Aside: It has taken me long enough, but I finally added a “subscribe to my idiocy by email” feature. Feel free to sign up on the right hand side if you’re that kind of glutton for punishment.

I’m still on Book Selection Probation, and so have been turning to the group for suggestions. This month, I’m going with Proust Was a Neuroscientist, suggested by my awesome sister-in-law. Since she’s smart, funny and obviously has fine taste in men, I trust her judgment.

The book, by Jonah Lehrer, discusses how the work of some artists seems to have predicted later scientific discoveries. For example, that Proust wrote about how tastes and smells evoke strong memories 90 years before a psychologist first demonstrated the same. Whether there is a causal link may be another story. I’m certainly no scientist, but it seems to me that artists may observe a pattern by intuition or long experience that may be later proven scientifically – which could only mean that the same original data is of interest to both parties and sometimes the outcome is bound to be similar, even if by chance.

The book sounds like an interesting exploration, and the author is apparently as bright as he is talented. I’d like to give it a go. Also, to save you the correction I got from my mother, Proust is pronounced “proost.”

I’ve been slow to get back to books because I’ve been trying to reduce the number of old, unread New Yorker magazines that are piling up in my dining room. I didn’t realize how much I relied on my metro commute to get me through those in a timely manner. As it happens, Bethesda to Metro Center five days a week is apparently roughly one New Yorker long. Especially if you skip the fiction. But the pile is a total waste and the magazine is just so damn good. I was thinking they should make it possible to buy a subscription for someone who can’t afford it, but would really love to read it cover to cover. Like, a New Yorker grant. I’d be into that.

• Proust Was a Neuroscientist website
• Read the New York Times review

I’ll ask for comments towards the end of June and plan to post something shortly thereafter.

• Would love to know what else you’re reading. Please comment below or…
• Join BookGraf on Facebook: Good books? Great company? No effort? Exciting typos? What’s not to like?

As always, any purchases of anything made through links on this site will generate a small donation to the American Cancer Society (via my Cancer is an Asshole campaign).

I said that Behind the Beautiful Forevers looked promising and I wasn’t disappointed. My original misgivings were focused mainly on how desperately depressing this book seemed likely to be. We all have read stories of abject poverty, been crushed and demoralized by the terrible things that happen to poor people just because they’re born poor. The world is an awful place a lot of the time – full of danger, degradation, pain, hunger, disease and fear. To name just a few highlights.

It’s actually the same reason I put off reading The Hunger Games for so long. I read the first two pages and had to put it down for a couple of weeks because I just didn’t have the heart to read about bad things happening to children.

But when the group suggested and then voted for Behind the Beautiful Forevers, I more or less cheerfully went along for the ride. And I’m not sorry. Reading author Katherine Boo’s qualifications (New Yorker staff writer, Pulitzer Prize winner), I should have known it would be a winner.

This book isn’t a slick movie – full of redemption and glossy symbolism – nor is it a dry, academic bore-a-thon (no offense to academics – love you!).

What it is, though, is an engaging and lively look into the lives of some of the thousands of people living in shacks on an unused piece of land next to a large and shiny international airport and the flashy hotels that surround it. Some sort and sell recyclable materials, some steal, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, really.

Never over the top, Boo still tells the hard truth. People die. Some of them horribly. Some work and scrape to provide and find that when they get just a small bit ahead of the most abject poverty, they are struck down by circumstance, whim or ill will. Often a really rich stew of the three. The system is broken – and leans heaviest on those with the least resources – wearing them down or grinding them up – the dispensables. They all face enormous challenges which are laid bare here, but not glorified.

Says friend L: “Her images are so real and so strong that they are seared into my brain, although I don’t want to spoil it for others by listing them here. The book shook me up both personally and professionally.”

My mom said that she can’t imagine how Boo reported this in such detail. In the epilogue, Boo explains how she researched and wrote the book – a necessary addition, since all I could think of during the whole tale was what an enormous amount of reporting must have gone into it. She spent years interviewing, observing, researching, and generally making a study of the lives of the people she portrays. Excavating details, polishing them, confirming them and them deftly snapping them into place to create a cogent narrative. This is a heroic feat of attention, energy, patience and organization. And it’s to all of our benefit that Boo is willing to undertake it and able to execute it so well.

• Behind the Beautiful Forevers website
• Read the Washington Post review

• Would love to know what you’re reading. Please comment below or…
• Join BookGraf on Facebook: Good books? Great company? No effort? Exciting typos? What’s not to like?

As always, any purchases of anything made through links on this site will generate a small donation to the American Cancer Society (via my Cancer is an Asshole campaign).

After the Swamplandia! debacle, I have handed in my book-selecting scepter. For this round, I turned to the group and had a lot of great suggestions for books. After a lackluster week of voting during which two books each got one vote, I am going with the one I didn’t pick. You can thank me later.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers looks really promising. It describes itself as “a landmark work of narrative nonfiction,” and is described by others as “brilliantly written, fast-paced” and “intensely reported.” Author, Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker staff writer Katherine Boo spent more than three years following the lives of people in a Mumbai slum. The Washington Post review opens with “This is an astonishing book,” and goes on to describe a story that comes vividly to life, and results in “a searing account, in effective and racy prose, that reads like a thrilling novel but packs a punch Sinclair Lewis might have envied.”

Okay then.

• Behind the Beautiful Forevers website
• Read the Washington Post review

I’ll ask for comments in mid-April and plan to post something shortly thereafter.

• Would love to know what you’re reading. Please comment below or…
• Join BookGraf on Facebook: Good books? Great company? No effort? Exciting typos? What’s not to like?

As always, any purchases of anything made through links on this site will generate a small donation to the American Cancer Society (via my Cancer is an Asshole campaign).

I chose Swamplandia! for a couple of reasons, one of which was the New York Times review, which noted that the author had “honed her elegant verbal wit and fused it with the nightmare logic that makes Swamplandia! such an eccentric yet revelatory family story.”

Not sure “eccentric” is the word I’d use, but author Karen Russel is obviously both talented and hard-working. Nothing in this story was casually composed, but there seemed to be just too much for her to keep track of, and a lot of threads are limply, damply dropped.

In fact, the feeling I had while reading this book was an overwhelming sense of humidity – pronounced in the New York manner (back when people had accents, before we were all homogenized by Real Housewives and YouTube), without the “h,” making it an almost mockingly contemptuous “yoo-midity.” That prickly feeling was a constant, irritating reminder of how little I like being hot and damp in my advanced age. I’d call the story “full-figured,” because it had a lot of color, a lot of dire and a lot of dank that made me think of sepsis. Lots of looming and description, and long, long intervals between flurries of activity.

It probably doesn’t help that I’m not a big fan of Florida in general. Have you ever noticed that when you read a news story that makes you shake your head and wonder when the depths of human depravity will finally be plumbed, the dateline is often Broward County? But I digress.

[and so begin the spoilers]

A lot of loose ends were also left waving in the water’s current, like the young protagonist  Ada’s shoelace. Just blithely, moistly lingering – full of mosquitoes and fury, signifying nothing.

Built on the presumed magic of the swamp, both the mystical qualities of the Everglades and the sordid nature of terra firma are whitewashed. “Of course it’s not XXXX” seems to be the moral. Nothing is as bad or as good as originally thought, imagined or mythologized. Nothing is resolved and nothing is better of worse. It’s only later. The only illusion left intact is that of Hilola – the mother figure, whisked off to the underworld at the height of her powers. A tragedy that turns out to be only the beginning of a long series of things that suck.

But back to the positive, because again – the author truly has something going. I’d love to read her next one, or maybe ease back in with some short stories, if she’s so inclined.

• Would love to know what you’re reading. Please comment here or join us on Facebook.

It’s a new year, if you can believe it. Honestly, I feel kind of shorted on 2011. There’s no way that was 12 whole months. 2012 just seems so rich by comparison – and already riddled with such delights as stolen credit cards, recalled automobiles, assorted family and friend-related mishegoss. But things are actually pretty good overall, and I’m just doing some wholesale Winter Whining.

So – as we look towards a couple of months of dark, cold, probably wet and/or icy days, let’s get a little lost in a nice, shiny, new novel that takes place in Florida (Unofficial Motto: The Sun-Damaged Décolletage State).

I selected Swamplandia! because it’s new, looked like fun, got good reviews, and is charmingly inexpensive. What can I say, in these trying economic times, it makes good sense to support the trade paperback industry.

Here’s the review in the New York Times, which mentions that author Karen Russell has “honed her elegant verbal wit and fused it with the nightmare logic that makes Swamplandia! such an eccentric yet revelatory family story.” Despite the fact that Ms. Russell is infuriatingly young and talented, I do like a lot of the adjectives in that sentence, and also a couple of the nouns, so let’s do this.

The novel unfolds in a failing gator-wrestling Everglades theme park, where the 13-year-old protagonist is trying to keep things afloat at the family theme park in the face of a pretty comprehensive list of crises. I’m making it sound wacky, and some of the ingredients are just that, but the review emphasizes that the story and its telling are also haunting and suspenseful.

I’ll ask for comments in mid-February and plan to post something shortly thereafter.

• Would love to know what you’re reading. Please comment below or…
• Join BookGraf on Facebook: Good books? Great company? No effort? Exciting typos? What’s not to like?

As always, any purchases of anything made through links on this site will generate a small donation to the American Cancer Society (via my Cancer is an Asshole campaign).

I was a little reluctant to read this one. No good reason for that. It was highly and widely praised (effusively, in the comments on Amazon), and all kinds of best-selling. Lord knows I love a good novel, and even a sensational one, and there is something I think almost organically compelling about a tale of captivity and redemption – the more sordid, the better.

Next Stop: Spoilers

Not that this was sordid. The more ghastly details of captivity are mostly lacking, and it’s this dignity that - I felt, anyway – made the captor less terrifying. In the notes at the end of the book, Donoghue said that she wanted this most of all to be a story of Jack and his mother. And maybe it’s that overriding sympathetic starting point that takes some of the horror out of an otherwise horrifying situation and leaves the captor kind of flat. And also, since 5-year-old Jack is the narrator, how horrible can it all be? His mother protects him as best she can, and this – after all – is the only world he’s ever known. A child’s home is, well, home.

The aspect I thought was most inspired is that so much of the narrative takes place “after.” The details of rescue were a little muddled for me, but I zipped through it so fast because I had to know what came next, so I can’t complain. I was mesmerized by this new beginning – The medical and security precautions, the pragmatic and social issues that arise when a long-time prisoner (who went in as a teenager and came out a woman and a mother) and a child who is essentially an alien are brought into the light. And how that big a transition is not likely to be a simple, happy, sashay into a bright future.

Here are some thoughts from B, another reader:

“I thought the portrait of the mother was excellent. She had such a crazy/anxious/bitter edge, having poured every bit of her humanity into her son. The author’s imagined world of one small room rang very true, as did her view from a child’s eyes: he saw the room as very, very big. And I agree with you that having half the book be about life after the room was a good move.”

B is very sympathetic to the mother (small wonder, B’s been one for almost 38 years), and I love the analysis about pouring her humanity into Jack. B is also a mental health counselor, so she may have some insight here.

P didn’t get that far, which I can also totally respect:

“I tried reading it, but had a very had time with the pace. I guess that’s maybe the point – to see how painfully slow time is for the kid and his mom. I feel obligated to try again some time, but right now I’m absorbed by The Hunger Games, which if you haven’t read it, is horrifying and awesome – everything I look for in a book.”

So all in all, I call it a win. What did you think?

• Pretty gushy New York Times review.
• A longer NPR dealio with an excerpt, if you’re into that sort of thing.
• Here’s the website for Room
• And here is the floor plan of, well, the room.
• Would love to know what you’re reading. Please comment below or join us on Facebook.

Not entirely sure if I’m up to it, but I’m going with Room for our November-ish book. With one online and a couple of offline recommends, it sounds like a good read, even if the premise (raising a child in captivity) is disturbing. Maybe it’s the laryngitis I’m battling now (daycare is a petri dish), maybe it’s the fact that I have become a total, abject wuss since the advent of Offspring, but I’m not champing at the bit to rip this one open.

But what do I know? The reviews are great, it’s a best-seller, and the whole point of this book club exercise is to read new things.

And isn’t that one of the dangers of the Internet? The ability to totally sequester yourself with those of like mind, limiting the diversity of influence in your own life, and failing to learn new things? I think this has a lot to do with the current state of political discourse in America. And also maybe the state of the workforce and disenfranchisement of the younger generations – when you have the world at your fingertips, sometimes real life disappoints. But I digress.

So let’s do it! I’ll ask for comments on the book towards the end of November.

• Here’s the website for Room
• And here is the floor plan of, well, the room.
• Would love to know what you’re reading. Please comment below or join us on Facebook.

Okay, show of hands, who vowed to change their shopping habits after reading this book? I sure did. No more mealy, unsatisfying tomatoes from the supermarket for me. Now I can glare at the ubiquitous stacks of tasteless salad decor and know that behind them are deformed babies, slavery and the agricultural cartel they call the Florida Tomato Committee.

“When I asked Molloy [chief assistant US attorney in Fort Myers, FL] if it was safe to assume that a consumer who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store, fast food restaurant, or food service company in the winter has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave, he corrected my choice of words. ‘Its not an assumption. It is a fact.”

What else do you need to know? I found Tomatoland to be a gripping read. Estabrook does a great job of weaving together all of the many failings of this industry, and then closes (spoiler alert) with the story of a farmer who has decided to take another tack, and found success producing tasty, healthful produce, without poisons, and while paying his employees a livable wage that allows them to take care of themselves and their families. Given, it’s clear that Tim Stark, the founder and owner of Eckerton Hill Farm is maybe a little intense, it takes that kind of intensity and single-mindedness of purpose to build a game-changing business literally from the ground up.

I’m kind of hoping that he doesn’t go after strawberries next. I anticipate that there is nothing good to learn there. And blueberries are almost certainly tiny, delectable fruits of the devil.

Barry Estabrook’s blog, Politics of the Plate, confirms my abiding suspicion that I just don’t think deeply enough about anything.

I think it’s really interesting that this book is making the rounds just as the #Occupy movement is getting more serious. The themes of corporate greed and omnipotence, as well as profiteering off of the most vulnerable people, ensuring their ongoing impoverishment – are clearly illustrated here with neither jargon nor hysteria. Pregnant women being sprayed with pesticides and threatened with eviction from their homes if they dare to call in sick. Clusters of babies born with multiple, devastating defects – some unsurvivable. People held in actual slavery with beatings and chains and stuff. These are not small things.

It’s not all bad news, though. Estabrook also writes about the bright spots. Organizations that are working to improve the lot of workers and large-scale produce buyers (grocery and fast food companies) pledging their support for workers and safety. Small but growing businesses that are making it even as they treat workers fairly, are good environmental stewards and produce a superior product.

Hey kids, it can be done.

The coverage has been great, and here are some selections.

Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes: The 1999 article in Gourmet magazine that started it all.

How Industrial Farming ‘Destroyed’ The Tasty Tomato: Estabrook’s Fresh Air interview, and an excerpt from the book.

That Perfect Florida Tomato, Cultivated for Bland Uniformity: New York Times review, that calls it an “angry new book,” that “simmers like a big, bright kettle of heirloom tomato sauce.” Hyperbole much, NYT?

Barry Estabrook’s ‘Tomatoland,’ an indictment of modern agriculture: The Washington Post’s review goes straight for the slavery. And why not?

• Would love to know what you’re reading. Please comment below or e-mail me at thea [at] nutgraf dot net.
• Join BookGraf on Facebook: Good books? Great company? No effort? What’s not to like?

It’s been a busy summer in a lot of ways. Professionally, personally, meteorologically and – God help us – geologically. Too much work, not enough time, way too much weather and a bonus earthquake later, and I’m feeling pretty good about not picking an August book. But as Labor Day and all of its attendant deadlines approached, I started looking for a good read to share for September. Here’s what I was looking for:

• Nonfiction – to help get back in the groove of serious work.
• Perhaps economics-related – after the redonkulous showdown on Capitol Hill this summer.
• Gripping and not too chewy – Too much math and I start stuttering. I’m not proud of this.
• Something recently released – Let’s get current!

As I was flapping around, I asked the group on Facebook for recommends, and they totally came through. Freakonomics,The Thank You Economy, Nudge, The Big Short, This Land is Their Land… All fantastic suggestions. None of which I decided to take.

I was sitting here at Nutgraf HQ (my workstation set up on the kitchen counter), tweeting on behalf of a client and half-listening to Science Friday where they were talking about Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, and I was interested in reading more.

I don’t know about you, but the way I grew up, summer was when you grew tomatoes. My grandmother was famous for her tomatoes in Great Neck, NY, and my grandfather told stories of her going into the yard and individually killing any bug that dared land on them. My mother grew them religiously, and so did I – compulsively – until last year when I finally saw the light and realized that I much prefer the walk to the farmer’s market, and that even at Bethesda rates, it is far more economical to go pick one up than to invest in the infrastructure needed to successfully produce your own. Which is all only to say how prominently they featured in my mid-Atlantic life.

But this book looks interesting because it is about the life and impact of the tomato industry. It looks like a really comprehensive and… terrifying examination of the lifecycle of the ubiquitous and virtually tasteless supermarket tomato, and I am looking forward to reading it.

Work/life being what it is when things really get rolling in September, let’s give this til mid-October. I’ll ask for comments on Facebook and post the review shortly thereafter.

• Would love to know what you’re reading. Please comment below or join us on Facebook.
• Join BookGraf on Facebook: Good books? Great company? No effort? Exciting typos? What’s not to like?

As always, any purchases through links on this site will generate a small donation to the American Cancer Society (via my Cancer is an Asshole campaign).

In a fit of pants-antsiness, I wrote a tiny children’s book. And by tiny I mean that it is written for tiny children, and also a tiny book. Since spawning, I’ve been trying to read her books of all kinds, but find myself fighting my gag reflex in the bookstore an awful lot. Either sickly sweet, or having nothing to them, there are a metric fuck-ton of weak children’s books on the market. That I now have to read endlessly over and over.

So I wanted to make a little book that parents would enjoy, too. Nothing too saucy, though I do think that Go the Fuck to Sleep is a work of beautiful genius. And I have a low nightmare index in a lot of ways, so it had to be unimpeachably pleasant. For example, who the heck approved the plot of Toy Story? That movie gives me a complex about the feelings of the heretofore inanimate items in my house.

So, here we are. I wrote a tiny book about a slightly dandy-ish sock monkey: Watson On The Move

I’ve made no secret of my affection for sock monkeys. We go way back. I used to make them (poorly), and was super excited to introduce the concept to my kid. When I was massively pregnant and people gave me seats on the metro (mostly out of fear that I might fall and crush the life out of them if they didn’t), my darling office mates gave me one as a baby shower kind of a gift. This was, of course, just before I went on maternity leave. A leave from which I utterly failed to return. Thanks guys!

I named our sock monkey Watson. Because Spouse and his family have a long and legitimate background in genomics, and Watson and Crick are popular in these parts. Yes. We’re nerds. That will only be news to you if you’re just tuning in. But I’m really proud of the name – I think it suits the monkey perfectly. It’s wacky, but earnest. Friendly and old fashioned. A little too formal, which makes it even cuter. I call it a win.

So, in what was effectively a nervous tic, I wrote this tiny children’s book about the monkey and his day. And it was crap. And I inflicted it on you all a while ago in a ridiculously expensive print format (see: I just accidentally wrote a children’s book). Ridiculously, because the final product is full of crappy low-res photos (trust me, I took them), and small and flimsy. My cat ate through the cover of my only copy in mere moments.

And then in a moment of lunacy, I sent it to an agent. A very kind agent who did eventually return my emailed query with a thoughtful and kind response, telling me all of the very fine reasons why he would decline to discuss the book further with me. Surprisingly none of which were that I am obviously a dangerous lunatic.

So I put on Kindle. Which sounds easy, but wasn’t because I was determined that it look well on the iphone, and the “preview” function on Amazon is kind of wonky. And we have no functioning Windows computers in this house (of roughly 12 computers) and you need Windows to make whatever crack-addled format Amazon prefers, so I had to do about a dozen versions of Word documents, while weeping gently, upload and test.

And now the rave reviews are just pouring in!

“Nice job. More Offspring photos, please.” - Mom

“What, no iPad version?” – A Friend

“I’ll wait til it’s out on Nook.” – A-nother friend

“Hey, are you done with those fries?” - Spouse

“[actual child's name] said her favorite part was when Watson takes a bath in his rain jacket. She had fun with it…kudos Thea! Great idea.” – Super Awesome Friend – your check is in the mail!

But here we are! It published cleanly and looks great on my iPhone and Xoom! The prose is still clunky (but much improved from version 1, promise), and the pictures are small and poor. But I think it’s adorable. And it’s cheap. I’m cooking up new things for Watson to do – thinking of taking him to the museum, to the firehouse, to the grocery store. Definitely taking him to the beach. With any luck, I’ll make the next ones more interesting.

• If you’re so inclined, you can check out Watson On The Move on Amazon.
• If you hate that idea, but want to check him out anyway, write to me and we’ll work it out.
• And if you’re into books, check out BookGraf on Facebook. We’re low-impact.