books #107-113

107. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan ****. Another book that made me extremely glad to be vegetarian, although I probably could eat the happy meat from the nice, sustainable farm he visited. The section about the industrial nature of the food industry was so depressing because of the way the whole system is set up to be enormously wasteful and destructive. The most depressing part (as with Nickel and Dimed) is how everyone else in the food supply chain is effectively subsidising the enormous corporations. The section about how little difference there is between large-scale organic and non-organic farming was also pretty depressing. The happy farm was nice, though, and the hunting and gathering section was mostly just interesting without being depressing.

108. Crossworld by Marc Romano **. I picked this up because it was on the shelf next to the excellent Word Freak, and I enjoyed the crossword documentary, Wordplay, although not as much as the Scrabble one. Unfortunately, I didn't really like this book. I found the author's tone and frequent irrelevant side notes about things like the women he found attractive kind of annoying.

109. It's Kind of A Funny Story by Ned Vizzini ****1/2. I was reading this last week while I ate lunch by myself. When I got in the lift to go back upstairs, the rest of my lab appeared, and they asked about the book. I was kind of embarrassed to be reading a YA book about a suicidal guy who ends up in a psychiatric hospital, probably because I could identify with it more than I would want to admit. It's a good book, though. Craig's depression and apathy were very familiar, but I was jealous of how much his life turned around in five days.

110. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield **1/2. The quote on the cover calls this book something like "a kick in the pants" and it was kind of good for that, I suppose. It mainly just describes how resistance gets in the way of doing anything remotely worth doing, and I kind of liked that it suggested that resistance is stronger the more you care about something, rather than the usual idea that perhaps that much resistance is a sign you don't really want to do the thing (something that came up in "It's Kind of a Funny Story"). The proposed solution, however, seemed to be simply "just do it", which, while true, is oh-so-helpful. I also found the tone to be irritatingly macho somehow.

111. The Ghost Map: the story of London's most terrifying epidemic - and how it changed science, cities and the modern world by Steven Johnson ***1/2. This was very interesting. It's pretty impressive how much detail is known about the cholera epidemic described. It got a little less interesting once it finished talking about that particular epidemic and moved on to talk about possible future threats. The only thing that really annoyed me, though, was that the book didn't include the actual map the title refers to.

112. Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss ****1/2. As I was reading this, I kept thinking about what makes a book worth 5 stars. This book was definitely a contender, but I didn't completely love it. I was wondering if hearing criticism of books I've previously given the highest rating has made me reluctant to trust my judgement (never an easy task for me, anyway), but perhaps it's just that I wanted to like it more than I did. I did like it a lot, anyway. It's the story of a man who loses all his memories after the age of 12, due to a brain tumour. His loneliness and loss, and those of his wife, who he doesn't recognise, were heartbreaking. The ideas surrounding the memory transfer experiments he got involved with were interesting, but somehow that part of the story didn't work quite as well as the rest of it.

113. The Now Habit by Neil Fiore ***. I actually put in a request for this book almost a year ago and I was slightly concerned my request would expire without me getting to read it. I wasn't sufficiently motivated to actually find a copy another way, though, which is kind of apt, given that it's yet another procrastination self-help book. It seems to have some more useful ideas than "just do it", some of which I've tried before, but I'll try them again and maybe some of the new ones.

This was a surprisingly non-fiction-heavy book post. I don't usually read much of that at all.