The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes From Around the World which is an award-winning cookbook but mostly features an extensive bit of information about why fermenting certain foods (and eating them every so often) is a good idea, and why that's the case. Interesting because while my wife and I are among the people who have generally improved our health during the pandemic, unlike most of them, we haven't made our own sourdough bread. However, thanks to an instant pot (and a local dairy farm that doesn't flash-pasteurize milk) we've been making our own yogurt, and I make saurkraut or a kim-chee-ish cabbage thing. Thanks to Sandor Ellix Katz, I think I'll expand out to things like kefir and even sourdough bread. Who knows, maybe there's natto in the future.
Snow Falling On Cedars by David Guterson. First published in 1995. It's a tale of Japanese internment during WWII and its legacies. It focuses on a trial on a small island in Washington state. Guterson's first novel.
Lots of fun interdimensional travel, superheroes killed, an unwanted partner, toture and loss of limbs, and a very bad robot. These two collect 12 issues from the series and take a splendid turn through the two arcs. Brilliant stuff and I'm just 5 volumes from the end of the series.
There's a baby, a new home on a distant planet, hilariously inserted single pages of a battle that lasts about 8 issues, time travel and a time jump, and still a very bad robot. Three more of these to go, which I'll be ordering soon and probably reading before the end of May once I'm done with my current novel and nonfiction books.
Breaking Bread With the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, which I was basically checking out to see if it would be a workable assignment in my first year writing classes. Alas, it was not, but not through any fault of Alan Jacobs, who is a pretty good literary scholar and critic and a solid writer for an English professor.
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. It's been referred to as possibly the best ending to a comic book series ever (not a high bar since so many don't end). It's a little too sappy for my tastes, but if you know Robert Kirkman you know that the kind of ending he wrote here is shocking in how sweet and hopeful it is. Now they need to hurry up and give us a date for season 2 of the show.
In The Kingdom Of Ice by Hampton Sides. The true story of the polar adventures of the USS Jeannette, which started in 1879. I've enjoyed the other books written by Sides, namely Blood And Thunder and Hellhound On His Trail. Looks like a good read.
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention -- and how to Think Deeply Again, another book I was test-reading for first year comp classes It might not make it because it's a bit too journalistic and pretty far from the sort of thing the students will have to write. On the other hand, it's pretty damn good, and it hits on things that a lot of students have been talking about. So Johann Hari just might make the cut. tl;dr: It's not a failure of your willpower or other personal failings. It's by design, and it's making a handful of companies extremely wealthy and powerful.
That's in my stack for later this year and apparently is a more well resourced update to books like The Shallows and Irresistible.
Tell Freedom, a great memoir by South African "coloured" writer Peter Abrahams (not to be confused with the American horror writer of the same name). "Coloured" is his word, and it was an important distinction in the South Africa of his childhood and youth, and the social forces that made it important are also crucial for his exit to England that ends this book. This book should not be so routinely out of print in the US. It rivals Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's Ake: The Years of Childhood in terms of it's quality, IMO.
A book that I first heard of in a "By the Book" article in the NYT books page, My First Seventy Years is so old that there seems to be no images of it available. But it's a short memoir by Sister M. Madeleva, CSC, a nun who was president at St. Mary's College in South Bend who has had a rather interesting life. Most interestingly, she refrians from massive name dropping, though when she has met people who are not well known, though interesting, she might go on for awhile. For example, she was sent by her order to Oxford for Ph.D. work, and she took classes with a noted English Catholic named D'Arcy, and took most of the remainder of her medieval and early modern literature classes with a guy named Tolkein and a guy named C.S. Lewis. An interesting tale by a fellow midwesterner. It was interesting when I read the two or three sentences about her in the Times: the book is published in 1959, so I knew our college library had a copy, since it's a Catholic college that was a Catholic women's college at the time. It is inscribed by the author to the college's current president. Probably worth . . . well, not a lot, really, on the open market. But a good memoir.
Utopia by St. Thomas More. The 16th Century classic, about the fictional island of Utopia. This book survived through the ages. Originally written in Latin, I read a fairly recent translation. It consists of two books. I read the first one.
Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner "He was just telling a story about something a man named Thomas Sutpen had experienced, which would still have been the same story if the man had had no name at all, if it had been told about any man or no man over whiskey at night."
The Templars by Dan Jones. A history of the controversial medieval Christian order. It does not appear to be a conspiracy theory book. Excited to read this!
The first of the Timeline 191 books, this is a fascinating read about a world 20 years after the Confederacy won and a second war between the states begins. It's fun to see where various people pop up. Samuel Clemens is a newspaper writer in San Francisco who never became Mark Twain because he never worked on steamboats on the Mississippi where he got the idea for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
So last weekend I was in Chesapeake VA visiting my sister and family. My niece is just finishing the third grade, and on Sunday I ad-libbed a rhyming game called "Don't Say Fart" with only a few rules: 1) words must rhyme with -art, -eart, or -arte; 2) you have to both write it out and say it; and 3) when you can't think of any other word that rhymes, you have to write and say "fart." This means you lose, but you also win because of how fun it is to say fart. It turned out to be fun and was a good twenty minutes with all of us contributing words. The next day she was at school for library day, and she checked out a book to bring home - not to read with me, but for me to read: My Weird School Fast Facts: Space, Humans, and Farts. And read it I did. Shared some facts with her. But the idea she got me a book at the library is really amazing.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. A classic novella about a fictional bridge collapse in 18th Century Peru. Apparently, Tony Blair quoted this book when memorializing the British 9/11 victims. Looks like a good read.
Thanks to the kind folks at the Western Washington University Library who sent the book via InterLibrary Loan, I was able to read this. I completely agree that the melding of the classics and his experience is expertly done. I had two main thoughts as I read: * Teaching in a Core Curriculum akin to the one described in the book seems both incredibly rewarding and also challenging. I have about fifteen years left in what I anticipate to be my teaching career, and I am about to enter a period where I will have some flexibility with my position description. I spent some time imagining what would be possible related to the mandate of the organizations I direct (causes of war, conditions necessary for peace, international system) in a year-long series that needn't be for any curriculum but could be transformational. But ultimately, the cautions Montas gives for how one needs to approach these sorts of teaching experiences convinced me I am not the person for the job. * Montas argues this kind of Core (adapted to each university) needs to be widespread at least, if not universal. But in all of his ruminations on what impedes them, he never once hints at what state funded systems face in terms of funding issues and political challenges. He kind of does in the penultimate paragraph - business models are mentioned as are external pressures - but this seems a pretty large oversight. The exception is his extolling of the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program at Purdue University; cool, a land grant even such as where I teach. So I looked it up, and it is actually part of a certificate program rather than the university core - though the two textual classes akin to what Columbia offers that are in the certificate will fulfill specific core classes in place of one of the other 15+ options therein. That sounds like I dislike the book, which isn't the case at all. The argument intrigues me, and I enjoy the three-pronged approach of great work, liberal arts core, and autobiography. But since about 75% of all US undergraduates are at public institutions, it's a peculiar oversight.
Concur. Having gone to a Directional State University for college and attented a Ph.D. program at an "Of/At" state university, that oversight didn't surprise me. Not sure if it was an error on Montas' part, or on his editors (probably both, now that I type that). But you would never guess the role of public higher education in this country if you relied on the publishing industry for your information. On the reading front . . . Christ the Eternal Tao, a fascinating reading of the teachings of Lao Tzu in the light of the Gospel, and vice versa, by the American born Russian Orthodox Hieromonk Damascene Christensen
The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 – James D. Hornfischer This is a good read, but not a comprehensive naval history. Mostly about the capture of the Marianas, and then the ultimate use of the airfields there = bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Border by the unfortunately named Norwegian author Erika Fatland. It's about the countries that border Russia. Written prior to recent events. A long, interesting tome.