June Reading
38. The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Harmful to Your Health
by Paul Campos
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 251
39. Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen
by Julie Powell
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 305
40. The 250 Job Interview Questions You’ll Must Likely be Asked and the Answers that Will Get You Hired
by Peter Veruki
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 189
41. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 132
42. Cook-off: Recipe Fever in America
by Amy Sutherland
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 333
43. The Other Side of Desire
by Daniel Bergner
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 205
44. Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth and Everyday Magic
by Martha Beck
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 328
45. Above Us Only Sky
by Marion Wink
Genre: Essays
Pages: 215
46. What It Takes to Get to Vegas
by Yxta Maya Murray
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 308
47. Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You
by Sean Thomas
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 300
The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Harmful to Your Health is an expose on the American diet industry and our cultural worship of thinness. I don’t think that health and weight are completely unrelated, but Campos has some extremely valid points to make about obesity experts who profit from the diet industry and research that shows that moderately fat people can be healthy. The most interesting parts of the book explore obesity from a cultural standpoint and Campos convincingly illustrates that in many cases, our culture’s hatred of fat people gives people a covert way to be classist and racist. The book is a good read for anyone interested in body image issues.
I read two cooking-related books this month: Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen and Cook-off: Recipe Fever in America. In Julie & Julia, Julie Powell deals with a quarter-life crisis by cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It originally started out as a blog, and it is one of those books that made me say, “Why didn’t I write a book about that?” Julie has a certain spunky charm and I enjoyed the book. I’m not sure how they managed to make a film of it, because it’s not exactly action-packed. Cook-off: Recipe Fever in America is a well-written book about recipe contests in America. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who isn’t into cooking, but if you’re like me, you’ll think, “This is the coolest thing ever. I should start entering cooking contests.”
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a brilliant, incredible book. Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor-in-chief of French Elle when he suffered a rare stroke. It left him a victim of locked-in syndrome, with his left eye the only part of his body that he could move. Bauby learned to communicate by blinking and blinked this extraordinary memoir about life in a body that no longer worked. One of the reviews on the back of my edition called the book, “as riveting as a narrative from an explorer of deep space.” There is something distinctly otherworldly about the memoir, whose author died two days after its publication. The chapter in which Bauby’s children come to visit him in the hospital is one the saddest things I’ve ever read.
The Other Side of Desire is a book about perverts. To be more politically correct, it’s a book about people with strange sexual fetishes--a man who is into feet, a female sadist, a man who propositioned his twelve year-old stepdaughter, and a man who is attracted to amputees. It’s a lurid and creepily intriguing book, but it suffers from being a mile wide and an inch deep. Bergner falls short on thoroughly exploring the science behind why bizarre sexual fetishes exist. Overall, I just felt like something was missing.
Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth and Everyday Magic is mainly about Martha Beck’s decision to continue a pregnancy after discovering that the fetus has Down’s Syndrome. She and her husband were grad students at Harvard at the time. There was a lot about the memoir that was engaging and inspirational, but I found it off-putting by the end. Beck claimed not to be overtly religious, but everyone at Harvard was practically portrayed as having fangs and horns, and there were far too many supernatural “spiritual” events that happened to her to be remotely plausible. It also made me sad that she and her husband, who are devoted to each other in this book, eventually divorced. I have also read a later memoir of hers, Leaving the Saints, in which she recovers a repressed memory of her father molesting her as a child. The sheer volume of implausible events in that book in addition to this book, have led me to the conclusion that all of her memoirs are most likely highly fictionalized.
Above Us Only Sky is a book of essays by Marion Winik. The jacket describes the book as funny, but I have decided that David Sedaris is the only NPR commentator who actually deserves to be called funny as hell. This book is more intermittently amusing. For one thing, parent humor just isn’t very funny. Another thing is that many of the essays, such as the titular essay about a friend’s suicide, are more like depressing and strange vignettes. I was also sort of annoyed that she mentions her ex-husband’s death from AIDS multiple times, but never tells us how he contracted the disease when she presumably didn’t. I don’t know why that bothered me, but it seems that these overly confessional books should tell all.
Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas is a poetic and powerful book about the struggle of two young women to make a place for themselves in the male-dominated world of Los Angeles gang life. By comparison, What It Takes to Get to Vegas, her follow-up novel, is barely worth reading. Rita Zapata is a disadvantaged Latina girl with a slutty mom who plans to move up in the world by hooking up with boxers. She forms a dysfunctional relationship with a successful boxer named Billy. Locas had such strong, independent female characters and Rita is pretty much a brainless bimbo. I was so disappointed by this book that I found it hard to believe that it was written by the same author.
Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You is the story of one man’s foray into the world of Internet dating. I find that whenever I read a book that is supposed to give me an inside look into what men really think, I want to buy a bunch of cats and be single for the rest of my life. After many years of being a jerk and doing creepy things like dating a seventeen-year-old when he’s thirty, Sean is somehow surprised to find himself single at thirty-seven and gives Internet dating a try for a magazine article. He does get some moderately funny stories out of the deal, but I couldn’t get past my dislike of him as a person. I wished I could reach through the book and tell him, “When you pick your girlfriends solely based on their looks, you’re going to run into a lot of crazy bitches.” However, Sean must not be the sharpest tool in the shed, because he relates a story about almost being tricked into believing that Thai prostitute is pregnant with his baby. That is right, he didn’t use a condom…with a whore…in Thailand. I think I almost said out loud, “Jesus Christ, was he trying to get AIDS?” Which did somewhat allow me to write him off and negated my impulse to get a cat.
by Paul Campos
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 251
39. Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen
by Julie Powell
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 305
40. The 250 Job Interview Questions You’ll Must Likely be Asked and the Answers that Will Get You Hired
by Peter Veruki
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 189
41. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 132
42. Cook-off: Recipe Fever in America
by Amy Sutherland
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 333
43. The Other Side of Desire
by Daniel Bergner
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 205
44. Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth and Everyday Magic
by Martha Beck
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 328
45. Above Us Only Sky
by Marion Wink
Genre: Essays
Pages: 215
46. What It Takes to Get to Vegas
by Yxta Maya Murray
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 308
47. Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You
by Sean Thomas
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 300
The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Harmful to Your Health is an expose on the American diet industry and our cultural worship of thinness. I don’t think that health and weight are completely unrelated, but Campos has some extremely valid points to make about obesity experts who profit from the diet industry and research that shows that moderately fat people can be healthy. The most interesting parts of the book explore obesity from a cultural standpoint and Campos convincingly illustrates that in many cases, our culture’s hatred of fat people gives people a covert way to be classist and racist. The book is a good read for anyone interested in body image issues.
I read two cooking-related books this month: Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen and Cook-off: Recipe Fever in America. In Julie & Julia, Julie Powell deals with a quarter-life crisis by cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It originally started out as a blog, and it is one of those books that made me say, “Why didn’t I write a book about that?” Julie has a certain spunky charm and I enjoyed the book. I’m not sure how they managed to make a film of it, because it’s not exactly action-packed. Cook-off: Recipe Fever in America is a well-written book about recipe contests in America. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who isn’t into cooking, but if you’re like me, you’ll think, “This is the coolest thing ever. I should start entering cooking contests.”
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a brilliant, incredible book. Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor-in-chief of French Elle when he suffered a rare stroke. It left him a victim of locked-in syndrome, with his left eye the only part of his body that he could move. Bauby learned to communicate by blinking and blinked this extraordinary memoir about life in a body that no longer worked. One of the reviews on the back of my edition called the book, “as riveting as a narrative from an explorer of deep space.” There is something distinctly otherworldly about the memoir, whose author died two days after its publication. The chapter in which Bauby’s children come to visit him in the hospital is one the saddest things I’ve ever read.
The Other Side of Desire is a book about perverts. To be more politically correct, it’s a book about people with strange sexual fetishes--a man who is into feet, a female sadist, a man who propositioned his twelve year-old stepdaughter, and a man who is attracted to amputees. It’s a lurid and creepily intriguing book, but it suffers from being a mile wide and an inch deep. Bergner falls short on thoroughly exploring the science behind why bizarre sexual fetishes exist. Overall, I just felt like something was missing.
Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth and Everyday Magic is mainly about Martha Beck’s decision to continue a pregnancy after discovering that the fetus has Down’s Syndrome. She and her husband were grad students at Harvard at the time. There was a lot about the memoir that was engaging and inspirational, but I found it off-putting by the end. Beck claimed not to be overtly religious, but everyone at Harvard was practically portrayed as having fangs and horns, and there were far too many supernatural “spiritual” events that happened to her to be remotely plausible. It also made me sad that she and her husband, who are devoted to each other in this book, eventually divorced. I have also read a later memoir of hers, Leaving the Saints, in which she recovers a repressed memory of her father molesting her as a child. The sheer volume of implausible events in that book in addition to this book, have led me to the conclusion that all of her memoirs are most likely highly fictionalized.
Above Us Only Sky is a book of essays by Marion Winik. The jacket describes the book as funny, but I have decided that David Sedaris is the only NPR commentator who actually deserves to be called funny as hell. This book is more intermittently amusing. For one thing, parent humor just isn’t very funny. Another thing is that many of the essays, such as the titular essay about a friend’s suicide, are more like depressing and strange vignettes. I was also sort of annoyed that she mentions her ex-husband’s death from AIDS multiple times, but never tells us how he contracted the disease when she presumably didn’t. I don’t know why that bothered me, but it seems that these overly confessional books should tell all.
Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas is a poetic and powerful book about the struggle of two young women to make a place for themselves in the male-dominated world of Los Angeles gang life. By comparison, What It Takes to Get to Vegas, her follow-up novel, is barely worth reading. Rita Zapata is a disadvantaged Latina girl with a slutty mom who plans to move up in the world by hooking up with boxers. She forms a dysfunctional relationship with a successful boxer named Billy. Locas had such strong, independent female characters and Rita is pretty much a brainless bimbo. I was so disappointed by this book that I found it hard to believe that it was written by the same author.
Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You is the story of one man’s foray into the world of Internet dating. I find that whenever I read a book that is supposed to give me an inside look into what men really think, I want to buy a bunch of cats and be single for the rest of my life. After many years of being a jerk and doing creepy things like dating a seventeen-year-old when he’s thirty, Sean is somehow surprised to find himself single at thirty-seven and gives Internet dating a try for a magazine article. He does get some moderately funny stories out of the deal, but I couldn’t get past my dislike of him as a person. I wished I could reach through the book and tell him, “When you pick your girlfriends solely based on their looks, you’re going to run into a lot of crazy bitches.” However, Sean must not be the sharpest tool in the shed, because he relates a story about almost being tricked into believing that Thai prostitute is pregnant with his baby. That is right, he didn’t use a condom…with a whore…in Thailand. I think I almost said out loud, “Jesus Christ, was he trying to get AIDS?” Which did somewhat allow me to write him off and negated my impulse to get a cat.