. The premise was interesting. Two sisters from a small town in Canada part ways in 1934. One heads to New York for a career in radio and the other stays behind working as a school teacher. The book follows them over the next couple of years. It sounded interesting enough, but I didn't like how the author--a man--described Clara's feelings around sex and motherhood. Clara is the sister that stays behind. At one point she gets raped and then she fantasizes about that and goes out of her way to find the guy that did it. It is too weird. I just don't like it when men attempt to imagine what a woman might be going through. It becomes very stereotypical and contrived. The book contains a lot of references to literature, radio, and film at the time, which was interesting. 5.