Food Rules: An Eater's Manual by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan's Food Rules: An Eater's Manual is such a quick read at only 139 pages that I almost forgot to write about it here after I read it all in one afternoon. Pollan writes in his other books about his simple "diet" philosophy: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants, and this book is divided into three sections based on those three ideas. Each section contains "rules" meant to guide you towards creating a food culture for yourself that avoids the traps of modern industrial processed food and establishes healthier eating patterns.

Disclaimer: Let me just say that I usually cringe at the thought of "healthy lifestyles." I sneer at exercise, I've never been inside a gym, I don't run (weak ankles!), and I hate "health food." Foodies and trendy diet nuts are to be avoided. I like bourbon, butter, and backsliding. I love caffeine and chicken friend steak. Nevertheless, some of the "food" that I see advertised on TV scares the bajeezus out of me. What are we eating, America?! It's not right.

So I appreciate that Pollan is offering up 64 completely commonsensical tips for doing a better job of consuming actual food in reasonable portions. Here are some of my favorites:

#2: Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
#11: Avoid foods you see advertised on television.
#19: If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.
#36: Don't eat breakfast foods that change the color of the milk.
#39: Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.
#47: Eat when you are hungry, not when you're bored. "If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry. Food is a costly antidepressant." - I've actually been using this test. It makes so much sense!!
#63: Cook.
#64: Break the rules once in a while.

As always, whenever someone lays out some simple, honest Truths for you, it feels good to embrace them. Buy this book! (Thanks Jane and Dale for buying me this book!)

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

In 1940, Germany invaded France and occupied the northern half which included Paris. The southern half was governed under martial law by the Vichy French State who collaborated heavily with the Germans in order to maintain the illusion of independent sovereignty. On May 10, 1941, about 4,000 Jewish men of non-French nationality were arrested by the French police and sent to internment camps. Then, on July 16 and 17, 1942, a massive round up of more than 13,000 men, women, and children took place mostly in and around Paris. The Germans called it Operation Spring Breeze, but the French and Jewish people refer to it as Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver (or just Vel' d'Hiv).

The Vélodrome d'Hiver was an indoor cycling arena near the Eiffel Tower. After the arrests were made around dawn, the Jews were bussed from all over the city to the Vel' d'Hiv and confined there for several days in sweltering summer heat under glass skylights without food, water, or sanitation. From there, they were sent to internment camps around Paris, and later on to Auschwitz in Poland to be killed.

The rafle (roundup) was meticulously planned by the German SS, but it was carried out by the French police force with the permission of the Vichy leadership who seem to have considered Jewish deportation a benefit to France even though they claimed to have had no choice but to appease their occupiers in this request. As evidence of French enthusiasm, the French police ordered children as young as two to be arrested with their parents even though children younger than 15 or 16 were not included in the German deportation orders (since they were upholding the ploy that the Jews were needed as workers). Additionally, only foreign born or stateless Jews were required by the Germans, but many of the Vel' d'Hiv Jews were actually French citizens, especially the children who were often even French-born. After the war, the French government refused to take responsibility for their complicity in the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, claiming that the Vichy State was not the French Republic and therefore the Republic was not to blame, until in 1995 Jaques Chirac formally acknowledged the deportation and apologized for France's involvement.

Tatiana de Rosnay's novel Sarah's Key tells the story of the Vel' d'Hiv in two intertwining narratives: one of a young Jewish girl living through the roundup and its aftermath in 1942 and the other of a middle-aged American journalist living in present-day Paris with her French husband and daughter, researching the event for an article. Julia, the journalist, discovers a very personal connection between herself and Sarah, the girl, which promts her to try to find out whether or not Sarah survived the Holocaust and might still be alive, now an old woman.

I generally shy away from Holocaust literature and films. I've read and seen tons of them now, and visited Jewish museums in Germany, and it's emotionally exhausting to keep recovering that same horrifying ground. When my sister-in-law loaned this book to me, I was intruiged by the plot summary but wary of digging into a book I couldn't finish. Nevertheless, I found this unusual story of a forgotten piece of war history to be really captivating. I ended up doing some additional reading online about the Vel' d'Hiv, the French camps, the Vichy government, and the French Resistance because the topic sparked my interest. My only quibble was that I felt the relationship between Julia and her husband was kind of a distraction and not really satisfactorily resolved in terms of how it related to the rest of the story. There should have been something about how uncovering Sarah's story changed the way she felt about family and relationships or something like that, but it never really surfaced. Otherwise, I felt it was at least something new, a new story well told about an well-covered era.

Ironically, I also watched Inglorious Basterds this weekend! Another French setting for an unusual Holocaust story. Weird. Good movie - the German officer Landau steals the show!

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie

What's the deal with all the Agatha Christie novels on your reading list?

Well OK, here's the deal, after Kate was born I had loads of time trapped on the couch at 3 am with a nursing baby and not a lot of brainpower left to ponder the deep thoughts of Western Civilization. I decided to reread all of my Agatha Christies. I have TONS of them on a bookshelf upstairs, collected since high school since I've probably read all of the novels, most of the short stories, a play or two, and her autobiography. Agatha wrote 80 detective novels (between 1920 and 1973), about 160 short stories, about 20 plays, some poems, two works of nonfiction, and a handful of romance novels under a pseudonym. Only the Bible has outsold her, and her play The Mousetrap is the longest running play ever in the world (it opened in 1952 and is still being performed).

It sounds like a daunting task, but I can rip through a Poirot or a Miss Marple in a couple of days, especially since I've already read most of them before. Surprisingly, though, I rarely remember the outcomes of the stories entirely until I get close to the end - probably because there are just so many plots to remember and because the characters tend to be very similar British upper-class stereotypes. Also, a decade of hard drinking has passed since I read some of these! :) Often, the plot twists still catch me off guard, and even when I do remember whodunit I still get to marvel at her ingenuity.

I decided from the beginning to read the books in chronological order. One of the fascinating things about Agatha's novels are that they are set in the time that they were written and her career spanned the middle 50 years of the 20th century. So much changed so drastically in Great Britain from WWI to the Cold War. The Tommy and Tuppence books are the best example of this: the series of I think about 5 books begins with a very young couple during WWI and continues through various stages of their family life together into old age with all the changes to British culture and technology happening in the background. It's great entertainment for a history lover like me. I started a year ago with The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and now I've just finished Evil Under the Sun (1941). Here's a list of all her books, in chronological order, if you're interested to see how I'm doing. I am also reading the short stories, although I'm not doing as well at keeping them in the chronological order so I will have to catch up with them at some point, but I'm skipping the plays and other writings for now.

Next up, N or M? (a Tommy and Tuppence, by the way).

Half Broke Horses, Part Two

Now that Festivus is over, I'm dedicated to getting this blog going again. I'm going to rip through some books over here, I promise. Let's begin by wrapping up Half Broke Horses, shall we?

After finishing the whole story, my recommendation still stands. Walls brings to life an amazing character in all her complexity, celebrating her while never shying away from her flaws. That's quite an accomplishment, especially considering the character is her actual grandmother. It would be so easy to just make her sound delightful and move on, but there's a mountain of dysfunction in Walls' family, and that didn't just crop up out of nowhere. Lily Casey Smith was a tough woman, and you can admire her for that, but on the other hand she was also a hard woman, and that wasn't so easy for her little daughter who grew up to be the author's messed up mother.

The book is subtitled, A True Life Novel, which at first glance makes no sense. Walls decided to tell Lily's story first person, thereby being forced to fictionalize some details and dialogue in order to keep a readable narrative going. For this reason, I guess, it's no longer a memoir or a biography. Lily grew up on horse ranches in West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. She later taught school (uneducated and uncertified herself, but willing, I guess, and that's all that mattered at the time) in one room school houses in remote desert towns. She married, had two kids, and worked ranches with her husband, too. She was a horse racin', poker playin', airplane flyin', gun totin', straight shootin' wild west character, and while that life may have been wild and free, it was not easy by any means. Some of Lily's stories are awe inspiring, some mind boggling, some horrifying, some hilarious. One of my favorite lines is repeated a few times when Lily says, "You just got the lace knocked off your panties, that's all!"

But you get the sense that as she aged, Lily lost patience with the softness in other people. In particular, she had very little empathy for her dreamy, artistic, impractical daughter. She spent most of her time "teaching her a lesson," thinking she was saving the girl from learning hard truths through experience. Little Rosemary was impulsive and irrational though, and these cold lessons just pushed her further and further from her mother's practical approach to life's joys and miseries.

In her first memoir, Walls told the Angela's Ashes-esque story of her own childhood in Rosemary's manic-depressive care. (Walls' father was also an alcoholic and a dreamer.) Having read The Glass Castle, it's fascinating to see where some of Rosemary's personality quirks originated. As I said in my last post, I would recommend reading The Glass Castle first. Half Broke Horses definitely stands on it's own as a novel and could be read entirely by itself, but you would miss some of the deeper, looming tragedy that will play out in the next generation. It would be interesting to read them chronologically, I guess, but I still think that there's an assumption in Half Broke Horses that you already know and understand the darker aspect of Lily's legacy. Whichever way you decide to tackle them, both stories are gripping and complex and real and amazing.