Sunday Review: COOKED, by Michael Pollan

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Yet there is a deeper kind of learning that can only be had by doing the work yourself, acquainting all your senses with the ins and outs and how-tos and wherefores of an intricate making. What you end up with is a first-person, physical kind of knowledge that is the precise opposite of abstract or academic. I think of it as embodied knowledge, as when you nose or your fingertips can tell you that the dough needs another turn or is ready to be baked....Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget....To make it [beer] once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance."

One review I read of this book claims this is simply a repeat of everything Pollan has written before. I find that to be a complete misunderstanding of this book. If anything, I find this book to be unlike his other food books, and rather more similar to A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder in its almost spiritual approach to the subject at hand, and in Pollan's positioning himself as not the expert researcher, but the novice. Yes, some of Pollan's central theses remain: whole foods are good, industrialization of food has had terrible consequences on our health, but this takes it to a different level. This is less about the individual act of eating than the communal act of creating.

Although Pollan's other books contain anecdotes of his visits to various people and places to understand his topic, this book is more his grappling with what he learns and trying to apply it immediately. (Again why it reminds me more of APOMO rather than his other food books—he's again "building," just this time with food.) Yes, there's a good bit of information about the evolution of all these different kinds of cooking, but a lot of the focus is simply on Pollan's own transformations in his understanding of not only the processes of cooking, but their significance to him personally.

Where his other books are outward, I would describe this book as inward. Yes, it contains some scathing criticisms of industrial food culture (it doesn't stray from the theses in Omnivore's)And approaching it that way, I found it the most satisfying of all his food books to read. It's a book that will get you to think about why it's necessary to cook; not from a "this is good for your health" or "processed food is evil" standpoint, but from the idea that the act of cooking and sharing food is good for the soul.

I see this book as being the parallel to The Omnivore's Dilemma--4 foods, and now 4 preparations. The outward exploration of the purpose of food, and then the inward contemplation of preparing and consuming it. I look forward to it coming out in paperback, because I think the two books together will make a nice paired gift to my foodie friends (well, the ones who haven't already devoured everything Pollan has to offer.)



View all my Goodreads reviews

Learning Suspension of Disbelief at Hundred Oaks High

I agree 100% with a 1-star review of a book I finished last week.

So I gave it four stars and an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

*sound of tires squealing to a stop*

What?

I don't know about you, but I often read the low-star reviews of a book I'm going to give a high-star review to, and vice versa, before writing my own. I'm not easily swayed, but I'm always interested in what people liked or disliked that I can address in my own review. Along the way I came across a review tearing apart Miranda Kenneally's CATCHING JORDAN for misrepresenting the transition from high school to NCAA Division I-A to NFL football. It made the book too unrealistic, the reviewer ranted. No school is like that and no kids expect that. In my opinion, having gone to a school that sent a lot of kids to D I-A, and then having gone to one of the D I-A schools where the Hundred Oaks High kids end up...

...I agree completely. The football didn't map on to my personal experience of NCAA football at all.

And yet, CATCHING JORDAN works. I loved it.

Why?

One of the reasons HARRY POTTER and TWILIGHT are so universally popular, I think, is that the books themselves, while containing fantastical elements, are ultimately about the mundane—growing up, navigating friendships and relationships, finding love. Yes, there are wizards and dragons and vampires and werewolves, but that's not what those stories are about. The stories are about the struggles of characters we can identify with, who you read and go, "I've felt that; I've been there."
And because you can so solidly identify and root for the characters, you're right along for the ride, werewolves and dragons and all.

As contemporary writer, I don't always think about suspension of disbelief—my books take place at real (although fictional) high schools, with kids who don't sprout wings or get letters from Hogwarts. I could easily argue that contemporary YA is automatically believable because nothing is fantastical about it. But the truth is, even contemporary writers have our "dragons:" the things that we need to sell the reader on so that we can bring her along for the ride. And for those, the same rules still apply—connect the reader to the character, and they're along for the entire ride; even if some parts run completely counter to their everyday experience.

CATCHING JORDAN works because even though I have difficulty buying that Jordan has all the D I-A prospects she seems to (though the bit with Alabama did make some sense), Jordan feels all the things I would feel in that situation. Her relationships with her friends, and her brother, and her mother and father are the same sorts of relationships, and with the same sorts of impetuous-decisions/inattentional relationship blindness potholes that I or my friends drove into. And so I find myself rooting for her to win—at football, sure, but also at life.

I have my own "dragons" and "wizards" in my books, I know: the things I have to bring the reader along for the ride. After reading CATCHING JORDAN and thinking about it a bit, I have a sense of exactly how to do that—to bring the reader along, you have to give her something she can identify with, so that the parts that she can't, she'll buy anyway.

It's a good lesson, and I'll be returning to Hundred Oaks High to learn some more.

What's your experience with suspension of disbelief in contemporary fiction? What makes you "buy" (not purchase) a book? Who's done it well, and what did you get out of it?

And speaking of the other kind of buying:

Catching Jordan on Indiebound
Catching Jordan at Powell's
Catching Jordan at B&N
Catching Jordan at Amazon

Read my Goodreads review of CATCHING JORDAN

Strict Pick: IN ONE PERSON by John Irving

In One Person by John Irving
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(ARC received from Simon & Schuster via Barnes & Noble.)

John Irving doesn't really write books. He writes journeys. I once read a director (I believe) quoted regarding adapting A Widow for One Year for film (The Door in the Floor) that adaptations of John Irving novels ought to be considered an art forum unto themselves. Certainly, the scope alone makes adaptation difficult--we meet William "Bill" Abbott at age fifteen in the beginning of the novel, and at the end he's seventy. But the beauty of Irving is that he can make a sixty-year journey in the same head a worthwhile read.

Review + ARC Giveaway: PANDEMONIUM by Lauren Oliver

Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You have your world, the way it is, you think you're ready for things to proceed exactly as they should, and then you suddenly understand the cracks in the pavement and all hell breaks loose.

Pandemonium.

The third book in Oliver's DELIRIUM series is titled REQUIEM, and given how aptly the second is titled, I'm eagerly anticipating the third.

Review: DELIRIUM by Lauren Oliver (ARC giveaway of book 2 to come!)

Delirium by Lauren Oliver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The writing: Dear god, the writing in this. It gives me hope that people will buy and read things that have great imagery, and which spend time describing the environment rather than making every single moment slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am nonstop action. I loved wallowing in Oliver's descriptions; I felt very much like I was there with Lena as she went through her story. Particularly wonderful, I thought, were the ways in which the settings contrasted--the Wilds vs. Portland, the houses in Deering Highlands vs. the homes in the rest of Portland. Oliver has a way of writing description that puts you right in the middle of the action, and for someone who tends to otherwise imagine characters kind of moving about in blank white space, that level of attention to detail was very much appreciated. There aren't senses missing in this--Oliver gets in to how things smell, feel, taste in addition to just how they look.

The plot: DELIRIUM starts out slowly. VERY slowly. Had I not been reading it mostly so that I could get to my ARC copy of PANDEMONIUM, I might have put it down. That said, there are plenty of twists and turns on this path (even if some are a bit predictable: Alex somehow not being a real Cured is foreseeable from the very first moment Lena sees him) to keep one interested. I'm happy that DELIRIUM ends and PANDEMONIUM begins with some big issues still in play, such as the ultimate fate of Lena's mother.

The book does fall in to the ongoing problem of teen trilogies, however, which is that it feels like there was little self-contained plot in this book alone. Like many others (Ally Condie's Matched for instance, comes to mind), the book ends on a cliffhanger, and it feels very much like 1/3 of a larger work, rather than a first book in a set of three. If there's anything contributing to my dropping a star on this book, it's that.

The characters: Lena is very relatable. One of my favorite tiny details about her was her friendship with Hana (Hana got her own novella, which I don't have time to read before PANDEMONIUM releases, but which looks interesting), which plays as a very normal teenage girl relationship. I especially loved that she and Hana had the "Hallelujah Halena!" cheer for each other. It's exactly the kind of thing I remember creating in junior high school, and details like that made Lena a very real, easily identified-with character.

And Alex--I loved his comfort with who he was and his ability to move in and out of Portland society. He had just enough "cool" to make him believable in all the things he's been able to accomplish, but also had a deep caring for Lena which makes him easily sympathized with.

I loved the secondary characters, also. Grace is a wonderful foil for Lena, and lets us see a lot about who Lena is as an "infected" person. So far in PANDEMONIUM, great secondaries seem to be Oliver's specialty, so I'm looking forward to getting to know them more.

My one very minor beef: Is it ever mentioned in the beginning of this book that "Portland" is Portland, ME? I spent a long time trying to figure out if perhaps the sea level had risen and that was why there was shoreline in Portland, OR, and was a little jolted to find that the book was set on the opposite side of the country halfway through the book.

Overall: This is one of the more interesting dystopian ideas I've read in a while. When I first heard the premise, I thought it sounded silly--love as a disease? But as I read and understood it not as only romantic love, but all feeling and strong emotion, I found myself strangely agreeing with many of the society's premises--that love and strong emotion causes as much destruction as it prevents, and able to see exactly how such a society might come into being. For me, that's a critical piece--can I buy in to the dystopian world? DELIRIUM delivered on that front, and that made it an enjoyable read for me. On to book number 2--and I'll be giving away my ARC when I'm done!

4 stars even on this one. One star loss for the slow start and the ever-present YA trilogy "no full plot in this book" problem.

View all my Goodreads reviews

Nab Delirium: 

Indiebound
Amazon 
B&N 

Have you read Delirium? What did you think? Link your review if you have one!