A good ending for a year of reading, completely enjoyable. Chatty but interesting, with great facts and amazing juxtapositions.
Archives
Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1842 by William Dalrymple
This was so good that when I ran out of time to read it, I reordered it (it was from another library) to finish it. The author found a whole lot of previously unknown (to English speakers) accounts from the Afghan POV, and they are included in translation.
Excellent.
Suri’s Burn Book by Allie Hagan
I’m a big fan of the blog surisburnbook.com but it didn’t translate so well to print, probably because the blog is terse and the book isn’t.
The Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney
The subtitle is, The Priceless Experience of Losing it All.
Except…she doesn’t.
I checked this out, thinking it would be an actual chronicle of someone who became homeless and clawed their way out of that nasty spot…but no. Penney is an affluent New Yorker who lives the glamourous life, and has plenty of resources.
Sure, she loses her retirement savings, and is left with several pieces of worthless real estate; she has to retrench, lower her standard of living and hustle for jobs and money. She started this blog as a way to earn money, and had plenty of friends who came to her rescue.
She chronicles her worries and fears for the first six months after the news about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme broke…but she came through it just fine.
Not as interesting as i had hoped, although I did listen to the whole thing.
The Grand Guignol: Theater of Fear and Terror by Mel Gordon
This has been coming up recently- this theater was a big part of the plot in another book I just read, The Bones of Paris; and then I found out that the film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover was available for streaming (never been released to DVD, in 24 years) and I watched it with Spider Jerusalem.
So I tracked down a book about it…just what I wanted, a short history, descriptions of plays and a few scripts. Interesting without being too bogged down in details.
Thermopylae by Paul Cartledge
Pretty good, mostly. There’s not a lot of info on this battle, only two sources and Cartledge sticks mostly to Herodotus. He spends half the book giving background on the Athenians, the Spartans and the Persians and the political situation, then just a few pages on the battle, then another big chunk on the meaning of it all.
And he tries to make it relevant to the modern day reader, which kind of didn’t work for me.
But interesting.
The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter
Economics, pretty basic, kinda dry. Kept me going through a 6 hour drive, but not outstanding.
Cooked by Michael Pollan
I’m a huge fan of Pollan’s, and have been since Botany of Desire. This is about the four ways of cooking: with fire (barbecue), water (stewing/braising), air (yeast/baking) and earth (fermenting/pickling). Along the way he talks about history, society and his own learning process. Wonderful. Makes me want to make my own bread, which nothing else on this planet has ever done.
But…the cover photo of pasta? there is NO PASTA COOKING IN THIS BOOK. just sayin’.
Gulp by Mary Roach
It’s alimentary, my dear Watson…
I love Mary Roach’s nonfiction books about all kinds of gross and touchy subjects. This one was great.
The Feud: the Hatfields and McCoys: the True Story by Dean King
Pretty interesting, actually. King got access to and found all sorts of primary source documents that had been hidden/lost/overlooked, and gives a pretty clear, if confusingly full of repeated names (think Edward or Richard in the Wars of the Roses) account of the famous feud.
Hard to keep track of, even with his genealogical scorecards showing who has been killed or wounded, but fascinating nonetheless. King makes sense of this confusing period and events and puts it all in context.
Heat: Adventures in the World’s Fiery Places by Bill Streever
Of course the title grabbed me…and indeed the first chapter was about Death Valley, although Streever and his companion went walking for four hours with only a gallon of water between them. Idiots.
He includes things like oil wells (fuel) and nuclear test sites.
Interesting but not awesome.
When America First Met China by Eric Dolin
I was looking for a popular history of China from about 1600 to the present, and there was nothing at my library that wasn’t really long and detailed but this.
Which was kinda meh.
Firstly, it was mostly about America, which I wasn’t as interested in.
The writing wasn’t bad, but it felt padded- repetitive and a lot of added stuff. A quarter of the book was notes, and a sixth of the actual text had to do with the opium war, which the Americans had nothing to do with except in dealing with the aftermath, after the Treaty of Nanking was signed…yet this was 50/300 pages?
And the thing that annoyed me the most- there were multiple black and white illustrations, contemporary portraits of key figures and landscapes/views of places mentioned. Then a whole lot of these illustrations were included in color plates in the middle. So why put them in the text? felt like padding to me.
An okay read, but not great.
Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss
I love reading about the food wars, they are fascinating me.
This is a huge bestseller right now. All the dirt about how the mega food corporations use science to make food that one literally cannot stop eating…but nobody is allowed to use the word ‘addiction’…
Really well written and interesting.
Comic-con and the Business of Popular Culture by Rob Salkowitz
I love Comic-con, so I thought I’d give this a whirl.
Salkowitz is a long-time attendee, and knows his way around the con…this is a good overview of the whole wild ride that is Comic-con. He knows artists and dealers and writers, rather than being hoi polloi like me, but he had some interesting things to say about the phenomenon, as well as the industry, all the popular culture facets of the genres that are connected to the comics industry.
And he mentioned two graphic novels for me to try- Frank Miller’s newest, Holy Terror, and a long-running series that I’d never heard of called Supernatural Law. So I’ve ordered each from my library, and am excited about both.
This is how : proven aid in overcoming shyness, molestation, fatness, spinsterhood, grief, disease, lushery, decrepitude & more– for young and old alike by Augusten Burroughs
Wow.
Just wow.
I got this expecting it to be acerbic, amusing, tongue in cheek…what I didn’t expect was that Burroughs would be ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.
And what does this book tell you about how to fix your life?
Get over it. Move on. Stop wallowing. Be honest with yourself even if you aren’t with other people. Some things can’t be fixed but they can be survived.
This is harsh but honest advice for people who are looking for self-help books to fix themselves, and just about every word Burroughs says is exactly, perfectly true.
Read it. Make all your friends read it if you love them. Because it really is how.
Justice in Chains: From the Galleys to Devil’s Island by Michel Bourdet-Pléville
I saw Les Misérables after Xmas, and had read Papillon (many times) in high school, and I just started wondering about the French prison system…and found this book, which I ordered through Link+ (computerized free interlibrary loan, it rocks). Which pretty much answered all my questions. Plus it was well-written (translated), amusing in many places, a good read.
The cover image is obviously from some reprint- the original book is from 1960, and the copy I read had a cloth binding. It was, of course, from a university.
My Life in the Foreign Legion by Prince Aage of Denmark
My kids got me this for Xmas; it’s been on my wish list FOREVER. Excellent. Prince Aage was in the Legion in the mid 1920s, during the Riff war, until he was invalided out, a good description of his time there, pretty darn exciting. Also unique in that most FL bios are of entry-level legionnaires; Aage came in an officer, so a different viewpoint as he pals around with Lyautey and them folks. Very good.
Otter Be Reading 