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Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 18th, 2016 08:32 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I am still chewing over a few days after finishing it. There’s a lot of stuff in this book and I don’t think I can really do justice to all of it (I’m not even sure I could summarize all of it in a reasonably-sized post, let alone offer my opinions on it). But one thing it really drove home for me is the massive hypocrisy of federal healthy eating initiatives, given that the federal government’s approach to agricultural subsidies is pretty much the reason that American eating patterns are so completely messed up in the first place.
Like, seriously. If the government stopped subsidizing corn on such a massive scale, it might not solve the obesity/heart disease/type II diabetes/every other diet-linked health issue caused by the mainstream American diet. But it would help a lot more than nitpicking about school lunch guidelines and whether there ought to be soda machines in schools.
What I’m Reading Now
I asked one of my grad school friends for book recommendations about daily life during the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately I think something was lost in translation, because he recommended The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, which is interesting if you want to know something about the political motivations of the common man in Boston or the way that the public memory of the Revolutionary War changed in the later decades (did you know the Boston Tea Party wasn’t called that till the 1820s?), but not so useful if you were really hoping for something about, say, what people ate for breakfast in the years around the Revolution.
I’m also trundling along in Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, and have become unexpectedly caught up in it. Our heroine Sylvia married a man she likes but doesn’t love, because she thought the man she did love had married another… Only it turns out he didn’t! And never sent her a letter or anything, because they gazed deep into each other’s eyes one time and of course after that he was sure she could never even think of marrying someone else. He has been bitterly disabused of this illusion.
And now he’s paying a visit to Sylvia and her husband, because of course he is, and they’re all having an amiable chat about the morality of divorce in cases of marital incompatibility. (I feel kind of sorry for the husband here. He has no idea that he may be talking his lady love into leaving him.) Is Alcott going to end up writing an argument for divorce???
This seems so unlikely - I really think it’s more likely that Sylvia’s husband is going to conveniently die in battle or something - AND YET. I’ll keep you posted on how it all pans out!
What I Plan to Read Next
You guy, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna read all the Caldecott winners. I found a printable list of Caldecott winners (it’s made to be colored in as you read each book! How cute is that?), and also I checked and the local library has all but two of the Caldecott winning books. So OBVIOUSLY I have to do it.
Plus, the 2016 winner is Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear, about the origins of Winnie the Pooh. Obviously I can’t pass that up!
Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I am still chewing over a few days after finishing it. There’s a lot of stuff in this book and I don’t think I can really do justice to all of it (I’m not even sure I could summarize all of it in a reasonably-sized post, let alone offer my opinions on it). But one thing it really drove home for me is the massive hypocrisy of federal healthy eating initiatives, given that the federal government’s approach to agricultural subsidies is pretty much the reason that American eating patterns are so completely messed up in the first place.
Like, seriously. If the government stopped subsidizing corn on such a massive scale, it might not solve the obesity/heart disease/type II diabetes/every other diet-linked health issue caused by the mainstream American diet. But it would help a lot more than nitpicking about school lunch guidelines and whether there ought to be soda machines in schools.
What I’m Reading Now
I asked one of my grad school friends for book recommendations about daily life during the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately I think something was lost in translation, because he recommended The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, which is interesting if you want to know something about the political motivations of the common man in Boston or the way that the public memory of the Revolutionary War changed in the later decades (did you know the Boston Tea Party wasn’t called that till the 1820s?), but not so useful if you were really hoping for something about, say, what people ate for breakfast in the years around the Revolution.
I’m also trundling along in Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, and have become unexpectedly caught up in it. Our heroine Sylvia married a man she likes but doesn’t love, because she thought the man she did love had married another… Only it turns out he didn’t! And never sent her a letter or anything, because they gazed deep into each other’s eyes one time and of course after that he was sure she could never even think of marrying someone else. He has been bitterly disabused of this illusion.
And now he’s paying a visit to Sylvia and her husband, because of course he is, and they’re all having an amiable chat about the morality of divorce in cases of marital incompatibility. (I feel kind of sorry for the husband here. He has no idea that he may be talking his lady love into leaving him.) Is Alcott going to end up writing an argument for divorce???
This seems so unlikely - I really think it’s more likely that Sylvia’s husband is going to conveniently die in battle or something - AND YET. I’ll keep you posted on how it all pans out!
What I Plan to Read Next
You guy, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna read all the Caldecott winners. I found a printable list of Caldecott winners (it’s made to be colored in as you read each book! How cute is that?), and also I checked and the local library has all but two of the Caldecott winning books. So OBVIOUSLY I have to do it.
Plus, the 2016 winner is Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear, about the origins of Winnie the Pooh. Obviously I can’t pass that up!
