China Road

Rob Gifford is a NPR correspondent. He used to be based in Beijing. I would often hear him on Market Place and All Things Considered reporting on anything to do with China. He has a very distinctive voice--a lovely British accented baritone. I could hear his voice reading China Road all the way through.

This was an ok book. Before Gifford leaves China to take on a new NPR assignment, he travels across China 3000 miles from east to west on Route 312. He talks to all sorts of people, stops in many places, and then turns his experience on this trip and as a Chinese based journalist into this book.

My main problem with the book: there was lots of information and as someone who doesn't know a lot about China, I had a hard time keeping the names and places straight. He doesn't go into a lot of detail about any one thing, making it harder to absorb everything. And, it wasn't really engaging as a memoir kind of book. So, all in all, it was mostly an introduction to me. I think I would have preferred to learn about one small piece in more depth than so much in less detail.

I saw Ted Koeppel on The Daily Show this week. He has a 4 hour piece on China coming out in July. I think I should watch it. Maybe some more will sink in for me.

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Bedtimes at the Summer Soltice

Hmm. Not a good night with the kids. AJ left to go to a conference. On a Friday afternoon. Not good. He won't be home until late Wednesday. We've already had meltdowns. (The sun'll come out, tomorrow? Let's hope.) It's so hard to get the kids to go to bed when it's light out. They were in bed at 8:30, but it seemed like 6:30. Of course they don't want to go to sleep. They goof around. They yell at each other and step on each other. They cut up paper in the hallway. They play with water in the bathroom. And T runs around in the hallway after I've given him his last warning. Then I have to shut his door and he freaks out. I reach a breaking point and yell and hustle MJ back into her room. And then I regret it. This hasn't been a very good week with them...
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The Rule of Four

This was a fun read. I heard about it when I was in Princeton. One of the authors was a Princeton undergrad, and the bulk of the novel takes place on Princeton's campus. Lots of familiar places were included: the hospital where MJ was born, many campus buildings and locations, Prospect Street where my first office was located (in a former eating club), Hoagie Haven, and even the street where my advisor lives. Part of the plot includes a thesis advisor gone wacko. (shudder)

Anyway, at the center of the story are four roommates and a mysterious Renaissance text with secret messages encoded within its pages. Throw some Florentine history in there. (I was happy that I figured out the Savonarola tie in before it happened.) It was pretty good. Better writing than Da Vinci Code. I thought the story of the Hypnerotomachia overshadowed the deeper story of friends and relationships. The characters didn't seem well enough developed for me to invest much in this other piece. It was interesting, though, to consider how much the two main protaganists gave up--especially in their relationships--to devote to the Hypnerotomachia.

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Better

I like this background and these colors better. I still need to get the "read more" back up and working and the margins are funky. The colors are not entirely how I want it. But, it's fun to play around with it.
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Under Construction

I've been playing with my blog. After spending time on it, I'm not quite sure what I think of it. Does it seem too busy? I'm going to try a few more things out.
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Rereadings

Edited by Anne Fadiman. I scanned through a lot of this one. These were originally published in The American Scholar. Each essay is written by a famous author and recounts a rereading of a book that was highly influential earlier in life. To show how much I know, none of the "famous writers" were familiar to me; neither were most of their influential books.

I did really love reading about a woman's connection to her wildflower identification book. She traipes about the hills, looking at flowers, as a 19 year old, with her Peterson's in hand and later goes on to become a biologist. I love this line: "Why I persisted in carrying it around and consulting its crowded pages at every opportunity, I have no idea. The book was stubborn; well, I was stubborn too; that was part of it. And I had no choice, really, not if I wanted to get in. A landscape may be handsome in the aggregate, but this book led to the particulars, and that's what I wanted." I have recently felt again the desire to become more connected to my locality. And, coincidentally, one thing I've been wanting to get is a Trees of Minnesota book.

This essay, in the middle of the book, was the first one I read and persuaded me to look at some of the other chapters.

I liked this too:

I read the book slowly, in part because it was dense and in part because I wanted to be seen reading it. I wore the book as much as I read it, "absentmindedly" holding it in one hand on the street even when I was carrying a satchel of books in the other, "casually" parking it atop my notebook next to my coffee cup wherever I sat.

I love sneeking peeks at what other people are reading. A couple of years ago, AJ and I went on a cruise and I smugly compared my vacation reading material with all the Danielle Steeles and John Grishoms that were out there.

So even though the authors and the material they discussed were unknown, the subtext of the way particular books shape us was cozy and familiar.

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The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

A while ago, there was a fascinating article on paleoclimatology in the New Yorker. It was all about how researchers have been able to use methods like tree ring analysis and ice cores to figure out how the weather--temperature and precipitation--have varied over the last few thousand years.

So, when I heard Brian Fagan talking about his recent book on historical trends in climate change on The Daily Show, I thought it sounds interesting. But, I gave it 50 pages, and couldn't get into it. The material was good, but the writing not so much. It just didn't captivate me.

Even now, though, I think I should go back and try to read through some more of it...
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Cities and Knights

I love you!

We had the happy chance to play twice this weekend with auntie M and uncle R. Fun, fun, fun! I was blue in this game. Notice the two metropolises !(or is it metropoli?)

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No more newborn

Baby Z has made the transition to full blown baby. He doesn't curl up like a hedgehog when he sleeps on AJ's chest, he always wears real clothes during the day--no more pj's 24/7--he has grown out of his car seat headrest, and he is more alert and interacting with us--smiling, laughing, and cooing.

We were just wondering when we will be able to see his personality more clearly and how he will compare with MJ and T. I think he may be more emotionally reserved than either of them. But, we shall see.

This is a trademark baby Z half smile. I love it.

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Last Newborn Pleasure

Too bad I never got a photo of this one. As a new baby, Z would doze when he was nursing. And, as a typical newborn, it took him a long to eat. Every so often when baby Z would finally finish, I'd pull him back from my breast and his face would be all flushed, his hair disheveled, and his eyes would flutter open. Best of all, there would be a trickle of milk dribbling out of the side of his mouth.

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Omnivore's Dilemma

Very interesting. He traces four meals from the soil to the dinner table. A little dense since lots of information was presented--it took me a while to get through. Also an important book to read, I think. It (along with Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: this was a nice flowing narrative, more of a personal memoir) made me think of food and food consumption and the ethics of food in such a different manner. I loved the description of Joel Salatin's farm in Virginia, with his grass fed cattle and his elaborate rotation system. His description of the industrial food chain was also fascinating, as well as the impact of the US goverment's food policies on crops and food prices. And I loved his description of the final meal: eating foods only collected or grown by himself. So, he gets a hunting license, learns to fire a gun, and hunts for wild boar in northern California. And he forages for mushrooms and grows a garden.

I started thinking hard about my family's egg farm business and wanted a section of the book devoted to this. Or at least a New Yorker article. He does include a few paragraphs to egg production to say that journalists have a hard time getting into egg farms and that from all accounts, "egg operations are the worst...The American laying hen spends her brief span of days piled together with a half dozen other hends in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall. Every natural instinct of this hen is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral "vices" that can include cannibalizing her cage mates and rubbing her breast agasint the wire mesh until it is completely bald and bleeding." Hmm. I would love to talk to my uncles about these kinds of ideas, but it might not be received well. I wonder if they have had protests, letters, etc about the way the chickens are treated. The problems of egg production are about scalability. It would be impossible to produce the eggs they do with free range chickens. And it would make eggs a lot more expensive. But, Pollan claims they would be more nutritious.

All very interesting. I am going to look into some locally produced meats, just to get a sense of price difference, and maybe we can make a few strategic moves in this direction. I really love the idea of buying a lot of beef, say, a half cow, all from one single cow that has lived a good cow-life, freezing it, and then being extra-grateful for this one cow and the food that she has given us.

And I am recommitted to visiting the farmer's market once a week during the summer. We'll go this Thursday.

I've been thinking about the committment I would need to make to go all the way with some of these food consumption ideas. With eating locally, with not eating meat that has been produced in CAFO's (confined animal feeding operations), or with going organic. I have decided that there is no way we can do everything, but that we can do something. I need to think more about strategic priorities. What do I feel strongest about? And then we can do a few things here and there. Hopefully, the changes we make in where we spend our food dollars will combine with other tiny drops in the bucket to influence the larger food production process.

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The Year of Living Bibically

Oh, I am way behind in my book notes. Things have been busy here, in a good way. But, I want to catch up this week. This was a very fun read. Another one of the Do-Something-For-A-Year-And Write-A-Book-About-It memoirs that seem to be so popular write now. Jacobs decides to try to follow ever rule/commandment in the Bible over the course of one year. These include both the famous 10 Commandments and less well known admonitions: avoid wearing mixed fibers, stoning adultorers, and playing a 10 stringed harp. Matching his inner committment, he grows a beard and dresses in white. The general tone of the book is witty and entertaining, but he does share profound reflections that have come to him during the process. I especially liked his thoughts on prayer: prayers of gratitude (and very specific ones: "thank you for the farmer who grew the chick peas for my hummus) and prayers for other people.

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Parenting, Inc

by Pamela Paul. This felt like a big jumble of information that has been written about better in other places. Of course selling to parents and kids is huge business. And parents are overbuying. It didn't seem new. She kept repeating herself, a lot of the topical chapters didn't stick that close to topic, and at points, it seemed like she was advocating for specific products which seemed to go against her general thesis, like her raving about the sleep consultant. Is this stuff good or bad? The line was fuzzy for me. And there weren't any really good pieces of practical advice. I guess just being aware of this stuff is helpful? Like I said, it didn't feel new to me. The data factoid that I found stunning: the average American kid gets 70 new toys per year. Ugh. I have felt revulsion against the consuming kids culture quite a bit. I never want to have a "everyone bring a gift, big birthday party" again. Maybe with the third kid, where most everything is a hand me down, and I am longing to purge the toyroom, the idea of consuming more baby goods just feels so unnecessary.
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