I remember when I got to the end of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma thinking, “Well, what the hell CAN I eat, then?” Although the mental image of that potato farmer covered in fertilizer did stick, to the point that I started growing my own potatoes, I was pretty much done with Pollan lecturing me…
Read more I can handle bad news, but not with every mouthful.
[Reposting this because of all the hoohah about The Odyssey. Penelope’s voice is every bit as important as her husband’s (and I would argue far more worthy of listening to than any nasty thing their son has to say) and Claire North’s trilogy is inspired, hilarious, heartbreaking, and mesmerizing. Prepare to binge.] This is the…
A collection of essays on the art of cooking well for one’s friends. On his kitchen beginnings …as with sex, politics, and religion, so with cooking; by the time I began finding out about it for myself, it was too late to ask my parents. They had failed to instruct me, and I would punish…
A coffee table book about brooches, but don’t let that frivolous description stop you. Madeleine Albright, first woman secretary of state, accessorized with pins all her life, but it wasn’t until Saddam Hussein called her “an unparalleled serpent” in a poem he allegedly wrote himself that she retaliated by wearing a pin in the shape…
Read more …it wasn’t until Saddam Hussein called her “an unparalleled serpent…”
First time Jesus Christ ever died that I felt like I’d lost a friend. Told from the first-person viewpoint of his best friend Biff, who first sees Jesus/Joshua when he’s resurrecting his little brother’s lizard every time his little brother smashes said lizard to death with a rock. And then there is the scene where…
Read more Told from the viewpoint of JC’s best friend, Biff.
McKibben calls this a fable, but I donʼt know. What if people like Vern in states like Vermont all over the nation became accidental, nonviolent secessionists? What if they inspired their states’ equivalents of town halls to talk about and even vote on leaving the nation to be their own independent countries? If enough of…
The tenth and so far best of McGuire’s October Daye series about a fully realized Fae world living next to the real world of present-day San Francisco, which allows Toby to make Ewok jokes even if her squire Quentin, aka the heir to Faerie’s High King and Queen, doesn’t get them. In this installment a…
Around about 2005 expat British author Richard Grant decides to drive the 900-mile stretch of the Sierra Madre Mountains in northern Mexico. The Sierra Madres, a rugged, comfortless and dangerous place, are home to drunks, druggies, marijuana growers, meth cookers, drug lords, bandits, rapists, murderers, Mormons, mestizos, cave-dwelling Indians and entire companies of corrupt Mexican…
Read more The type of men who pride themselves on their willingness to kill.
Two detective inspectors from Glasgow, one of them recently back from sick leave (possibly too soon?) are sent to investigate a death on Eilean Eadar, a very tiny, very remote Scottish island. The island’s inhabitants have lived and fished there for generations, they aren’t welcoming to mainlanders, and they resent the fact that the only…
Read more The wood on the island is dark and deep but it is not lovely
A reread after many years, which holds up well. Not much style but a lot of substance—settlers fleeing a dying Earth emigrate across the stars to a planet in orbit around Rukbat. A story for our times for sure. Only—uh-oh—until…after they’ve landed and moved planetside they discover that an erratic body that transverses Rukbat’s solar…
