Mishmash

I've been reading a lot, due to a nice vacation in Mexico and my odd schedule.

The recent highlights:





Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll. I looked like a weirdo reading this at the beach in Mexico, but I didn't care. This is what all nonfiction should be like: engaging, full of incredible facts, suspenseful. I am still thinking about it a month later, and seeing connections to it everywhere. I only knew a bit about the whole Russia/Afghanistan/US connection, but thanks to this book, I know much more and actually feel like I understand it. The roots of Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden's madness are also detailed here. I highly, highly recommend this one. Other 9/11 related books that I think are worth reading include Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies and the 9/11 Commission Report. Um, in case you were saying "I wonder what else Laura would recommend?"





Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee. I've now read all of his novels (the others are A Gesture Life and Aloft and if forced to pick a favorite I think I'd pick Aloft) and I am such a fan of this author. His characters are always compelling--they are usually Korean-Americans who are struggling to assimilate. I think he writes great fiction.






Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. Full disclosure: I avoided this one for a long time because I was turned off by the title, and the book cover (yes, I know I should know better than to judge a book by its cover..) Plus all of the reviews I read were glowing but I could never get a sense of what the book was actually about. One day it beckoned to me from the New Books shelf at the library and I am so glad that I put aside my first impressions. I really enjoyed this book. It had a great main character, 16 year old Blue Van Meer, and there were twists and turns that I didn't expect.




The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. In January 2002, Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan. He faces not only brutal weather and terrain, but often dangerous situations. Stewart is a historian, and his knowledge of the country's past, along with his ability to speak the language (albeit clumsily at times), allows him to make his way across the land. It is a breathtaking book. I learned so much about Afghanistan's past and present, and I was amazed at Stewart's bravery and grace.

Hi, Internet. I've been meaning to do this for a long time, and kept chickening out, but I'm giving it a shot now. Books! Let's talk about them!

The premise of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is both breathtakingly daring and simple: Barbara Kingsolver and her family decided that for one year, they would eat only food that they grew themselves, or bought from local farmers. They moved from Arizona to rural Virginia, where they planted a huge garden and began to raise chickens and turkeys.

Farming and rural life are very close to my heart. I lived on a farm until I was ten years old. My mother's side of the family still owns a farm that an ancestor received as payment for being a soldier in the War of 1812. I am part of the first generation on my father's side of the family to not be farmers. I remember being a little kid, riding in the tractor on my Grandpa Scott's lap, looking out the window, thinking that the fields stretched on forever. We rode along on the hayrack while my dad and uncle bailed hay-- I have always loved how bales of hay look dotting a pasture. I gathered still warm eggs from underneath hens, and got my hand away before a beak pecked me. My brothers and I husked thousands of ears of sweet corn sitting on our old picnic table. My dad loved to have big gardens, and I delighted in following behind him, dropping seeds into the furrow he'd created.

I grew up eating food that was grown on our farm or nearby. That reality now seems so far removed from my life, and the world we live in.

Kingsolver's tone is nearly pitch perfect. She never condescends, but it is apparent that her knowledge is vast, and her passion for the topic shines through. The facts she spills out are harrowing. She is aghast that we have become so disengaged from our food and food sources. She hates that organic food is often looked down upon as something that only rich people eat or can afford.

I think this is my favorite passage in the book. It's a bit lengthy, but I couldn't bear to abbreviate it:

"Most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics: when various fruits and vegetables come into season, which ones keep through the winter, how to preserve the others. On what day autumn's first frost will likely fall on their county, and when to expect the last one in the spring. Which crops can be planted before the last frost, and which must wait. Which grains are autumn-planted. What an asparagus patch looks like in August. Most importantly: what animals and vegetables thrive in one's immediate region and how to live well on those, with little else thrown into the mix beyond a bag of flour, a pinch of salt, and a handful of coffee. Few people of my generation, and approximately none of our children, could answer any of those questions, let alone all. This knowledge has vanished from our culture.

We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn't too important. Consider how Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools, alongside reading and mathematics. A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down on the farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt-- two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.

If that is true, why isn't it good enough for someone else to know multiplication and the contents of the Bill of Rights? Is the story of bread, from tilled ground to our table, less relevant to our lives than the history of the thirteen colonies? Couldn't one make a case for the relevance of a subject that informs choices we make daily-- as in, What's for dinner? Isn't ignorance of our food sources causing problems as diverse as overdependence on petroleum, and an epidemic of diet related diseases?"

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. p. 9

I was enthralled by this book and I highly recommend it.