#'s 5, 6 7 and 7 1/2

During our trip to Galveston, I powered through a bunch of books. So I continue my quest for 25 this year with the following:

5) Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink Ph.D.: this book was basically a regurgitation of tons of studies this guy has done about how and why we eat what we do. Some pretty interesting tidbits in there, including that children of big families tend to eat more, faster because of the "you snooze, you lose" mentality regarding dinner and snacks. As the only girl in a house of three boys and a dad with a big appetite, if there was something yummy in the house, I learned to eat as much as I wanted as fast as I wanted, lest it be gone the next time I was hungry. Unfortunately, this rarely applied to fruit or vegetables, but instead to poptarts and doritos. Those things never lasted more than a couple of hours in our house. The most notable example of this phenomenon occurred when "we" ate all of my brother Mike's birthday cake (I believe I was in college at the time, so it wasn't me, and I'm pretty sure that the bulk of that cake was digested by my father, having likely forgotten it was anyone's birthday). Anyway, an interesting book, and I think there might be some noteworthy items in there for Andrew's thesis.

6) Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski: my first work of fiction in the group. This is the story of an American journalist bumming around Thailand while his girlfriend is there teaching English. He gets caught up in the story of a female anthropologist imprisoned for murdering a missionary. She commits suicide right after finishing a couple of papers on life inside the prison. It was a pretty good book -- I got through all 300+ pages in about a day and a half, but the ending was somewhat anticlimactic. Tons of build up to some incredible ending, but then just kind of fizzled. Maybe I read it too fast and missed something. But still interesting. Almost made me want to move to Thailand. Definitely made me happy I'm not an anthropologist.

7) Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer: admittedly, this was re-read. My brother had borrowed it and I had run out of books to read for the ride home, so I just re-read this one. And I loved it -- again. I came home and dug around for more of the stories of the other climbers and the backlash against Krakauer for his alleged finger-pointing in the book. I actually don't think that he was blaming anyone in particular, and I think he did a decent job of accepting some blame himself, which he may or may not deserve. He was one of the first ones down, seemed to be physically one of the best off, both before and after the summit, but he didn't take part in any way in any of the rescue efforts. He even left Beck Weathers lying in the tent freezing and started down on his own, apparently on the advice of the other climbers, all of whom concluded Weathers was going to die anyway and they would have enough trouble getting down on their own. So, it might be that Krakauer is a self-centered douchebag, or maybe he was just crazy tired and doing his best to stay alive. Never having met the guy, nor having ever tried to climb anything higher than Crowder's "Mountain" (read, "big hill"), in Charlotte, I'm not going to judge. Regardless, he writes a great book.

7 1/2) The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang: This book describes the events surrounding the Japanese takeover of Nanking, China in 1936. By conservative accounts, the Japanese tortured and massacred at least 200,000 Chinese (some estimates have it as high as almost 400,000), most of whom were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. I had to stop this one halfway through, to stave off the inevitable nightmares and depression. There has been lots of backlash against this book -- no doubt Chang had an agenda. She's a Chinese-American whose grandparents have fled Japanese invasions. So, she's pissed. Specifically, she was taking issue in the book with the fact that Japanese war criminals were never prosecuted for the atrocities of Nanking, nor has the Japanese government ever atoned or apologized for the brutality that occurred there. The descriptions (many of which included pictures) detailed the murders and rapes (including rapes of pregnant women, which the Japanese soldiers completed by using a bayonet to slice open her abdomen, rip out her intestines, then the baby, then bayoneting the baby; sons being forced to have sex with their mothers; fathers being forced to rape their daughters). The Chinese were allegedly beheaded, burned alive, buried alive, eaten by dogs, etc., etc. Lots of Japanese historians question the death count (although independent agencies have estimated, conservatively 260,000) and the mode of death. But it seems fairly solid that in six weeks, Japanese soldiers individually killed more people than those killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I'm not necessarily saying one was better or worse than the other, but ever since I was a kid and learned about those bombings, I've been ashamed, and I've questioned how America and humanity could ever engage in such an act (this is the same guilt I carry about the Japanese internment during WWII, slavery, the massacres of Native Americans, etc. -- in short, I'm ridiculously naive and idealistic). But now I have a little more perspective -- the Japanese weren't saints themselves, nor were the Chinese. But my feelings about escaping to an island somewhere (it used to be an igloo, but my love for winter is fading quickly...), shunning my national identity, avoiding politics and commercialism and materialism, has been strengthened significantly.

#3 and #4

Today I wrapped up two books. First is I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson. I'm a huge fan of his, having read A Short History of Nearly Everything, Lost Continent, and, one of my all-time favorites, A Walk in the Woods. This one did not disappoint. It's a compilation of the columns he wrote for a British newspaper when he moved back to U.S. (Hanover, New Hampshire) after having spent the past 20 years in Britain. Here's my favorite passage. He's describing his attempts to find a winter pastime in New Hampshire, and here he's taking his daughter ice-skating:

And I do know how to skate, honestly. It's just that my legs, after years of inactivity, got a little overecited to be confronted with so much slipperiness. As soon as I stepped onto the ice, they decided they wanted to visit every corner of the pond at once, from lots of different directions. They went this way and that, scissoring and splaying, sometimes getting as much as twelve feet apart, but constantly gathering momentum, until at last they flew out from udner me and I landed on my butt with such a wallop that my coccyx hit the roof of my mouth and i had to push my esophagus back in with my fingers.

"Wow!" said my startled butt as I clambered heavily back to my feet. "That ice is hard."

"Hey, let ME see," cried by head and instantly down I went again.

And so it went for the next thirty minutes, with various extremities of my body -- shoulders, chin, nose, one or two of the more adventurous internal organs -- hurling themselves at the ice in a spirit of investigation. From a distance I suppose I must have looked like someone being worked over by an invisible gladiator."

Admittedly, this strikes a cord given our recent recreational activities. Great, quick read.

I've also just finished How to Practice; the Way to a Meaningful Life, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Interestingly enough, this one wasn't quite as entertaining as #3. I was interested in learning a little more about Buddhism, so when I came across this on an endcap at a Target, I figured, "what the hell" (because, of course, all life-changing spiritual awakenings are prompted by purchases off an endcap at a major discount department store). I figure there are two kinds of people who would read this book, a) those people who wanted to read something by the Dalai Lama, to learn more about Buddhism, b) those people who were interested in putting themselves on the path toward enlightenment. Now, not everyone may know which category they fall into when they open the book. I was keeping an open-mind. I mean, I have been to that one Buddhist meditation retreat (it was three hours long, and I spent the final two hours and 45 minutes thinking about how incredibly uncomfortable I was having to sit criss-cross-applesauce), AND Buddhism seemed to do a lot for Tina Turner (at least according to Angela Basset's performance in What's Love Got to Do With It). So I was thinking, at least superficially, maybe I should get on board.

Well now, having finished the book, I can safely say that I am the "learning more about Buddhism" type. I'm not sure that the path to enlightenment is easily navigable for a stay-at-home mom in suburbia. Not that I didn't get what His Holiness was saying (ok, well, I didn't get all of it), but it's just that that shit seemed really hard. For what it's worth though, the tenets of Buddhism seem to come down to one thing: help others, and if that's not possible, do no harm. That's something I can aspire to.

The First Two

Inspired by Robertson, I chose as one of my New Year's resolutions to aim to read 25 books this year, and I figure I'll keep track of them here. (Since Brian shamed me into blogging more, I may as well take advantage of the medium.)

1. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich

This was my second attempt at this book -- I've been doing a lot of that lately, starting and stopping books. I just figure life is too short and there are too many good books out there to bother with ones that don't interest you. But I had heard too many wonderful things about this particular book, among which was that I could not consider myself a true bleeding-heart liberal and not read it. So I did, and I urge everyone else in the world to also. It's heartbreaking and eye-opening and infuriating, all at the same time.

The book chronicles the author's attempt to live on minimum wage, and she does so in three different parts of the country (the Keys, near her actual home, coastal Maine and the Twin Cities). She took abundantly reasonable steps to make the experiment as real as possible to mimic the experiences of your average blue-collar worker who would have to settle down and try to make a life for him or herself. But, unlike many such folks, she did not have a spouse or any children to support, and she was not burdened with any debt.

And (spoiler alert!, but only if you live in a hole), she couldn't do it. A single, middle-aged, healthy woman could not support herself, eat a semi-healthful diet, and live in anything other than squalor, on minimum wage. And the experiences she recounted of how she was treated in these minimum wage jobs was so depressing, causing many uncomfortable flashbacks of the summer my parents made me work at KMart. Nepotism got me that job (dad was the pharmacist) the summer in between my sophomore and junior years of college (my unpaid internships for the U.S. Congressman and the United Way weren't satisfactorily contributing to the bottom line). My "education," energy and work ethic -- relative to the middle-aged woman who had spent their lives on their feet at those cash registers -- shot me to Employee of the Month and Customer Service Desk Manager a mere two weeks into the job, and I will never forget the disgust and disdain flowing from my co-worker (she was not my supervisor, even though she had been there 12 years and I had been there two weeks), when I got to leave early one day because my new contacts were irritating my eyes. Because who the hell was I? Some college snot without a clue as to how privileged I was, evidenced by the ridiculous amount of time I spent bitching to my parents about that job.

So anyway, a quick must-read, frustrating in that you're left not knowing what you can do to solve a massive problem in our society. But at the very least, the tips we leave will be as large as we can afford, we'll do our best to show our respect, and our children will definitely be forced spend a few summers working shit jobs for no money.

2. Grace (Eventually), Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott

This is the fourth book of hers that I've read, and she is by far one of my favorite writers. Reading most of her non-fiction (the books are largely reprints of columns and essays published previously -- she has written a lot for Salon), is a deeply personal endeavor. She talks motherhood, politics, family, friends, disease, and body image, all with a spiritual bent. Not necessarily a book for the atheists or cynics in the crowd, but definitely one for those of us who are overwhelmed sometimes by fear and self-doubt, and who need help to be reminded to just slow down and take a deep breath.