Monday, July 15, 2013

Summer Reading


I love to read, and is in fact what I do most of the day.  I will admit that the stuff I read for fun does not (often) make me smarter, but it definitely entertains me.  When I'm in the middle of a good book, reading is all I want to do.  I get grumpy when I have to go to work, walk the dogs, eat, talk to Kevin or do anything else.  I just want to finish the book!

Here is what I've been reading this summer that I will recommend:


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The last Sookie Stackhouse novel! If you haven't read this series, you have lots of good reading time ahead of you.  Even if you watch True Blood on HBO, you should read this.  HBO doesn't follow the books' story lines at all.  Some overall themes might be the same, but there are different characters and different stories.  HBO did this really well and the fact they are different, but both good, has made me excited to both watch the show and read the books.


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The beautiful creatures trilogy.  I will admit I heard of this book when I saw a preview for the movie.  This is how I often find books to read.  I haven't watched the movie yet, but the first two books were good.  I am looking forward to the last one.

And one book that might make me a bit smarter (or just annoying):


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Cooked, by Michael Pollan.  The book is broken into four parts: fire, water, air, earth.  The fire (all about bbq) and water (all about cooking) were not that interesting to me.  Air (about bread baking) was okay.  The earth part - about all good bacteria and how we are just discovering what it does for us - blew my mind.  Michael Pollan, once again changing my life.  I was totally entranced and kept reading aloud parts to Kevin (he was thrilled, let me tell you).  Do you know that breast milk contains oligosaccharides, which infants can't digest? For years researchers could not figure out why.  Breast milk is the perfect human food, and we have naturally selected out anything not necessary because of the toll it takes on women to produce (why waste energy producing something unnecessary).  So the oligosaccharides was a stumper.  Researchers now think we produce this to feed the good bacteria! So that bacteria has the ability to set up shop in our guts before the more unsavory ones do.  I'm totally fascinated by this and the theory that we have made ourselves too clean.  That we should not be eradicating all bacteria - some of them we need to be healthy. Here is an article he wrote for the NYT if you are interested but don't want to get the book.

I've been talking about it basically nonstop (hence the annoying part).  Our social calendar has been pretty bare lately, hopefully this is just correlation and not caused by our friends being sick of me talking about bacteria :)

Anyway, I'm always on the lookout for good books. If you've read something good lately, let me know!
 


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