Book #5: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Title: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
Author: Jacqueline Kelly

It's August of 1899, the hottest summer on record in Fentress, Texas, a sleepy little town south of Austin where eleven-year-old Calpurnia Tate's father runs the cotton gin and she lives with her parents, her six brothers, and her grandfather. To pass the long, hot days, Callie begins recording what she sees in the world around her in a notebook, and her stern grandfather takes her under his wing and encourages her budding career as a naturalist.

Part coming-of-age novel and part feminist training manual for today's young girls (the book is written for a 5th-8th grade audience), Callie must come to grips with the fact that the things that are expected of her (sewing, embroidery, cooking, deportment) don't interest her at all, and the things she loves (exploring by the river, experimenting with her grandfather in his laboratory, reading Darwin, dreaming about college and career) don't fall in line with what her mother expects of a young woman of her station. Perhaps the best illustration of this comes on Christmas Eve, when Callie receives a book from her parents, and glimpses the word "science" through the wrapping paper. She continues to tear open the package, feeling hopeful that her parents finally understand her, but when she realizes that it's actually a book on "The Science of Homemaking" she can't hide her frustration. The book clearly highlights how many more opportunities young women have today than they had a century ago, but probably also acts as a springboard for young girls to see where discrepancies still exist.

Like many books about young girls in olden times (think Little House, Betsy-Tacy, etc...) there's not one single storyline that drives the text. Instead each chapter has its own rising and falling action, which makes it feel even more domestic. It's very well done, written by a woman born in New Zealand and raised in Canada, who is both a lawyer and a physician now living in Texas. One of my favorite things about the book is its cover. The cut paper is intricate and beautiful, even if Callie looks strangely one-legged.

Book #4: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

Title: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
Authors: William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

In The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, William Kamkwamba talks about growing up in Malawi, where everyone, young and old, goes to bed at 7pm. Why? Because that's when the sun sets, and 98% (that figure may be wrong) of rural Malawians live without electricity. William grew up as the son of a farmer, and when a famine struck the land, his parents could no longer pay his school fees and he had to drop out after one year of secondary school. Armed with not much more than an old high school physics textbook and access to the town junk heap, William had a dream of bringing electricity to his house, and spent months creating a windmill that would harness electricity to light up his home.

While William's story of his childhood in Malawi and the construction of the windmill are interesting, the sensation he created (which is described in the last few chapters of the book) is equally interesting. After a few local journalists reported on the windmill, he was nominated to attend a TED conference in Tanzania, which led to a scholarship to a pan-African high school, a better windmill for his parents (to draw water from a well), several trips to America, ,where he was feted by rich Americans, and, presumably, this book. By the end of the book, it felt a little bit like the sensation of a boy who built a windmill was more the story than the boy who actually built the windmill, if he was even the same boy anymore.

Book #3: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Title: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Author: Alan Bradley

Every once in a while, I love a good mystery. This is a good mystery. The eleven-year-old protagonist, Flavia de Luce, wakes up early one morning to find a dead man among the cucumbers in her garden, and then proceeds to race the police in her small English town to find the murderer. A child detective could be oh so wrong, but Bradley does a great job with the precocious de Luce, whose greatest love in life is Chemistry. She takes off on her bicycle, sleuthing in an age before the internet made it both easy and possible to do it from the comfort of home (the book takes place in 1950).

As far as the mystery goes, the murderer wasn't all that much of a surprise, but the backstory is compelling enough that it doesn't really matter. I learned a lot about philately (which sounds dirty, but it's really just stamp collecting) and poisonous compounds along the way. While the book's heroine is a child, this isn't a book written for children (it won the Dagger Award for best first crime novel), although I think it would be appropriate for a teenage reader. Apparently Bradley has a second Flavia de Luce novel in the works, and I'm very eager to read about her next adventures.

Book #2: The End of Overeating

Title: The End of Overeating
Author: David Kessler

I love seven-layer bars. Even thinking about them right now makes my stomach start to rumble. There's something about the combination of the chocolate, the salty nuts, the coconut and the caramelized butterscotch and sweetened condensed milk that makes them completely irresistible. I used to make them every so often, but I realized that when I do that, I can not stop myself from eating them. No one else in the family likes them, but I'd often eat an entire 9x13" pan in two days, three days tops. So I don't make them anymore, but when I see them for sale at a bakery, I'll buy myself a square.

This "not being able to stop" phenomenon is what David Kessler talks about in The End of Overeating. He calls it conditioned hypereating, and studies show that a majority of obese people struggle with it, along with significant portions of overweight and normal-weight Americans. According to Kessler, the American food industry has snowballed the problem by creating foods that are hyperpalatable (with multiple layers of fat, sugar and salt) and by making eating out a rewarding occurrence that takes place with increasing regularity in our society.

Kessler, a pediatrician and professor of medicine at UCSF (and the man behind the new food labels), spends the first half of the book talking about why we crave sugar, fat and salt, and how those cravings get harder to turn away as they become habits. He also spends a significant amount of time talking about how the food industry creates foods that are addictive and bad for us (he uses examples from Cinnabon, Outback Steakhouse, Panera Bread, and I'm pretty sure I will never be able to eat at a Chili's again). But the last third of the book is about what we can do to recircuit the now-instinctive behaviors and conquer conditioned hypereating. It's a really interesting read, although I think it's probably just a first step for people for whom conditioned hyereating is really a problem. I think back to when I was trying to lose weight about three years ago, and lots of what he says in the book (like setting rules-- I had a rule that I would never eat dessert before lunch, which has worked really well for me) reflects the things that I used back then. Ironically, I've thought more about the foods that call out to me over the last two days (and craved them more strongly) than I usually do, but I can see that Kessler's book helps all of us understand why we as a society struggle with obesity and how to start fixing the problem on an individual level.

Book #84: Her Fearful Symmetry

Title: Her Fearful Symmetry
Author: Audrey Niffeneger

Whoops! I forgot this one in my book count from last year. I guess I really read 84 books, which puts me only four back from 2008, when I got to 88 (but several of those were cookbooks, I just can't not be competitive, even with myself!).

I know there are lots of people out there who like fantasy and science fiction. I'm not one of them. I barely tolerated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid and I hated A Wrinkle in Time (what kinds of enemies have I earned myself?). For some reason, even though her characters travel through time and live as ghosts, Audrey Niffeneger's books feel enough like real life that I really like them. Does that even make any sense?

And I guess I also have to recant some of what I said here, because although I found the first three-quarters of Her Fearful Symmetry to be totally charming, it did get weird at the end. The book is the story of Valentina and Julia Poole, twenty-year-old identical twins who live in Chicago when they get the news that their aunt Elspeth (their mother's identical twin) has died, leaving her London flat and her fortune to them, under the condition that they come spend a year living in the flat. By the time they arrive, Elspeth comes to realize that she's not so dead after all, living as a ghost, but limited to the confines of the apartment. The girls become close to the other people living in the building (including Elspeth's lover) and learn secrets about their mother and aunt.

I heard Audrey Niffenegger interviewed somewhere (was it Fresh Air? Diane Rheem?) about writing the book, and how she became a guide at London's Highgate Cemetery (the cemetery figures prominently in the narrative). I find that I enjoy books a lot more if I've heard the author speak about the writing process (which I guess shouldn't be all that surprising). In this case, I wonder if I would have liked the book as much without the author interview or the good feelings I had about The Time Traveler's Wife-- if it had existed in a vacuum. It's a quick read and a page turner, but the end strayed a little bit far from what this realistic kind of girl felt entirely comfortable with.

Book #1: Cleaving

Title: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession
Author: Julie Powell

Remember Julie Powell? Cute, sweet, Julie Powell so adorably portrayed by Amy Adams in the film Julie and Julia? Well, that Julie Powell and the one in Cleaving bear only a couple of resemblances: the hangdog husband Eric, and an annoying tendency to whine. In Bad Mother, Ayelet Waldman talks about how people with bipolar disorder make the best memoirists because they tend to overshare-- to lack the inhibition that makes most people stop talking about the most intimate details of their lives. While Julie Powell only hints at her psychological difficulties (quite possibly the only thing she only hints at), she definitely falls into the category of oversharing. Big time.

When I read on the book's jacket that she was caught between her faithful husband and a lover, I thought the lover must have been a lover in a metaphorical sense. But no, Cleaving is the story of how Powell makes herself miserable over the course of the three or four years after the end of Julie and Julia, carrying on an extended affair with the man she cheated on Eric with back in college, a man who indulges her S&M fantasies (yes, I'm serious). While the personal stories are squirm-worthy and almost too salacious to be believed, she mixes them in with the story of her butchering apprenticeship, which I actually sort of loved. I learned a lot about how meat goes from squealing to sausage, and I think she did a pretty good job of using metaphors between butchering pigs and cows and the butchering she was doing to her marriage.

You've got to admire someone who isn't afraid to come across as pretty despicable, as Julie does in Cleaving. But honestly, I was riveted. I could not stop reading the book. But if it had been my life (which I cannot even fathom), I would have changed the names and the places and called the thing a novel.

Book #83: Superfreakonomics

Title: Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

Author: Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

If you read and enjoyed Freakonomics or any of the recent Malcolm Gladwell books (The Tipping Point, Outliers, etc...) then you'll likely enjoy Superfreakonomics. It's full of interesting tidbits about why condoms fail in India more than in other parts of the world, why prostitution isn't as lucrative a field as it was a century ago, or why the solution to global warming involves nothing more than a long garden hose. I read it in a few hours (which makes me feel that it wasn't worth the price for the hardcover), and while it's got a lot of splashy facts, I think I'm sort of tired of this genre of books-- the "things aren't really as they seem" field of economics/parenting/social networking that seems so popular lately (think Nurtureshock). But Superfreakonomics is what it is, and as an example of the genre it's pretty good, but not $29.99 worth of good.

The Fifty Book Challenge-- Year Five!

I don't know why I bother calling this the Fifty Book Challenge any more, but it's nice to have a goal that, at least so far, has been relatively attainable. Here are my totals for years past:

2009: 84
2008: 88
2007: 72
2006: 85

Hope you'll enjoy the reviews! I know I love reading the books and have even sort of come around to liking the act of writing about them.

Book #82: The Lacuna

Title: The Lacuna
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

I had great luck in December with picking books that were both really intelligent and totally engrossing. I spent three hours in bed one morning last week, ignoring my kids, and getting lost in the life Harrison Shepherd, a boy whose growing-up years alternate between military schools near his American father and the kitchens of his Mexican mother's rich boyfriends. As a teenager he becomes first a plaster-mixer, then a cook, and finally a secretary for muralist Diego Rivera, and befriends Frida Kahlo. After working for Trotsky, Shepherd returns to America, where he becomes an author of historical potboilers, and finds that he can't escape his past... until he finds a lacuna.

Kingsolver must have done an inordinate amount of research in writing The Lacuna. She has an intimate knowledge of Rivera, Kahlo, Trotsky, McCarthyism, and the writing style of small-town newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s. The result is a completely enjoyable read with a satisfying, if surprising ending.

Book #81: Discovering Home with Laurie Smith

Title: Discovering Home with Laurie Smith: Find Your Personal Style

Author: Laurie Smith

Laurie Smith was far and away my favorite decorator back when I was addicted to Trading Spaces. She was nice to her clients, hardworking and organized, and her stuff always turned out great. When Stephmodo recommended her book, I signed up for it at the library. The premise of the book is simple: she takes us through pretty much every room of the Mississippi house she and her husband recently bought, renovated, and decorated. She goes through all of the little details that make her work special (techniques like mixing multiple fabrics, raising doorways, not matching artwork to the color scheme of the room, adding something vintage to each room, and mixing woods and furniture styles). I love the voyeuristic quality of being able to see every bit of her personal space, which is impeccably well done.