Do-Over! (Robin Hemley)

You know those things you did when you were a kid/teenager that still kind of haunt you? Like not learning how to ride a bike (just a generic example). And giving up on piano lessons because the teacher wanted you to play classical music and you wanted to play the Beatles (again, just another generic example). Robin Hemley confronts his own list of do-overs at the age of 48 in Do-Over!, including kindergarten, an elementary school play where he flubbed his lines, eighth grade, and a foreign exchange year cut short.

I loved reading this book. I would end a chapter and ask Jim questions like if he ever went to camp (answer: yes), what his favorite grade was (answer: twelfth, because it was the last) and his least favorite one (eighth grade, same as Hemley's). (My favorite was tenth grade, the year I went to a great school in Colorado Springs, and my least favorite was seventh, when it was very, very uncool to be smart). Hemley assimilates easily back into kindergarten. Of all the grades he revisits, these kids are most accepting of him.

By the end of my first day, we're all a bit confused. If I wasn't having a midlife crisis before, I am now. And my classmates are having a bit of a beginning-life crisis---not quite sure what to make of the new kid.

As we're waiting at the end of the day to be dismissed, we sit on the floor with our coats and backpacks, legs "crisscross applesauce," which is a little difficult for me.

"Are you going to Extended Day?" Stefan asks me.
"No," I say. "I'm going home."
"Do you ride the bus?" Louis asks.
"No."
"Oh. Well, who's picking you up?" Haley asks.
"My wife," I say.
There's a long moment of silence as they take that in and blink at me like cats.
"Oh," says Stefan finally. "I thought you were going to say your dad."

Hemley finds that the second time around isn't necessarily easier, and still feels a lot of the nervousness/embarrassment he felt the first time. Or there's added nervousness when he starts to think about the strangeness of his project and what others must be thinking about it.

I'd often think about my own do-over list while reading. The only item I really could think of was piano lessons (a common answer, according to Hemley), but instead of a do-over list, I was forming a different list in my head, what some people call a bucket list, or a life list (my favorite example is Maggie Mason's Mighty Life List, and she even recently got herself a sponsor!). I haven't really decided what would be on it, but in some ways it might resemble a do-over list in that some items would be things that I could have done in the past but didn't (like learn how to ride a horse, hike Pikes Peak) and other items that either I'd forget that I'd want to do or might need an extra push to actually go do them (either because they're out of my comfort zone or take commitment or extra funds, etc.). Sometimes just writing down a list of things you want to accomplish can really help push you in the right direction. I'm thinking of posting it on Facebook so then I have a built-in cheering section and can document the progress.

(Oh, and I did finally learn to ride a bike. At age 25. In a Jewish Community Center parking lot on a borrowed bike. So in some ways I guess that's a version of my own do-over.)

Shakespeare (Bill Bryson)

Most of my reading these days gets done at night, right before I fall asleep, which is translating to a lot of "easy" reading, for lack of a better term: entertaining, nothing with too many details, uncomplicated, nothing really considered too literary. So I surprised myself when I requested a biography of Shakespeare at the library. But it was by Bill Bryson, who I've loved, and who I've loved not so much. I knew I had made the right decision when I read the first sentence of the book:

Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.

Fiction workshops can be built around first sentences, and this one, although considered nonfiction, is right up there with the best. (Grenville had been the owner of what is now known as the Chandos portrait, which is believed to be of Shakespeare.) Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, Bryson explains, "was written not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare as this series does. The idea is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record. Which is one reason, of course, it's so slender."

There isn't a lot on record of Shakespeare, but this hasn't stopped people from speculating, sometimes wildly, about his life and who exactly he was. Bryson brings us back to Shakespeare's time, tells us what we know, what we might, and what we don't. (He does an excellent job near the end of the book dispelling some of the myths of the Shakespeare conspiracists who believe that someone else wrote the plays, noting that much of the drive behind that movement came from Delia Bacon, an American who believed, quite wrongly, that she was connected to Francis Bacon, and that Francis Bacon was then the real playwright.)

It's definitely a good read and would probably be an excellent audiobook for those of you who appreciate such things.

The Pluto Files (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

The day after the International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto's status to a "dwarf planet," my friend and coworker Jenn printed out "I Heart Pluto" stickers for many in our office to wear in defiance. What? You didn't do this at your work on that day? Hmmm, then maybe you don't work in science. We felt compelled to stand up for Pluto, the underdog of the nine planets, probably because that's all we remember about the Solar System in elementary school science. How can you forget Pluto? It's the furthest away and the smallest. And it has the same name as Mickey Mouse's dog.

Neil deGrasse Tyson knows Pluto all too well for an astrophysicist whose specialty is not planetary bodies. As director of the Hayden Planetarium, in 2000 he was involved in the planning of the American Museum of Natural History's new Rose Center for Earth and Space. After much discussion about Pluto, they decided to side-step the issue by not talking about the nine planets as a whole and instead grouped items with other like items. The gas giants together, the terrestrial planets together, and then Pluto together with members of the Kuiper belt (in another area of the center).

Now, I can see how as scientists this grouping like-with-like made perfect sense to them, and how they could believe that this would resolve the issue, no problem, with no questions. But soon after opening day, although the media was not discussing it yet, some of their smallest critics saw right away that Pluto was missing from their Scales of the Universe display. All the other planets were there. Where was Pluto?

The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet discusses the history of Pluto, the media storm around Pluto that began with the Rose Center's new design, and deGrasse Tyson's own personal history with Pluto (including just a few examples of the many, many letters he received some school children, along with letters and emails from working scientists and the general public). The book is engaging, written for a general audience, and brings up lots of great points: 1) We probably wouldn't have had this kind of public reaction to Pluto's reclassification if Pluto hadn't been discovered by an American, 2) There actually isn't an exact definition for what makes a planet a planet, and 3) Pluto does not care what we call it. It just goes on being Pluto.

The letters and emails contained in the book are great, and I want to highlight a couple here. Here's an email, accusing deGrasse Tyson of cultural insensitivity:

Would you say a small child or midget wasn't a person? Of course you wouldn't, although they are a different versions of the normal standard that is set as what a person would like, but they are still classified as people. By saying that Pluto is not a planet, is like saying a midget or a small child is not a person.

I'll end with a letter from Madeline Trost, an example of what deGrasse Tyson calls the "angry-kid genre." "After addressing the envelope to me personally, she bluntly addresses her letter 'Dear Scientest,' and she can't contain her flurry of assaults on my integrity, ending with an appeal to accommodate a shortcoming of her own":

Dear Scientest,
What do you call Pluto if its not a planet anymore? If you make it a planet agian all the science books will be right. Do poeple live on Pluto? If there are poeple who live there they won't exists. Why can't Pluto be a planet? If it's small doesn't meant that it doen't have to be a planet anymore. Some poeple like Pluto. If it doen't exist then they don't have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive because I can't read in cursive.

Gluten-Free Girl (Shauna James Ahern)

When I was pregnant, I kept telling Jim the list of foods (foods I currently wasn't eating due to safety recommendations) I was going to eat once Noah was born. High on the list was a wonderful fried-egg breakfast sandwich at a local restaurant, complete with yummy soft French cheese. I was thinking I'd get this sandwich in the first few weeks after giving birth. I still haven't gotten to eat this sandwich. Much like myself as a baby, Noah and dairy are not friends. Meaning that I have to take a lengthy vacation from it as well. (Most babies outgrow this dairy intolerance in their first two years of life. My fingers are crossed that this happens sooner rather than later, but it was the full two years for myself.)

It turns out that avoiding all dairy, especially in packaged food, is very hard. Down low on a lengthy list of ingredients can be hiding whey power or milk protein. But I cannot even imagine how hard it must be for someone who couldn't eat gluten. Because it's not even listed on products that can contain it, which is something I didn't know until I had read Gluten-Free Girl by Shauna James Ahern. (Astute readers may realize that this is another blogger who wrote a book, and I'll just let you know right now that there are two other blogger books on hold at the library. Apparently I'm going through a phase.)

Ahern's celiac disease went undiagnosed for a long time. She was often tired and generally not feeling well. When she realized her symptoms may very well be signs of celiac disease, she couldn't get her doctor to run the test. (He told her it was a rare disease, which is completely wrong.) Most people would have been quite upset to find out they could never eat bread again (I know I certainly would've taken the news hard as a freshly baked piece of bread, toasted and buttered, is one of my favorite things in this world), but given how much better Ahern was feeling, for the first time in her life really, she embraced it.

Ahern writes beautifully in this book about re-discovering food, much of it local, seasonal food, and how she's adapted to a gluten-free life. This is a great book, well-written, engaging, but I will say that I visited her blog after finishing the book, and it looks like some parts of the book existed as blog postings in various forms prior to the book's publication, so if you are a fan of her blog, there may not be a lot of new material here.

She also includes near the end the story of how she met her husband, the chef, as she calls him. Not that I want to give too much away here, but how can you get much better than this: Her husband (at the time her boyfriend), the chef at a small, fabulous restaurant? Yeah, he ends up making the entire menu at his restaurant gluten-free. How absolutely incredible is that? Sigh. They should make their love story into a movie. I'd go see it, and I'm sure I'd end up crying at that part.

Hungry Monkey (Matthew Amster-Burton)

Noah is just a few days away from getting his hands on some solid food. Well, except, technically he's already had his first solid food: a small chunk of the service program at the Unitarian church on Mother's Day. Oh well.

The "first" of what will be a lifetime of non-liquid foods can be a little stressful for well-meaning parents. Iron-fortified rice cereal? Jarred food? Mashed bananas? The intricacies of these choices are expounded upon in Web sites, blender-specific homemade baby food books, and pamphlets given out at the doctor's office. Do this (strain, steam, vegetables-before-fruit, wait four days between new foods). Don't do this (possible allergens, unsanitized cookware, vegetables with nitrates). Thank goodness for friends with second children and for Matthew Amster-Burton's book Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater.

Amster-Burton is a writer (also a blogger) who lives in Seattle with his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Iris. I got this book for my birthday (thank you, Sue!) because I had known a little about Amster-Burton's writing through the Web site Serious Eats, and I thought it might be handy for when Noah reached the solid-food stage.

When she was around one-year old, Iris would eat just about anything, loving especially very spicy food. Sushi, spicy Thai noodles, enchiladas, you name it. Amster-Burton was thrilled, thinking he had done all the right things as a parent. And then she got older. And pickier. Just like most other kids, he learned. But even then he still tries to make a meal everyone can enjoy at dinner time, with some modification, and he shares those tips in the book. A stay-at-home dad, Amster-Burton reads Working Mother, and Iris at one point isn't actually sure her mother can cook. (She can do that? She says, in disbelief, when the idea is mentioned.) This reminds me of my sister Betsy, whose oldest daughter once complained to her father that when he was away on a business trip, Betsy made them eat cereal for breakfast. Cereal.

Some of my favorite things I've taken away from this book are that, for Iris (and I'm guessing Noah given his current behavior at the dinner table), there was a very small window of time where Amster-Burton and his wife could eat their own meal while Iris at prepared baby food. She wanted their food. So he finely chopped a portion of their meal for her, with salt and spices. In preparation for the toddler years, I'm also going to try to keep in mind a quote from Ellyn Satter that Amster-Burton draws attention to (I'm paraphrasing here): once you put the plate in front of your child, your work is done. So Zenlike, and I'm sure so hard to follow given the behavior that follows.

A Voyage Long and Strange (Tony Horwitz)

I'm in week eight of my maternity leave and have discovered that the advertisers of daytime television really want me to eat at Golden Corral, buy many items from Billy Mays, and help me get the life insurance I need for my peace of mind. And while our dinners have been improved immensely by my new friends Giada and Ina, there's only so many times I can watch prosciutto being wrapped around figs. Between nursing, changing diapers, and making funny faces at the baby, I've tried to get in a little reading, and was able to finish Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World just a few hours before it was due. I was even able to snap the blurry photo above. But one thing I wasn't able to do was spend any quality time going back over the book to find the really great quotes and highlights, so bear with me on the details.

I remember 4th grade history being the year of explorers, name after name of men I imagined yielding swords in puffy pantaloons. History not being my strong point (it is unlikely I'll remember any fact for longer than oh, say, 20 minutes), I was unaware of how many Europeans had landed on our shores prior to both Columbus and the Pilgrims. I doubt that I'm alone. Horwitz explores these men and the many misconceptions that surrounds them and their legacies, with the modern cities/peoples who are constantly in a tug-of-war to be the deemed the first of the firsts.

Horwitz has this great reporting/writing style that weaves the modern into the historical, which I had enjoyed in his Blue Latitudes, his book about Captain Cook. Because A Voyage Long and Strange covers so many explorers, there's a lot more historical background for each one, especially at the beginning of the book. But today's people enter in quickly, and in interesting ways. Compared to Europe, it seems that America is lacking in a rich sense of history or tradition, but Horwitz meets people who trace themselves back to remarkably different first settlers, and hold onto these identities strongly. As always, his interactions with these people are interesting, and often hilarious (such as his participation in an all-era reinactment camp: think pirates interacting with knights).

If you want to love history but most presentations of history don't love you back, try reading some of Horwitz's writing. It's totally approachable and fun, and I've already requested another of his books from the library.

The Wishing Year (Noelle Oxenhandler)

The magazine Body + Soul has a book review section at the end, in which I sometimes find books to read. One recent one was The Wishing Year: A House, A Man, My Soul -- A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire by Noelle Oxenhandler. From what I remember of the book review, the essence was that Oxenhandler did indeed get a house and a man, partly from wishing, and I was curious as to how exactly that came to be.

Oxenhandler presents herself to the reader as a skeptic. She lives in Northern California and has many friends who believe strongly in wishing, in letting their desires be known and waiting for opportunities to come from that. And she doesn't feel she fits that mold. So she decides one year to experiment with the power of wishing, the results of which are presented here.

While The Wishing Year is a memoir, it also is part literary analysis of the term wish. Those parts to me weren't as strong or as interesting as the rest of the book. One thing Oxenhandler points out from this research, however, is that the power of the formation of the wish can focus your thinking and actions into fulfilling that wish, consciously or not. And I think this is true, as seen in the somewhat recent proliferation of 100 things lists.

Did I love this book? No. Am I glad I read it? I think so. It never felt like work to pick it up at the end of the day to read, and it was fairly enjoyable overall. If the subject seems like something you're interested, then I think it would be worth picking up at the library.

Comfort Food (Kate Jacobs)

As I posted earlier, I enjoyed Kate Jacobs' The Friday Night Knitting Club, so when I found out her follow-up book, Comfort Food, was about cooking, I immediately put it on my hold list at the library. I actually read the book back in August (and have since returned it to the library), so this won't be the most detailed review, but I can still definitely give you my overall impressions on it.

Powell's gives a brief plot synopsis that is better than anything I could do from memory here. The book's structure is similar to The Friday Night Knitting Club in that there are multiple narrators telling their sides of the story throughout the book. This worked really well in the previous book, but I felt like the story in Comfort Food wasn't as compelling, making this technique almost unnecessary. One of my biggest problems with the book had to do with a fairly minor character, whose behavior and personality throughout most of the book are explained and resolved way too easily near the end, making for an abrupt 180-degree turn that just didn't resonate as real.

All that said, I read the majority of the book on an airplane, and it definitely was interesting enough to keep me reading and entertained throughout my flights. So if you're going on a trip, and read and enjoyed The Friday Night Knitting Club, I'd recommend Comfort Food for that kind of reading.

Somewhat related, we just finished our first summer as CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) members. We had held off becoming members because Madison has great farmer's markets that I love to shop at, but eventually we wanted to directly support a farm. I knew the weekly CSA box would change the way I cook, but I wasn't fully aware of the extent of it. I became more of a cook-what's-on-hand person, and when confronted with an overbounty of broccoli or potatoes, learned quickly to either blanch and freeze or make a soup that would freeze well. The CSA ended this week, and now it's going to be very strange to go back to what was "normal" meal planning and grocery shopping.

One recipe that became a regular this summer helped out when our CSA box had a lot of beets: chocolate beet muffins. Jim likes to point out that these muffins sound like they would taste awful, but that they are so delicious. And, they're pretty good for you, too. (I'd recommend waiting until they cool to eat them, otherwise they may have an overly "beet-y" flavor.)

Double Dark Chocolate Beet Muffins

1 C. whole wheat flour
1 C. all-purpose flour
2 t. baking powder
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
1 C. (split into two half-cups) Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips
1/2 C. chopped pecans or walnuts

1/8 C. butter
1/8 C. milk
3/4 C. packed brown sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 C. beet puree*
1 C plain lowfat yogurt
1 t. vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Grease a 12-cup muffin tin or line it with paper cups; set aside.
3. In a large bowl, whisk together first 5 ingredients until well combined.Stir in the half cup chocolate chips and nuts; set aside.
4. In a small saucepan, melt the other 1/2 cup chocolate chips and butter over very low heat. Stir to combine, add milk, and set aside to cool until lukewarm.
5. In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, brown sugar, beet puree, yogurt, vanilla, and melted chocolate.
6. Pour the chocolate mixture into the dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon until just combined. Don’t over mix.
7. Immediately spoon batter into 12 well-greased or paper-lined muffin cups. Batter should completely fill the cups.
8. Place muffin pan in a preheated 375 oven and bake for 18-20 minutes. Muffins are done when they spring back when touched lightly in the center (or when a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean). Don’t overbake!
9. Cool muffins for 10 minutes in pan then remove them to a wire rack to cool completely.

*To prepare beets: Cut off the greens leaving about one inch attached. Don’t cut anything off the root end. Gently scrub the beets being careful not to cut the skin. In a medium saucepan, cover beets with water, bring to a gentle boil and cook, covered, 30-45 minutes until tender. Drain and let sit until cool enough to handle. The tops should pull off easily or they can be cut off. The skins will slip right off. Puree beets with a little bit of the cooking liquid in a food processor until they are the consistency of applesauce.

Recipe adapted from here.