The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

I read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan about two months ago and it really made me think about how I eat. No, it doesn't wax poetic on all the reasons you should go vegetarian, but makes you think about how to eat ethically and environmentally friendly. I learned a lot, and full disclosure, didn't realize I was reading the kid's version until I was about 100 pages in and realized how many diagrams there were.

Overall, a great read. Highly recommend to anyone who eats. 352 pages.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery: This book focuses mainly on two characters: a short, ugly and plump concierge of a chic Parisian apartment building who is secretly an art and literature connoisseur, and 12-year-old Paloma, who lives in the building and is secretly quite smart and planning to kill herself before she turns 13 because people are not worth it.

It was another book club choice and totally enjoyable. I recommend it for the ineresting weaving of characters and the frequent literary references. Courtney, I think you'll especially enjoy this one.

336 pages.

If You Have to Cry, Go Outside by Kelly Cutrone

The world's toughest fashion publicist wrote a book. And it's awesome. If You Have to Cry, Go Outside chronicles the rise of Kelly Cutrone from outsider to fashion week queen, as well as giving advice on how to make your career work for you, and advice targeted at the young woman working to become a "power bitch." Kelly advocates being true to yourself over everything, and making your individual talents propel your career. She also peppers it with some of her religious beliefs, which are interesting on their own. Overall, brothers, none of you will like this book, but sisters, you might enjoy it!

208 pages.

4: LA Candy by Lauren Conrad

Yes, I read this. For real. It was mind candy.

It was about young Jane Roberts' move to LA and how she and her best friend Scarlett somewhat accidentally end up with their own reality show.

Really a stretch for the author.

3: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

My friend Betsy and I pooled our friend resources and started a book club. Our first meeting was on Sunday and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout was our first read.

Overall, it was extremely well-written (I mean, it did win the Pulitzer Prize last year), but I don't know if I would recommend it. The book is comprised of short stories surrounding a small town in Maine, which is the only thread besides the character the book is named for. It was certainly an interesting way to arrange vignettes, and a new format to be sure. Ms. Strout also has an incredible way with words, but I didn't really walk away with any real feeling about the book.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Although I am sure most, if not all of you, have read this at some point, let me jsut recommend this one. Even though my English teacher did all she could to beat this one to death, it's hard to get past the twisted family tree that pervades the novel. To be perfectly basic, it is the story of two households in England that have a screwed up history of deceit and a cycle of revenge that proves difficult to break. The story is told with shifting timelines and a frame narrative, so everything that is said in the first chapter is completely irrelevant until you get to the parts that explain it. Overall, I'm happy to have finished this book, and I did kind of like it.

Cane by Jean Toomer

Cane is an interesting book. It's regarded as one of the best works of the Harlem Renaissance, and is a pretty dense read. He combines plenty of poetry with prose and drama, and even the prose ends up feeling very poetic. It's very stream-of-conscious-like writing, though not technically, and tells a series of stories from the South focusing on race relations, sexual conventions of the African American community, sugarcane, and general southern-ness. I would not particularly recommend it unless someone is craving a text with integrated parts of prose and poetry. 117 pages.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

VERY good novel, a classic and for good reason, the story is loosely based off of the time that Hemingway spent in Paris and Europe after WWI where he was injured as an ambulance driver. In the novel, however, the protagonist's injury is his man parts and chronicles his group of alcoholic ex-pat friends as they live and travel in a drunken haze. The story takes the group on vacation in Spain where Hemingway uses bullfighting as vivid and beautiful metaphor for masculinity of his characters (all of which are, or have at one time, trying to pursue the same woman, Lady Bret). Recommended for everyone, a classic from arguably the greatest American writer of the 20th century. 247 pages.

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

It's one of Hemingway's earliest collections of short stories, and par usual for the man, is thoroughly readable. The stories are divided into some of the main Hemingway-an categories - love stories, war stories, and bull fighting. 153 pages.

The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich

This book is an inside look at the founding of Facebook and how it developed from a dorm room joke program to a 15 billion dollar business in such a short time. Easy, interesting read. If you've read Bringing Down the House, it's written by the same author and follows the same kind of idea.

255 Pages

The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith

This book is about the 90-91 Bulls season, written right after they won the title. I heard about it through the Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons and it contains alot of insight and first person accounts of how the Bulls dynasty was started with Jordan and Pippen. The book gained notoriety because it contained stories that sometimes portrayed Jordan negatively. The book was interesting to me because it really showed how dysfunctional that team was, despite how great they were. Great insight into the the minds of Phil Jackso, Jordan and all the players. It was cool to read the book knowing the future of how that Bulls team would end up, especially in regards to how they viewed Dennis Rodman.

I would recommend to any of the boys, which is in no way sexist.

378 Pages

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Some of you have probably already read this, but it's an interesting read. Gladwell's way of thinking and how he explains things is enlightening and makes you look at things in a different way. I would recommend to any of us, the themes in the book are something most anyone can relate to.

280 Pages

World War Z; An Oral History of the Zombie War

By Max Brooks, who also wrote The Zombie Survival Guide. The story follows a writer who compiles interviews with military personnel, civilians, and any significant role-player in the rise of and the backing down of the undead. It's a particularly interesting novel because it's scope; most zombie movies/books consider themselves with the survival on an individual, whereas this story focuses on the international level, different national approaches and strategies to dealing with a war enemy and the potential pitfalls of the panic related to an epidemic like Zombies which would nearly bring humanity to extinction. I think these post-apocalyptic topics are so interesting because of that factor - what would we have to do to defend our species - not just human life, but the human spirit as well. That and that the enemy is literally the body of your friend, neighbor, or even family member reanimated by a different being hell-bent on destroying you. That's pretty f-ed up, but so was the holocaust, so go figure.

Everything is Illimunated by Jonathon Safran Foer

288 pages. It's the story, written in a cool format of two characters in a correspondence as the authors. The protagonist, who shares the name of the author, goes to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Holocaust, and basically tells his family history along the way. It was a little more risque than I expected at parts (as I have been reading books approved by the Fenwick English Department for too long), but is super well done and really pretty addicting.

The Book of Basketball

I second Christopher's post. At times it feels like when you ingest too much meat, and get the meat sweats. Except with reading about basketball.

Open by Andre Agassi

The book is an autobiography written by Andre Agassi. It generated a huge buzz when the book came out, because of Agassi's openness within the writing, for instance admitting that he tested positive for crystal meth while on tour and lied about it. It also talks candidly about his relationships with Brooke Shields and Steffi Graf. I found the book to be very interesting, even though I knew about most the revelations Agassi makes before I read the book. It deals much more with the mental aspect of sport than the physical side. I recommend to anyone who vaguely remembers Agassi's playing career. 387 Pages, but doesn't feel that long.

1: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

This wonderful work of fiction was my first book 0f 2010 about Oskar Schell, an 8-year-old boy who loses his beloved father in the September 11th attacks. He finds a key his father left behind - and no lock. He traipses around all five boroughs of New York to find the answer and deal with his grief - with just one clue.

It's very sad. But very well done.

368 pages.

2: The Learners by Chip Kidd

For any of my siblings who may wonder about what a) graphic design is or b) what a graphic design student experience is, Chip Kidd's "The Learners" is a great start. Well, technically, the first book "Cheese Monkeys" is better, though that was my last book of 2009.

In "The Learners," we meet the recent grad in his first job experience at an agency in New Haven, CT. Alert: psychological experiments play a heavy role in the book.

Extra: Chip Kidd is a legendary book cover designer for such authors as David Sedaris and Michael Crichton. You can see his work here. To some extent, graphic design is a character in the book - with clever layouts to emphasize emotion, etc.

A novel in 288 pages.

Up In The Air

This is the Walter Kirn book they made in to a movie. I read it on the way back from Maui, so I may have been legally blacked out after a certain point of exhaustion was reached, after which I continued reading to a lesser level of effectiveness. I plan on seeing the movie and would like not to spoil it for anyone who is planning on it, but if you have any questions, let me know. I thought it was a decent, not all that good book. Frankly from what I saw of the preview the two stories seem to have a couple parallels but have two different plots. Movie seems like the way to go. This may in fact conclude my 2010 book postings, and I think I'm tied for the lead!!!

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy

This was the Bill Simmons book dragged around by myself and Matthew for most of the Maui trip. I say dragged because it was 736 PAGES ABOUT FREAKING BASKETBALL! I read it strictly because one of my favorite writers (really The Sports Guy is an ESPN columnist who intertwines sports knowledge with an impressive level of pop culture & much humor) rather than as some sort of basketball die-hard. Not for the faint of heart. Had some sweating episodes and shortness of breath due to excessive amounts of basketball. I think the current readership of our family should be all of its readership.

Blindness

By José Saramago, 326 pages, original title Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, or Essay about Blindness. It's a big one in Portuguese (from Portugal) contemporary literature, and is an international best-seller about how blindness suddenly becomes an epidemic, spreading like an airborne disease and effecting everyone it comes into contact with, and one woman (julianne moore in the movie) who can still see through it all. It was really good, the style takes a bit of time to get into bc he uses punctuation sparingly and doesn't directly indicate who's speaking, but as the book goes on it gives the dialogue a much more realistic feel. It's pretty moving and I'd recommend it to anyone, particularly if you enjoy that post-apocalyptic genre of "everything is totally fucked" literature.

Superfreakonomics

Easy to read, pretty interesting. 216 pages.

How to post...

OK sportsfans, here is the blog to keep track, as promised. I suggest in the interest of keeping the task less daunting, we clarify what we should post.

The post should contain;

the title of the book (in the title of the post)
the author
the number of pages
why the book interested you in the first place
your reactions to the read

and anything else you may want to put up. The last thing I'd want is for this to feel like some of the postings I do for school, so it should be fairly simple and not at all time-consuming.

to actually write a posting, you will first need to go to the blog, then hit log-in in the upper right corner of the blue blogger bar. use the e-mail you register with, (or your gmail address, the site is run by google) and it will show all the blogs you are registered with that e-mail. then hit the blue new post button, write your post, hit publish now, and whammy - posted.

and really, i guess we don't need to post on everything we read, but it's probably a good thing to mentally note a couple things about any book, whether you liked it or not, and be able to recall things about it down the road. otherwise why the fuck did you read it, you know?

If you're not first, you're last

Born to Run, 282 pgs. Recommended for Courtney and Katie - quick read and gets you pumped about running. Also about eating something called pinole.