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!