Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I spent most of Monday afternoon sitting in my chaise in my sunny room, drinking a cup of tea as I read Charles Finch’s latest Charles Lenox book, The Inheritance, and this is just about the best use of an afternoon that I can think of. This series is a gift that keeps on giving: I love Charles Lenox and his ever-so-slowly expanding group of family and friends and their affection for each other and even the infodumps, God bless Finch’s enthusiasm for weird bits of historical trivia. Obviously what this book needed was a page-long digression about why American drive on the right while the British drive on the left.

This book also includes lengthy flashbacks of Lenox’s schooldays at Harrow during the early Victorian era. YESSSSSS, this is everything I never knew I wanted from a Charles Lenox book! (Also I love that Charles’ older brother Edmund was kind of obnoxious and full of himself when they were at Harrow together. People grow and change!)

Also: DALLINGTON D: D: D:

In other news, littlerhymes and I read Mary Grant Bruce’s A Little Bush Maid, the first book in the classic Australian Billabong series, which has all characteristic strengths of early twentieth century children’s fiction - breathless adventure! entertainingly unlikely coincidences! delicious food description! delightful landscape description! modern fiction could really stand to include more descriptive passages - and also the characteristic weaknesses, which is to say racism.

In this case, it’s not only racist but actually at the more racist end of the “how racist is this book?” spectrum of its time period, and the spectrum is pretty racist to begin with.

We’re still going to read the next book, though, just to see how many more ways our heroine Norah will save the day. In book one alone she saved a) an entire flock of sheep from a bushfire, b) a lion tamer from his lion, and c) a mysterious hermit from typhoid or typhus, I can never remember which is which. Is Norah the first Australian superheroine? Stay tuned to find out!

What I’m Reading Now

I’m allllmost done with Rob Dunn’s Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future, which is terrifically interesting in “World-wide famine indirectly caused by agribusiness is not an apocalyptic scenario I had previously considered” kind of way, although unfortunately not quite so interesting on a page by page level.

What I Plan to Read Next

I still need to read The Things They Carried.

Book Review: Never Out of Season

I’d like to be able to whole-heartedly recommend Rob Dunn’s Never Out of Season: Why Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future, because I think it’s got an important and thought-provoking message; certainly in my post-apocalyptic imaginings I had not spent much time contemplating the possibility of a vast famine (followed probably by a vast pestilence, given that the malnourished survivors will be easy prey for disease) caused by some pest destroying our increasingly homogeneous genetically modified crops, in much the same way that the potato blight caused the Irish potato famine.

The Irish potato famine was as devastating as it was in part because the potatoes themselves were so close to genetically identical: they all came from a very few ancestors imported to Europe from the Americas. Naturally, human beings learned nothing from this, and instead of diversifying have spent the last century narrowing down the crops we grow to the few highest-producing varieties of just a few plants.

Never Out of Season is a cri de coeur for us to embrace and protect crop diversity before it’s too late, and it’s, well, it’s just a bit repetitive. It could have made a kickass magazine article but as a book, each chapter is just a further repetition of this theme - not even really an elaboration of it; just variations of the same story where a lack of crop diversity leads to disaster.

Although I did find the story of the scientists in the Leningrad seed bank during the siege quite touching. There they are, surrounded by bags of rice and barley and wheat, succumbing to diseases brought on by malnutrition because they’re stoically saving their seed collection for the future.

In any case, there’s a great seed for an apocalypse story in here. Or a post-apocalyptic paean to crop diversity, centered around the characters working their polycultural garden and feasting upon the fruits of their labors.